Agricultural cooperative
Marketing cooperatives are established by farmers to undertake transportation, packaging, pricing, distribution, sales and promotion of farm products (both crop and livestock).
The latter drive the creation of cooperatives as a competitive yardstick or as a means of allowing farmers to build countervailing market power to oppose the IOFs.
[8] Producer organisations can also empower smallholders to become more resilient; in other words, they build the capacity of farmers to prepare for and react to economic and environmental stressors and shocks in a way that limits vulnerability and promotes their sustainability.
[9] Research suggests that membership in a producer organisation is more highly correlated with farmer output or income than other standalone investments such as training, certification, or credit.
[citation needed][12] During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in certain areas of Greece, back then, under Ottoman rule, a particular form of cooperative organization was developed.
While it was a society of textile workers, and thus not an agriculture cooperative in the strict sense, it also aimed to rent land, to be cultivated by members "who may be out of employment or whose labour may be badly remunerated".
Supply cooperatives provide inputs required for agricultural production including seeds, fertilizers, chemicals, fuel, and farm machinery.
Some supply cooperatives operate machinery pools that provide mechanical field services (e.g., plowing, harvesting) to their members.
[18] However, after World War II, with the advent of improved transportation, processing technologies and energy systems, a trend to merge dairy cooperatives occurred.
Two smaller cooperatives did not join Fonterra, preferring to remain independent – the Morrinsville-based Tatua Dairy Company and Westland Milk Products on the West Coast of the South Island.
The meat industry, which has struggled at times, has proposed various mergers similar to the creation of Fonterra; however, these have failed to gain the necessary member support.
In the Napo region 850 Kichwa families have come together with help from American biologist, Judy Logback, to form an agricultural marketing cooperatives, Kallari Association.
With the Anand pattern three-fourths of the price paid by the mainly urban consumers goes into the hands of millions of small dairy farmers, who are the owners of the brand and the cooperative.
The cooperative hires professionals for their expertise and skills and uses hi-tech research labs and modern processing plants & transport cold-chains, to ensure quality of their produce and value-add to the milk.
[25] Over the last sixty years, the local sugar mills have played a crucial part in encouraging rural political participation and as a stepping stone for aspiring politicians.
[26] This is particularly true in the state of Maharashtra where a large number of politicians belonging to the Congress party or NCP had ties to sugar cooperatives from their respective local areas.
