Grade A Milk Marketing by Manufacturing Co-ops: Findings in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa

Excerpts from the report: Cooperative dairy manufacturing firms in the Midwest are concerned with opportunities, costs, and problems involved in handling Grade A fluid milk. Many of them feel a competitive pressure to add Grade A operations but require a knowledge of market opportunities and fuller knowledge of other organizations' experience in deciding whether to expand into the Grade A field. While data for this report were drawn entirely from cooperatives, similar problems confront noncooperative manufacturing firms. To help cooperatives make sound economic decisions about handling Grade A fluid milk, Farmer Cooperative Service in 1957 studied dairy manufacturing associations with fluid operations in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where we find about two-thirds of the country's dairy cooperatives. Farmer Cooperative Service made this study to find guides for improving Grade A handling in the tri-State area. The first step was to learn what methods manufacturing cooperatives were using in marketing fluid milk. The second was to discover factors determining kind and number of Grade A functions a cooperative might successfully perform