484 TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



formed because the people thought they could accomplish something 

 through that, and when they had gone through the preliminaries of organ- 

 izing the association, getting a certain number to sign on the dotted line, 

 and then it came to the practical problem of handling the shipping busi- 

 ness of the association, they looked around to elect a manager, and they 

 said: "Well, George, you better do it." George couldn't do that, and he 

 said, "No, let Bill do it." And that managership, that important busi- 

 ness position on which the whole success of the association depended, 

 was knocked about from one to the other, and very frequently passed 

 from one to another every month or two, so that you might have three 

 or four managers in the first six months of the association. 



Generally there wasn't any six months' period under those circum- 

 stances, and in a large majority of cases it finally ended up in the hands 

 of a man who hadn't had anything like a business training for the carry- 

 ing on of that sort of business. We found that there was really not any 

 constructive business move for the improvement of live stock shipping 

 going on in the case of a majority of those associations. We felt that 

 the problem of working out with these managers who were anxious 

 enough to do just that thing but didn't know how to get into it — for us 

 to work out with them some principles of sound organization and of good 

 business management and of good accounting, was the first thing by 

 which we could carry through from that initial stage into something 

 that would be a constructive and permanent help to guarantee the suc- 

 cess of those local shipping associations. 



We looked ahead a year before that and had stolen away from some 

 people who wanted him, a man who was particularly well qualified to 

 work out the accounting problems and the business management prob- 

 lems of the local shipping association. Mr. Robotka, of our staff, per- 

 fected a simple system of accounting for local co-operative live stock 

 shipping associations, which in the form of a bulletin is now in press at 

 the station, and will be out in the course of a couple of weeks probably, 

 a system in which the experience of all this group of states through here, 

 who also had a great body of experimentation and experience with ship- 

 ping associations, was drawn upon and the forms which were finally 

 worked out are now being used all over this state and are being ordered 

 from other states because of the fact that that really represents the final 

 result of the experience in co-operative live stock shipping today. 



Now we still had that feeling that we wanted to follow through, start 

 in at some proper place and follow through, these problems until we 

 could get results. We could not stop when we simply had found out 

 amongst a small, select group of people what was necessary in the way 

 of accounts which would put such an association on a real business basis. 

 That might be known to a few people. Some form might be drawn up, 

 but you can not stop there unless that actually is carried out to all those 

 managers so that they have at least an opportunity. There is no coer- 

 cion in this, but so that any manager who really wants to study the busi- 

 ness management of a co-operative live stock shipping association has 

 that opportunity. If you do that, then you are really getting that service 

 under way. 



So the job that was begun in the experiment station passed over to 



