Grain Marketing

Farmers may be perennially willing to buy bad oil stocks, but they will not apparently purchase securities of "cooperative marketing" enterprises.

In 1921, the U. S. Grain Growers obtained the backing of all the farm organizations in the West, yet it perished in 1922. The next scheme, entitled the National Wheat Growers, arrived in

1922 and departed in 1924. Last year (TIME, July 28) the $26,000,000 Grain Marketing Co. was incorporated amid shouts of applause by professional rather than vocational "farmers." Now the Grain Marketing Co. has apparently in its turn reached the end of its tether, and faces dissolution.

The Grain Marketing Co. undertook to operate the leading Chicago terminal levators on lease. Now, however, being unable to fulfill its obligations under the lease, the constituent companies will be turned back to their original owners. Already the Armour Grain Co. and the Rosenbaum Grain Corporation are leaving the temporary merger, with others possibly to follow suit shortly.

The Grain Marketing Co. was favored by a huge rise in wheat prices during its incumbency. Yet it failed to remove speculation from grain trading, as some had claimed it would, and also failed to prove any very profitable enterprise from a commercial standpoint. The only value in the experiment of letting farmer-representatives try their hand at running the terminal elevator business, apparently, has been to prove to them that it is not quite so simple as they had thought. Now, perhaps, individual companies in this field will be less hampered than formerly by legislation passed in the supposed interests of the grain farmers.