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This document is brought to you in electronic format by the University
of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives
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May 1995

Make No Small Plans: A Cooperative Revival for Rural America 

by Lee Ergstrom
Rochester, Minnesota:  Lone Oak Press, Ltd., 1994
294 pages; ISBN 1-883477-04-2
Appendix lists 50 "New Generation" cooperatives.


The title of journalist Lee Egerstrom's latest book, Make No Small
Plans: A Cooperative Revival for Rural America, was well chosen.
Indeed, this text is nothing less than a rallying call for bold
cooperative action in an increasingly-troubled rural America.  The
first eight chapters essentially lay out the facts and arguments to
justify Egerstrom's enthusiasm for an exciting "New Generation" of
farmer-owned cooperatives, which he unveils in the final chapter on
rural economic development.

The impetus for these New Generation cooperatives has come mainly from
farmers themselves, looking to improve their individual farms' net
incomes.  The forms of value-added processing that these farmers have
pursued has been quite varied.  The basic concept, however, remains
the same across all of these new ventures:  farmers capture profits
that occur beyond the farm-gate by owning and controlling the local
businesses that are positioned to earn those profits.

One of the oldest means of value-added processing is to raise hogs,
cattle, or chickens for market.  To accomplish this cooperatively,
grain farmers have pooled capital to construct and operate new,
large-scale animal farms.  Once up and running, the farmers send corn
grown on their own farms "through" cooperatively-owned animals, and
profits from the sale of animal products are distributed back to the
individual farm-members, in proportion to grain supplied.

New Generation activity in Minnesota and North Dakota involves
ambitious efforts to process corn into sweeteners and ethanol, wheat
into pasta, tortillas, bagels, and pizza dough, and to process and
market dry edible beans, organic flours, specialty cheeses,
straw-based particle board, and alfalfa juice.

Opposition to these New Generation co-ops has come from farm
families and farmer organizations that see large-scale co-op farms as
a threat to smaller farms owned by lone families.  These advocates for
family farming, Egerstrom notes, may well be opposing one of the few
ways to preserve what they hold dear.  "They have a point," he argues,
"until one looks at the alter-natives_larger and fewer grain farms
while livestock and poultry production is moved from the Midwest and
consolidated under agribusiness firms in North Carolina, Missouri, and
Oklahoma."

Farmers and communities that don't act now may lose out to
communities that do.  The author offers a disturbing vision of
farmsteads and "redundant townsites" plowed under to make way for
contiguous soybean and corn fields.  Raw products from the depopulated
regions will be shipped (at commodity prices) to communities that have
wisely invested further up the food chain.  

Egerstrom's main message is not really directed at farming families,
but at entire rural communities. It's a book about community economic
development.  At this point, it seems both Egerstrom and the founders
of these new cooperatives may be overlooking potential support for
this community development:  co-op employees, local investors, rural
and even urban consumers in the region. Nevertheless, the farmers of
rural North Dakota and Minnesota are breaking new ground, they
definitely deserve a serious look, and Egerstrom's new book provides
it.  

Greg Lawless