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74    WISCONSIN CHEESE MAKERS' ASSOCIATION
heard him just about half way through, and he just exploded and said,
"Stop a train of cars with wind? Man, you are crazy."
Now, you have something that is good. You have confidence in your
produce, you have loyalty for your state, but your cheese isn't bring-
ing the price that it should bring, and you are not selling quite as
much as you should sell.
The intelligent course that has been followed by all successful
business institutions in the United States when confronted with a sit-
uation of this kind has been this, they have started a good intelligent
selling campaign and they started advertising, and they started mer-
chandising, and if they had the right kind of men that were serious,
they put it over, and I feel sure that you people have a product that
you deserve to win with, and if you are serious and if you will get
together you will win, and I wish you all the luck in the world. I
thank you.
ML MALOZEWma: Mr. President, I would like to ask the gentle-
man, how do they collect the funds from the producers in order to be
able to do the advertising?
MM LEONARD: It was just a matter of detail. We pay $2.50 on the
ton or 1% cents on the pound. We had to get the growers to sign up
and that took 90 days, and it was a hard job. I would be glad to go
into detail with you but I don't want to bother this meeting with a lot
of those details, but we collect it this way: we have commercial pack-
ers that buy up from us growers. In California the growers dry the
product. The drying would perhaps correspond to your cheese mak-
ing. You see, now on my own place I have my own drying equipment
and I dry my own prunes and put them in the bin. There are about
fourteen concerns I can sell to. There are some other small ones.
When I sell I have an agreement that $2.50 would be deducted from
my check, and he sends that to the United Prune Growers in Califor-
nia. You can work that out with your cheese dealer or your own men
here would know how to figure that out. For instance, if a farmer
understood exactly how this was to be handled, the cheese maker is
paying the same amount and that can be sent right in to you.
MR MALCZEWSKI: What do you do with your non-contract
growers?
MR LEONARD: We got them up to 95 per cent.
SECRETARY SAMMIS: How many farmers are there who signed up
this contract?
MR LEONARD: There are over ten thousand growers. But we have
had a very complicated situation. There was some five thousand
growers in a cooperative that came in in a body and then we had to
get some more signed up and the packers agreed to collect the fee
from any outsider that didn't pool his crop.
SECRETARY SAMMIS: In addition to the farmers, that is the grow-
ers, did anybody else in the industry besides those farmers pay
anything?
MR LEONARD: No sir. I think in your dealings here, that you
cheese makers are very fair and I think you have a good fair proposi-
tion from what I can see of it.