Mr. President and Gentlemen:

No other problem before the American people today is so big in magnitude as is this problem of marketing farm products. In round numbers, we raise ten billion dollars worth of farm products a year, and it costs us ten billions of dollars to get these products from the farm into the home and the

factory where they are used. We have been intensely interested in getting the farmer to grow more on the farm, but we have altogether ignored the problem of how to help get that product from the farm to the home. So intensely ignorant are we of this marketing problem, that when the question comes up before the legislature of doing what the good bishop said today we ought to do, and what, in a small measure, I have been trying to do for the last five years to study this marketing problem and, under the auspices of the University, go out to the people of the State of Minnesota and talk about the marketing of farm products, the revenues of the University are cut a half million dollars. What is the first thing to fall by the wayside? The Extension Service. If the men in our legislature really sensed the significance of the marketing problem, and also the problem which I shall have the privilege of discussing with you tonight for a few minutes, community development, I do not believe they would take the attitude towards the University that

Address delivered at the Fifth Annual Convention of the League of Minnesota Municipalities, St. Cloud, Oct 17, 1917.

they do in the matter of funds for extension work.

The transfer from the farm to the

factory and the home of ten billion dollars worth of products in one year is a big proposition. What do you know about it? You are interested and eager to have farm institutes, short courses in agriculture; you are interested in having the University train dentists. lawyers, doctors, and engineers, but there is nothing in our University for the purpose of training men to perform this great service of marketing farm products. Five great big things are involved in the marketing problem. Each one of them is big enough to be the subject of a separate lecture.

Grading

An important matter is the grading of farm products, which involves a square deal between the man who sells and the man who buys. It means that when a consumer pays the agreed price for the product, he shall get that which he bought. We have made very little progress along that line. For illustration, I go to the manager of our market in Stillwater and I say to the manager, “I want a load of clover hay for the Jersey cow up at the house." He calls up the farmer, and the farmer telephones me, "How much do you want?" I answer, "Bring up a load." and the farmer brings up a load, thirty six hundred pounds of baled hay. All winter my boys pound the barn floor with brickbats that were made out of clover hay pressed when too damp. Now, that farmer didn't deliver to me

what I thought I was buying; he had not graded his product right.

How often every home discusses the problem of apples that are so fine at the top of the barrel, but when you get down to the middle what do you find? How often your potato bin, before the winter is over, contains rotten potatoes that have to be sorted out, because the farmer did not grade his potatoes right. The great fruit packers of California have taught the lesson to the world, that if the producer will only be careful in the grading and selection of his fruit and vegetables and keep them free from bruises, they can be preserved and kept very much longer and will be infinitely more whole

some.

How are you going to awaken an interest in grading? I was down in Minnesota, in the little town of Olivia, and heard an old Scotchman make this statement to his audience. "I got $700 from two acres of my farm. I took the prize down at St. Louis, the sweepstake, against the whole United States for apples grown here in Minnesota." What do you know about that? Most of us do not know a thing about it.. What is the secret? The selection of the fruit. I have a brother-in-law out in Washington who is sometimes called the "Pear King of the Yakima Valley." His output was thirteen carloads in one summer. He has sent his pears to the city of Minneapolis year after year, and the commission man who handled his product made the statement in my presence, that when Sawyer's pears are put upon the market, his third grade brings nearly the same price as the first. The reason is superior grading and packing. Too much emphasis can

not be put upon this phase of the marketing problem.

Transportation

The second phase of the marketing problem is transportation. How are

you going to get the product from the farm into the cities, over the common sandy highways of the State of Minnesota; highways that arouse such desperate feelings in the hearts of automobilists? How often you get in these sandy places or mud-holes! You get stalled with your machine. About that time is a good time for people who are intensely averse to profanity to get out of hearing. Yet we never have got home into the consciousness of farmers that economically it is just as expensive to generate power from the consumption of feed in the body of a horse as it is to generate power by consuming gasoline in the engine of the automobile. A part of the problem of marketing is the building of good roads that will make it less expensive to get the product from the farm to the town.

