The Organic Small Farm Cooperative Initiative

Organic farming has been proven optimally suited for overall best consumer health and sustained long-term soil management. However, the present global farming picture is dominated by chemical-based management practices, having shifted from the earlier period of whole-substance, organic fertilizations into a more mechanized, large-scale crop system to feed a growing and dependent urbanized global population.

In order to return world food supply to organic means, an immediate dilemma presents itself; small-farms by themselves are insufficiently organized to replace existing chemical-based farming on such a grand scale. One problem is that small farms lack the required infrastructure of moving vast amounts of produce to various commercial markets. In addition, a small producer typically either lacks the sheer required volumes of certain crops in demand or cannot produce a sufficient variety to satisfy market requirements.

One solution is the Organic Farming Cooperative. Typically, cooperatives are themselves not farmers, but organizations created to gather several producers under one source to address the larger food-supply market. Immediately with this scenario, most of the small-farm limitations are mitigated by creating essentially a much larger, one-stop food source, and matching available productions to awaiting markets.

The Cooperative Advantage

The main advantage to organic cooperatives is the ability to supply on a larger scale, what the global consumer is calling for. There can no longer be doubt that a global, organic food supply is necessary and is very much in demand. Consumers around the world are now sufficiently informed to know the drastic differences in food quality – and the resulting consumer health – between organic and non-organic foods. Thus, the organic cooperative is in the much-needed position to fill a yawing food-quality gap.

Cooperatives can also address other issues such as higher consumer prices for organics versus chemical produce. An operational and endowed cooperative may have the ability to offer simpler, less expensive means for produce to reach markets. For example, dedicated transport services can be contracted to complete circuits of regional organic farms and to deliver fresh produce directly where they are sold, with lower costs to both the farmer and consumer.

A cooperative with sufficient market outreach can also direct particular crops to immediately flow to markets in low supply, thereby alleviating farms from having to arrange complicated or non-justifiable deliveries. The result here is that more produce is delivered when and where it is needed, with less waste.

Adapting to Changing Demand

One advantage of particular note is the ability of small organic producers to rapidly shift to crops that are in higher immediate demand and to opt out of produce that currently experiences market gluts or lower prices. The cooperative is instrumental in this, having the needed ongoing contact with food retailers, and thus can pass these opportunities to client organic suppliers. The high-production, chemical producers are much less in position to follow suit; with operational structures, budgets, and labor force planned often well in advance, most large-scale farms are limited in response to immediate or short-term crop changes.

Example of a Successful Cooperative

Organic Valley Cooperative, founded in 1988 and headquartered in La Farge, Wisconsin, is the largest coop in the United States. This farmer-owned organization claims that, since the 1960s, over 600,000 family farms have been purchased by corporations, which demand higher returns on investments every year – thereby putting constant pressure on large-farm managers.

Organic Valley began as most cooperatives do, as a reaction to disappearing family and small farms, to real choices in food-world, and to quality in the overall food market. In the late 1980s, now CEO George Siemon simply began posting notices in his home area in Wisconsin, telling farmers to join and do something about this dilemma. The cooperative was thus born and quickly thrived when consumers readily responded to the sudden access to high-quality food the coop offered.

The decision by the cooperative to go strictly organic was not easily accomplished, even with the knowledge base of many members. One member family, the Elsenpeters, had already been farming for 150 years, yet brothers Dan and Luke in 2006 were the first in their clan to go organic. Another member, Jarrid Bordessa, explains that many farmers who transition to organic did so for financial reasons, “then realized it’s just a better way to farm.”

Regional and Small Nation Difficulties

Unfortunately, cooperatives in themselves cannot remove all of organic farming’s woes. This human world, particularly in localized regions, often is fraught with local corruptions, controls, and neighboring-farm jealousies, which result in a kind of local lockdown on free market realizations. Pat Kauba (known locally as “Charlie”) is owner-operator of 5 Element Organic Bastion in Panauti, Nepal, which currently supplies organic dairy products, fruits, nuts, and vegetables to selected retailers in the capital city of Kathmandu.

Pat “Charlie” explains that under current conditions an organic farming cooperative in Nepal is highly unlikely. In his experience, local jealousy and parochial interests have resulted in blockades, theft and suddenly uninterested retail points when any ‘non-member’ producer arises in the area. This forces any specialized or organic producers to selectively market their produce further away from home – thereby raising prices and overall operational hardship. The organic cooperative in these cases may be prevented from taking on all available producers as clients, and begs an invitation to organic farmers to invent creative solutions to run their own local gauntlets, in order to bring their needed fruits to a hungry market.

Cooperative Strategies for the Future

Thus, the table is set for the Great Organic Shift; on the one hand is the small organic farmer with limited supply but a rapid ability to meet new demand, on the other is the large-scale chemical producer now supplying the wider market but unable, or unwilling, to shift towards more diverse crops or changing harvests. The organic farming cooperative is the force in position to tip the balance in favor of the organic market. Yet it may be that only the most solution-oriented and creative of these coops and farmers are likely to arise as major players in global food production, in view of the many obstacles currently in place.

Advantages of Small Farm Organic Cooperatives

• Cooperatives and the organic farms they represent, supply a relatively new and growing market sector. As such, organic market presence, influence, and share will all grow accordingly – as opposed to the overall downward spiral of the commercial farming business model, due to both performance and public perception on a global scale.

• Organic cooperatives and their subscribing farms are also poised for a naturally healthy interdependency. Coops can offer services such as regular deliveries, inter-farm resource exchanges, and real-time market changes to member farms, empowering them as more holistic, robust, and reliable assets in the cooperative arsenal.

• Consumer confidence and loyalty will yield positive results, particularly when organic cooperatives work in community. The results of this may include an increased acceptance of the relatively higher organic food prices, increased availability of retail-point shelf space, a growth of local cooperative organic farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture (CSA), as well as consumer involvement schemes, which can provide food credits and strengthened relationships.

• Prediction: Assuming a continual long-term growth for the organic cooperative movement, the organic versus chemical food market share will eventually arrive at parity, whereas comparative product pricing tends to even out. Due to quality factors and customer preference, market momentum will continue to favor the organic food market, over time resulting in a less expensive organic product overall. This decisive turnabout will sound the death-knell for chemical foods and transform the global food market as we currently know it.

Summary

Finally, the global nutritional endgame does not end well for chemical foods, if all likely factors mentioned herein play out consistently. Large-scale farming with its associated chemical accompaniment is a business model intentionally planned by a mega-industry, which stands to profit from every contrivance in the formula. This model is not the sensible or even ‘inevitable’ result of an industry rising to meet daunting realities, as many are wont to believe.

What may be actually inevitable for world food is a return to the sensible origins of natural processes and improved long-term consumer health through wholesome diets. The solid consumer demand for this is undeniable, and only stands to expand in depth and knowledge, as creative organic farmers and cooperatives further develop the means by which their products and trade can serve the greater human population.

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