115 



SECRETARY BROWN: We have been using the 

 Pease Grader. 



MR. PUTNAM : On the ungraded apples, was the size 

 taken into consideration ? You can put large ones or medi- 

 um ones together if they were ungraded? 



MR. GAGE : I believe that according to law, you do 

 not need to put the sizes on. 



MR. PUTNAM : That is what I understand. 



MR. GAGE : If you put on the minimum size, 2 1-4, and 

 people are sure you haven't any apples in there the size of a 

 walnut, you are more likely to get a ready sale of apples. The 

 small apples we send to the cider, mill, anyway. 



We have dreams. We hope some day to have an evapo- 

 rating plant and so forth and so on. The only way co-opera- 

 tion can succeed, gentlemen, is for a number of these ex- 

 changes to start and then amalgamate into a state exchange 

 which will do our buying and do it the way you are doing 

 through the Worcester County Farm Bureau at the present 

 time. If Ave get organized in that way, we are going to have 

 a tremendous puchasing power. If you could get an organ- 

 ization of agriculturists together under one head and start 

 to buy three or four million dollars worth of material they 

 are going to receive much more reasonable rates than any 

 local exchange. We have had that demonstrated with Mr. 

 Austin and other men from Maine. They paid their own 

 way up here and spoke to us twice last year, hoping that we 

 would organize a statewide organization. They have a 

 purchasing power down there now of over $3,000,000, buy 

 over $1,000,000 worth of grain a year. 



I am drifting off my subject a little, but they have a 

 subsidiary company, — the Farmers' Union Grain and Supply 

 Company, in which the unions of the state of Maine have 

 stock. They buy the grain direct from the jobbers in the. 

 West and charge one j^ercent for doing business. Those 

 cars are sidetracked at a certain point in New York and are 

 made up in mixed cars if desired and shipped to the state of 

 Maine. Now, in that one percent they paid the manager, 



