But these are only a few of the different types of coöperative organizations. A Danish peasant may be a member of a society for the purchase of tools, implements, and other necessaries, of which there are fifteen in Denmark, with a membership numbering between sixty and seventy thousand. He may belong to a society for exporting cattle, for collecting and exporting eggs, for horse breeding, for cattle, sheep, and pig breeding. Finally he may belong to what are known as "control" societies, organized for the purpose of keeping account, by means of careful registration, of the milk yield of each cow belonging to a member of the society, and of the butter-fat in the milk, and the relation between the milk yield and the fodder consumed. The value of these societies is found in the fact that the annual yield per cow in the case of members of the control society was 67,760 pounds, while in the case of cows owned outside of the society the amount was 58,520 pounds. Through the medium of these different societies, some of which are purely commercial, while others exist for the purpose of improving the methods and technique of agriculture, the farming industry has become thoroughly organized. First of all, there has been a great saving in cost of handling and selling farm products. Not many years ago the Danish farmer used to send his butter to England by way of Hamburg, and there were at that time, I have been told, no less than six middlemen who came between the farmer and his customer. Now the coöperative manufacturing and selling societies sell a large part of their products direct to the coöperative purchasing societies in England. In this way the farmer and his customer, the producer and distributer, are brought together again, not exactly in the way in which they still come together in some of the old-fashioned market places in Europe, but still in a way to benefit both classes. For one thing, as a result of this organization of the farming industry, farming methods and the whole technical side of the industry have been greatly benefited. A striking evidence of this fact is found in the following statistics showing the rapid increase in the annual yield of milk per cow in the period from 1898 to 1908: Year Annual yield per cow in pounds 1898 4,480 1901 4,884 1904 5,335 1907 5,689 1908 5,874 I might add, as showing the extent to which Danish agriculture has been organized in the way I have described, that now Denmark produces about 253,000,000 pounds of butter every year. Of this amount 220,000,000 pounds come from the coöperative dairies.