 There are a lot of doubters every time any new business gets started. Maybe there are even more doubters when you try to start a co-op. It means a lot of people getting together. Many people don't want to take the trouble, but by 1938 most of us around here were pretty well convinced of the co-op way of doing things. It wasn't a very good year. Prices were down, there wasn't much work. Some of the boys who had gone up to the big cities and factories in busy years drifted back to the farm. They found the old homestead looked pretty good and life was more pleasant. Prices of chicken was down as low as 11 cents a pound and sometimes no takers even at that. Nothing to do but eat them. It's a slow mean job to pluck a turkey or a chicken. The feathers and pin feathers are only the beginning. After all that you still have to clean the bird and show away everything but the giblets. But this Rockingham farmer had learned something up in Detroit. He figures if you could make automobiles on a moving line you could sure clean poultry the same way. He sketched out his idea of how it would work. Sunday. Just about the only time to show his neighbors the new idea. He'd show them how to process poultry on a moving line. Sell a lot more that way and do it real fast. Save a lot of money and turn out a better finished bird. Some of them said he was dreaming. It would cost too much. People wouldn't bring the birds in. Where was all the money coming from? He told them you could run and put in there everything as a cooperative. Store, a milk plant, cannery. There wasn't any reason not to run a poultry plant as a co-op. Some of them said it was too big. You'd never get the money. He came awfully close to being right. But after a lot of wrangling we managed to do it and on our own. Three thousand poultrymen put up twenty-five dollars each for a share of common stock. A lot of them bought preferred stock too. They all share in the profits. Let's go in and take a look at the way our friend's line works. Rubber beaders strip off the feathers. They're dipped in hot wax. After cooling the wax is stripped off. That takes care of the fin feathers. Some of them are sold whole. They're sorted out by weight. Another line takes care of the birds that are to be packaged and frozen. Here's the government inspector always on the job. Every bird is inspected to make sure they're all okay. After they've been pieced and sorted they're wrapped and packed into individual boxes. The box birds are quickly frozen in this modern cold storage and freezing plant. Then they're shipped to the big cities for sale. This mutual cold storage is another of our co-ops. Members can have beef butchered here. They have their own freezer lockers too. One more thing we do cooperatively in Rockingham County. Any true co-op is actually run by its members. The members choose a board of directors like any other big business. The board tells the manager what to do and decides important questions by vote. They have complete control. I'm a member of the board of the poultry marketing co-op. This is a pretty typical meeting. Matters like how much to spend on advertising are quickly taken in stride. But with something big like grading of the birds comes up takes a lot of talking. One man says it'll be fine to raise their quality by paying a premium price for top birds and buying only the best grade. Another thinks that wouldn't be fair to all members. A lot of them aren't equipped to produce top quality birds. But they're all members and they have the right to sell what they produce. Finally it's decided to grade by the flock instead of the bird. That way we'd pay a premium for a top quality flock and a lower price for a second grade flock. Simple and it puts the emphasis where it belongs on the flock. That's the way it works. Maybe there's a lot of talking but these are individual businessmen with free choice. Doing business the way they themselves chose. They own their own business and together they run it. Let's see how these co-ops get started in the first place. They're all alike but just for example let's take the poultry co-op. First we formed an organization and got ourselves incorporated so we could sell stocks. Then we each put in $25 and each got a stock certificate in the corporation. Lots of co-ops start with less. Some of ours around here started with as little as two dollars per member. You don't have to have any special amount. 3,000 turkey and chicken raises each put in 25 dollars. That made a total of 75,000 dollars. That's a heap of money and nobody has over 25 dollars in the kitty. Then with the bird stock that doesn't carry any voting or management rights at all. We got a total of 160,000 dollars. Then we had a meeting. Elected a board of directors and a manager. Hired a builder and at no time at all we had a new plan and it belongs to all of us. The members and non-member producers who wanted to market their birds through the co-op but didn't want to join brought in their turkeys and chickens. The birds from both members and non-members anybody can deal with this co-op were paid for at the standard market prices. They were boxed, frozen, shipped in special refrigerating cars and sold. Money from sales began to come in. It belonged to all of us. After the workers, the taxes and all costs were paid there were still some left. It was ours so we divided it. Simple isn't it? Well, simple and principal anyway. We had to do a lot of work and there was a lot of people who made it tough. We did it ourselves. A bunch of dirt farmers who didn't even have very good dirt. Yes, we formed all this ourselves. Anybody can do it though not without work. You have to argue quite a bit. This show is a little to what we've got. That square building is their mutual coal storage and behind it's the poultry co-op. The building under construction is a new meatpacking co-op. We just got started and there's their co-op cannery. We buy our supplies through co-op stores and sell our wool. We buy electric current and sell our milk. We produce about 31 million dollars worth of farm products every year in this county. There's my neighbor, Fred McNeil, taking his family to church like he does every Sunday. Now Fred's