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The Role of Farmers
in the
Future Economy
The Role of Farmers
in the
Future Economy
BRETT FAIRBAIRN
Centre for the Study of Co-operatives
University of Saskatchewan
Copyright © 2003 Brett Fairbairn
Centre for the Study of Co-operatives
University of Saskatchewan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or
by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. In the case of
photocopying or other forms of reprographic reproduction, please consult Access
Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, at 1–800–893–5777.
Cover design by Byron Henderson
Editing, interior layout, and design by Nora Russell
CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Fairbairn, Brett, 1959–
The role of farmers in the future economy / Brett Fairbairn.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–88880–470–9
1. Agriculture—Economic aspects—Canada. 2. Agriculture and
state—Canada. I. University of Saskatchewan. Centre for the Study of
Co-operatives. II. Title.
HD1787.F34 2003 338.1'0971 C2003–910288–2
Printed in Canada
03 04 05 06 07/ 5 4 3 2 1
Centre for the Study of Co-operatives
101 Diefenbaker Place
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon SK Canada S7N 5B8
Phone: (306) 966–8509 / Fax: (306) 966–8517
E-mail: [email protected] / Website: http://coop-studies.usask.ca
Editor’s Note: The contents of this booklet are based on a speech given to the
Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, 14 June 2002, at the Radisson
Hotel in Saskatoon.
Contents
Introduction 1
Unsustainability, Transformations,
and Commodity Agriculture 2
The New Economy 5
The New Agriculture 7
The New Farmer 12
Endnotes 15
Centre for the Study of Co-operatives
is an
T HE CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
interdisciplinary teaching and research institution located
on the University of Saskatchewan campus in Saskatoon. It is supported
financially by the co-operative sector—Credit Union Central of Saskat-
chewan, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, Federated Co-operatives Ltd., Co-
operative Trust, The Co-operators, and the CUMIS Group—the Govern-
ment of Saskatchewan, and the University of Saskatchewan. The univer-
sity not only houses our offices but provides in-kind contributions from
a number of departments and units—Agricultural Economics, History,
Management and Marketing, Political Studies, and Sociology—as well
as financial assistance with operations and nonsalary expenditures. We
acknowledge with gratitude the ongoing support of all our sponsoring
organizations.
The objectives of the centre are:
• to develop and offer university courses that provide an
understanding of co-operative theory, principles, develop-
ments, structures, and legislation;
• to undertake original research into co-operatives;
• to publish co-operative research, both that of centre
staff and of other researchers; and
• to maintain a resource centre of materials that support
the centre’s teaching and research functions.
Our publications are designed to disseminate and encourage the discussion
of research conducted at, or under the auspices of, the Centre for the Study
of Co-operatives. The views expressed constitute the opinions of the
author, to whom any comments should be addressed.
VI CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
Introduction
“The Role of Farmers in
T HE TOPIC OF THIS BOOKLET,
the Future Economy,” is connected with some new research
and new thinking a group of academic colleagues have been doing at the
1
university. This is a critical topic, which every farmer and every rural or-
ganization needs to think about. The world isn’t what it was, and farmers
need strong voices and strong representation if they are not going to get
overlooked in today’s economy and politics. Our economy has been going
through a fundamental transformation since the 1970s. The environment
is changing: the economic environment, the natural environment, the so-
cial and political environment. But the internal, structural changes within
the agricultural sector have only just begun to become apparent. There is
more to come. And it is important that farmers and rural people think
about the issues and guide the change process as much as they can in their
own interests.
Many of today’s farmers may not recognize what farming is likely to
become in the future. It will be in some ways a totally different industry.
Change is not necessarily bad, but it is important to work with change to
minimize the bad and develop the good.
There is some irony in a historian contemplating the future, and a uni-
versity professor writing about agriculture. In important ways, farmers
know agriculture better than a university professor ever can. And that’s the
first message: Be skeptical. Think critically. Do not accept things just be-
cause university professors, government officials, or representatives of cor-
porations say them. But equally, do not disbelieve things just because of
who says them, either. Instead: think, talk, seek out new ideas, and acquire
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 1
• FAIRBAIRN
the information necessary to make informed decisions. The policy and
education processes of organizations such as the Agricultural Producers
Association of Saskatchewan are critically important, but the same study,
reflection, and thinking must be taken to ever-wider groups of producers.
