PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 483 



to do. We therefore began our work in connection with the marketing 

 of live stock. The reasons are obvious. The live stock industry is, in 

 terms of dollars returned to the producers of this state, the one which 

 is financially most important. We approached it from the standpoint of 

 the co-operative method of handling live stock shipments, which just then 

 was at the peak, or perhaps in a boom period— a highly stimulated period 

 of growth. We found that co-operative live stock shipping associations 

 had had an unprecedented run, 310 such associations being formed over 

 the state in a single year. 



We therefore felt that it was quite possible that some of that growth 

 was rather hasty, and that the foundations were not laid as permanently 

 as they might be; that there might be some danger of mistakes in con- 

 nection with that movement or the uncertainty of a going business with 

 some of those associations. We therefore conceived it as being one of 

 the greatest opportunities that we would have to put our efforts at the 

 beginning in the careful, systematic, impartial study of that method which 

 was assuming so great importance and on whose success so many people 

 in the state were pinning their hopes at that time. 



Possibly some of you have seen the experiment station bulletin, No. 

 200, in which we gave a report of that survey. We did simply the first 

 study, a general study, trying to get our bearings. It was not the end. 

 We did not merely care to go out and get the information and say there 

 are so many associations and their management made so much, and they 

 handled so many cars of stock. We wanted to make a quantitative 

 measure of that movement, but also we wanted to make a real economic 

 analysis of what it was doing, what it was trying to do, the methods it 

 was following and the soundness of those methods from the standpoint 

 of modern business organization, because we looked at it this way: 



That movement was not merely 647 little individual shipping associa- 

 tions here and there; but, take it altogether, they represented a state- 

 wide effort of the live stock producers of this state to go into the busi- 

 ness of handling the marketing of their live stock for themselves, and as 

 we showed when we did count noses and measure the value of those cars, 

 it represented a business in that year of $100,000,000. 



Now if that thing is going to be handled on a satisfactory basis, we 

 must bring to bear upon it all that is known about good, sound business 

 organization in general, and in particular all that we know about the 

 peculiar form of business organization which is known as co-operative 

 today, if the farmers of the state are going to incorporate a great, state- 

 wide business with a product of $100,000,000 and handle it in a really 

 efficient and a really economical manner and are going to accomplish 

 real, significant savings and a permanent improvement in the method 

 of marketing live stock. 



All right. After we had made our study of that shipping association 

 movement as it stood at that time, all of the men who participated in that 

 study felt that certain outstanding conclusions could be drawn from that. 

 We felt that our first fear was more than justified, namely, that a great 

 many of those organizations were on a very insecure basis, that there 

 were certain outstanding weaknesses in the plan of organization and of 

 operation. We found that in a great many cases the association had been 



