PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 505 



of the increase in capital of the Farm Land banks, which made it pos- 

 sible for them to function more efficiently. At the present time the 

 Farm Land banks are lending about a million dollars a day on farm loans. 

 The law which recognizes the rights of farmers to organize for co-opera- 

 tive selling of their commodities and which protects them against prose- 

 cution at the hands of some over-zealous official has very greatly encour- 

 aged co-operative marketing organizations. 



Last week there was a meeting in Washington, a really wonderful 

 meeting, composed of representatives from the various commodity mar- 

 keting organizations. I don't know when I have looked into the faces of 

 a more vigorous, intelligent and capable group of marketing men than I 

 did last week when I spoke to them for a few minutes. Out of that 

 meeting I understand is to come a national council of co-operative com- 

 modity organizations, and I think their plan is that they will have repre- 

 sentatives there in Washington to look after the interests of organizations 

 of that particular type. 



Those commodity organizations, you understand, are a little different 

 from the organizations we have here in the middle west. They organize, 

 for example, the tobacco growers and cotton growers and peanut growers, 

 and all down the line of commodities, the raisin growers and prune grow- 

 ers, and so on, and the members bind themselves for five years to hand 

 over the control of that crop to the organization. It enables an organiza- 

 tion of that kind to deal with the economics of marketing as well as 

 the mechanics of it. 



There is a good deal to be saved through co-operative marketing organ- 

 izations in the mere mechanics of the marketing. You people here have 

 been making very material savings for many years past, the people of 

 Iowa the co-operative elevator companies, the creameries and others, 

 and you people more lately in the live stock marketing associations. But 

 your savings have been the savings in the actual process of marketing. 

 Now your commodity organization goes farther than that. It is able to 

 exercise a considerable amount of control as to the time of marketing, 

 to stabilize the marketing, to feed the crop out as the demand for it ex- 

 ists, a fair price. That is what I mean by the economics of marketing. 

 And the savings in the mechanics of marketing as compared with the 

 benefits which come to us through, in a measure, price control, in the 

 economics of marketing, is very much greater in the latter than in the 

 former case. 



Where you have a country of diversified farming such as we have 

 it is, very much more difficult to organize on that basis, but in so far as 

 that plan can be carried out in a thoroughly practical way I look for con- 

 siderable benefits to come wholly aside from the mere saving in the prac- 

 tical marketing operations. 



The packer and stockyards law, which was enacted last year, and I 

 think which I spoke to you of last year, was finally declared constitutional 

 by the supreme court, and is now in full force. We have resident super- 

 visors at all of the principal live stock markets. At such markets as 

 Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, St. Joseph, Sioux City, Indianauolis, Fort 

 Worth — all of those larger markets — we have a resident supervisor, a 

 representative of the Department of Agriculture, who has been selected 



