340 
Hour, 
investment in a tractor is worth pro¬ 
tecting—especially the motor. The bearings, the 
cylinder walls, the valve and timing mechanisms, 
piston rings. They all need the kind of protection 
that Socony Motor Oil is especially designed to give. 
Whether you burn gas or kerosene, the extreme 
heat developed in a tractor is death on ordinary 
oil. And when an oil has broken down and lost 
its effectiveness the motor is in danger. Socony 
Motor Oil resists extreme cylinder heat and keeps 
on lubricating after many oils become useless. 
♦ 
The Socony chart at your dealer’s tells you which 
type of oil is correct for your tractor. Use it con¬ 
sistently and you’ll protect your tractor invest¬ 
ment— get finer service and longer use out of 
it. No two ways about it—it pays to use the 
finest—Socony Motor Oil. Delivery in 30 or 
50 gallon metal drums, with faucet, probably 
will suit you best, and it costs no more. 
Call or write our nearest station. 
STANDARD OIL CO. OF NEW YORK 
26 Broadway 
SDCDNY 
MOTOR OIL 
c for Tractor Lubrication 
CAULIFLOWER SEED 
Early Snowball. Imported direct from Denmark. Oz. 
$2. Quarter oz. 75c. postpaid. Free catalog 
B. F. Metcalf & Son,Inc., 206-208 W.Gene.ee St., Syracuse, N.Y. 
Peach Trees 20c, 
Apple Trees 25c Postpaid 
d tor 1924 Bargain Catalog of Fruit Trees, Berry 
ats Vines, Shrubs. Guaranteed to Grow Garden and 
,ver Seeds. Special Prices to Large Planters. 
,EN’S NURSERY & SEED HOUSE, GENEVA, OHIO 
American Agriculturist, April 5,1924 
Problems of Cooperation 
An A. A. Radio Talk Broadcast From WEAF 
Y OU were told in my By AAROI 
first talk that co¬ 
operative marketing sets out to control the 
flow of supply as to time, place and quan¬ 
tity. In order to do that it has to stop indi¬ 
vidual selling. The aim of co-operative mar¬ 
keting is to merchandise in that way instead 
of dumping in the old method of individual 
selling. 
The farmer, as an individual, is a splendid 
producer; but the farmer, as a merchandiser, 
must meet his group problem as a group. 
I named the steps in merchandising: 
First: grading—standardizing, raising quality, brand¬ 
ing, standing behind your brand. 
Second: care of the package — perfecting the package, 
so that it carries the commodity to the consumer in good 
condition and the unit that the housewife likes to handle. 
Third: extending markets by time and by place—by 
time, in that you sell over a long period instead of dumping 
in the first sixty days after harvest; by place in that you 
study geography and get the largest possible distribution 
of that commodity. 
Fourth: increasing the use of the commodity by adver¬ 
tising, f, r example. 
Fifth: control of the actual flow. With perishables, a 
problem of routing, so that no market gets a glut and no 
market gets a famine. With non-perishables, a question 
of storage and finance, storage so that you put the non- 
perishable in the storehouse or warehouse, borrow money 
on it so that the farmer gets as much as possible immedi¬ 
ately upon delivery, and then keep selling over a period of 
ten months or so for the orderly marketing of that 
commodity. 
Sixth: to make the price depend upon, the supply that 
you move into the points of consumption instead of letting 
price depend upon supply at points of production. 
These six points are the steps in merchandis¬ 
ing. Not a one of them can be done by indi¬ 
vidual farmers. Not a one can be accomplished 
by local units, selling locally, except where the 
sales problem is wholly local in character. 
Every single one can be done by a co-operative 
that is rightly organized. 
This is the aim of co-operative marketing, 
to substitute merchandising as against the old 
system of individual selling or dumping. 
Keep Your Eye on the Commodity 
The second big thing in co-operative mar¬ 
keting is to keep your eye on the particular 
commodity. You can not organize strawber¬ 
ries in the same way that you organize cotton. 
Each commodity must be studied by itself. 
First, you separate them into perishables, then 
semi-perishables, then non-perishables. If it is 
a perishable, your problem is routing. If it is 
a semi-perishable like eggs or potatoes, your 
problem is partly routing, partly storage and 
finance. If it is a non-perishable like wheat or 
cotton, your problem is wholly a problem of 
storage and finance. 
Then you have to study the commodity from 
other viewpoints. If you are dealing in fluid 
milk, your unit of organization is a metropoli¬ 
tan area. If you are dealing with cheese, your 
unit of organization should be the commodity 
as widely as it ranges. For example, with 
cheese you would want to take all the co-opera¬ 
tive cheese factories in Wisconsin and federate 
them together into one federation, and then 
have that federation join hands with an Iowa 
federation, a Minnesota federation, an Illinois 
federation, so as to get a full commodity view¬ 
point on cheese. But with milk, you would 
want to organize milk as they have done in 
New York City, around the needs of that 
metropolitan area, stretching the organization 
back as far as any shipper ships milk for fluid 
use into New York City. 
