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These men bought from the farmers, generally to fill orders previously 

 booked. As a matter of actual experience, the competition was all in the 

 selling end of their business. The farmers, uninformed as to general 

 market conditions and forced by the perishable nature of their goods to 

 make quick sales, were helpless to do any real bargaining and pretty gen- 

 erally accepted whatever price the local buyers offered. Moreover, as these 

 local buyers were men of small capital and worked generally for a per pack- 

 age brokerage or margin of profit, regardless of whether prices happened 

 to be high or low, they had a very positive interest in establishing and 

 maintaining a low range of prices. And the actual and inevitable result 

 of their activities had come to be that after a brief period of early high 

 prices, before the general crop movement was well under way, the market 

 would fall to about the lowest level at which the farmers could be induced 

 to pack and haul out their already matured products rather than leave them 

 to rot in the ground. It was a realization of the abuses inherent in this 

 system of "laissez faire'' marketing and a determination to supplant it 

 that furnished the initial momentum for the movement to establish the 

 Exchange. 



Again, the Exchange stands for the standardization of farm products. 

 It aims to get the farmer more for his goods by making those goods intrin- 

 sically worth more — and above all, by making their worth more certain — 

 by making the contents of his packages a fair inference from the manifest 

 and the top layer, and not, as is too often the case with the farmer's pack, 

 a mere matter of conjecture. When the Exchange member hauls his goods 

 to the station, they go first to the local inspector, who must examine and 

 pass upon them, emptying a barrel at random from every load, before 

 they go into the car. Certain definite standards of culling, of size and 

 filling of packages, and of quality and condition of contents, are insisted 

 upon; and only goods which meet these requirements are. sold under the 

 association's official mark of approval — its registered trade mark, the Red 

 Star Brand. To promote uniformity and insure certainty of inspection, a 

 general inspector, having now complete administrative control of the 

 entire force of local inspectors, with power of removal, and provided with 

 an assistant, travels constantly from one shipping point to another, coach- 

 ing and reviewing the work of the local inspectors. The process involved, 

 as it affects the farmer, is one of education, and therefore slow, and the 

 results thus far attained leave much to be accomplished, as an occasional 

 letter from some exasperated customer still forces us to admit; but great 

 and permanent progress has indisputably been made in this field of the 

 association's labors, and it is not too much to say that the Red Star Brand 

 has now acquired a national reputation among produce dealers, which 

 insures the goods that bear it a preference in practically every important 

 market in the United States. 



And finally, and more comprehensiv^, the Exchange aims at, and 

 has in large measure achieved, first througffrhe natural economy of operat- 



