The West Liberty Foods turkey cooperative was formed in 1996 to purchase the assets and assume operations of Louis Rich Foods (an investor-owned processing firm), which, at the time, announced the imminent shutdown of its West Liberty, Iowa, processing facility. We study the creation and...

This paper identifies market and commodity characteristics that seem to support successful cooperative bargaining in markets for farm output. Bargaining is not just about increasing prices paid to farmers; indeed, although there is very little empirical research that addresses the issue, what...

Cooperative formation in agriculture sometimes occurs in response to the exit of a private firm and typically requires substantial equity investment by participating farmers. What economic rationale can explain why farmers are willing to contribute capital to an activity that (apparently) fails...

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms. We describe and analyze each firm's management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process...

This papers analyzes efficient regulatory design of a polluting firm who has two kinds of private information about its production environment. First, the firm has better information than the regulator regarding technological possibilities for controlling pollution; and second, some aspects of...

This paper uses extensive data on production outcomes for processing tomato growers in California to examine the efficacy of explicit incentives observed in grower-processor contracts. Our data include all deliveries of tomatoes to some 51 processors over a period of 7 years in which at least 65...