24 AGRICULTURAL ORGANISATION 



for collective purchase, the co-operative dairies and the 

 other local bodies were doing. There are also 4,399 rural 

 banks of the independent Raiffeisen Organisation which 

 arrange purchases through the Central Agricultural Loan 

 Bank. We thus get a total of 8,413 rural banks in addition 

 to the other organisations affiliated to central societies for 

 the purchase of goods, this total representing more than half 

 of the 15,000 rural banks in Germany. At the end of 1909 

 only 12 per cent, of the co-operative societies for purchase 

 remained unconnected with the central purchase federations. 



Included in the 10,348 members of the twenty-seven 

 central federations are 3,787 "individual" members. These, 

 it is explained, are mostly large farmers resident in districts 

 where there are, as yet, no societies, or where, for some 

 reason or other, societies cannot be formed. 



The central federations act in concert with one another in 

 making their purchases from producers or importers, and in 

 this way they can not only give orders for exceptionally 

 large quantities, but they have a better opportunity for 

 overcoming the influence of traders' syndicates and com- 

 binations, and for obtaining concessions from which the 

 smaller societies and their members directly gain. The 

 federation of federations has, in turn, gone so far that there 

 is an Imperial Federation of German Agricultural Co-opera- 

 tive Societies which at the end of 1910 included : 



Central co-operative societies . . 80 



Co-operative agricultural credit banks 12,978 



,, sale and purchase societies 2,194 



,, dairies . . . . . . 2,050 



Other co-operative societies . . . . 1,811 



Total .. .. 19,113 



This was an increase of 480 societies over the number for 

 the previous year. 



In 1909 the purchases made by the central societies 

 connected with the Imperial Federation, which includes 

 80 per cent, of the agricultural co-operative societies in the 

 German Empire, amounted to 7,397,000. Adding to this 

 figure the sum of 2,415,000 expended for the Raiffeisen 



