Sec. 11. #Rapid growth of farmers’ selling cooeperation#.  Despite what has just been said, cooeperation among farmers now is more developed and is growing faster than all other kinds of cooeperation in America.  This is most marked in farming communities in the West, especially in California and in the Middle Western or Northwestern states (e.g., Minnesota and Wisconsin).  There the farmers are younger, and many have been educated in the state agricultural colleges.  They all produce nearly the same kinds of crops of staple produce which must be shipped to distant markets.  The need of uniting to get what they thought would be fair treatment from the railroads, and to protect themselves against the abuses of the competitive commission salesagents, seems to have given the first impetus to farmers’ cooeperation.

The most notable developments were those of the California Fruit Exchange and of cooeperative societies of the Northwest for marketing grain.  The membership of the former is made up entirely of the local citrus growers’ associations in California.  It has a complete organization of selling agents in the Eastern cities and a remarkably efficient, tho simple, system of equalizing and expediting shipments.  Now the agricultural cooeperative associations of various kinds are multiplying all over the country, for shipping live stock, fruits, butter, cheese, and other farm products.  Cooeperation for these purposes called forth new activities; packing houses were built, and grain elevators and creameries and dairies, and now a goodly number of the simple manufacturing processes are undertaken by these societies, now numbering thousands.

Sec. 12. #Some economic features of farmers’ selling cooeperation#.  This type of producers’ selling cooeperation is proving in America to be far more successful than producers’ cooeperation among workingmen;[3] and certain important economic features in it should be noted.  The local producers’ selling cooeperative society is composed of farmers who as enterprisers own and carry on their own separate businesses; they are not, as in the other case, wage workers.  Any productive processes undertaken by this kind of society are subordinate to the main business, being such as picking, packing, drying, preserving, and making boxes for packing.  This form of cooeperation with the related form of consumers’ cooeperation that is fostered by it, promises to have a wide extension.

Some of these societies, as those dealing in citrus fruits, regulate with some success the picking and the marketing so as to distribute them more evenly throughout the year.  They watch the markets and direct their agents by telegraph to divert cars en route away from markets that are glutted with products and into markets where prices are higher.  They take some of the products, as eggs in the spring at the period of low prices, and pack or refrigerate them, to be sold when prices are higher.  For