Agricultural producers face significant price risk. For some products, farmers may hedge this risk in well-functioning futures markets. For several products, however, no such risk management instrument is readily available. We suggest that farmers reduce price risk by organizing cooperatives...

This article values the debt of an input cooperative that procures a single commodity from farmers and then processes and markets the output, and an otherwise identical firm structured as an investor-owned firm (IOF) using the Black-Scholes option pricing model. The major conclusion of this...

Bargaining in agriculture is collective because an agent represents multiple principals, the farmers, in contrast to an agent who negotiates on behalf of a single or corporate entity. Collective bargaining adds the complication of securing commitments from several individuals, each possibly...

In this work, the improvements that influenced the participation of the farmers in the cooperative were analyzed. A survey of 125 farmers was carried out in Juanjui using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis in order to assess the underlying opinions of the cocoa farmers. The...

On June 20, 2002, the members of the South Dakota Soybean Processors (SDSP) Cooperative approved the reorganization of the cooperative into a limited liability company. Between the vote of the SDSP board of directors to reorganize on October 12, 2001 and the majority vote of the membership to...

The objective of this article is to describe the key elements of cooperative finance that have been found in the literature and illustrate how they relate to the function and structure of cooperatives.

The Oklahoma Food Cooperative (OFC) facilitates transactions between producers and consumers of locally-grown food items. Although the OFC has more than 3,000 members, the cooperative is still working to discover member needs and ensure its long-term sustainability. Both consumer-members and...

While proponents claim that fair trade provides meaningful benefits for participating commodity growers, few studies to date have measured these benefits on a global scale. This study estimates the worldwide monetary benefits that fair trade provides to participating coffee farmers, most of whom...

This study analyzes factors influencing farmer interest in marketing switchgrass through contracts and/or joining a cooperative that harvests, transports, stores, and markets their switchgrass. Data are from a survey of farmers in 12 southern states. A bivariate probit analysis is used to...