Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III MARKETING FARM PRODUCTS1 The farm is an important source of raw material for manufacture. But many farm products are ready for personal consumption without processing in any way, or at least with but slight change from their original state. The existence of I these two classes of farm products—production goods and con-| sumption goods—makes it necessary to keep clearly in mindl that the marketing of some agricultural products involves a process for placing them in the hands of manufacturers, and that from this point their distribution is a problem of the manufacturer's market. Products of this nature must be distinguished from others, the distribution of which involves transferring them to consumers in their original form.2 Characteristics of Agriculture.—Agriculture, in contrast with a prevailing tendency in manufacture, is a small scale in- dustry; and unlike manufacture, it is carried on by scattered producers located far from the great body of consumers. Thus the main output of shoes in this country is confined to a relatively small number of factories located in the midst of dense populations, but the hides for the leather used in their manufacture are obtained from cattle raised upon thousands of farms and ranches in the United States and in foreign countries. Even in the manufacture of flour, an industry in which large scale methods are not so predominant, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of farms growing wheat to each mill grinding it into flour. 'There is a sizable literature dealing with the marketing of farm products. Among the more accessible are the publications of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and of the State Agricultural Experiment Stations. Recently the Federal Trade Commission has issued several reports relating to farm products. ...