Getting together by commodity is not enough: it leads to too specialized
a focus, and it enables other participants in agriculture to use divide-and-
conquer tactics against farmers.
Unsustainability, Transformations,
and Commodity Agriculture
in the early twentieth century
O NE HUNDRED YEARS AGO,
prior to the First World War, there was a dust bowl in south-
western Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. This area had been settled
for less than a generation, and already it was afflicted by drought. Crops
did not come up, or failed. Soil blew. Settlers abandoned their homesteads.
Prosperous little towns, promoted by boosters with grand dreams, decayed
into ghost towns. The Palliser Triangle region was, as historian David C.
2
Jones has written, an “Empire of Dust.”
This story highlights three points.
First, the original pattern of Prairie settlement and agricultural devel-
opment was not sustainable, particularly in the driest areas. Governments
and their advisors had laid out a land system, a plan for a regional wheat
economy, and a transportation system that were economically and environ-
mentally unsustainable. This began to become apparent within decades of
non-Aboriginal settlement. We have been living, ever since, with the ongo-
ing adjustments of that original settlement system.
Second, expert advice from universities and government officials con-
tributed to the catastrophe. Agricultural experts, for example, advised
2 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
farmers in the dry areas to practice a technique they called the “dust
mulch.” Farmers were told to work their fallow land over and over, break-
ing the soil up and pulverizing it into dust. The theory was that this would
form a protective layer that would conserve deeper moisture. A fine pseu-
doscientific theory: it is easy to imagine the results. The moral of the story
is, be suspicious of experts. They may know things that farmers need to
know … but the one who is responsible for the land is the one who has to
make the decisions and live with the consequences.
Third, twentieth-century agriculture was in a constant process of trans-
formation. The history of modern agriculture is a history of continuous
change. Every generation has struggled with learning how to farm under
entirely new economic and scientific conditions. What we learn from the
past is that the present will not last. Whatever you see around you today is
not how things will be in twenty years.
Take, for example, the idea of agricultural commodity specialization.
When settlers first broke the land, the farms they built up were highly
flexible and diversified operations. I think back to my grandparents’ farms,
established in the teens and twenties. They had multiple crops—a different
crop on every quarter, it seemed—as well as many kinds of livestock and a
huge vegetable garden. There were horses, cattle, chickens, guinea hens;
there were eggs to sell, as well as milk and butter. We talk today about di-
versification, but those early homesteads were diversified beyond anything
we’ve seen since. They also included many subsistence or noncommercial,
nonmarket activities, which made them hard to incorporate into Saskat-
chewan’s developing economy.
Farmers learned how to specialize in the production of a few basic
commodities. They learned this, for the most part, between the 1920s and
the 1960s. They were taught to specialize in commodities, with government
studies, university research, corporate and marketing-board advice, all
guiding them to the same conclusion. Where wheat had once been merely
the largest cash crop, wheat, or cattle, became more like the exclusive prod-
uct of many farms.
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 3
• FAIRBAIRN
It is important to stress that what farmers produced were commodities.
A commodity is a generic or largely undifferentiated product, something
that can be aggregated between producers, transported long distances in
bulk, and can serve as an input into industrial processes, being turned into
other things before it is used. Farmers on the Prairies learned and were
taught to identify themselves with commodities.
So we have marketing boards that regulate or handle commodities, we
have producer organizations that define themselves by their commodities,
and we have discussions of agriculture that always start with commodities.
We have, in short, a commodity-specialization mentality. This, too, is
unsustainable. It’s not as stupid as the dust mulch was, but it’s rapidly be-
coming just as anachronistic. Agriculture is today going through another
transformation, and the central point in that transformation is the decline
of commodity-centred activities.
Specialization will remain. It is with us for good, and in many ways it
will increase. Farms will become specialized in individual varieties of crops
and animals, and individual stages of their production and marketing. But
the products will less and less have the characteristics of commodities. This
is a good thing for producers, because there isn’t much future, for the ma-
jority of farmers, in producing simple commodities.
The problem with commodities is that, over long periods of time, their
prices have tended downward, and the margins in producing and handling
them have narrowed. We have tried to cope, in Saskatchewan, by produc-
ing more and more, having larger and larger farms, in order to make a liv-
ing off those narrowing margins. Some of this will keep happening, but we
seem to be reaching a breaking point.
