Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1899 — FARMERS IN POOL. [ARTICLE]

FARMERS IN POOL.

Men with the Hoe Unite iu Twenty Million Trust. The Farmers’ Federation of the Mississippi Valley has been organized at Topeka, Kan., and officers elected. Walter N. Allen of Meriden is president and business manager. The object of the federation is to regulate and control the shipment of farm products of all the States in the Mississippi valley, to establish and maintain offices, yards, grain elevators, to maintain agents to handle, sell and distribute such products, and to lend and borrow money and do a banking business at Topeka, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati and Netfr Orleans. The capital stock will he $20,000,000, in shares of $lO each. President Allen, in a long statement of the purposes of the federation, says the cost in commissions for marketing the products in the Mississippi valley is over

$21,000,000. He plans that his company shall do this business for the farmers for less than $1,000,000. The by-laws provide that there shall be no rebates’to shippers or dividends paid to stockholders, and that the surplus earnings shall be reserved to finance a bank department, to pay interest on the bonds of the company and for the pnrehase of the business and good will of commission houses.