THE HOLDING MOVEMENT IN AGRICULTURE 245 
over, by the passage of the licensed warehouse act during the War, 
the Government had increased storage facilities and had made 
credit based upon the warehouse receipt possible. 
Therefore, wherever possible, crops were held in storage until 
the situation should right itself, and a holding movement resulted. 
While the holding movement in 1920 was rather extensive, it was 
highly sporadic in character, because in large part it was an 
individual movement rather than an organized effort on the part 
of the farmers. 
As is well known, this attempt ended in disaster, both to 
those farmers who acted independently and to those who acted 
cooperatively. However, the advocates of holding were undis- 
mayed. They attributed the failure to lack of organization and 
inadequate financing. An extensive movement was inaugurated 
to bring the farmers into assoclations, the chief purpose of which 
should be the cooperative marketing of their products. 
With the continued depression in agriculture, holding for higher 
prices has come to be widely accepted and is now held to be 
essential in any scheme for the improvement of the farmers’ 
situation; and they are now organized for cooperative action as 
never before. It is conservatively estimated that at the present, 
time more than 1,000,000 farmers are under contract to deliver 
their surplus products to cooperative associations which are to 
pool them for the purpose of holding until a propitious time for 
selling. While the cooperative holding movement has various 
alms, its chief purpose is the pooling and holding of its members’ 
crops for higher prices. 
The cooperative marketing associations undertake to secure 
for the individual farmer, by united action, higher prices for 
his product than he could get if acting alone. For the normal 
after harvest marketing by the individual grower they substitute 
a system of deferred marketing at the discretion of the asso- 
ciation, which, acting as agent for its members, pools and holds 
their crops and is authorized to place them on the market when 
prices seem favorable. 
This new form of marketing requires a vast amount of credit for 
the construction and maintenance of warehouses in which to store 
the pooled products, and for advances to the farmer to enable him 
to meet his after-harvest obligations and to finance himself until 
his product shall finally have been marketed. The Federal Gov-