It is a sobering exercise to graph the prices of commodities over long
periods of time, corrected for inflation. Wheat, for example, traded at
quite high prices in the mid-nineteenth century, but then declined as new
producing areas such as the western US, Argentina, Canada, and Australia
came on-stream, and as new technology such as railroads and steamships
4 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
moved things farther and faster. Prices went up during the First World
War, during and after the Second World War, and in the 1970s, but other-
wise the trend is down.
Much as we may bemoan US subsidies to their producers, the effect of
those subsidies has been to make a bad situation worse, not to create a bad
situation in the first place.
Generic commodities decline. We live in an economy where each new
round of globalization, each new technology, each new trade or subsidy
deal, seems to confirm that general pattern.
So what does this mean for the new economy, the new agriculture, and
for farmers?
The New Economy
has been widely used
T HE PHRASE “THE NEW ECONOMY”
in recent years, and is often associated with high-tech indus-
tries, dot-com companies, and recent stock-market bubbles. In fact, there
is something much more fundamental occurring, which affects the internal
structures and external linkages of all kinds of industries, whether they are
in the information-technology business or other branches of the economy.
This paper will not go into a lot of detail examining the new economy, but
it is useful to hit some highlights.
First, the “old economy” was the pre-1970s industrial economy we all
know reasonably well. This was an economy that stressed standardized
processes, mass-market products, managerial efficiency, and clear, well-
defined lines of authority and control within organizations and sectors.
Commodity agriculture was part of this industrial economy, because it
focussed on standardization, mass markets, and constant efforts to intro-
duce or improve scientific management.
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 5
• FAIRBAIRN
Some people refer to changes now occurring in agriculture as the “in-
dustrialization” of agriculture, but that is a misnomer. The industrializa-
tion of agriculture happened in the mid-twentieth century. What we are
going to see in agriculture, as in the larger economy, is the “postindustrial-
ization” of economic activities.
In the wider society, the new economy has a number of important fea-
tures, of which we will examine four.
First—of course—is the increased importance of knowledge and infor-
mation. But this does not just mean that more knowledge or information is
required, though that may also be true. The key is that knowledge and in-
formation become the organizing principles of businesses and industries.
The internal structure of firms changes, their planning and relationships
with other firms change, according to a focus on information. Companies
increasingly outsource physical production processes, leaving the core of
the company as an entity that specializes in co-ordination, research, design,
quality control, and so on—information, in other words. Power and
wealth in the new economy can be concentrated and captured where the
knowledge is, not where the product is. This is a new way of thinking, a
new way of organizing economies and businesses.
Second, and frequently remarked upon, is the growth of service indus-
tries. This too is connected to the new primacy of information. Where the
period of industrialization was characterized by the growth of the indus-
trial sector at the expense of the primary-production sector, the new period
of postindustrialization sees the growth of the service sector at the expense
of the others.
It is not surprising to notice that primary-production activities such as
production agriculture lose, relatively speaking, in both transformations,
the old as well as the new.
Third, the new economy is a network economy. Firms are not self-
contained and monolithic. Through outsourcing, contracts, joint ventures,
and the like, firms have fluid and flexible boundaries. Even internally they
6 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
may have become more fluid, with project units and work teams that have
changing focusses and relationships. Fluidity and connectedness are key
features of this economy. The firm is more like a network than an old or-
ganization; the relations among firms are more like a network. All the
pieces are interdependent and specialized in things that can contribute to
linkages and partnerships.
Fourth, and finally, the new economy is an economy of consumer
choices, niches, and preferences. At least in well-off, developed countries,
consumers are less interested in mass-market goods. They are less deferen-
tial to tradition and authority. They value choice for its own sake. They
will make choices, sometimes regardless of what experts tell them is good
for them. The new economy is moving from one with a crude, supply-
push emphasis to something much more complicated, dynamic, and
changeable. This is not to say the economy is more consumer driven.
However, all businesses need to focus much more explicitly than in the
past on changing consumer tastes and desires, on the ultimate end markets
for products and services.
Although most of these observations are commonplace, what does the
importance of knowledge, services, networks, and consumer preferences
mean for agriculture?
The New Agriculture
and sessions
D URING A NUMBER OF CONFERENCES
about rural development over the years, I have heard rural
people make passionate, sincere statements like the following:
“A farmer should be able to earn a living farming”—meaning that
growing a crop or producing animals should be lucrative enough to sup-
port a household. Governments, it is argued, should ensure that prices
make this possible.
