In order to encourage new and assist existing employee owned businesses, SBA is directed to provide education and outreach to businesses, employees and financial institutions about employee-ownership. “It is noted that worker owned businesses are uniquely structured to provide wide-ranging economic benefits.
Thanks to the efforts of Kirsten Gillibrand, senator from New York, the bill includes language encouraging the formation of cooperative businesses: Last March, President Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act into law. Just in the last few years a bounty of resources has appeared, offering information, advice and even grants for new farms – including the USDA, which offers grants through its Rural Cooperative Development Grant Program “to start, expand or improve rural cooperatives and other mutually owned businesses.” They can divide the chores according to each other’s respective skills, and they can cover for each other when someone is sick. What’s the advantage of farming cooperatively? In addition to sharing the cost of land, co-op farmers share the work, keep each other company on winter days and share childcare. Farming co-ops of the modern worldīut when the going gets tough, cooperatives begin to look more appealing and in today’s world, where the market seems to serve only the already rich, the idea of giving up some of that dyed-in-the-wool independence that allegedly has kept farmers from forming partnerships to take up the challenges of working together on shared land seems less daunting. Grocery co-ops sprung up everywhere, but in the long run they lacked staying power and were beat out of the market by giant supermarket chains. Then in the 1960s, cooperative ideals were embraced by young visionaries seeking pathways to a way of life more grounded in nature. History of the farming co-opīegun in England in the mid-19th century by a guild of weavers who saw the quality of their craft declining in the emerging industrial economy, and employed by American farmers forming cooperative credit unions and supply cooperatives to cut costs, the popularity of co-ops waxed and waned for 150 years. The cooperative economy may be an idea whose time has finally come.
#FARM TOGETHER LOCAL CO OP HOW TO#
Writing in Yes! magazine, Eric Michael Johnson writes, “the cooperative - the financial model in which a group of members owns a business and makes the rules about how to run it - is a modern institution that has much in common with the collective tribal heritage of our species.” If the high cost of farmland is all that’s standing in the way of realizing your dream of becoming a farmer, you might want to get together with a few other young farmers and form a cooperative.Īfter a hundred years of believing that Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had proved that competition determined the “survival of the fittest,” visionaries striving to develop a more collaborative (and hopefully harmonious) society discovered that in another book, The Descent of Man, Darwin had actually argued that cooperation - and compassion - have saved the species all along. This article first appeared in the August 2019 issue of Acres U.S.A.
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