Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: AMERICAN AGRICULTURE expanded dramatically after the Civil War.Much of the growth occurred in the Midwest as it became the nation's granary.Changing circumstances, such as settlement of the western Corn Belt, mechanization of agriculture, and the growth of railroads, transformed farming from, a partially subsistence or local marketing activity into one with connections to regional, national, and even intemational markets.Farmers faced situatior\s and problems seldom encountered in a less commercialized antebellum agriculture.One of the main problems that bedeviled farmers was how to market the ever growing supply of grain at a fair price.Many agriculturalists believed they had found a solution to this perennial problem in cooperative elevator societies.For lowans in the late nineteenth century, the model on which they drew was the cooperative elevator in the Cerro Gordo County town of Rockwell.That society, founded in 1889, became the first continuously successful one of its kind in the United States.In fact, from its position of leadership in the farmers' elevator movement, the Co-operative Farmers' Society of Rockwell played a significant role in the agricultural marketing crises of the late nineteenth century and fought many of the poignant battles ensuing from the rise of the cooperative way.The movement to establish farmers' elevators continued the tradition of farm protest, cooperation, and self-help initiated by the Grange
Source: The Annals of Iowa
Author: Philip J. Nelson
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W223457734