AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FEDERATION 277 



be used to find new markets. The flow of products to market had to be 

 regulated in order to make the supply equal the demand. Individual 

 selling was to be avoided, and products were to be sold at the point of 

 consumption rather than at the point of production. 54 



After two days of discussion, the conference advised President Howard 

 to select a committee which was not to exceed seventeen members to 

 investigate grain marketing and to form plans for cooperative grain 

 marketing through one or more central organizations of grain exchanges. 

 The selection of the committee was from more than 150 available men, 

 the overwhelming majority of whom came from the states of the western 

 Middle West. Some of the men appointed to the committee had a practi- 

 cal knowledge of cooperative grain marketing; unfortunately, a few could 

 hardly "distinguish between things which were practical and those which 

 were only spectacular." 5 



The committee spent nearly seven months studying marketing. Visits 

 were made to Canada to study the activities of the United Grain Growers, 

 Limited, and to California, where the citrus fruit industry had built a 

 successful marketing system. The best-informed men in the grain trade, 

 both those opposed to cooperative marketing and those favorable to it, 

 were interviewed. Among those consulted were Julius Barnes, grain 

 exporter and head of the United States Grain Corporation during the 

 World War; Bernard M. Baruch, New York financier and chairman of 

 the War Industries Board; Leslie F. Gates, president of the Chicago 

 Board of Trade; G. Harold Powell, manager of the California Fruit 

 Growers' Exchange; and Huston Thompson, chairman of the Federal 

 Trade Commission. 



A marketing plan was finally agreed upon in a meeting held in Kansas 

 City on February 17, 1921. The next step was to explain the plan to the 

 various farm groups and to have them elect delegates for a convention 

 to be held in Chicago on April 6, 1921. 



The recommendations made at the April 6 meeting were nothing 

 more than a resume of past demands. The old grievances against the 

 marketing system and the organized grain trade were repeated. It was 



54. Aaron Sapiro, Co-Operative Grain Marketing (Chicago, 1920) [a pamphlet 

 published by the Illinois Agricultural Association; it has in it the address delivered by 

 Sapiro before the Chicago conference of July 23 and 24, 1920]. 



55. Filley, Cooperation in Agriculture, p. 150. 



