Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that town—a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:
“In Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coöperative creamery, a coöperative telephone company, a coöperative grain elevator, a coöperative stock-shipping association, a coöperative store, a coöperative insurance company, a coöperative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coöperative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.
“In other words, the Svea farmers have become ‘business men’ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.”
The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coöperative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helped
them to work together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which they could coöperate for the upbuilding of the community. The coöperative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909, and to show how coöperation pays, the experience of the town pastor may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months later, it was found that the dividends due him—the rebate on his purchases—amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coöperating with his neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the benefits of coöperation before their eyes, it seems but natural that the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive, broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to be—the sort of folks who are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school they want.
Take, as another example of how the coöperative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had it—a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs will
know at once from the livestock entries that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coöperative creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient market, has been the coöperative leaven in Catawba County. It was started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the machinery purchased from a creamery “promoted” somewhere in Georgia by the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it. The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of service by handling the farmers’ eggs on a coöperative basis, teaching them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmers’ building and loan association, a “Sweet Potato Growers’ Association,” rural school improvement associations, women’s clubs, and are preparing for a coöperative laundry. The women meet and discuss the needs of their schools—as many women do—and then lay out a plan of action and go to work to supply the needs—as too many women do not. The Farmers’ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short, “Catawba is a live county,” as any North Carolinian will tell the inquirer, and coöperation among the farmers has made it live.
At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coöperation among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundry
group organizations which the city dweller has found so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of desirable ends to be worked for, and if a “divine discontent” with existing evils or needs is present in the community—as it usually is—it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole community. Then action follows.
The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coöperative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coöperator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.