Price Sustainability and Stability – An Achievable Goal? A Case Study of Organic Valley

Ye Su and Michael L. Cook

No 174399, 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Originating from a bold idea, Organic Valley currently reigns as the largest organic cooperative in North America. In 1988, from the non-glaciated, hilly part of Southwestern Wisconsin, seven progressive rural entrepreneurs started a courageous and visionary journey. The founders’ original objectives were to create an organization that would provide stable pay-prices to farmers and a sustainable family farm life style. For much of its more than 25 year history, Organic Valley has achieved this mission. However, in the past few years a more hostile economic environment emerged testing the resolve of George Siemon, CEO, and the Organic Valley leadership team. This case shares the evolution of a determined, idealistic group of mostly small rural producers leading a farmer owned firm from nothing but a dream to a complex international cooperative facing an important set of challenges. The current quandary: can the original mission of Organic Valley – to simultaneously deliver a stable producer pay-price and a sustainable life style to member suppliers – be maintained?

Keywords: Agribusiness; Community/Rural/Urban Development; Industrial Organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/174399/files/F ... y%20Case%20Study.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea14:174399

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.174399

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().