How can cooperative society in agriculture form

Voluntary and tradable investments: the indivisible and redeemable part of the asset or endowment of a cooperative needs to be kept as small as possible. Members need to be able to choose what investments to make through the voluntary purchase of shares and they need to be allowed to trade the shares among themselves albeit upon the approval of their board.

Visionary leadership: external incentives, in the form of grants, subsidies, credit and investments can induce members' disenfranchisement and side-selling. Visionary leadership thus means to anticipate external incentives through pre-emptive and effective communication, in order to keep justifying, motivating and enforcing collective marketing. Anticipate socio-economic changes: once a cooperative satisfies the initial and most urgent social needs of members, it has to start pursuing more commercial objectives, such as collective marketing and value addition.

Cooperatives that are solely established and designed to pursue short-term needs struggle to mobilise collective marketing and add value over time.

Marketing leaders Incentives investment cooperatives managers development Subsidies Leadership life cycle enterprises Governance. Location: Uganda. Be sure you don't miss our latest updates. First name Last name E-mail address Subscribe follow us follow us follow us follow us follow us. The members of a farming cooperative work for benefits rather than profit. Namely, they want to benefit from services provided by other members of the same cooperative or a neighboring co-op.

Among other benefits are availability of products and materials at a reasonably low cost, as well as access to the larger markets where the members-producers can sell their products or services. As we have already seen, every member of an agricultural cooperative is eligible to elect and to be elected as one of the board directors.

The latter are representatives of the membership and have a responsibility to oversee the business. In addition, a CEO can be appointed by the board for a more effective management. All of the financial and legal issues related to the functioning of the cooperative are the responsibility of the board and the CEO. Whatever they decide on these issues, however, should be and usually is in the interests of members rather than aimed at profit maximization.

Agricultural cooperatives are guaranteed independence from both public and private sectors by law. In the United States, they are, in fact, exempt from antitrust laws. This is allowed because of the nature of cooperatives as organizations formed by the people for the people, with an open but limited membership. In other words, each co-op decides on who can or cannot become its member, never letting the outside influence, be it the government or a major corporation, to impact any decisions or goals.

A patronage is the share of the overall co-op profit paid to a member based on his or her activity and input for that year or any other specific period of time agreed upon by the members.

In other words, if all farmers participate equally, they will get an equal share of profit. However, if some have contributed more than others this year, they will get a larger patronage from the profit respectively.

To put it more simply, every member receives what he or she justly deserves. Patronage can accumulate in the form of a retained profit and be paid out in full to a member of a farming cooperative as equity.

In other words, an individual can be an active member for a certain period of time for example, 10 years , and, at the end of the period, get paid all the patronages accumulated in those 10 years. Cost of business transactions can be enormous for one small business, and, without cooperation and proper investment, very little is possible to achieve. Moreover, it can be intimidating to face major business organizations and compete with them in the big market on your own.

Big corporations might not be interested in individual small businesses, but large agricultural co-ops will definitely attract their attention. One for all and all for one. The flip side of the independence and democratic control is the equally distributed economic responsibilities of the co-op members. Since no investment can enter the cooperative by outsourcing, loss of profit impacts every member. Every individual patronage has to be reduced to compensate for the loss.

No one is left to deal with the loss of profit on their own. Perhaps for someone the idea of sharing economic responsibilities may seem as a daunting prospect, but it is a kind of risk that is worth taking, considering the benefits of cooperation. Your profit and well-being depend on how well the co-op is doing financially, which, in turn, depends on the level of your participation. It is a fair and transparent deal with predictable risks and countless benefits as a counterweight.

There are many ways how producer cooperatives can benefit from using Crop Monitoring. Our digital agro-platform integrates satellite imagery, vegetation indices, and weather data, to provide precision-driven agricultural solutions to farmers, traders, insurers, and advisors.

Precision allows for a more rational use of resources, time, and budget, leading to both higher crop productivity and increased profitability.

Agricultural producers have to manage their fields on a regular basis, relying on traditional scouting, conventional weather forecasts, and historical harvest data records. The reliability of these traditional methods has always been somewhat questionable. Therefore, Crop Monitoring offers farming coops updated ways of managing fields. Our scouting feature is based on satellite data and vegetation indices, allowing for an automated detection of problem areas, and minimizing the reaction time.

Thanks to a team account feature, field owners and assigned scouts stay connected while performing tasks. There is no need for using heavy equipment in the fields and plenty of time is saved in the process. Similarly, satellite imagery and vegetation indices make it possible to identify zones with higher and lower productivity within every field owned by a producer cooperative.

This gives farmers an opportunity to precisely determine the amount of seeds and fertilizers required for each zone based on its productivity. As a result, there is a considerable reduction in waste of the supplies and budget along with an increase in the total crop yield. One more way a farming coop can be sure to increase productivity of their fields, is to know the history of crop rotation for every field.

Fumbling through the records is an unrewarding as well as time-consuming task, and sometimes records get lost. Instead of wasting time on fumbling through the historical weather records, you can look at the charts and see the weather data as curves and bars for a particular field for the past 5 years. Data relevant to farming, such as. Additionally, on the same chart you will see the history of vegetation development for the field, and growth stages for particular crop types.

This will also allow members of coops to make reliable predictions as to the future yields of their fields. What is more, EOS has partnered up with aWhere to deliver farmers a reliable day weather forecast specifically related to particular fields covering the area of 9 by 9 km.

At the same time, current weather conditions for every individual field, such as air temperature, humidity, and cloudiness to name a few , are always conveniently on display. With this feature, agricultural coops will be able to create a fuller picture of the climate influence on the development of crops, take appropriate measures, and thus ensure better yields.

We offer cooperatives not one but two versions of Crop Monitoring, one for PC, and one for a mobile device. Actually, there is no contest going on between the two; they are complementary with each other. While the classic software version is perfect for a desk at an office or home, the mobile app is ideal for the scouts in the fields.

The team account feature will make sure that agricultural coops can keep track of the assigned scouts performing all of the tasks. For example, when a scout spots a clearly visible problem in the plant, he or she can snap a photo of it and upload it into the task menu. The customer will then see that photo in their shared account.

A team account also makes it possible for scouts to instantly share task reports created right in the app. Notifications about the most relevant updates new satellite images of your fields, vegetation index value change, among others will be sent to your e-mail. Perhaps the key benefit that farming cooperatives can get out of using EOS Crop Monitoring is the ease with which our platform is operated.

All the crucial data is gathered in one screen to save you time on collecting it manually from different sources. Individual farmers cannot consistently and reliably control the price they receive for their agricultural products or the price they pay for the inputs needed to produce those goods.

Thus, farmers often form cooperatives so that they can enhance their economic market power. Although there is no universally accepted definition, a cooperative can be defined as a legal business entity created under state law that is owned and operated for the purpose of benefiting those individuals who use its services.

A farmer cooperative can serve one or more functions including but not limited to providing loans to farmers, supplying information pertinent to agricultural production, selling inputs necessary to agricultural production, bargaining on behalf of its members, providing transportation services, and marketing agricultural products for its members. Read the full overview. Note : Recently added resources are posted at the top of the applicable sections.

Agricultural Adjustment Act , 7 U. Agricultural and Horticultural Cooperatives , 7 C.