10 ADDRESSES 



co-operative marketing of products, offered the farmers of Ohio by these very 

 trade conditions. Why has not the farmer taken advantage of the facilities 

 for communication and transportation to make them serve his interests more 

 perfectly, as the manufacturer and the middleman have done? For example, the 

 either fall in Ohio, or just to the southwest. Our state is now, therefore, the 

 central state of the Union commercially, in the sense that a large part of the 

 trade of the country must pass through or over Ohio. The geographic location 

 manufacturer is using the telephone, the mails, the express and freight lines, 

 more and more each year, to sell directly to the farmers and so increase profits. 

 Why does not the farmer organize in similar manner to sell directly to the 

 manufacturer and his other consumers? These facilities are just as good for 

 the one as the other. When one observes the losing way in which most farmers 

 do their business with their city consumers, one would, think that the telephone, 

 the mail, and the railroads did not work both ways, or, at least, that they did 

 not work backward towards town for the farmer, but only for the commission 

 merchant. The trouble, of course, is that the farmers are not organized for 

 co-operative marketing/ 



There are no better illustrations of the gains of small farming and of 

 co-operation among producers than those found in the experiences of the farmers 

 of Denmark. After the Germans robbed them of their province and took away 

 their markets on the continent, the Danes sank rapidly, you will remember, into 

 a condition of extreme poverty. Necessity drove them to adopt new methods. 

 After a half century of scientific farming and co-operation, they are now the 

 wealthiest farmers per capita -in the world. This remarkable change, which, by 

 the way, has been accompanied by great industrial development in all other direc- 

 tions, is attributed directly to the improvement of agriculture through educa- 

 tional methods and its increased gains through co-operation. 



The Danes have, for instance, developed scientific dairying and stock rais- 

 ing in all its branches. The government employs many experts to instruct the 

 people in the breeding of live stock. If a group of -farmers wish to purchase a 

 bull, for example, for its co-operative society, it first consults the government 

 man. Even in the breeding of single hogs the individual farmer will consult 

 the expert. These experts furnish their services readily to the farmers who 

 ask them. The result of this has been the "rapid improvement of live stock and 

 a steady increase in the quantity and quality of the milk and the character of 

 all dairy products. In many herds the quantity of milk annually given by each 

 cow has been increased over one hundred gallons. The Danes attribute much 

 of this increase to their scientific methods of milking, as well as to this scien- 

 tific breeding. The creameries impose severe rules upon the farmers as to the 

 methods of feeding the cows and of handling the milk, and the loyalty of the 

 men to their organizations is remarkable. The Danish trade in butter alone 

 and their butter is considered the best that reaches the London market has 

 multiplied ten times in twenty years. 



Severe economy is practiced in all matters, with remarkable results. This 

 economy extends even to the cows, which are hitched and required to graze a 

 portion of the pasture in: til it is eaten clean. They milk three times a day, milk 

 tests are systematically applied, and the cows with poor records are discarded, 

 while the calves of record mothers are kept for the farm. 



The Danish co-operative methods of producing and selling are also most 

 interesting. The co-operative dairy movement now includes one thousand societies 

 with two hundred thousand members, and it delivered last year over five billion 

 pounds of milk, which produced two hundred million pounds of butter worth 

 sixty millions of dollars. 