In the Case of Eggs 
Take eggs. Eggs in California can be organ¬ 
ized in one easy, distinct, centralized method, 
because the egg producers have fairly large 
flocks, standardized down to white leghorns; 
they raise mostly infertile eggs, the best eggs for 
storage. The collection of eggs is frequent and 
easy and cheap. Standardizing, the putting out 
of a branded product, is one of the easiest of 
problems with the Pacific Coast Egg Pro¬ 
ducers. 
Take your middle Western sections, where 
the farmer gives some hens to his wife; and his 
wife raises the hens for dual purposes. She 
gets brown eggs and white eggs; most of the 
eggs are fertile eggs. She gathers them in 
when she pleases and she doesn't gather them 
in case units. The method of organizing eggs 
in the middle West will not only be totally 
different from the method used in the far West; 
but the cost of organizing eggs, of making col¬ 
lection of eggs, of grading eggs, of standardizing 
eggs and of selling eggs will probably be three 
times as great in some of these states as it is on 
the Pacific Coast, where they have large, 
standardized flocks and carry on egg produc¬ 
tion as a PRIMARY work on the farm. 
The third thing is about the technique of 
co-operative marketing. It is not enough to 
know where you are going, you have to build 
a machine that can take you there. The build¬ 
ing of the machine is the technique of co¬ 
operative marketing. 
I SAPIRO The first thing is this, , 
to have a right law 
under which you should not merely incorporate 
your co-operative, but under which you can 
stand on your contracts, know the kind of con¬ 
tract that will stand, and know the remedies 
under that contract. You don’t make the 
growers bind themselves; but if they want to 
do it, you have to give them the right to bind 
themselves as tightly as possible to each other. 
To-day, in thirty States, there is a co¬ 
operative marketing act, which has been gen¬ 
erally conceded as the standard co-operative 
marketing act of the United States. This is 
now before the Legislature at Albany, in the 
interest of the New York farmers. 
Then you have to incorporate. Unincorpo¬ 
rated groups mean that if twelve men get to¬ 
gether and agree to do something informally, 
they have a co-partners’ liability. If anything 
happens there, the one out of the twelve who has 
any money will be soaked for the entire respon¬ 
sibility or obligation. 
Locals To Receive, Grade and Store the 
Commodity 
Then if you must have local units, organize 
locals to receive and grade and store and pack 
and manufacture; but no more. You must 
federate all these locals when it comes to mar¬ 
keting. Everything that the farmers have done 
in the middle West in the creation of local ele¬ 
vators and local cheese factories and local 
creameries—everything they have done has 
been absolutely right in its time. They needed 
local plants. 
But they did only the first step. Organized 
locals to receive, grade, store, manufacture, 
and pack; but when it comes to selling or mar¬ 
keting, you have to federate them'all into a com¬ 
modity plan—otherwise you can not in any 
degree control the flow of supply or do any¬ 
thing which fundamentally affects the price. 
Remember, the aim of co-operative market¬ 
ing is not to fix prices arbitrarily. That can’t 
be done unless you have absolute control of an 
industry. The aim is to control flow of sub¬ 
stantial supply as to time, place, and quantity, 
so that you have something to say about the 
conditions that affect price values. You can 
not do it as individuals; you can not do it as 
local units; but if you take the local units and 
you federate them from a commodity view¬ 
point, then you can do something to affect the 
price. 
Apples as an Example 
Let me give you an illustration. We have a 
lot of apple co-operatives throughout the 
United States. In the Northwest, there are 
three groups in the Wenatchee Valley; there are 
two in the Yakima Valley; there is a group 
around the Willamette Valley; another in the 
Hood River section; another in the Roseburg 
section, and others; there are several distinct 
groups in the entire Northwest district; there 
are three other groups in California; there are 
some groups in Michigan; there is a group in 
Illinois; there are several groups in New York; 
there are several groups in New England; and 
there are some small groups in Virginia, organ¬ 
ized rightly from local standpoints. But what 
happens? Each of these locals has its own gen¬ 
eral manager; each of these general managers 
figures that he is the smartest man in the world 
when it comes to selling apples so he does not 
tell the other man what he is going to do, 
or where he is going to ship. Here is the result 
—more than 60 per cent, of all the apples 
handled by the co-operatives in the United 
States are sold into one city, New York City. 
More than 60 per cent.-—although New York 
represents less than 10 per cent, of the popula¬ 
tion of the United States. But the Yakima 
fellows, the Wenatchee fellows, all the groups 
in the Northwest, all the groups in New York 
State, lots of the groups in Michigan, simply 
keep their eye on that one single market and 
plump everything there. The result was that 
about three and one-half months ago they were 
selling the best boxed apples, the biggest size, 
out of the Northwest, for a dollar-sixty cents a 
box on the Erie Pier, which would bring to 
those farmers a net of about ninety cents a box 
on the best apples that they were sending out- 
apples which, because of their culling and their 
high production cost, must have actually stood 
them an expenditure of over two dollars a box 
before they ever left the Pacific Coast. 
Why? Not because they haven’t SOME 
organization; but because they haven t coni- > 
pleted the organization. They are organized 
by locality; and they are doing fine grading, 
fine packing, fine receiving, but when it conies 
to controlling the flow of supply and thereby 
keeping the New York market from gluts and 
collapses, they are an absolute and complete 
failure, because they have not organized by the 
COMMODITY instead of the locality. 
Continued on page 31+8 
