106 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



were working up the Canada plan, which is to send an agricultural col- 

 lege graduate to a high school in a city, have him open an ofRce in 

 town, where he spends his afternoons and acts as the adviser of the 

 farmer, and teach certain classes in the high school in the forenoons. If 

 a man wants to know anything ahout running his farm he goes in and 

 consults that graduate, and the graduate goes out to see the farmers. 

 That experiment is working fine. 



We had some very interesting inquiries on the subject of co-operation 

 which may interest you. We didn't find any co-operation in the south 

 except the co-operation of the Farmers' Union, which I was clearly satis- 

 fied was on wrong lines, and which is being changed now. I think one 

 benefit of the commission was the conversion of the president of the 

 Farmers' Union. They were starting out on the idea that their union was 

 to fix the price of cotton — and the first two years it stayed fixed, because 

 cotton was advancing; but they fixed it at 12 cents a pound the year we 

 were out, and they could get but 9 cents. Now they can get 14 or 15. We 

 gave them the idea that they should arrange to hold their cotton and 

 loan money to men who w-ere forced to sell (you have no idea of the 

 poverty of the southern farmer; I will tell you about that by and by), and 

 then persuade the farmers to raise their own vegetables and pork and keep 

 cows, and live off their farms and sell the cotton as a cash crop, in which 

 rase they couldn't be forced to sell it and would have a relatively higher 

 price the year around. Do you know that half the cotton in the south- 

 ern states is raised by men whose total income is $160 a year average, 

 on which they have to keep an average family of four persons and pay 

 about twice as much for products as you pay? The southern farmer 

 mortgages his crop to his landlord before it is grown; the landlord trans- 

 fers it to the merchant and the merchant to the bank. Do you wonder 

 that the farmers are poor? Mr. Rockefeller, bad and corrupt man as he is, 

 is getting some most excellent fire insurance by spending about $200,000 

 a year in hiring men under the guise of the Department of Agriculture to 

 go out and teach these people the first elements of farming, and they are 

 doing it most successfully, and starting in the way of revolutionizing and 

 regenerating the south. In fact, when he gets the hook worms out of 

 those people and gets them taught how to raise their own stuff instead 

 of buyng from the north, you will see a new condition of things in the 

 southern states. 



Now, when we came to California we came across a wonderful sys- 

 tem of co-operation in selling — what is called the Citrus Fruit Growers' 

 Association. I think there are two of them; w-e investigated one. They 

 don't aim to fix the prices of citrus fruits at all, but they aim to know 

 the size of the crop, to understand how to handle it and to feed it to 

 the market as it takes it. They have a competent man at the head of 

 it whom they pay a salary of $8,000 or $10,000 a year, and he is not a 

 fruit grower, either. They got the best business man they could find 

 without reference to what his occupation was, and said to him: "Now 

 you handle this stuff." Then they put men in the large cities to whom 

 they pay about $5,000 each, and they market almost the entire citrus 

 fruit crop and a large percentage of the raisins, and they are doing it 