Storage

A third phase of the marketing problem is storage. Mr. Wilson (A. D. Wilson), brought home to us forcefully this evening, in the little talk he gave us a sense of what a tremendous surplus of farm products we have. And you know how it is wasted. Apples that rot in the orchards, potatoes that rot, food of every kind that might be made available if there were only methods of storing it. The farmer has not storage facilities on the farm. There are no places in the city, except in the great cold storage plants which are for

the convenience of the owner and not for the convenience and service of the public; simply a money-making device

and not to provide food for a hungry world. This storage problem is one of the great big factors in marketing farm. products.

Distribution

Finally, just as big as gathering the harvest on the farm is the work of distribution. This service is performed by our merchants.

After all, this whole problem of marketing is a merchandizing problem. It is the problem of trading, of getting the product from the man who raises it and passing it on to the man who wants to use it, and that business of trading is just exactly as old as farming. Go back into ancient history and you read the story in the Bible of the days when Joseph and Pharoah put over a little deal in grain through a period of seven years. Nothing which our farmer friends feel ever so disgruntled about was ever done by the Chamber of Commerce of Minneapolis, or by traders in Chicago grain pit, that surpasses the story of the cornering of the grain in Egypt six thousand years ago.

So this matter of trading in farm products is an ancient proposition, from the beginning to the present hour, there has been scarcely anything done to devise better and more efficient methods of marketing farm products.

Now what is going to be the agency for improved marketing? For thousands of years the agency has been the individual man who had money. had a right to do with his money as he pleased. He went out and said to the man who had the farm product, "I am willing to exchange my money for your products." The farmer had no other means of outlet, and the mental attitude on the part of the farmer had

to be one of obligation to the trader. Instead of the farmer's being able to say to the man who came with the money, "I will sell you this at a price. of so much," the invariable query has been, “How much will you give?" The trader has been permitted to dictate the price, and there has grown up in the minds of men who live on the farm everywhere a feeling that something is wrong, since while the man who, by the sweat of his brow, through hours of unending toil on the farm, produces something of value, something that the world needs, the trader, who is the farmers' only means of disposing of the farm product, sets the price. And I want to tell you that when a bunch of farmers gather down in St. Paul and an old G. A. R. veteran makes an appeal for patriotic loyalty, and they sit quiet and unmoved, you and I must not forget that back of it all there is that keen resentment that has been growing for years in the mind of the farmer at the way in which the people in the city have handled this problem of marketing farm products. It is not at all that they are disloyal. It is that for the moment they have allowed full sway to the passion and hate which have grown up in their hearts against, as I heard one farmer express it at a farmers' meeting, "our enemies in the city." This is unfortunately the mental attitude of many farmers. I have listened until my blood ran cold at the impassioned pleas of some of these fellows promoting organizations, which arouse hostility and hatred against the men in the cities, against the traders, who are simply the victims of inherited habit, customs, and methods of doing business. And instead of our getting together, man to man, and discussing

conditions and trying to solve the problem, we organize each against the other, and get into a vicious, venomous spirit of class hatred. It is this kind of a thing that we want to get away from.

A Community Market

Stillwater has been trying for the last ten years to do something to allay this class feeling. I don't boast of the city, because we did it from necessity. Stillwater was a lumber town. Its mills had gone. The farmers of the community were not feeling very kindly toward the city of Stillwater; too many times they had hauled their potatoes to town to find no market for them and hauled them back home; too often they brought in their eggs and their butter to barter at the grocery store on such terms as the trader might dictate. A farm bank account was of no interest. As a bank friend said to me a few months ago, "Ten years ago we never thought of a farm bank account, but we do think of it today." But time has brought changes. The farmer has money. It is no wonder that the farmer, feeling the new power, the financial power and strength that has come to him, should begin to wonder if he is not independent of the man in the city. But I hope this evening when I discuss, as a part of your program, this subject of community development that I can show conclusively that our relations are so intimate that there is no possibility of divorcing the interests of the farmer from the interests of the man in the city.

