"The fellow who made that stove paid a profit to the Iron an' Steel Trust who supplied the raw iron ore," considered he. "Then he turned around an' added a profit of his own before he let the wholesaler have it. Then the wholesaler chalked up more profit before he shipped it along to Joe Green over in town an' Joe just naturally had to soak me something before I got her aboard for home. That's profits on the profits! It's a hot proposition an' it's my money that goes up the flue!"
When he added further profits which he figured might be due to agreements between supposed competitors in prices, the Grain Grower was quite ready to believe that he had paid about twice as much for that stove as the thing would cost him legitimately if he dealt with the maker direct. Here was the High Cost of Living that everybody was talking about. The remedy? The same chance as the Other Fellow for the farmer to use the resources of Nature and, by co-operation, the reduction to a minimum of production and distribution cost.
"I've done it with my grain. Why can't I do it with what I need to buy?" That was what the Grain Grower was asking himself. "Why must I feed and clothe and buy the smokes for so many of these middlemen?"
So when the directors of the grain-trading company came before him with the suggestion of buying a timber limit in British Columbia in order to put in their own saw-mills eventually to supply building materials on the prairie, the Grain Grower slapped his leg and said: "Good boy! An' say, what about a coal mine, too?"
That was the beginning of great developments for the organized farmers of Western Canada. It was the beginning of new furrows—the opening up of new vistas of emancipation, as the farmer saw it. And as the furrows lengthened and multiplied they were destined to cause much heart-burning and antagonism in new directions.
The timber limit which the Grain Growers' Grain Company purchased was estimated to contain two hundred and twenty-two million feet of lumber. A Co-Operative Department was opened with the manufacture and sale of more than 130 carloads of flour at a saving to the farmer of fifty cents per cwt, even this small beginning registering a drop in milling company prices. Next they got in touch with the Ontario Fruit Growers' Association and sold over 4,000 bbls. of apples to Western farmers at the Eastern growers' carload-lot price, plus freight, plus a commission of ten cents per barrel. More than one hundred carloads of coal were handled in one month and the farmers then got after the lumber manufacturers for lumber by the carload at a saving of several dollars per thousand feet.
Still experimenting, the Grain Growers' Grain Company added to the list of commodities in 1912-13—fence posts, woven fence wire, barbed wire and binder twine. Followed other staples—cement, plaster, sash and doors, hardware and other builders' supplies; sheet metal roofing and siding, shingles, curbing, culverts, portable granaries, etc.; oil, salt and other miscellaneous supplies; finally, in 1914-15, farm machinery of all kinds, scales, cream separators, sewing machines and even typewriters. Of binder twine alone nearly seven million pounds was handled during this season. Thus did co-operative purchasing by the farmers pass from experiment to a permanent place in their activities.
Expansion was taking place in other directions also. In 1912 the Company leased from the Canadian Pacific Railway a terminal elevator at Fort William, capacity 2,500,000 bushels. A small cleaning elevator was acquired at the same place and, with an eye to possible developments at the Pacific Coast, a controlling interest in a small terminal elevator in British Columbia was purchased. At Port Arthur, on a six-hundred-foot lake frontage, a new elevator has just been built with a storage capacity of 600,000 bushels.
So much for terminal facilities of this farmers' pioneer trading organization. Now, what about the country elevators for government control of which the farmers had campaigned so vigorously in the three Prairie Provinces? As we have seen, the problem had been handled in Saskatchewan along very different lines to the method adopted in Manitoba. In Manitoba the 374 elevators, owned by the Provincial Government and operated by the Provincial Elevator Commission, showed a loss. It was even hinted in some quarters that the Manitoba Government had no intention in the first place of operating at anything but a loss. Whether or not there was any ground for these irreverent suspicions, the fact remained that the Government elevator system in Manitoba was beginning to assume the bulk of a snow-white elephant. The Government, not entering the field as buyers, had tried to run the elevators as a storage proposition solely. In 1910-11 the loss had exceeded $84,000 and the year following was not much better. At last the Government said in effect to the Grain Growers:
"We've lost money on this proposition. We tried it out to please you farmers, but you're still dissatisfied. Try to run 'em yourselves!"