One difference between the farmer in Denmark and in other countries is that, whereas the ordinary farmer raises his crops and ships them to the market to be sold, the Danish farmer sells nothing but the manufactured product, and as far as possible he sells it direct to the consumer. For example, until about 1880 Denmark was still a grain exporting country; in recent years, however, it has become a grain importing country. Grain and fodder of various kinds to the value of something like twenty-five millions of dollars are now annually purchased by Danish farmers in Russia and neighbouring countries. The agricultural products thus imported are fed to the cattle, swine, and chickens and thus converted into butter, pork, and eggs. The butter is manufactured in a coöperative dairy; the pork is slaughtered in a coöperative pork-packing house; the eggs are collected and packed by a coöperative egg-collecting association. Then they are either sold direct, or are turned over to a central coöperative selling association, which disposes of the most of them in England. The annual exports to England amount to nearly $90,000,000 a year, of which $51,000,000 is for butter, nearly $30,000,000 for bacon, and the remainder for eggs.
As a gentleman whom I met in Denmark put it: "If Denmark, like ancient Gaul, were divided into three parts, one of these would be butter, another pork, and the third eggs." It is from these things that the country, in the main, gets its living. There are in Denmark, as elsewhere, railways, newspapers, telephones, merchants, preachers, teachers, and all the other accessories of a high civilization, but they are all supported from the sale of butter, pork, and eggs, to which ought to be added cattle, for Denmark still exports a considerable amount of beef and live cattle. The export of live cattle has, however, fallen from about $21,000,000 a year in 1880 to about $7,000,000, but in the same period the excess of butter, bacon, and eggs has risen from something like $7,000,000 to over $70,000,000. Meanwhile the raw production of the Danish farms has increased 50 per cent. and more, the difference being that, instead of producing grains for the manufacture of flour and meal, the Danish farmers have turned their attention to producing root crops to feed their cattle. This means that the peasant in Denmark is not merely a scientific farmer, as I have already suggested, but he is at the same time, in a small way, a business man.
The success of the peasant farmer in Denmark is, as I have already suggested, due to a very large extent to the coöperative societies which manufacture and sell his farm products. Through the medium of these the Danish peasant has become a business man—I might almost say, a capitalist. I do not know how much money is invested in these different coöperative dairies, egg-collecting and pork-packing concerns, but all Denmark is dotted with them, and the total amount of money invested in them must be considerable. There are, for example, 1,157 coöperative dairies, with a membership of 157,000. The number of coöperative pork-packing societies is 34, with a membership of 95,000.
As soon as I found to what extent the peasants were manufacturing and selling their own products, I naturally wanted to know how they had succeeded in getting the capital to carry on these large enterprises, because in the part of the country from which I hail the average farmer not only has no money to put into any sort of business outside his farm, but has to borrow money, frequently at a high rate of interest, to carry on his farming operations. I found that when the farmers in Denmark began establishing coöperative dairies some of the well-to-do farmers came together and signed a contract to send all their milk which they were not able to use at home to the community dairy. Then they borrowed money on their land to raise the money to begin operations. In borrowing this money they bound themselves "jointly and severally," as the legal phrase is, to secure the payments of the money borrowed—that is, each man became individually responsible for the whole loan. This gave the bank which made the loan a much better security than if each individual had secured a loan on his own responsibility, and in this way it was possible to provide the capital needed at a very moderate rate of interest.
When the farmer brought his milk to the common dairy he was paid a price for it a little less than the average market price. This added something to the working capital. At the end of the year a portion of the earnings of the dairy were set aside to pay interest charges, another portion was used to pay off the loan, and the remainder was divided in profits among the members of the association, each receiving an amount proportionate to the milk he had contributed. In this way the farmer in the course of some years found himself with a sum of money, equal to his individual share, invested in a paying enterprise that was every year increasing in value. In the meanwhile he had received more for his milk than if he had sold it in the ordinary way. At the same time, out of the annual profits he received from his share in the dairy, he had, perhaps, been able to put some money in the savings bank. The savings banks have always been popular and have played a much more important part in the life of the people than they have elsewhere. At the present time the average amount of deposits in proportion to the number of inhabitants is larger than is true of any other country in the world. For example, the average amount of deposits in the Danish savings banks is $77.88; in England $20.62; in the United States $31.22. At the same time the number of depositors in Danish savings banks is considerably larger than in other countries. For example, there are fifty-one depositors for every hundred persons in Denmark. In England the corresponding number is twenty-seven.
The most remarkable thing about the Danish savings banks, however, is that 78 per cent.—nearly four fifths—of them are located in the rural districts. That is one reason that Danish farmers have not found it difficult to secure the capital they needed to organize and carry on their coöperative enterprises. With the money which they had saved and put in the savings bank from the earnings in the coöperative dairies they were able to borrow money with which to start their coöperative slaughterhouses and egg-collecting societies.
But these are only a few of the different types of coöperative organizations. A Danish peasant may be a member of a society for the purchase of tools, implements, and other necessaries, of which there are fifteen in Denmark, with a membership numbering between sixty and seventy thousand. He may belong to a society for exporting cattle, for collecting and exporting eggs, for horse breeding, for cattle, sheep, and pig breeding. Finally he may belong to what are known as "control" societies, organized for the purpose of keeping account, by means of careful registration, of the milk yield of each cow belonging to a member of the society, and of the butter-fat in the milk, and the relation between the milk yield and the fodder consumed. The value of these societies is found in the fact that the annual yield per cow in the case of members of the control society was 67,760 pounds, while in the case of cows owned outside of the society the amount was 58,520 pounds.
Through the medium of these different societies, some of which are purely commercial, while others exist for the purpose of improving the methods and technique of agriculture, the farming industry has become thoroughly organized. First of all, there has been a great saving in cost of handling and selling farm products. Not many years ago the Danish farmer used to send his butter to England by way of Hamburg, and there were at that time, I have been told, no less than six middlemen who came between the farmer and his customer. Now the coöperative manufacturing and selling societies sell a large part of their products direct to the coöperative purchasing societies in England. In this way the farmer and his customer, the producer and distributer, are brought together again, not exactly in the way in which they still come together in some of the old-fashioned market places in Europe, but still in a way to benefit both classes. For one thing, as a result of this organization of the farming industry, farming methods and the whole technical side of the industry have been greatly benefited. A striking evidence of this fact is found in the following statistics showing the rapid increase in the annual yield of milk per cow in the period from 1898 to 1908:
| Annual yield | |
| per cow in | |
| Year | pounds |
| 1898 | 4,480 |
| 1901 | 4,884 |
| 1904 | 5,335 |
| 1907 | 5,689 |
| 1908 | 5,874 |