POWER OF AGRICULTURAL CO-OPERATIVE ASSOCIATIONS TO LIMIT PRODUCTION

Farmers within recent years have recognized the necessity of combining in larger and still larger numbers, and great cooperative farm organizations have been formed, some of them with sales reaching $100,000,000 each year. These organizations in 1923 did a combined business estimated at $2,200,000,000. "Giant marketing associations, covering whole states, and even groups of states, have been organized with startling rapidity in the great cotton and tobacco growing states." Co-operative marketing legislation has given these groups great and far reaching powers to attain the end of making agriculture more profitable and to secure better returns to the producers of farm products. The question of whether these groups have power to limit or restrict production to obtain the desired end of better and higher prices is now being raised for the first time in the courts.