88 Cooperation in Agriculture 



mentioned than in handling and marketing and in the 

 purchase of supplies. 



The cooperative method may be applied to several 

 phases of agricultural production. Its most practical 

 application lies in the improvement by associated rather 

 than individual effort of crops and animals and in the 

 protection of crops against insect pests, fungous diseases, 

 and injurious temperatures. It may also be applied to 

 some of the details of crop production such as the pruning 

 of trees, the irrigation of the land, to the fumigation of 

 trees, or other cultural features which may be handled 

 for the individual members by a crop-marketing or sepa- 

 rate organization. All of these problems can be met effec- 

 tively by progressive farmers, but their efficiency in an 

 industry can reach a high plane only when a group of 

 farmers organize to apply the best-known agricultural 

 methods to an industry as a whole. The individual 

 farmer, for example, can fumigate or spray his trees for 

 scale insects, and if all of the growers in his locality prac- 

 tice fumigation voluntarily, the trees of a community 

 may be kept free of the pest. But there will be the widest 

 variation in the methods of fumigation, and this will re- 

 duce the average efficiency of the whole operation. On 

 the other hand, a cooperative organization formed by 

 the growers of a community to handle the fumigation or 

 spraying problem collectively brings about greater econ- 

 omy in work and a uniformity in the application of methods 

 which is rarely realized through the efforts of the individual 

 fruit-growers or by contractors who fumigate or spray 

 the trees for the growers. Incidentally, the value of prop- 

 erty increases in such a community, because the orchard 



