AGRICULTURAL CO-OPERATION. 



By the Hon. Gifford Pinchot, 

 Milford, Penna. 



I think it would be hard to find anywhere deeper interest in country 

 Hfe than you have shown in this conference. 



As I read history it was not the decadence of the city that destroyed 

 Rome. It was the gradual sinking of life in the open country, together 

 with the existing slave system of those days. Gradually, the man who 

 worked on the land came to be ranked as a piece of agricultural machin- 

 ery, and as his status dropped it took with it the sterling qualities of vigor 

 from the town, because all of us know that much of the best blood of the 

 city comes in a continual stream from out of the country. 



This co-operative movement rests on a new conception as to what 

 life on the farm means. For years and years we prided ourselves because 

 we did more for the farmers, and did it more effectively, than any other 

 nation in the world, and it was true in a sense. Through our Agricultural 

 Department in Washington, our Agricultural Departments in the States, 

 our Experiment Stations, and Agricultural Colleges, we were spending 

 money more rapidly than any other nation in the world, and all this 

 almost wholly to help the farmer to grow better crops. We have been deal- 

 ing with the farmer and the farmer's wife as men and women whose sole 

 fimction was to produce food for others to eat, and incidentally getting 

 enough food for their own needs. But we are learning slowly that it is 

 just as important to help him get the best possible returns for the crops 

 he grows, and to utihze those returns so as to make them yield him the 

 best and happiest life. The problem is not merely to get better crops, not 

 merely to dispose of crops better, but in the last analysis to have happier 

 and richer lives of men and women on the farm. 



There are certain things I would like to call to your attention about 

 the condition of farming in the United States and the tendencies which 

 mark it just now. During the last census period, 1900-1910, the popula- 

 tion of the United States increased 21 per cent, but the food production 

 increased only 10 per cent. In other words, we were adding people to 

 our population twice as fast as we were adding food to our food supply, 

 and it was no wonder the cost of food rose. What a farmer was getting 

 $1.00 for in 1900, he got $1.67 in 1910. The average price of farm prod- 

 ucts had risen in ten years 67 per cent. Yet, taking the farming 

 population by and large, in spite of this marvelous increase in what he 

 got for his crops, the farmer has not been nearly as prosperous in the last 



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