Vol. LXXI. No. 4148. 
MONMOUTH COUNTY FARMERS’ EXCHANGE 
How a New Jersey County Organized. 
Part I. 
[At the meeting of the N. Y. State Agricultural Society 
at Albany last Winter W. H. Ingling, manager of the 
Monmouth Co., N. J., Farmers’ Exchange, spoke on co-opera¬ 
tion. We give below a synopsis of his paper. This ex¬ 
change has proved a great help to its members.] 
PROPER DISTRIBUTION, we believe, is in the 
farmer placing his goods as near to the consumer by 
his original sale as is possible. Whenever he fails to 
do this he injures himself. He cannot place them 
directly in the hands of the consumer through the 
present channels of trade except in a local way, neither 
can he quite reach the consumer by any association 
or exchange he may be able to organize. Yet to 
reach the consumer is his ultimate object, because 
without him his goods have no value. How can he 
do it? He can organize a cooperative exchange that 
will place his products with the dealer only once 
removed from the consumer, which will enable him 
greatly to increase the receipts for his crops. With 
an organized exchange of his own to sell the products 
of his farm as well as buy what seeds, fertilizers, etc. 
he needs, he has placed his business in shape to deal 
directly with the consumer as soon as he sees and 
takes advantage of his opportunity. The consumer’s 
necessity should cause him also to' organize a co¬ 
operative buying association through which he could 
purchase all of his requirements at a large saving 
to himself. The farmers’ exchange could then sell 
direct to the consumers’ exchange, thus benefiting the 
farmers as well as the consumer. There are many 
NEW YORK, APRIL 27, 1912. 
of these co-operative buying associations in England, 
which are successfully operated to the great benefit 
of their members, and the sum of whose business 
amounts to many millions of dollars per year. 
NEW JERSEY CONDITIONS.—As we are more 
familiar with the situation in Monmouth County, New 
Jersey, we will take that as a fair example of the 
general conditions that have existed in the past. We 
take it that our farmers in New Jersey are at least 
average representatives of the class throughout the 
country, and yet they have been allowing the buyers 
for years to fix the price of their products. No other 
business allows this. The farmer somehow, no mat¬ 
ter how much care, anxiety and unceasing toil may 
have been required to raise his crops, fails to ap¬ 
preciate these efforts when he comes to market them. 
His interest ceases when he carts his goods to the sta¬ 
tion, for he accepts the price offered by the local 
buyer, and permits him to find the consumer at the 
farmer’s expense. He does not fix the price when he 
buys his groceries, or when he purchases a suit of 
clothes; the owner of the groceries or suit does that. 
Yet the farmer owns his produce but does not fix 
the price. I had some experience last Fall in buying 
seed potatoes that will illustrate this statement. There 
being no fanners’ exchange, of course. I had to g<j 
to the dealer, who had the seed I wanted, in one of 
the western counties of this State. I wrote him for 
prices, and he quoted me a price that I thought was 
a little more than the market, so I offered a price 
somewhat lower, but in the end I had to pay his price. 
Now the point is, he fixed the price he paid the 
farmer and also the price he sold them to me. The 
WEEKLY, $1.00 PER YEAR 
farmer had nothing to say about it in anyway. Do 
you think that the farmer can come to his own under 
such conditions? 
A 41-CENT DOLLAR.—The old way of reaching 
the consumer, the system as practiced in New Jersey, 
was as follows: The farmer delivered his potatoes 
to the local buyer at his price. This local buyer 
sold them to the jobber in New York or Philadelphia 
at about 10 cents per barrel advance. This jobber 
sold them to another jobber, we will say in Chicago, 
Cincinnati or some other city at an advance of 10 or 
15 cents per barrel. This jobber sold them to a 
wholesaler or small jobber in his own town or one 
contiguous at an advance of possibly 10 or 15 cents 
more per barrel. The wholesaler sold them to the 
retail grocer at another advance, and the retail grocer 
sold them to the consumer at 25 to 50% advance. To 
this must be added the freight of perhaps 40 to 50 
cents per barrel. No wonder the consumer complains 
of the high cost of living under such a system of 
distribution. But that was the way we were doing 
it in New Jersey. It is true our potatoes reached 
the consumer in the end. but five sets of dealers 
handled them before the user for whom they were 
grown received them, and every one who touched 
them increased the cost without any benefit to the 
farmer. He had the 41 cents and the consumer had 
paid his dollar; the system had the other 59. These 
were the conditions in Monmouth County, New Jer¬ 
sey, in 1906. Our farmers in the Grange began to 
discuss the situation, trying to find some solution 
of the unsatisfactory condition existing in marketing 
their produce. They saw that the local buyers were 
A WHITE WYANDOTTE HOME CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETY. Fig. 191. 
