Image Source: Land O Lakes Co. – Flickr – Public Domain

Land O’ Lakes dairy cooperative was founded in 1921 in St. Paul Minnesota by 320 small cooperative creameries. They hoped to improve the quality of butter produced in Minnesota as well as implement better marketing practices thereby improving the profitability of dairy farmers. That’s always been the goal of farmer cooperatives, by working together, groups of small farmers can get better prices for what they sell and pay lower prices for the inputs they have to buy.

That was the theory, part of the cooperative thinking that made rural America a better place. Farmer cooperatives were supportive of parity pricing, introduced in Roosevelt’s 1933 Agriculture Adjustment Act– the first Farm Bill, that ensured farmers a fair price. In their early years, cooperatives truly had the best interests of their farmer members at heart. But as some cooperatives grew into national powerhouses and many small local cooperatives went out of business, farmers felt the big cooperatives looked more like corporations than the small cooperative cheese factories or local feed mills that they grew up with, growth seemed more important than the collective good of the farmers.

In a recent piece in Time magazine Land O’ Lakes CEO Beth Ford voiced her concern at the continuing loss of farmers, low commodity prices and declining farm income which........

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