“Why can’t they?” asked Olaf Hansen, the father of Bettina.
“Well,” said Newton, “they have to have so much cream that they’ve got to ship it so far that it gets rotten on the way, and they have to renovate it with lime and other ingredients before they can churn it.”
“Well,” said Raymond Simms, “I reckon they sell their butter fo’ all it’s wuth; an’ they cain’t get within from foah to seven cents a pound as much fo’ it as the farmers’ creameries in Wisconsin and Minnesota get fo’ theirs.”
“That’s a fact, Olaf,” said Jim.
“How do you kids know so darned much about it?” queried Pete.
“Huh!” sniffed Bettina. “We’ve been reading about it, and writing letters about it, and figuring percentages on it in school all winter. We’ve done arithmetic and geography and grammar and I don’t know what else on it.”
“Well, I’m agin’ any schoolin’,” said Pete, “that makes kids smarter in farmin’ than their parents and their parents’ hired men. Gi’ me another swig o’ that lemonade, Jim!”
“You see,” said Jim to his audience, meanwhile pouring the lemonade, “the centralizer creamery is uneconomic in several ways. It has to pay excessive transportation charges. It has to pay excessive commissions to its cream buyers. It has to accept cream without proper inspection, and mixes the good with the bad. It makes such long shipments that the cream spoils in transit and lowers the quality of the butter. It can’t make the best use of the buttermilk. All these losses and leaks the farmers have to stand. I can prove—and so can the six or eight pupils in the Woodruff school who have been working on the cream question this winter—that we could make at least six cents a pound on our butter if we had a cooperative creamery and all sent our cream to it.”
“Well,” said Ezra Bronson, “let’s start one.”