The Northwestern region of the United States has been noted as the granary and the larder of the nation, since, with the passing of the Homestead Act in 1862, the tapping by small farmers began. The existence of such small farmers had swayed there until reccently. Also it is well known that the region had been the center of farmers' movements for the period., 1870〜1900, against railway and mercantile capitalist exploitation of small producers. What were the special difficulties of Prairie farming or why farmers' discontents always fomented in the Northwest? In the newly settled areas of the Northwest, though lacking home markets, commercial farming developed, centering around extensive one-crop (wheat) farming for the remoter markets--the European and the industrialized Eastern markets. This development was made passible by the rapid railway building and the formation of the marketing system, in which enormous foreign and Eastern idle funds wers invested. The progress of mechanized and extensive wheat production, while seeming to have greatly enhanced the productivity, did not make for the conspicuous disintegration of farmers into agrarian capitalists and laborers owing to the following conditions: first, single-crop farming soon exhausted the soil, thus diminishing the farmers' gain; second, the accumulation in the hands of the middle and the upper layer farmers was checked by the large capitalists' robbing the farmers of their profits; and thirdly, though the vital unprofitableness of single-crop farming was gradually eliminated as farming was diversified, the downfall of the lower layer farmers and the bankrupted did not bring forth so much an increass of farming laborers as that of tenants, fundamentally on account of abundant knobbing of speculative and absentee landlordism. These factors stood in the way of the small farmers' thriving and delayed the growth of capitalist farming there as compared with in other regions (the Northern Atlantic and the Pacific coast regions). That is the why of the continuous coiling up of farmers' discontents and frequent outbreaks of the so-called agrarian revolt in the Northwest. The farmers' movements from the Granger down to the Populist are generally defined as the resistance of small producers to large capitalists and the non-confidence in the state organization. But, however tenaciously and uncompromisingly the farmers may have attacked the monopoly of land and the market, they can not have been opposed to "Capitalism" itself. Agrarian capitalism had to be acquired someway and someday. To discover the exact nature of the difficulties which the farmers have found in the market, and to learn how the problems have been solved, I made use of the investigation about the development of wheat market and the farmers' various attempts at reform in Minnesota. Of course conditions in Minnesota were never typical of those in the whole wheat producing section, but in the nature and sequence of the development in its wheat trade and in the problems which have appeared Minnesota is representatve of the larger region.

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