8o 



AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



The difficulties faced by farmer associations which tried to break into 

 the terminal market before 1920 appear in the history of two such com- 

 panies the Equity Cooperative Exchange of St. Paul and the Farmers' 

 Cooperative Commission Company of Hutchinson, Kansas. The Equity 

 Cooperative Exchange of St. Paul, in spite of its name, was incorporated 

 in North Dakota in 1911 and began its business operations in Minneapolis. 

 There it became involved in endless difficulties with representatives and 

 sympathizers of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce. It moved to 

 St. Paul in 1914, where it set up a grain exchange and began to acquire 

 a line of seventy or eighty local elevators scattered throughout the Dakotas, 

 Minnesota, and Montana. Never a stable organization, the exchange ex- 

 perienced an endless procession of internal bickerings and litigation until 

 it was forced into the hands of receivers in 1923. The second terminal 

 marketing cooperative, the Farmers' Cooperative Commission Company, 

 began operations in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1915; in 1928, it claimed to 

 own, operate, and control no less than fifty-four local companies and 

 sixty country elevators. The company owned memberships on the boards 

 of trade in Kansas City, Missouri, and in Wichita, Hutchinson, and Dodge 

 City, Kansas. Both the Equity Cooperative Exchange and the Farmers' 

 Cooperative Commission Company encountered their greatest opposition 

 when they sought to obtain membership on boards of trade, for private 

 dealers particularly resented the cooperative practice of disbursing patron- 

 age dividends. But eventually the farmers obtained state and federal 

 legislation which prohibited boards of trade from discriminating in this 

 way against cooperatives. 50 



Impressive as their accomplishments were, the grain-marketing coopera- 

 tives were probably not as effective as the associations formed for the 

 marketing of livestock. In this activity the farmers of Minnesota, Wis- 

 consin, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas were the pioneers. In these states the 

 multiplication of local associations was most rapid during the years 1917 

 to 1920; in the latter year their volume of shipments attained record- 

 breaking proportions. In Iowa alone on January i, 1921, there were 610 



50. Ibid., pp. 61-63; Theodore Saloutos, "The Rise of the Equity Cooperative 

 Exchange," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXII (June, 1945), pp. 31-62; 

 Steen, Cooperative Marketing, pp. 213-14; Senate Document 95, 70 Congress, i 

 session, pp. 62-63. 



