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AMERICAN POMOEOGICAR SOCIETY 
Co-operative Marketing Needed. 
The individual farmer in the nature of things cannot market his own 
crop as advantageously or as successfully as a group of farmers can. I 
do not need to speak to a group of fruit growers about the advantages in 
general of cooperation; and still we find all over the country magnificent 
opportunities to cooperate going to waste. The fine example of the citrus 
associations in California, and of the deciduous fruit organizations, of the 
farmers’ grain elevators and of the cooperative creameries, all of which 
have redounded so beneficially to the people who participate in them, have 
failed to impress many of the communities, in fact whole areas, as to the 
benefits to be obtained by cooperation. Nevertheless the adoption of a co- 
operative system of handling and marketing our fruit and other farm prod- 
ucts is absolutely essential to the future development of our farming in- 
dustries. I have studied this subject most carefully, and I see no hope of 
getting on an economic basis, working individualistically as we are at present. 
I do not wish to be understood as saying, or even indicating, that there 
is not a great deal of cooperation in the country today. There is. We have 
something like three thousand farmers’ cooperative elevators. I might say 
that these are not truly cooperative in the sense that the one-share-one-vote 
system prevails, but they are mutual organizations of farmers in their busi- 
ness; the individual organizations have an average membership of about 
one hundred and twenty-five persons; each organization handling an average 
of about $200,000, which makes a total of $600,000,000, or something like that, 
as the cooperation annual turnover in the grain industry alone. The fruit 
organizations, of which there are many and among which are some of the 
most successful cooperative organizations that we have, help to swell this 
total. There are some twenty-five hundred cooperative creameries, and the 
various truck-growing associations, cattle-growing associations, cow-test- 
ing associations, all of which handle their products cooperatively; probably 
they put the total up to between $800,600,000 and $1,0)00,000,000. 
So you see cooperation in the aggregate cuts a large figure in our coun- 
try, though we do not realize it because of its scattering occurrence. In 
fact, there are persons somewhat unenthusiastically inclined who sometimes 
minimize very much the extent of cooperation. There are others who com- 
pare the United States rather invidiously with Denmark, Germany, Italy 
and other countries in which cooperation is extensively practiced. I wish 
to say that I have made a very rough estimate of the subject; and, eliminat- 
ing the cooperative banking and cooperative credit organizations of those 
countries, I am under the impression that the United States handles a 
product whose total value is greater than the cooperatively-handled products 
of all those countries put together. Cooperation is still in an undevel- 
oped state with us, however, when considered in comparison with the op- 
portunity that our enormous country gives for its development. 
The Marketing Problem is Difficult. 
Some people have the idea that marketing is no more difficult than 
production. As a matter of fact, it is; it is very much more difficult, and very 
