[7] Plunkett had witnessed at first-hand the success of agricultural cooperatives in the United States of America, and desired to establish a more productive business-like approach to farming in Ireland, taking account of Scandinavian models of co-operation.
As Plunkett recalled in his 1908 pamphlet The Rural Life Problem of the United States: Our message to Irish farmers was that they must imitate the methods of their Continental competitors, who were defeating them in their own markets simply by superior organisation.
[8] IAOS activists believed that the application of cooperative principles offered a solution to problems of rural life and addressed social anxieties prevalent in the Irish countryside.
Several of the largest businesses in Ireland, including Aryzta, Glanbia and Kerry Group, trace their roots to the cooperative farming activity initiated and supported by the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society.
The IAOS advocated the move from consumer co-operation to the promotion of creameries, leading to conflict with the British Co-operative Union, which had helped to finance some of the early propagandising in Ireland.
The CWS, as the central wholesaling body of the British retail co-operative movement, already had economic interests in Ireland, including butter-buying agencies, and the move to set up creameries seemed a logical extension of its own business activities.
It could buy up creameries and equip and run them at no expense to the local milk-producing farmers, though the IAOS feared that the longer-term effect would be a loss of control and economic dependency.
Particularly worrying for Irish co-operators were indications that some farmers were prepared to take the short-term view, preferring to entrust the development of the milk-processing industry to outside interests.
Together with other members of the society, such as George William Russell and W. B. Yeats, Plunkett and Lord Monteagle came to believe that Home Rule was the only way to keep Ireland united, which was one of the main motivations behind the founding of the IAOS.
This political group sought to prevent the partition of Ireland, but also believed that the Irish should organise themselves to take control of their domestic policy, a principle very much inline with the IAOS's beliefs.
In 1902, the then-President of the IAOS, Lord Monteagle, stated in his annual report that Conradh na Gaeilge meetings and Irish Republican Brotherhood events were increasingly taking place in cooperative halls.
[24] In County Kerry, Lord Monteagle's daughter, Mary Spring Rice, regularly used meetings of the local IAOS to promote nationalist politics.