We wanted a good Dorset ram which would cost in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars; we wanted a good bull which would cost in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars. Unless a man went into either business extensively such an investment wouldn’t pay. It seemed natural enough then for us all to club together and buy shares. But if we did this, why shouldn’t we do more? There was the whole problem of marketing still confronting us. We had solved it in a crude way last spring but that only served to show us what might be done with a perfected organization. Out of this was born with scarcely any talk, scarcely any planning and almost full grown, the scheme which finally welded us into one compact business firm--the Pioneer Products Company. The idea had been growing all this time and we didn’t know it. When we did recognize it, it seemed so natural and obvious that everyone marveled that we hadn’t thought of it from the beginning. It’s merely another example of what a rut farming folk have fallen into. There isn’t any business on the face of the earth that lends itself so readily to coöperation as farming. Every country village consists of a small compact body of men living side by side and almost to a man engaged in buying the same products, manufacturing the same products and selling the same products to the same market. And these products are the universal necessities of life. It might be possible for men to get along without coal, without oil, without steel, even without beef, but they surely could not get along without wheat and corn, without vegetables, without eggs and milk. And yet these communities instead of holding the world by the throat are themselves the prey of the world even with their own products. With common interests, common foes, with a common plant and a common organization they still are the common victims of a hundred diversified outside interests. This is solely because the outside interests--like the banks--are allowed to treat with them as small weak units instead of as one large strong unit. And this after coöperation has been taught them by their government, by every business in the land, by every labor organization. It is, as I have said, this branch of the pioneer spirit which has been both their salvation and their undoing. But that it is possible both to preserve this and curb it we proved to our satisfaction with the Pioneer Products Company.