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 7
• FAIRBAIRN
Or, “It’s my job to produce the stuff. That’s what I know. That’s what
I’m good at. I shouldn’t have to worry about it after it leaves the farm
gate.”
These kinds of statements are powerful, and it is hard not to sympa-
thize with the emotions, the pressures, the values and ideals that lie behind
them.
But when you look at where agriculture is heading, you also have to
conclude that these ways of thinking, at least in their pure form, are no
longer useful in today’s agriculture. What farmers have to do to make a
living, what they call farming, whether they have to worry about more
than just production, are questions that are all up in the air right now.
Everyone has heard about adding value to things—perhaps so much
so that we’re tired of talking about it. But the discussion of value-added is
only part of a bigger set of structural changes in the economy. The reason
value-added is an issue is because there are certain points in marketing
chains where power and wealth can best be extracted. Every marketing
chain runs from producers, through processors and distributors, to end
users. Increasingly, for agricultural products, there is wealth and power in
the middle of these chains that does not necessarily flow to the producers
on one end or the consumers on the other.
The issue is simply that if producers are not satisfied with price or
terms, or consumers are not satisfied with price or quality, they probably
need somehow to become involved further up or down the value chain in
order to secure their needs and interests. Vertical integration, or more gen-
erally speaking some kind of vertical co-ordination, is what is needed to
3
achieve this.
Right now, value chains related to agri-food projects are being trans-
formed and reorganized in new ways. These changes are not necessarily to
the advantage of producers. If producers want to be involved, they will
have to make a concerted effort.
One of the first industries to be reorganized on the new model, or one
8 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
version of the new model, was the chicken industry in the United States.
During a recent conversation at a conference, a southern US chicken pro-
ducer described his role in the industry in such a way that it looks nothing
like our current idea of what it means to be a farmer.
Briefly, he received a given genetic stock, supplied by the processing
company, and signed contracts to raise the stock in specified ways, and
deliver it with specified characteristics at a predetermined date. While the
company was guaranteeing to take the product, it was also requiring that it
have exactly the characteristics required for them to maximize the return
from their own processing and marketing operations. The farmer bore the
risk if something happened that made him unable to meet the terms of the
contract. Similarly, the farmer was required to meet environmental stan-
dards on his buildings, and company inspectors could dictate to him what
improvements he had to pay for to bring his ventilation or other systems
up to the company’s standards. The company also changed the prices and
terms as it saw fit, more or less unilaterally.
It is not surprising, then, that some people characterize farmers as be-
coming more like employees than independent operators. Perhaps a truer
analogy is that they will be like owners of a store franchise. Buying a farm
will be like buying a McDonald’s franchise: it’s yours to run, within the
rules set by the bigger company.
Stories like this are all too common. The point is that this is one exam-
ple of how vertical co-ordination will be achieved. Every sector of agricul-
ture will see some similar kind of reorganization and rebalancing of roles
among producers, processors, and consumers. The only question concerns
exactly what kind of rebalancing this will be.
For years, people have talked about the dangers of corporate farms. But
corporations do not need to own the farm in order to have the control and
profit that they seek. Farming land is indeed probably best left to farmers
who are close to and have individual, local knowledge of their land and an-
imals. The real danger is that farmers will lose control without losing their
land.
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 9
• FAIRBAIRN
Production agriculture is a unique industry. It is almost the last sector
of the economy where small-to-medium-sized enterprises predominate.
Where manufacturing and banking are dominated by huge corporations
and multinationals, and retailing by chains and franchises, we still have
tens of thousands of more or less independent farmers. The reason for this
is that farmers have unique local knowledge of their land and practices;
and the unique strength, in many cases, of farm enterprises that are inte-
grated with and supported by homes and households and families located
on the land. No distant corporate head office could be as flexible and adapt-
able as the local farm-family unit. This suggests that farmers will continue
to exist in the new agriculture, and will not be replaced by corporations or
machines. However, none of this says that farmers will prosper. It is quite
possible to retain tens of thousands of farmers on the land, eking out an
existence, while the real power and profits go to others. Indeed, this seems
a reasonable description of where we are now. Contractual relationships
between producers and processors will not necessarily make this trend bet-
ter, unless the underlying issues of control and bargaining power are taken
into account.
