Future Roles for Agricultural Cooperatives

A T THE winter meetings of this association in 1961, two papers-one.ft by Joseph Knapp and the other by D. B. DeLoach-centered on the future role of cooperation in U.S. agriculture [1, 2]. Little has tran-spired since then to allow better prediction; and the present paper is a continuation of the previous speculation with, hopefully, a few new ideas for further discussion and research. To some extent, the discussion is relevant to cooperation by nonfarm firms and consumers. Ideally, we would like to know the past, present, and future effective-ness of farmer cooperatives in achieving whatever goals might be pre-scribed for them, presumably assuring competitive terms of trade in sell-ing and buying. I question neither the value of such information nor the difficulty in securing it. The approach taken in this paper, however, is less demanding in that it backs away from impacts and focuses on (1) the growth and present position of fanner cooperation, and (2) the major fac-tors determining past trends and future prospects. Such appraisal is of value on the assumption that increasing cooperation pushes market per