COOPERATIVE AGRICULTURE IN FLORIDA 79

The cooperative system grew out of distinct needs, not
needs for the moment but needs for a different system of
credit, one geared to the processes of agriculture, one
that could wait long enough for funds for the biological
and marketing processes of agriculture to be completed.

 Granted, interest rates have been exceedingly im-
portant factors, but they did not cause all the troubles.
Turn your mind back to the days before the Land Bank
System was started, some 38 years ago, and you will re-
call that interest rates were excessively high, so high in
some localities that farmers absolutely could not make
the grade with sizable loans on their properties. But
many of the practices that had grown up in the farm
mortgage field distressed farmers fully as much as in-
terest rates themselves. Farm mortgages were all writ-
ten for very short periods. They had a habit of falling
due at the most inopportune times when farmers found
it very difficult or absolutely impossible to raise the
funds with which to pay off their loans. Because of the
scarcity of money in some areas, it was the practice to
charge unconscionable commissions In those days a
long-term farm mortgage loan which could be amortized
over the years was a thing only dreamed of by those who
advocated the passage of the Federal Farm Loan Act.
 The Production Credit System also brought into the
farm credit picture a type of loan particularly adapted
to farmers and ranchers. And in much the same way
the banks for cooperatives in 1933 made available three
special types of credit for farmers' cooperative market-
ing, purchasing, and service associations.

 Farmers' credit cooperatives are very much like other
cooperatives, They. too, are under fire. and it may be
just as hot The attacks on cooperatives in general are
intended to weaken them and the attacks on farmers'
cooperative credit institutions are for the same purpose.
They cannot be attacked because of the volume of busi-
ness they do. That it is only a small proportion of the