As contractual agreements of many kinds become widespread in agri-
culture, the relations between producers and processors will continue to
change. It is common, for example, for contract prices to be based on mar-
ket prices. But as contracts grow, markets shrink. At some point, the quan-
tity of products that flows under contracts exceeds the quantity that goes
through open markets; some branches of agriculture have already reached
this point. So what happens when there is no longer a meaningful market
to provide a price yardstick for contracts? Very likely, as markets decline in
significance, the importance of bargaining power increases. The terms of
contracts will inevitably be dictated by the relative power positions of pro-
cessing companies and producers. All else being equal, this situation will
be disadvantageous to farmers.
Even in cases where farmers are not exploited because of contractual
dependency, the new agriculture will pose unique challenges for them.
10 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
There is a cost associated with searching out deals from suppliers and mar-
keters, with negotiating and monitoring contracts. Producers will be hard-
pressed to deal with these transaction costs, and they will seek ways to re-
duce the time, effort, and risk associated with the new environment. The
new agriculture, like the new economy generally, will be a network econ-
4
omy, and farmers will have to learn to function as parts of networks.
So what can farmers do about it? There are three, or perhaps four,
possibilities.
First, farmers can demand that governments regulate the industry to
protect their autonomy and their interests. This is a possible solution,
though limited by the fact that the farm voice is currently fragmented and
that farmers make up only a couple of percent of the whole electorate and
population. The days when agriculture could demand special treatment
compared to other industries are perhaps past.
Second, farmers can band together to support each other and bargain
with processors and middlemen. Bargaining associations play important
5
roles in a number of European countries, and in some cases, in the US.
Third, farmers can acquire ownership and control in the processing
and handling industries. By deriving income from these activities, and by
exerting control over policy, they can prevent exploitation and keep them-
selves in business. This option means that farmers can preserve their auton-
omy by working in a group and giving some of it up. This third option is
the reason for the popularity of New Generation Co-operatives in the mid-
6
western United States, and perhaps soon in Canada, too.
There is a reason why we have seen new kinds of co-ops emerging and
being talked about. The old co-ops, the ones we’re most familiar with in
Saskatchewan agriculture, were designed to suit the old economy. They
dealt in commodities. They dealt in spot markets. They maintained wide-
spread, multipurpose assets and facilities. They concentrated on price more
than on quality. Most of all, they were concentrated in, even limited to,
those parts of the value chain that were close to farmers: farm supply and
first-stage commodity handling.
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 11
• FAIRBAIRN
New co-ops will be more specialized and more interlinked up and
down the value chain. They will address specific consumer markets. They
will stress quality, niches, and special characteristics of crops and animals.
They will be based on tight, mutually beneficial contractual relationships
with members. They will invest not only in physical facilities, but in intel-
lectual capital. In short, the transition from old-farm co-ops to new ones
7
will mirror the transformation of agriculture and of farms.
That’s three options: regulation, bargaining, new kinds of co-ops.
The fourth option is for farmers to simply go with the flow and allow the
trends in agriculture to continue. That direction leads to the US chicken
industry, which is not in all ways undesirable. It requires the least invest-
ment and the least common effort by farmers.
The world’s population is growing, and surely, as world incomes rise
and become more equitable, the demand for food will increase. That is in-
deed something to think about. However, there are also contrary trends:
as countries develop, one of the first things they learn how to do is develop
their own agriculture. We have been talking for two generations about
feeding a hungry world, and so far what has happened is that some of the
countries we thought we would be feeding are feeding themselves. It seems
that shipping commodities and generic foodstuffs around the world will
not be the salvation of Prairie agriculture, even with rising world food con-
sumption.
The New Farmer
will have
T HE NEW FARMER, LIKE THE NEW ECONOMY,
to be more knowledgeable and information-savvy, more net-
worked and interlinked than before, and certainly more vertically co-ordi-
nated along the value chain. These characteristics run counter to some
well-entrenched attitudes about what farming is.
12 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
Michael Boehlje has commented:
Farmers have generally been eager to try new hybrids, new
chemicals, new tillage practices, new feeding regimes and new
equipment, but new ways of doing business have met with
more resistance, possibly because they change relationships
and frequently substitute interdependence for independence
8
in the decision-making process.
As in all other human affairs, some will be early adopters of the new
thinking, and others will be late. Following is another comment from a
conference participant, this one from Bob Church of the University of
Calgary, who is also a ranch owner.
