For this purpose the Exchange established a system of exclusive agencies in all the principal cities of the country, employing as agents active, capable young men of experience in the fruit business.  Most of these agents are salaried, and have no other business of any kind to engage their attention, and none of the Exchange representatives handle any other citrus fruits.  These agents sell to smaller cities contiguous to their headquarters, or in the territory covered by their districts.

Over all these agencies are two general or traveling agents, with authority to supervise and check up the various offices.  These general agents maintain in their offices at Chicago and Omaha, a complete bureau of information, through which all agents receive every day detailed information as to sales of Exchange fruit in other markets the previous day.  Possessing this data, the selling agent cannot be taken advantage of as to prices.  If any agent finds his market sluggish, and is unable to sell at the average prices prevailing elsewhere, he promptly advises the head office in Los Angeles, and sufficient fruit is diverted from his market to relieve it and restore prices to normal level.

Through these agencies of its own the Exchange is able to get and transmit to its members the most trustworthy information regarding market conditions, visible supplies, etc.  This system affords a maximum of good service at a minimum cost.  The volume of the business is so large that a most thorough equipment is maintained at much less cost to growers than any other selling agency can offer.

The annual business of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange amounts to over ten million dollars, and the Exchange handles over half the citrus fruit output of the State.  Yet there are people who say co-operation in America will not work.

Co-operative Egg Marketing in Denmark.

I have discussed at length the work of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, as the best example in the United States of the co-operative marketing of farm produce.  We have thus far but little co-operative work in the marketing of poultry products.  Canada has a few examples, but it is to European countries that we must go for a full demonstration of the principle of co-operation when applied to the products of the hen.  In England and in Ireland co-operative efforts in the growing, fattening, and marketing of poultry and eggs are quite common.  It is to Denmark, however, that we must go to find the most wholesale example of this truly modern type of business effort.

The Danes are co-operators in the fullest sense.  They have co-operative creameries and co-operative packing houses.  The Danish Egg Export Society is an organization, the plan and work of which is very much like that of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange.

The local branch of the association buys the eggs of the farmer, paying for them by weight.  Collectors are hired to gather them at frequent and regular intervals, and are paid In accordance with the amount of their collections, but must stand the loss of breakage.  Each individual poultryman’s eggs are kept separate until they reach a centralizing station.  There are a number of these central stations at which the eggs are carefully crated and packed for shipment to England.