just an ordinary farmer but he's a pretty important man in our county. He didn't have anything to start with and doesn't much money now. He works hard because farmers always work hard. But now there's nothing too new or wonderful about all this and we don't say there is. Anybody could do it. Millions of folks have. But there's a proud satisfaction that you want to share in your country. About 6,000 of us all together put up the money to build all these things and nobody put up very much. We own them. We meet and wrangle and fire and fire. It's a democracy right down to the limestone. It outcrops the same way. Here in this rocky land where people have lived and worked and suffered, where women have born children and struggled and died, just like they do everywhere, we just happened to carry through an idea. It was hard work but it was worth it. I guess the most important thing about it all is that we're just an ordinary group of people. But we've learned how to live and work with each other. This is Rockingham County, Virginia. It's my home and when I get away from the store I like to come up here and look at it. We have a way of doing business here that works pretty well. Nobody told us we had to do it this way. Other sections of the country do things differently. But this way works out fine for us. I'd like to tell you about it. It's just an ordinary county I guess though it's mighty pretty. It's in the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains. A lot of people drive through here on this fine highway. Tourists come through by the hundreds. They drive too fast to see much. But if they slowed down they'd see pleasant little villages with fine old houses. It's old country for this part of the world. First settled at Builder's House in 1727. Here it is. Of course they've patched up now and then. The Civil War left this section burnt out, gutted. Some of the wounds still show. But the people instead of crying over the ruins dug in and began to build for the future. There's a lot of history been made around here. George Washington wrote a fine Morgan stallion through this gap during our fight for independence. Yes a lot of people go through the valley but they don't have much time to look around off the main roads. If they did they might see farmers like Fred McNeil plowing his field or doing the endless things that farmers everywhere have to do. It's a rocky 70 acres but then the whole country around here is rocky. It's been farmed a long time. It's too hilly to start with. Fact is a lot of it's pretty well worn out. Fields must be fertilized. Pences must be fixed. Coming is tough work in any country. There's a lot of turkeys down here. There's a lot to do even with electric ponds. Where you've got chickens you've got eggs to sell. To be done in town today. Harrisonburg the county's seat. It's a shopping center for everybody around here. It's a good friendly town just about like any other. But it's a little different from a lot of other towns in this country. Most of the people in this region decided to go into business together. We organized cooperatives. A lot of them. Most of us, not all of us, belong to one or more of these customer-owned business organizations. Fred takes his eggs into sell just like all farmers do. Takes them to a big store. It's got everything just like every farm supply store. But this one is owned and run by its customers. It's a co-op. Yes, we built this ourselves. Started with the buying club. That's where a lot of farmers all chip in to buy a carload of fertilizer or something to save money by buying in large quantities. Now we get everything the same way. The store buys for all of us. We buy each other's farm products and sell them on the open market. We buy the finest supplies and quantity lots at good prices to sell to our members. Started with a little shed. Now we've got this $100,000 store and four branches out in the country. 4,500 of us put up the money. We own it and we run it. I've been with it since it started. In fact, I'm a storekeeper here. Fred pays the same for his can of tobacco as he'd pay anywhere. Same with everything else bought here. But at the end of the year there's a surplus. Yep, candy for the kids too. Everything we farmers need. Shoes. All kinds of hardware. Everything the farmers need or want. We sell everything here from tractors to lipsticks. Fertilize or feed in special mixtures for any requirements. This is one of the many things we do for members here. Is all this equipment make money? It sure does. Though we call it surplus rather than profit. But it's all money. Every year we have a meeting and all vote on how much we want to put back in to expand or buy new equipment. Then we divide up what's left and every one of our 4,000 members gets back in cash a percentage of his purchases during the year. Generally it's about 8% and he also gets a bigger share in the plant. Last year it averaged about 120 dollars a piece. Gas, we have our own gas station too. Gas, oil, tractor fuel, everything needed to feed the modern workhorses. There were a lot of people who didn't believe in this at first. Thought the farmers wouldn't get along with each other. They were too independent financially. Getting it started took a lot of talking to people who couldn't quite get the idea. They thought it was too complicated and couldn't be made to work. Well it did work and now most of the doubters belong. We all own it. We all manage it the way we think best. Here's another business run the same way. A milk processing plant. While the kids and Mrs. McNeil look around town, Fred delivers his milk. He belongs to this too. Matter of fact, Fred belongs to a number of co-ops. Some of the people in the county don't belong to any. Others have joined all of them. Just depends on what they have to sell and what they want to do. Fred gets a better price for his milk here. Besides that gets his share of the plant surplus. Works the same way as the store. Every member owns it and runs it. The milk is weighed and credit is given to the farmer. A sample is taken of each farm's milk as it comes in. It's tested for a bacterial count. 90 percent of the milk sold in Harrisonburg goes through our plant.