a surplus the individual farmer must sell, while the buyer can,
within limits, purchase where or from whom he chooses. Thus for the same
reason that labor is forced to organize trade unions to maintain its
wages and working conditions, farmers are forced to organize to market
their products together and to bargain collectively for their price.
This is the outstanding agricultural movement of the past decade and at
the present time is so successfully challenging the established system
of marketing as to command national attention. The success of such a
movement depends primarily upon the solidarity and efficiency of the
local units, so that collective bargaining requires the organization of
the agricultural community into selling associations for its various
products. The whole process encourages the economic organization of the
rural community and heightens community consciousness through the effort
of its members to defend their common economic interests.

The method of collective selling may vary, but in practice the
cooperative selling association has proven the most satisfactory and
will be discussed in the following chapter.

When the most successful farmers on the best land in Illinois lose
twenty-five cents on every bushel of corn they raised, as was the case
in 1921, and when it is easier for isolated farmers in Kansas to burn
corn than to buy coal at the prices current, while at the same time
millions of innocent women and children are starving in Europe, it seems
evident that the complex system of marketing upon which modern industry
and civilization has depended, is pretty well out of gear and that
national and international questions must be wisely solved before it can
again function. Yet in last analysis the solution of the complex
problems of marketing rests not alone with international treaties, but
with the farmers' selling associations of the rural communities. If we
are to have a marketing system which is truly functional, which is built
on the principle of the greatest service at the lowest cost, rather than
on the principle now implicit in business of sufficient service to
secure the maximum of profit which the traffic will bear, then it must
be a cooperative system, the primary unit of which is the local
cooperative association, whose success depends upon the loyalty of its
members to the cooperative principle. So cooperation is a community
problem.

Nor can we expect marked progress in other phas