TRANSPORTATION AND STORAGE FACILITIES 

 AS FACTORS IN THE MARKETING 



OF FARM PRODUCTS 







Introduction 



It is a commonplace observation that American agriculture has 

 been dependent at every stage of its development upon the extent 

 and character of transportation facilities available at the moment. 

 The Colonial tobacco planter must keep near enough to the streams 

 so that he could roll his product in hogsheads to the local boat-landing. 

 The pioneers of the Ohio Valley were hard put to it to market then- 

 products till the early canals gave them cheap access to the eastern 

 ports and consuming centers. The farmers who crossed the Missis- 

 sippi soon found how thoroughly their fortunes depended upon the 

 building activities and the rate-making policies of the railroads. 

 Today the competition of the various agricultural regions of the 

 country is not upon the basis of their ability merely to grow certain 

 crops, but upon the basis of their ability to lay these goods down in a 

 certain condition and with a certain cost of delivery in the markets 

 of this or other countries. 



Indeed our whole industrial organization has been built up upon a 

 basis of cheap transportation of agricultural products. This has made 

 possible on the one hand the extreme specialization along manufactur- 

 ing and industrial lines of certain countries and favored regions, and 

 on the other hand a similar specialization by different agricultural 

 regions in those lines of production for which they were especially 

 fitted. England's industrial supremacy, at the expense of a neglected 

 agriculture, would have been quite impossible except for the cheap 

 transportation of food-stuffs from regions where they could be cheaply 

 grown (see selection 179). The piling up of dense populations like 

 that of Massachusetts or the extreme congestion of cities like New 

 York are limited by the possibility of our transportation systems to 

 furnish them with quick and economical contact with wide sources of 

 food supply. Much of the recent talk of high cost of living and inves- 

 tigation of city marketing arrangements is an expression of the fact 



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