This truth will be easily realised if we consider for a moment the system of distribution which the food demand of the modern market has evolved. Agricultural produce finds its chief market in the great cities. Their populations must have their food so sent in that it can be rapidly distributed; and this requires that the consignments must be delivered regularly, in large quantities, and of such uniform quality that a sample will give a correct indication of the whole. These three conditions are essential to rapid distribution, but their fulfilment is not within the power of isolated farmers, however large their operations. It is an open question whether farmers should themselves undertake the distribution of their produce through agencies of their own, thus saving the wholesale and possibly the retail profits. But unquestionably they should be so well organised at home that they can take this course if they are unfairly treated by organised middlemen. The Danish farmers, whose highly organised system of distribution has made them the chief competitors of the Irish farmers, have established (with Government assistance which their organisation enabled them to secure) very efficient machinery for distributing their butter, bacon and eggs in the British markets. Other European farming communities are becoming equally well organised, and similarly control the marketing of their produce. But where, as in America and the United Kingdom, the town dominates the country, and the machinery of distribution is owned by the business men of the towns, it is worked by them in their own interests. They naturally take from the unorganised producers as well as from the unorganised consumers the full business value of the service they render. With the growing cost of living, this has become a matter of urgent importance to the towns. In the cheaper-food campaign which began in the late fall of 1909, voices are heard calling the farmers to account for their uneconomical methods, while here and there organisations of consumers are endeavouring to solve the problem to their own satisfaction by acquiring land and raising upon it the produce which they require.
In the face of such facts it is not easy to account for the backwardness of American and British farmers in the obviously important matter of organisation. The farmer, we know, is everywhere the most conservative and individualistic of human beings. He dislikes change in his methods, and he venerates those which have come down to him from his fathers' fathers. Whatever else he may waste, these traditions he conserves. He does not wish to interfere with anybody else's business, and he is fixedly determined that others shall not interfere with his. These estimable qualities make agricultural organisation more difficult in Anglo-Saxon communities than in those where clan or tribal instincts seem to survive.[4]