26 
| 
—these old shoes 
contain “ fertilizer! ” 
Old shoes contain fertilizer! 
Throw them in your wheat field. 
Will they help the wheat to grow? 
You know, of course, they will 
not. Why? Because it will be 
years before the shoes will decay 
into a form where the food ele¬ 
ments become available. 
Yet many good farmers believe 
that their soil contains plenty of 
potash. They buy mixed fertilizer 
containing no potash of any kind, 
or very, very little potash. 
They forget that plant-food to be 
of any use must be available —-in 
such form that hungry roots 
can greedily absorb it. 
Try Potash One Year. 
Perhaps an analysis of your 
soil would show “no need 
for potash.” But is it avail' 
able to hungry roots ? That 
is the question. 
There is only one way to be sure 
that potash is not a limiting fac¬ 
tor in your soil, and that is to try 
it one year. Sow a check-strip if 
you choose, but experiment for 
yourself. Soils often differ com¬ 
pletely on two adjoining farms. 
If you buy mixed fertilizer insist on 
a formula that is high in potash. 
Your dealer has Genuine German 
Potash in stock, either in the form 
of mixed fertilizer or in 200 pound 
sacks. It is plentiful now. Should 
he be temporarily out of it, write us 
and we will tell you how and where 
to get it in the grade you 
wish. 
The distribution of German 
Potash, formerly managed 
in this country by the Ger¬ 
man Kali Works and the 
Potash Syndicate, is now 
controlled by the 
POTASH IMPORTING COR¬ 
PORATION OF AMERICA 
81 FULTON STREET, NEW YORK 
B-l 17-224 
Genuine German 
POTASH 
p 
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SECTION 
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Ask your dealer for Arrow Tee 
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Write for Free Booklet G-84 
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PATENTS 
Write today for free instruction 
book and Record of Invention 
blank. Send sketch or model 
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ington, D. C. 
American Agriculturist, January 12, 1924 
The Multiple Price Plan 
A Consideration of the League s Sales Policy 
T BELIEVE that 
1 the first, strenuous 
days of the cooperatives are now far enough in 
the past and that we are becoming sufficiently 
broad gauge in our thinking so that it is no 
longer rank treason to discuss policies and to 
publicly ask—or question—the economic wis¬ 
dom of certain cooperative efforts. I have the 
feeling that what I am about to say will not be 
popular, but there are questionings that have 
been running through my mind for a good 
while and I think I will feel better if I get them 
out of my system. Hitherto, if I have ex¬ 
pressed such heretical ideas it has been only in 
conversation with my 
friends and not in 
public or in print. Of- 
those who will greatly 
disagree with me— 
who will perhaps 
number me with the 
“enemy,” I ask par¬ 
don before I begin, 
for I am venturing to 
question one funda¬ 
mental effort of the 
Dairymen’s League. 
Perhaps I ought 
first to set forth my 
own actual relation 
to the League. I 
have been (as we say 
in the churches) “a 
member in good and 
regular standing” in 
the old Dairymen’s 
League since the 
beginning, and I 
signed the pooling 
contract, although, 
owing to the nature 
of ’our business, it 
did not really con¬ 
cern me. Although 
we live in an inten¬ 
sive milk-shipping 
region with one 
League-owned and 
two Sheffield plants 
within two miles of 
us, yet we have re¬ 
mained the only dairy 
farm of any size in 
this section that has 
steadfastly refused to 
sell liquid milk. Our 
main business has 
been selling cream. 
We have made ice¬ 
cream for two sum¬ 
mers. Also we have 
made some Neufcha- 
tel cheese and some 
butter, but with the 
exception of a little 
milk sold at irregu¬ 
lar intervals and in 
uncertain quantities 
to help out a couple 
of local peddlers we 
have sold no liquid 
milk in many years. 
I regard skim milk 
as suchj a valuable 
foodstuff for pigs 
and calves that 1 am 
willing to make con¬ 
siderable immediate 
financial sacrifice to 
keep it on the farm. So I am rather a poor 
pooler because my membership has been only 
nominal, and I cannot boast that I have suf¬ 
fered or bled for the cause. It is true that dur¬ 
ing two milk strikes I was glad to separate a 
good deal of milk for the community, but on 
the whole I have viewed events from the side 
lines with bad wishes but without the blood 
lust of combat. 
Now for my heretical questionings. From the 
very beginning and never more than now I 
have had grave doubts as to the economic 
soundness of the plan of selling the same article 
for several different prices, the precise price 
depending wholly upon just what use the buyer 
proposed to make of it. A would-be purchaser 
goes to the League and says, “What will you 
charge me for 100 cans of milk?” and the 
answer is not a quotation but a question, “What 
are you going to do with it?” In any other 
commercial relation the question would be 
deemed an impertinence. It seems to me that 
in definitely establishing different prices for 
milk according to the use which is to be made 
of it the League has gone further than any 
other selling organization and has introduced 
a practice almost unheard of in the commercial 
world. The Citrus Fruit Exchange of the 
Pacific coast is the oft-quoted example of a 
very successful pooling sales organization, but 
when it has an inquiry for a box or a carload 
of lemons it does not 
first inquire if the 
purchaser intends to make lemonade or a lemon 
pie or is going to suck them to cure his cold, 
They are interested only in finding a man who 
wants to buy and pay for lemons at a price as 
high as permitted by the adjustment of supply 
and demand. Grade, time of delivery and 
freight rates must of course be taken into 
consideration but not the ultimate disposal. 
