Cooperative buying has been most successfully developed by industrial workers in towns and cities and is commonly known as "consumers' cooperation." Starting with a few poverty-stricken workers who pooled their meager savings so that they could buy at wholesale and share in the profits of the retailer, the Rochdale system has grown until the wholesale cooperative societies of England and Scotland are probably the largest general merchandising corporations in the world, doing a business of approximately a billion dollars a year. Cooperative buying of farm supplies, fertilizers, machinery, spraying materials, feeds, binder twine, etc., is one of the first forms of cooperative effort ordinarily undertaken by farmers' associations, and is carried on by numerous methods. In most cases the services rendered in the business management of such buying is at first largely on a voluntary basis or is but poorly paid. Only in a few sections of the country has the cooperative buying of agricultural supplies assumed a permanent or stable form of organization, and in those cases it is very frequently a department of a cooperative selling association, such as a fruit exchange. From an educational standpoint there is much to be said for commencing cooperation through organization for buying agricultural supplies, for through it farmers are trained in the principles of cooperation with the greatest possibility of advantage and the least risk of loss. There is little probability of loss in judicious cooperative purchases of carload lots with orders in hand, while in cooperative selling, unless marketing facilities are so bad as to force him to take the risk, the chance of loss is a serious consideration to the farmer. This point has been well stated by Edwin A. Pratt, a leader of agricultural organization in England, who says: "Inquiry into the conditions under which organization of agriculture has been successfully carried out in other countries showed that a beginning had invariably been made with the simplest form of combination for the joint purchase of agricultural necessaries. In this way the advantages of cooperation could be brought home to cultivators, who were gradually educated in the theory and practice of combination without having their suspicions aroused and their mutual distrust stimulated by proposals that they should at once alter their old conditions of trading in accordance with that system of combination for transport or sale which really constitutes not the beginning of agricultural organization, but one of the most difficult and most complicated of all its many phases."[30]