COOPERATIVES, 1920-32 313 



agreement provided for a price of not less than $1.42 a hundred for 3.5 

 per cent milk and a retail price of eight cents a quart. Late in November, 

 1933, this was changed to provide for a minimum price of $1.70 a hun- 

 dred, and there were other changes after that as well. 53 



Another Twin Cities cooperative, the Franklin Cooperative Creamery 

 Association, was organized by producers, milk-wagon drivers, and some 

 distributors who did not cooperate with the Twin City Milk Producers' 

 Association. This association retailed milk and began its operations in 

 March, 1921, with eighteen wagons. About a year and a half later it op- 

 erated 130 wagons and delivered half the milk in Minneapolis. 54 



Another type of cooperative dairy association was that dealing with 

 manufactured products, such as butter and cheese. Large-scale associations 

 handling these products were built where the local creameries were the 

 most numerous. In 1934 some 1,079 local cooperative creameries operating 

 in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa produced about 68 per cent of the 

 butter turned out by the nation's cooperatives. Cooperative cheese factories 

 also had made their greatest progress in the western Middle West. Al- 

 most two-thirds of the total production of American and foreign types 

 of cheese were manufactured there. Other states, in the order of their 

 importance from the standpoint of volume, were Minnesota, Illinois, and 

 New York. 55 



One of the first and most successful of these dairy associations, and 

 also the largest, was the Land O'Lakes Creameries, Incorporated, a fed- 

 eration of local associations located largely in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and 

 the Dakotas. The first step taken by local cooperative creameries toward 

 this end came in 1919, when county associations were established in Hous- 

 ton and McLeod counties in Minnesota. The next year even more effec- 

 tive county organizations were set up. By the end of 1920, fifteen counties 

 in Minnesota and one in Wisconsin had formed county cooperative as- 

 sociations. The annual output of butter manufactured by the 226 cream- 

 eries belonging to these county associations amounted to about forty 

 million pounds. 



Next the dairymen began to talk of improvement, standardization, 



53. Twin City Milk Producers' Association, Annual Report, 1920, pp. 12-17, and 

 Annual Report, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Number (St. Paul, 1941), XXV, 42-43. 



54. Filley, Cooperation in Agriculture, pp. 283-84. 



55. Fetrow, Cooperative Marketing of Agricultural Products, pp. 23-24. 



