when to bring their produce to the market, when to hold 

 their produce in reserve? I heard the other day of a 

 farmer carrying a load of tomatoes to Boston and being 

 compelled to sell in the glutted market for thirty-five and 

 forty cents a bushel. Another farmer carried in a load 

 of green corn, and sold for two cents per dozen ears. 

 This sort of thing, no doubt, is common enough. 

 And the consumer, as a rule, pays the same price 

 as usual for the farm produce. I have knoAvn some mar- 

 ketmen to get rich, while the farmers who have enriched 

 them, have, by equal skill and industry, no more than held 

 their own. It has seemed to me that farmers might, by 

 having a competent adviser at the market, one who can 

 keep a practiced eye on all the markets, save themselves 

 from much needless waste. Farmers, I assume, are in 

 some degree served by the public weather bureau ; to-mor- 

 row's weather probabilities may properly, to a certain ex- 

 tent, govern their labor-plails. Why not also by the prob- 

 abilities forecast by a friendly market expert? Farmers 

 do not now seem to very thoroughly understand even the 

 demands of the home market. While I am told of Bartlett 

 pears selling in Boston for seventy-five cents a barrel, I try 

 in vain to buy good autumn eating apples at any price in 

 our home market. Farmers ought to be helpers rather 

 than rivals of each other. My suggestion may not be 

 worth the breath it consumes to utter it ; butit has seemed 

 to me that the tillers of the soil might, not by forming a 

 trust, but by friendly combination and unitary action, come 

 into more just relations to the market. 



Through precisely such a society as this, farmers may 

 promote their social and home life. This society is fortu- 

 nately organized on a broad basis. No one is excluded for 

 his politics, or his religion, or ids race; and one is allowed 

 formal membership in the society even if he is a farmer 

 only by being a consumer of farm produce. The benefit 

 which this old and honored agricultural society has con- 



