ough. We cannot foretell the
developments in each branch, but we can see clearly that the organized
community can lay hold of discoveries and inventions which the
individual farmer cannot. It is little for the co-operative society to
buy expensive threshing sets and let its members have the use of them,
but the individual farmer would have to save a long time before he could
raise several hundred pounds. The society is a better buyer than the
individual. It can buy things the individual cannot buy. It is a better
producer also. The plant for a creamery is beyond the individual farmer;
but our organized farmers in Ireland, small though they are, find it no
trouble to erect and equip a creamery with plant costing two thousand
pounds. The organized rural community of the future will generate its
own electricity at its central buildings, and run not only its factories
and other enterprises by this power, but will supply light to the houses
of its members and also mechanical power to run machinery on the farm.
One of our Irish societies already supplies electric light for the town
it works in. In the organized rural community the eggs, milk, poultry,
pigs, cattle, grain, and wheat produced on the farm and not consumed,
or required for further agricultural production, will automatically be
delivered to the co-operative business centre of the district, where the
manager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter or cheese, and the
skim milk will be returned to feed the community's pigs. The poultry and
egg department will pack and dispatch the fowl and eggs to market. The
mill will grind the corn and return it ground to the member, or there
may be a co-operative bakery to which some of it may go. The pigs will
be dealt with in the abattoir, sent as fresh pork to the market or
be turned into bacon to feed the members. We may be certain that any
intelligent rural community will try to feed itself first, and will only
sell the surplus. It will realize that it will be unable to buy any food
half as good as the food it produces. The community will hold in
common all the best machinery too expensive for the members to buy
individually. The agricultural laborers will gradually become skilled
mechanics, able to direct threshers, binders, diggers, cultivators, and
new implements we have no conception of now. They will be members of the
society, sharing in its profits in proportion to their wages, even as
the farmer will in proportion to