280 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



West prevailed. Those from the range states called the committee's plan 

 a "Corn Belt scheme" that hardly fitted their requirements. Their industry 

 was in a bad state, and they needed immediate relief. Livestock-shipping 

 associations and better marketing machinery were not what they wanted. 

 The majority of the members of this conference were from the corn-hog 

 area, however, and therefore the National Producers' plan, designed 

 primarily for the hog market, went into effect. It called for a system of 

 terminal livestock commission associations with a central administrative 

 organization, the livestock commission associations to be supplied by pro- 

 ducing members bound together through local cooperative shipping as- 

 sociations. 



There were two other points of controversy: the relation of the newly 

 organized system to existing livestock-marketing associations, and also 

 its relation to the general farm organizations. Opponents of the com- 

 mittee's plan insisted that the organization should grow from the bottom 

 up and not from the top down, as had been recommended. But supporters 

 of the plan replied that their marketing machinery was going to be built 

 around the individual farmer, and their views were sustained by a margin 

 of 28 to 22, chiefly because of the votes of Farm Bureau delegates from 

 Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. 



As Nourse and Knapp wrote, the arguments of the supporters of the 

 committee's plan to the effect that their proposal "was built on the in- 

 dividual farmer was hardly less than rubbing salt in the wounds of the 

 leaders of the cooperative shipping movement." Shippers from already 

 established local associations in Iowa and Minnesota were hardly enthu- 

 siastic about dismantling their associations or turning them over to the 

 state farm bureau federations. Representatives from these states had come 

 to the conference with the idea that whatever marketing organization 

 came into existence would be based "strictly on commodity lines" and 

 not be attached to any general farm organization. Leaders from Wisconsin, 

 Kansas, and other states said that when and if a national livestock-market- 

 ing plan came into being, it should come about because the local associa- 

 tions had expanded into the terminal market. One Kansas delegate 

 remarked that the adoption of the committee plan would bring about 

 something "little short of revolution and murder in Kansas" because of 

 the strong pro-Farmers' Union sentiment that prevailed there and the sue- 



