Antitrust Status of Farmer Cooperatives: - USDA Rural Development ...

oughly equal to all of western Europe, was made available to ranchers
and farmer s.
Opening the West to farming and ranching led to a new set of
problems for producers. For one thing, it was difficult for settlers
used to farming the fertile, rain-blessed land around and east of the
Mississippi River to adapt to the semi-arid high plains lands of the
West.
Also, many farmers had borrowed heavily during the war to
purchase more land and equipment. Paying off these loans became
difficult as general price deflation and reduced demand contributed to
sharp declines in farm prices after the conflict ended. All of this land
coming into production further depressed the prices farmers received.
Finally, while towns and markets were springing up every day as
people came west to seek their fortune in mining or provide goods and
services to others, farm markets were still primarily east of the
Mississippi. This meant shipping east via railroads.
RAILROAD GROWTH, CONDUCT, AND
REGULATION
During the 1860s, businessmen in San Francisco began shipping
wheat to the East Coast and exporting wheat to Great Britain,
Australia, and even China. Wheat farms in California became largescale
enterprises, supported by absentee owner s, abundant credit, and
mechanization. For example, by the early 1870s the combine was
used throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. Combines
didn' t come into general use in the Great Plains until the 1920s.
After the end of the Civil War, the move to unite the states
included a drive to build a transcontinental railroad linking the states
along the Mississippi to California. Construction was funded by huge
land grants and government loans. For a small investment, four
Sacramento businessmen--Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis
Huntington, and Charles Crocker--gained control of the Central Pacific
Railway. It was building east from Sacramento to meet with the Union
Pacific, which was building west from Omaha, in the Nebraska
Territory just beyond the Iowa border.
In 1869, the Golden Spike ceremony commemorating the joining
of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific marked the advent of
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