Files
Abstract
Little is known about cooperative adjustment to industrialized agriculture.
This inductive study hypothesizes that cooperative adjustment to
industrialization is a function of critical resource changes, managerial vision,
and ideological change. Agrarian-oriented cooperatives sought to maintain
farmer control over agriculture. They feared production from industrialized
agriculture would displace family farm production, weakening cooperatives.
“Top-down” corporate vertical integration presaged a new era of feudal
control over agriculture. Open market decline would lock formerly
independent, entrepreneurial producers into the feudal dependence of
“serfdom” as contract growers—the equivalent of hired labor.
The “serfdom” metaphor motivated cooperatives to buffer producers from
structural change by establishing more markets. As integrated, industrialized
production grew commodity by commodity, cooperatives increasingly
regarded producers as a scarce and critical resource. Yet, agrarian-oriented
cooperatives did not foresee that the moral hazard associated with pork
contracting would limit grower exploitation. Nor did such cooperatives
recognize how productivity-enhancing technologies accelerated farmer
attrition. Visionary cooperative managers compensated for agrarianism’s
ideological weaknesses by creating new, global cooperative goals such as
“feeding the world.” By the end of the 20th century, cooperatives had come to
regard capital as their scarce and critical resource.