During its 74-year history, Farmland served its farmer membership as a diversified, integrated organization, playing a significant role in agricultural markets both domestically and worldwide.

Tradigrain was a wholly owned subsidiary of Farmland and had branch offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Paris, France; Bremen, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Tokyo, Japan; Mexico City, Mexico; Moscow, Russia; Seoul, Korea; Kyiv, Ukraine; Mykolaiv, Ukraine, London, United Kingdom; and Akkala, Uzbekistan.

With hogs and beef, the cooperative was involved in the raising of the animals through feed, the slaughtering and packaging process, as well as marketing the meats under the "Farmland" brand.

CCA became involved in a variety of other areas, including the production of flour and feed, the manufacture of household and electrical appliances, and the development of insurance and finance associations.

In many ways it was considered an industrial powerhouse, controlling a wide range of assets: oil wells, pipelines, refineries, grease and paint factories, feed mills, fertilizer works, warehouses, and a fleet of trucks.

The organization also faced mounting pressure to better serve farmers by engaging in the marketing of agricultural products, an area which CCA had intentionally avoided.

A year later the cooperative purchased the Crawford County Packing Company in Denison, Iowa, and entered the pork processing business, ultimately acquiring food manufacturing facilities throughout the Midwest.

During the course of developing its food processing capability, the cooperative sought to improve operating efficiencies, marketing strategies and the relationship with facility employees.

Throughout the latter part of the century, Farmland continued to grow and diversify, turning to international markets, contracting to sell wheat, fertilizer and food products overseas and forming joint ventures with foreign partners.

During this period, Farmland became a North American and international cooperative, expanding its employee base to include executive and administrative functions.

In 1998, the company's $2.8 billion asset base included nitrogen complexes in the U.S. and abroad; the second-largest petroleum refinery in the Midwest; phosphate mining operations; grain storage capacity of 145 million bushels; diverse feed manufacturing entities that included feed mills, spray dry plants and commodity sheds; 12 meat plants; and a transportation fleet of more than 4,400 rail cars, 1,060 over-the-road trucks and 1,850 trailers, and interest in 100 dry cargo barges and several ocean-vessels.

These efforts were designed to stay at the forefront of technologies such as remote sensing, variable rate fertilization, grid sampling, yield mapping and global positioning and geographic information systems.

In June 1999, the company broke ground for a 280,000-square-foot (26,000 m2) headquarters on a 40-acre (160,000 m2) campus[3] just east of Kansas City International Airport to consolidate the offices for 1,000 employees.

Although the cooperative continued to operate as a going concern, the reorganization process ultimately resulted in the decision to sell virtually all of the company's assets, including the following subsidiaries: Farmland Foods, Inc., the pork processing division to Smithfield Foods for $367M; Farmland National Beef Packing Company to US Premium Beef for $232M; and the fertilizer production division to Koch Industries.

[6] Before the liquidation was completed, it was accepted that no assets remained to be distributed to the members, the local cooperatives, who had to write off the loss of their equity account balances.

A 2004 study in Oklahoma suggested that the most significant effects on cooperatives related to farmer connections and lost business relationships, and the direct financial impact of the write off was low.