Performance of the Top 18 Dairy Co-ops, 1992-2012

Cooperatives’ performance changed substantially over time as well as relative to one another, reflecting the challenges of operating in the dynamic dairy industry over the past two decades. Performance did improve for the majority of the surviving cooperatives of mergers and consolidations, at least initially. In the time periods under consideration, some of the larger scale cooperatives did not perform as well as the rest of the cooperatives. And some of the larger scale cooperatives also relied more on debt and less on equity than the rest of the cooperatives to finance their operations. Performance is measured by the amount a cooperative’s net savings exceeds the opportunity cost of members’ equity―the “extra value.” Extra value is made scale-neutral and mode-neutral by expressing it as a percentage of operating capital to arrive at an extra-value index for comparing performance among cooperatives and over time