Farmer cooperative managers and directors were contracted to determine their perspectives of the cooperative environment. Special emphasis was given to assessing their perceptions of division of responsibility between management and the board of directors, the importance of cooperative...

Cooperative directors’ perceptions of their roles, knowledge, and implementation of cooperative principles, business decision making, financial analysis, cooperative law, and division of responsibility with management were analyzed using data from forty-eight agricultural and thirty-one...

Cooperatives throughout North America are consolidating at an increasing rate and for a variety of reasons. While many cooperatives merge with others or are acquired to achieve greater economies of scale, several fail due to changes in the external economy, which make them redundant. Often, such...

The criterion for allocative efficiency is derived for a market system consisting of producers, a processor, and consumers and compared to the solution conditions for cooperative and profit-maximizing processors. A cooperative that maximizes total member returns will restrict output to less than...

Returns from establishing closed (defined membership) cooperatives owned by grain producers to produce hogs in Iowa are evaluated. Using a computer-simulated production model incorporating biological and price factors and statistical techniques, uncertainty of production and the market...

North Dakota and Minnesota are currently witnessing a renewal in the growth of cooperative enterprises. At the heart of this renewal lies the so-called New Generation Cooperative (NGC), a term that has been applied to the dozens of value-added processing, selected membership cooperatives that...

Review of: American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, by Jon Lauck

The concept of economies of size is crucial for the analysis of price and output equilibria for a marketing cooperative. If there are economies of size in processing, a cooperatively organized processing industry may be socially preferable when compared to an investor-owned processor with...