preventing
over-supply.

These associations often purchase for their members all supplies needed in
the business and keep their laborers busy in the slack seasons making
boxes, crates, etc., so that they are able to develop and retain a
permanent force of skilled labor instead of depending on the precarious
supply of seasonal help. The Grand Junction Fruit Growers' Union of
Colorado bought, in 1906, 224 carloads of supplies for its members, both
for business and household use.

For fifteen years past, three-fourths of the citrus growers of California
have been cooperating successfully and are most efficiently organized.
Their central agency markets an annual product worth fifteen millions and
keeps representatives in some seventy-five leading markets of America and
in London. They command the highest market price for their product and
distribute it at a saving of about one-half the expense.

_Some Elements of Success and Failure_

Cooperation is succeeding well not only among fruit growers, but producers
of tobacco, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, and, to a limited extent,
cereals. Experience has proved that it pays for farmers of a whole section
to specialize on the same product; and the most uniform success has come
in societies that are purely cooperative, that is, not joint-stock
companies with voting power according to shares, but _one vote for each
member_, the profits being of course proportionate to the relative volume
of business each contributes.

Short-sighted selfishness resists this plan and yields slowly to pure
cooperation; but experience shows that, as Prof. E. K. Eyerly states, "in
the stock companies the large shareholders are tempted constantly to
increase the dividend rate on capital at the expense of the other patrons.
This may explain in part the difficulty of the cooperative creamery in New
England to hold its own, where only 20% are of the purely cooperative
type." Dr. Eyerly includes among the more common causes of failure
individualism, conservatism, jealousy, mercenary traits, poor business
management, a lack of knowledge of what other societies are doing, and
lack of restrictions on share voting and the number of shares owned.

In the local beginnings of cooperation, ingrained selfishness as well as
rural suspicion and ignorance, sometimes blocks progress. When the strong
California Fruit Growers' Exchange began twenty years ago, it had
difficulty holding some of its members to t