Over in Stillwater, some ten years ago, before our Civic Club came the question, "Why cannot we do something to create a market here in Stillwater?" At that time it was my misfor

tune or good fortune, as you please, to be secretary of the club. Everyone said, "Amen. Let us go to it." As you know, the secretary is the "goat" for anything the club undertakes to carry out. It fell to me to carry out the resolution that was adopted, and for ten years I have been the secretary and one of the directors, and I sometimes say spiritual adviser, for the Stillwater Market.

Now right here I want to endorse the use of a particular word. In all the discussions I have heard you never once used the word "municipality," because, unconsciously, you have got hold of the right word, "community." There is no such thing as municipality today. There are only communities. Once, when we had nothing but police service on the part of the organized community; once, in years gone by when it was only the duty of the municipality to see that good order was preserved, it was all right to talk about the municipalities; but today, on every tongue, in discussing social problems, the word is "community." We at Stillwater do not talk about our municipal market. We speak of the community market. Between two and three hundred men have put their money into the experiment. $10,000 capital has been paid in. This has earned another $10,000, so that the Stillwater Market is in excellent shape financially. This gives a person a little confidence in discussing the marketing problem. It is success in life, experience, that gives us the right to speak, and I speak to you tonight on this marketing problem, because of the experience of years in our Stillwater experiment.

What has been done of the most farreaching results of the Stillwater ex

periment? There has grown up decidedly better relationship between the town and the country. You will pardon me if I boast a little and tell you my home county, Washington, leads the State of Minnesota today in the achievement of its farm expert, the farm agent. For three successive years our county took the blue ribbon at the State Fair and then the silver cup. Today the record of our county is second to that of no other in the state. In the Red Cross work eight hundred fifty farmers have pledged a portion of their crops to the Red Cross. It is estimated it is going to bring us $15,000, possibly $20,000. All this has grown out of the spirit that prompted Stillwater ten years ago to co-operate with the farmer in marketing his products.

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Now, what did we do? We got away from the idea that the individual was going to have a monopoly of marketing the farm products. We have not put the individual out of business. The groceryman still buys potatoes and eggs, but our market fixes the price. We have an institution in our community that operates in such way that no farmer ever takes anything back home. We bought over forty products in one season. It may be pumpkins or rhubarb or squashes. As an illustration of possibilities, let us take the squash, a product that the ordinary farmer looks upon as a waste, and yet you know the Hubbard squash is one of the finest delicacies on our table. One farmer planted an eighth of an acre to squashes, and realized forty dollars from that eighth of an acre, because the market was there to take his squashes. I sometimes say this beats the chicken business, forty dollars from an eighth of

an acre means three hundred twenty dollars from an acre. At that rate, a farmer who has a hundred-sixty-acre farm has something that beats a gold mine. One of my farmer friends told me that it used to be the practice of farmers to go to town with empty wagons, but today he hardly ever sees a farmer going to town but that he has something in the back end of the wagon. One of the incidental results is the stimulation to increased production of every kind of farm product.

Type of Organization

Now a word as to the agency which may take the place of the individual trader. I want to call your attention to this fact that approximately eighty per cent of the business of the United States is done today through corporate organizations. Go down the streets of this city and you will be surprised at the number of institutions that are corporations. Now, a corporation is an individual, a personality, just as much a creature as a Holstein cow, and is subject to certain influences to bring about specific results. There are two types of corporations, the ordinary and the co-operative. Each has certain characteristics just as marked as those of the Holstein cow. I am going to enumerate them briefly. An ordinary corporation is a limited concern, usually a family affair. Most of the corporations in your city are family affairs, or if they go outside it is to include some personal friend. If you think you have a good thing, you feel so kindly toward your friend that you are willing to take him in and let him. share your good fortune.

The person that has the most money in the corporation has the most voice.