AGRICULTURAL COOPERATION IN DENMARK. 61 
department now specializes in the seed business. Although the 
Cooperative Wholesale Society initiated the first efforts toward co- 
operative buying of farm supplies, the development of the movement 
has led to specialization, resulting in the formation of independent 
purchasing associations, each to buy and distribute one particular 
kind of farm supply. 
It is significant that, in the sphere of cooperative distribution, the 
Danish farmers have followed the business practice of large private 
corporations in specializing, rather than handling a large variety 
of commodities. As the cooperative movement enlarges its scope of 
activity in agriculture, it must so operate as to furnish the business 
efficiency and service offered by private dealers. 
SEED SUPPLY AND SEED GROWERS' ASSOCIATION. 
A complete evolution has taken place in the plant industry and 
crop rotation system in Denmark with the development of the 
dairy industry during the last 40 years. With the change from 
grain farming to dairying, the farmers turned to the production of 
feeds for their livestock — mangels, swedes, turnips, and carrots, and 
clovers, alfalfa, and grasses. The yearly acreage in roots, including 
jDotatoes, is now approximately 1,000,000, or 13.6 per cent 42 of the 
agricultural lands as against 2.6 per cent in 1880. The area in 
clover, grasses, and alfalfa, together with thousands of acres in 
meadows for hay production and grazing, forms approximately 40 
per cent of the agricultural lands. In early years, importation of 
seed was necessary and this seed frequently proved very unsatis- 
factory to the farmers, both in quality and because foreign varieties 
were introduced. 
When the Cooperative Wholesale Society of Denmark began its 
seed-purchasing activities it started a movement to improve the 
production and sale of home-grown guaranteed seeds, from im- 
proved selected strains of seeds from its own experimental plots. 
This seed was then grown on the better farms under the control and 
supervision of its seed experts and specialists. To further its work 
the Cooperative Wholesale Society purchased a 17^-acre farm in 
1904 and leased a larger farm, about 118 acres, in 1911. 
Thus the Cooperative Wholesale Society introduced the guarantee 
of " genuineness " into the Danish seed trade. This guarantee, that 
the seed was of the strain stated, was possible when the seed they sold 
was grown in cooperation with the producers, under inspection, from 
stock seed supplied by their seed department. This great im- 
provement won the confidence of the farmers and their agricultural 
societies, resulting in the formation of the Danish Farmers Coopera- 
tive Association for Seed Growing (DansTce Landboforeningers 
Froforsyning, Eoskilde) in 1906, a nonstock cooperative associa- 
tion of farmers who are recognized as highly qualified seed growers. 
The aim of the association is to promote the growing of good seed 
from selected improved strains, to facilitate better trade conditions 
between grower and consumer and a profitable sale of good, guar- 
anteed seed both at home and to foreign countries. The benefit to 
Danish agriculture has been twofold : Forage yield has been greatly 
43 Statistisk Aarbog, 1922. 
