FARM CO-OPERATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 221, 19 September 1938, Page 8

FARM CO-OPERATION.

With profits only slightly reduced from the record figures disclosed a year ago, and an already strong financial position further consolidated, the latest accounts of the Farmers' Auctioneering Company should prove highly satisfactory not only to the company's large body of shareholders but to the community «s a whole. Now in its thirty-first year, the Farmers' Auctioneering Company, operating mainly throughout the Waikato, with branches radiating from its headquarters at Hamilton, has the distinction of being the strongest co-operative organisation financially, compared with all others doing the same class of business, in the Dominion. Its turnover is well over £2,000,000, while its resources are ample to help to tide its customers over difficult periods. In the earliest of the slump years, 1931 to 1933, inclusive, when its farmer customers were having a lean time, hundreds of them losing money instead of earning it, the company's advances totalled the large sum of £316,000. During that period, while most of the co-operative farmers' concerns throughout New Zealand were so badly hit that hundreds of thousands of pounds were lost and in many cases capital adjustments had to be made in rectifying the financial position, the Waikato concern—well buttressed beforehand as the result of prudent management—came through the most difficult period in our economic history practically without damr.ge.