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| Coops work when they only do one thing (produce ethanol, OR grind feed, OR sale crops, OR ....). They can focus on the one goal, and anyone belonging to the coop will have the same goal. Thoudsands can be served, & served well.
The current mega-coops in the USA are too disjointed to be effective as a coop. Every coop around me is a CENEX coop. Every one. There is no competition. None. There is no one goal. They all want to sell fertilizer, market grain, sell pesticides, sell feed, custom spray, sell seed. No focus on anything.
You can't buy corn & sell hog feed and claim you are looking out for any one set of customers. There is a conflict there. This is not the coop spirit any more. If you sell my corn, market it for top dollar. If you want to sell me hog feed, I want it at lowest cost you can find. One coop can't be all to all. There is a conflict there.
This spring my local coop said they don't want to build more grain storage, even tho corn acres, bu per acre, & length of storage is going up do to many ethanol plants local to here. At a meeting to get farmers to buy condo or per year storage types of things, their grain marketer stated they don't really have to buy any grain from farmers as they can buy it off the board of trade to feed the feed mill & ethanol contracts...........
I don't know if that coop realizes how their new policies have changed it's relationship with farmers yet. Will be an interesting fall, to be sure.
I'm too busy farming to try to right that sort of management - I'm just looking for companies - private or coop - that are willing to work with and for me. I don't need to fight any battles.
This coop really scared me this spring - if they believe they don't need farmers raising crops for them any more. I'm working on alternatives to them. It's a shame, one of their locations is only 1/2 mile from me, but I gotta work for me, and find what works for me. I can't rely on a company that is willing to pull the rug out from under me.
I think coops in the USA are in a bad financial situation long term, having to pay off old equity on much thinner margins these days in a shrinking ag world. That is difficult. It's a problem they haven't solved, and one that may not have a solution by now.
Rather than get better, they continue to get bigger. That is a bandaid, and will not help long-term. The bubble will burst.
--->Paul | |
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Farm Coops
