In a group of 14 farmers situated in a community in one of the best farming regions in the corn belt, ... it was found that 5 men out of the 14 failed to get all their corn planted by the last week in May.  They had worked as hard and as steadily at that operation as had their neighbors, but they were delayed by one cause or another, such as lack of labor or teams, or were handling a larger acreage than their equipment would allow them to handle satisfactorily.  In this same community were 3 men who completed all their planting operations before the 20th of May, and 5 others who completed their work by the 25th of May. ...  If all these men had considered that corn planting was a national necessity and had pooled their efforts, all of the corn on all the farms could have been planted within the most favorable time. [Footnote:  The Farm Labor Problem, U.S.  Department of Agriculture, Office of the Secretary, Circular No. 112, p. 5.]

Give other illustrations of this sort of cooperation from the farm or community life of your neighborhood.

Give illustrations of such teamwork among boys and girls.

Give illustrations of the failure of enterprises in which you have been interested because of a lack of teamwork.

Why is it an advantage for the farmers to use one threshing machine for all the threshing of the neighborhood instead of each farmer having his own machine?

ORGANIZED COOPERATION AND LEADERSHIP

As communities grow and the people become more dependent upon one another, and especially when it becomes hard to see how one thing that happens may affect others, as shown in Chapter ii, cooperation becomes more difficult, but it becomes even more necessary.  It needs to be organized, and it needs leadership.  The experience of fruit growers in California affords a good illustration of this.  When they acted independently of one another, they often had difficulty in disposing of their product to advantage.  Sometimes it rotted on the ground.  As individuals they did not have the means of learning where the best markets were.  They had to make their own terms separately with the railroads for transportation and since they shipped in small quantities, they paid high freight rates.  They had no adequate means of storing fruit while it was awaiting shipment.  They were dependent upon commission merchants in the cities for such prices as they could get, which were often practically nothing at all.

These and other difficulties that made fruit growing unprofitable were overcome by the organization of fruit growers’ associations, in which each grower may become a member by purchasing shares of stock.  The members elect from their number a board of directors, who in turn appoint a business manager who gives his entire attention to the association’s business.  The association has central offices and storage and packing houses.