There is a school of economists who say that 
just so long as America has a single bushel of 
wheat that must seek a market abroad the 
price of that one bushel will determine the 
price of the entire 
crop — an extreme 
statement of course 
and yet measurably 
true. In any case 
the grain trade recog¬ 
nizes that the price 
of wheat must decline 
until “it gets down 
to an export basis” 
and the fact that for 
two years past this 
“export basis” has 
been disastrously low 
explains the woes of 
the wheat farmer. 
Now I hold that 
the dairy industry is 
in a somewhat com¬ 
parable situation. 
There is never a time 
when we do not pro¬ 
duce far more milk 
than can possibly be 
used either as market 
milk, cream, ice¬ 
cream, soft cheese or 
any of the higher 
classifications. Al¬ 
ways taking the 
country as a whole, 
we have a large per¬ 
centage of the entire 
supply that must find 
its markets in the 
old, dependable and 
always (at some 
price) unlimited mar¬ 
kets for butter and 
cheese. In America, 
butter is relatively 
far more important 
than cheese and 
hence the price of 
butter is the great, 
fundamental basic 
factor in the price 
of all dairy products. 
Of course it is true 
that market milk will 
and ought to bring 
somewhat higher 
prices than milk for 
manufacturing pur¬ 
poses. 
One reason is that 
it costs more to pro¬ 
duce it because of 
the higher standards 
of cleanliness and 
care. 
Then,too, the terri¬ 
tory from which milk 
is most conveniently 
shipped to the cities 
is limited. Ibis is a natural or geographical 
advantage which certainly tends to grow less 
with the development of country motor-truck 
transportation. 
Another and most important reason is that 
shipping milk precludes any possibility of 
income from the by-products—-a source of 
revenue that does considerable to equalize 
the otherwise very low price received for milk 
made into butter. 
Here are at least three reasons why market 
milk should and does bring higher prices than 
milk to be manufactured and this was true 
long before any cooperative control of prices 
was attempted. 
The condensaries always paid a price which, 
while usually lower than market milk, was 
higher than that marketed through butter 
factories because there was no whey or skim 
milk to be returned and furthermore because 
they did demand rather special standards of 
cleanliness and cooling. 
I do feel, however, that usually an effort has 
been made to sell Class 1 milk at a price which 
was higher above the general milk price level 
than the facts in the case justify. For example, 
on October 24 just passsed, the League voted 
to fix a price of $3.45 per hundred pounds of 
3 c /o milk that is to say, $1.15 per pound of 
butter fat a price that to a man accustomed 
0 Continued on page 30) 
BY JARED VAN WAGENEN, JR. 
TO DAIRYMEN 
W HETHER you are in the Dairymen’s 
League Cooperative Association or not, 
whether you agree with Mr. Van Wagenen 
or not in his constructive criticisms on this 
page, we believe that you will want to read 
his article because it will set you thinking, 
and right thinking based on right facts is 
fundamental to success. 
Mr. Van Wagenen’s article leads to 
another question on this problem of market¬ 
ing fluid milk and manufactured dairy 
products. For some time now the League 
has been engaged in a great campaign cost¬ 
ing hundreds of thousands of dollars trying 
to teach the housewives of New York and 
other cities to use more “Dairylea” Evapo¬ 
rated Milk. While there is no question that 
the League was right in advertising exten¬ 
sively its products in other cities outside of 
our territory, it seemed to us that it was 
a mistake to conduct such a campaign in 
New York City. 
Every can of evaporated milk which the 
housewife is taught to use reduces, to some 
extent at least, her demand for whole fluid 
milk. Because fluid milk cannot be shipped 
long distances, dairymen within three to four 
hundred miles have pretty nearly a monop¬ 
oly of the New York City fluid milk mar¬ 
ket. On the other hand, canned milk can be 
brought for sale in New York City from 
practically every other dairy country in the 
world. Therefore, advertising that increases 
the consumption of canned milk and de¬ 
creases the consumption of fluid milk in New 
York City will in time surely operate to the 
disadvantage of the farmers in this territory 
producing fluid milk for the metropolitan 
district. 
The answer which the League has made to 
this thought has been that the advertising 
was for the purpose of establishing in the 
consumer’s mind, in the quickest way. 
Dairymen’s League milk, and that the estab¬ 
lishment of the League’s trade name for its 
manufactured milk would pave the way to 
sell more League fluid milk. The League 
now announces that it is rapidly becoming 
a fluid milk marketing association and that 
more and more of its product is being sold 
in Class 1. With this fact in mind, and if 
the organization has for its future policy the 
selling of Dairymen’s League fluid milk di¬ 
rect to the consumer, perhaps its advertising 
campaign of “Dairylea” evaporated milk as 
a stepping stone is justified.— THE EDITOR 
