“We figure that we will need between $20,000 and $30,000 for the purchase of buildings, wagons, equipment and good-will now in the hands of the distributors.  At first we thought it would be a good plan to have every member of the association subscribe to the amount proportioned by the number of cows he keeps or the amount of milk he has for sale.  But for several reasons this wouldn’t work.  So we hit on the scheme of having each man subscribe to the amount he personally is able to finance.

“We already have $24,000 subscribed in sums between set limits of $100 and $1000.  We’re issuing five-year certificates of indebtedness bearing six per cent interest.  Our producers will have about $9000 worth of milk a month to distribute.  We plan to deduct five per cent every month from these milk checks to pay off the certificates.  Then later we’ll create a new set of certificates and redistribute these in proportion to the amounts of milk produced on the members’ farms.”

Manager Peet and the producers are making it perfectly plain to Lockport consumers that this is no move contemplating price control.  In fact, they expect to sell milk for a cent a quart under the old price.

The farm-labor shortage which antedated our entrance into the war became a national menace about the time our selective draft began to operate.  New York farmers were as hard hit as any other farmers, particularly in the fruit sections, where a tremendous labor supply falls suddenly due at harvest time.  Niagara County came in for its full share of this trouble and the Niagara County Farm Bureau went its length to meet the emergency.

In 1917 Western New York produced the biggest crop of peaches in its history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine.  There were nearly 8000 cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the ground.  Peet anticipated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a veritable county labor department.  He was promised a good number of high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to be cleared through a central office in Buffalo.

Manager Peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in forty-two camps strategically located.  The camps were to accommodate thirty boys each.  The farmers had asked Peet for 4500 hands.  He applied for 1500 boys and had every reason to expect these.  But at the critical moment something went wrong in Buffalo headquarters and of the 1500 asked for he got only 200!

“I was in Buffalo at the time the news was broken,” Manager Peet was saying to me, “and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!”