COOPERATIVE AGRICULTURE


been driving home to farmers the importance of "open
formula" on the outside of a sack of fertilizer. Today farm-
ers know what they are getting in the form of phosphates,
potash, and nitrogen. From the marketing associations have
come the treated seed, the standard varieties, the disease-
resisting plant, that mean assured income instead of crop
failure. Today in hundreds of agricultural communities
co-op membership meetings are virtual classrooms for in-
structing farmers in the latest methods of spraying, hand-
ling, packing, and preserving farm products.

 To prevent the ravages of insects and blight, to check
the wash of soils, to improve dairy herds-these are some
of the purposes for which farmers have organized hundreds
of production-service associations. These associations pro-
cure for the use of the whole community the heavy machin-
ery or the technical services which the individual farmer,
acting alone, could not afford to buy. Scores of new soil
conservation co-ops are buying machinery for terracing and
grading. Farmers are cooperatively ginning 15 to 20 per
cent of the Texas-Oklahoma cotton crop. In the Western
and Pacifiic States, the new survey shows that about 2,400
mutual irrigation companies are leading water to farms and
ranches on a cooperative basis. Dairy-herd improvement
associations are increasing the profits per cow. Through
other types of service associations farmers are cooperatively
spraying orchards and field crops, crushing limestone for
fertilizer, and setting poles for electric lines and telephone
service.

 PROGRESS IN EDUCATION
 Farmers' Association are marketing sound cooperative
 principles along with their commodities and farm supplies.
 From the new survey we learn that 86 per cent of the 10,-
 000-odd marketing and purchasing associations in the United
 States are governed by the accepted cooperative principle
 of one-man-one-vote control. Not many students of agri-
 cultural cooperation would have ventured to place the