The Place of the Cooperatives in the Agricultural Adjustment Program

Excerpts: In considering the place of the cooperatives in the agricultural adjustment program, one immediately faces the question, What do we mean by "cooperatives"? One may think of cooperatives as groups of farmers banded together for specific purposes of selling, buying or producing, or performing services like spraying or threshing. However, cooperatives in the usual sense are thought of as groups of farmers banded together primarily for marketing their products. It is to this type of cooperative that I will devote most of my remarks in this paper. The agricultural adjustment program can be conceived broadly as including readjustments and changes in many lines—taxes, credit, international trade, land utilization, and rural organizations and institutions—as well as adjustments in the volume of production of the different commodities and in marketing methods and practices. It is with these last two phases of adjustment that the AAA is directly concerned. Now, in considering the place of the marketing cooperatives in these phases of agricultural adjustment and the relation of the cooperatives to the work of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, we must face the question, What can the cooperatives do in adjusting production by commodities, and in toto?