You have to ask, “What business are you in?” Farmers facilitate
the conversion of water, sunlight, and soil into marketable bio-
mass. Farming is “sustainable biomass production.” Producers
have to look imaginatively at the “uses of biomass”—what biomass
can be stewarded to produce, and what has value or is desired by
someone. You have to produce what sells, instead of selling what
9
you produce.
That, in a nutshell, is the new agriculture and the producer’s role.
A farmer, in this view, is a manager of biomass resources: of soil, water,
land, and of the plants and animals upon it. The farmer is an entrepreneur
who finds market niches she or he can fill, using these biomass inputs. Farm-
ing begins with marketing, instead of ending with it. Markets might not
involve normal food products: it might be entertainment, pharmaceuticals,
construction materials, or tourism. What one farmer does may not be the
same as what her or his neighbour does: they may often be in totally unre-
lated value chains.
Such a view implies farmers who have extensive knowledge and entre-
preneurial skills. It also implies the fragmentation of the farm community
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 13
• FAIRBAIRN
into many, fundamentally different kinds of farm units. Products and mar-
kets will not be what ties farmers together. Perhaps only the rural setting,
and the common relationship to that land or biomass, is what will give
farmers common interests.
The more science and entrepreneurship we see in agriculture, the more
diverse and different farmers will become. Farming will be less tied toge-
ther by science and markets. Lifestyles, values, and people’s rural identities
will become what defines agricultural communities. Some people have
talked about putting the “culture” back into “agriculture.” That’s part of
what they mean.
General agricultural organizations, which are not commodity-centred,
can play an important role.
Farmers need to talk and think about the future of their industry. More
than new techniques, what producers today need most is a new perspective
on their livelihoods, a different outlook on agriculture, and a new frame-
work for thinking about what it is they do. The new economy and the new
agriculture are redefining what it means to be a farmer. The question is
whether producers can get ahead of this trend and redefine themselves
before the costs of adjustment are too great.
One important issue is whether farmers can or want to do all this as
separate individuals and households, or whether they might not be better
able to tackle the new challenges in groups. While some farmers will be
early adopters and individual entrepreneurs, most will probably do better
if they work together. There is room for all kinds of networks and associa-
tions: commodity groups, general-purpose farm organizations, bargaining
associations, specialized co-operatives, and much more.
Above all else, the farmer in the new agriculture will be a networked
farmer, interdependent and entrepreneurial, with a high capacity to find
and evaluate information, and a high capacity to maintain mutually bene-
ficial relationships with other farmers and with associations, co-ops, and
companies. The time for producers to start building the kind of networks
they want—is now.
14 CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CO-OPERATIVES
Endnotes
1. See, especially, Murray Fulton and Kim Sanderson, “Co-operatives and
Farmers in the New Agriculture,” report prepared for the Co-operatives
Secretariat, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, March 2002.
2. David C. Jones, Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry
Belt (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1987).
3. On vertical co-ordination, see Jill E. Hobbs and Linda M. Young, Verti-
cal Linkages in Agri-Food Supply Chains in Canada and the United States
(Ottawa: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2001).
4. See Mona Holmlund and Murray Fulton, Networking for Success: Strate-
gic Alliances in the New Agriculture (Saskatoon: Centre for the Study of
Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan, 1999).
5. G. Hendrikse and J. Bijman, “On the Emergence of New Growers’
Associations: Self-Selection versus Countervailing Power,” European
Review of Agricultural Economics, Special Issue on Contracting in
Agriculture, forthcoming.
6. A. Harris, B. Stefanson, and M. Fulton, “New Generation Cooperatives
and Cooperative Theory,” Journal of Cooperatives 11 (1996): 15–28.
7. A point well made by Mike Cook at “Building the New Saskatchewan:
A Conference for the Development of New Generation Co-operatives,”
Saskatoon, 26–27 January 2000; see also Fulton and Sanderson.
8. M. Boehlje, “Industrialization of Agriculture: What Are the Implica-
tions?” Choices, 4th Quarter (1996): 30–33.
9. Based on Church’s presentation to “Building the New Saskatchewan: A
Conference for the Development of New Generation Co-operatives,”
Saskatoon, 26–27 January 2000.
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 15
THE ROLE OF FARMERS IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY •
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 17
