Indeed, so much has been written in a Barnumesque way of the wonders of the new agriculture, that its actual results and further possibilities are in many minds absurdly exaggerated.  It has not as yet been potent enough to prevent diminishing returns in respect to the great staple foods and raw materials obtained by agriculture.  It apparently has barely kept pace with the needs of the growing population of Christendom.  It has enabled a larger population to exist in about the same, if not in a worse condition, on the same area, while progress in cheapness of goods has come almost entirely from the side of the chemical and the mechanical industries.  It does not give the promise of an indefinite amelioration of the lot of an indefinitely multiplying population.  But to a population slowly increasing, a new and ever newer agriculture, utilizing constantly the achievements of the natural sciences and the mechanic arts, ensures the possibility of a steady betterment of the popular welfare in city and in open country alike.

Sec. 10. #Difficulty of cooeperation among farmers#.  Rural communities are proverbially conservative; the American farmer is proverbially an individualist.  No wonder, then, that the new ideas and plans of cooeperation in business matters have made headway in agriculture slowly and with difficulty.  The need of mutual aid among American farmers is especially great, for, as has often been, said, isolation is the problem of the farm as congestion is that of the city.  On the frontier a cooeperative spirit manifested itself frequently in mutual helpfulness, in house raising bees, husking bees, threshing bees, and other similar gatherings.

But this spirit seems to have almost disappeared in the older communities, the more rapidly doubtless in the period of decaying agricultural prosperity.[2] To-day, for example, it is impossible on a certain Pennsylvania road for one more progressive farmer to get his neighbors to cooeperate in so simple a matter as hauling their milk cans to the creamery, and so every day in the year ten horses are hitched to ten delivery wagons carrying two or three milk cans apiece, and driven by ten drivers along the same road to and from the railroad station.  One driver and two horses could easily carry as much or more, as is done now in many other dairy districts.  Even of successful cooeperation among farmers sympathetic critics are forced to say:  “Many students of rural economics assert that cooeperation as applied to the distribution and marketing of farm products is not very successful unless it is founded upon dire necessity.  When the records of the organizations of the country are analyzed it becomes almost necessary to accept that statement.  So long as farmers do fairly well in their own way they are not inclined to cooeperate.”