74 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



the field and plague the producers. Perhaps the situation in North Dakota 

 during the first decade of the twentieth century was typical. Promoters, 

 representing manufacturers of creamery machinery and equipment, en- 

 couraged farmers to build creameries in communities where not enough 

 milk could be produced to support them. Real estate agents, eager to 

 draw in settlers from the eastern dairy states, aided the promoters, regard- 

 less of the disaster that would inevitably follow. The promoters were 

 merely interested in making cash sales, while the real estate agents cared 

 little whether the creamery failed or succeeded, if only they could make 

 land sales. Nearly 40 per cent of local creameries in North Dakota were 

 built at the instigation of outside promoters. It should have occasioned no 

 surprise that creameries established under such conditions failed. Out of 

 133 creameries established in the state between 1888 and 1923, not less 

 than 107 failed, mostly because of the excessive competition between 

 creameries for an inadequate supply of cream. Other trouble came from 

 poor management, dishonest officials, and poor workmanship. 38 



Perhaps more representative of middle western agrarian discontent 

 than the dairy farmers' cooperatives, and eventually more numerous, were 

 the local grain-marketing associations. The organizations of these locals 

 took on exceptional earnestness about 1900, and over the next twenty 

 years nearly 4,000 of them were set up to receive and ship grain. 39 



The roots of the cooperative grain-marketing movement are to be found 

 in the unfavorable marketing conditions which accompanied the expan- 

 sion of wheat growing following the Civil War. During the seventies, 

 the Grange had been instrumental in organizing a number of grain eleva- 

 tors, many of them cooperative, but largely because of mismanagement 

 nearly all of them failed after a few years of operation. This left the coun- 

 try grain business in the hands of independent dealers who competed 

 with one another fiercely, with disastrous results for many operators. 

 Among the problems that perplexed them were overbidding for grain, 

 dishonesty among weight masters and commission men on the primary 

 market, and leaky cars which lost much of the grain en route to the 

 market. 



38. Alva H. Benton, "Marketing Dairy Products," North Dakota Agricultural 

 College Experiment Station, Bulletin 182 (Agricultural College, N. Dak., 1924), 

 pp. 11-15. 



39. F.F.B., Statistics of Farmers' Selling and Buying Associations, pp. 4, 43, 71. 



