124 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



to meet the demand, can hardly bo supplied by the small indi- 

 vidual farmer : and because they tfannot be supplied in that way, 

 the marketman and consumer naturally go to the jobber to get 

 their goods. The jobber pays the farmer as small a price as 

 he can and charges the consumer as high a price as he can for 

 his costly services of packing, grading and distributing the prod- 

 uct uniformly. 



European farmers in England, Ireland, Denmark and other 

 countries found themselves confronted with the same marketing 

 conditions which the farmers of the United States have found. 

 They struggled with it just as the farmers of the United States 

 are struggling, but unlike the majority of the farmers of the 

 United States, they struggled to some effect. The farmers of 

 the Old World are small farmers. Not many of them produce 

 more than a mere handful of products of any one sort. Some of 

 them found themselves with no home market and were obliged 

 to ship their products across the seas into foreign countries. 

 Some of them found an organized opposition to the sale of their 

 goods in other countries. Nevertheless, the -European farmers 

 in the countries mentioned found the way out by organizing 

 themselves into small cooperative selling associations. By pool- 

 ing their products they were able to facilitate their marketing 

 because, in the first place, they were able to pack uniformly, 

 supply the market sufficiently and regularly, and because of the 

 supply which they controlled, they were able to meet success- 

 fully organized opposition to their interests. 



No other poultry in the world is packed as well as Danish 

 poultry ; no other eggs are graded as well as Danish eggs ; there 

 is no bacon that commands a higher price than Danish bacon. 

 This is true chiefly because Danish poultry, Danish eggs, and 

 Danish bacon are skillfully packed, uniformly graded and 

 shipped regularly under the guarantee of the shipper. It is 

 known the world over that this cooperation has been the salva- 

 tion of Danish agriculture, that the farmer of Denmark is to-day 

 the most important man in his country and is important chiefly 

 because he has known how to organize. It is said that the 

 number of cooperative organizations in Denmark is four times 

 the number of farmers; that is to say, on the average, each far- 

 mer in Denmark belongs to four cooperative organizations. 



