Image Source: Land O Lakes Co. – Flickr – Public Domain
Land O’ Lakes dairy cooperative was founded in 1921 in St. Paul Minnesota by 320 small cooperative creameries. They hoped to improve the quality of butter produced in Minnesota as well as implement better marketing practices thereby improving the profitability of dairy farmers. That’s always been the goal of farmer cooperatives, by working together, groups of small farmers can get better prices for what they sell and pay lower prices for the inputs they have to buy.
That was the theory, part of the cooperative thinking that made rural America a better place. Farmer cooperatives were supportive of parity pricing, introduced in Roosevelt’s 1933 Agriculture Adjustment Act– the first Farm Bill, that ensured farmers a fair price. In their early years, cooperatives truly had the best interests of their farmer members at heart. But as some cooperatives grew into national powerhouses and many small local cooperatives went out of business, farmers felt the big cooperatives looked more like corporations than the small cooperative cheese factories or local feed mills that they grew up with, growth seemed more important than the collective good of the farmers.
In a recent piece in Time magazine Land O’ Lakes CEO Beth Ford voiced her concern at the continuing loss of farmers, low commodity prices and declining farm income which dropped 25% from 2022 to 2024. Estimates put median farm income for 2025 at -$328. It’s not a new phenomenon, according to USDA data, the average US dairy farm turned a profit twice between 2000 and 2021.
She mentions that farmers are getting older, with more farmers over the age of 75 than under the age of 35— no wonder, not many 20 or 30 somethings would take a job knowing they would probably be working for a negative income while slowly loosing their equity.
Still, kudos to Beth Ford for at least pointing out some of the problems farmers have always faced, —basically an up and down cycle of good years and bad, with luck, enough good years to keep going, but never enough good years to be consistently profitable.
But, there is more to the story of Land O’ Lakes. Most agribusiness CEO’s (while collecting their seven figure salaries) and their well compensated boards of directors, move their business model towards more growth and advise farmers to adopt more “efficient farming practices” meaning a shift to fewer, but larger farms that can afford the capital investments required to stay in business as markets, credit and infrastructure favor growth.
So, while lamenting the loss of so many farms and farmers, Land O’ Lakes, through their own business model of consolidation has promoted this trend. “As agricultural markets consolidate, competition lessens, meaning producers and consumers have fewer options”. “Milk producers historically organized into co-ops to counterbalance concentrated power among buyers, but today, the largest co-ops, such as Dairy Farmers of America and Land O’ Lakes, prey off of small-scale producers they’re supposed to protect and strike arrangements with massive milk processors, like Dean Foods, that result in additional wealth transfers from farmers to their own executives”.
While farm income has continued to drop, one of Ms. Ford’s solutions, —robust trade, apparently hasn’t raised farm incomes either. The US has promoted liberalized international trade of agricultural commodities for over 50 years, and even more aggressively since the 1996 farm bill that wanted to “get the government out of the marketplace”, yet farmers still can’t make a living and “get big or get out” is accepted as inevitable.
Despite their squashing of competition in the domestic dairy sector, Land O’ Lakes has established a “strategic partnership” with the worlds largest dairy exporter, New Zealand based Fonterra. Apparently importing New Zealand cream cheese, non-dairy butter spread etc, will help US dairy farmers?
Cooperatives are supposed to work for the best interests of their farmer owners, so it’s also unclear why a CEO and the cooperative board would think that engaging in illegal activities would be in the best interests the cooperative in general, specifically, its farmers. Yet they did, resulting in the price-fixing lawsuits and the ensuing settlements in dairy
Ms. Ford finally notes that “As private equity firms have become financial buyers of farmland, consolidation trends are changing. In Iowa alone, 20 million of its 30 million acres of farmland are set to transition. When farms are owned by firms, not families, communities wither. Contract farming does not plant community roots”.
An odd comment for someone who has held a seat on the Board of Directors of BlackRock, an investment firm with considerable holdings in US farmland, agribusiness corporations and recently in Ukrainian farmland. While she stated that she was “honored to join this impactful organization” her resignation a year later, “was not a result of any disagreement with the Company, the Company’s management or the Board”, — so, she was part of their investment strategy and apparently did not disagree with it.
Money and power can corrupt and cooperatives, can become that which they sought to oppose.
The post The Duplicity of Land O’ Lakes Cooperative appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jim Goodman.
Jim Goodman | Radio Free (2025-10-30T05:53:00+00:00) The Duplicity of Land O’ Lakes Cooperative. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/10/30/the-duplicity-of-land-o-lakes-cooperative/
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