We risk inadvertently squelching the very opportunities innovative producers have been fostering to move into a value-added category. It is important to realize up front that not every producer-owned venture has reached fruition or succeeded. In fact, we as producers have historically experienced limited success in owning businesses outside of the ones we manage daily. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline in order to avoid these pitfalls. There are a thousand ways to put a producer owned cooperative venture together wrong and only a handful the right way.
Fear is a great motivator.
The fear of being a highly invested participant in an industry that had lost market share for 20 consecutive years. The awareness that under the current marketing system, the economic signals were to buy the cheapest, poorest animal that walked the face of the earth and feed him until a feedlot bundled him with entire showlist and sold at one price. If the consumer paid General Motors the same price for Chevys as Cadillacs, they would stop manufacturing Cadillacs. The beef industry has too many Chevys because of our broken marketing system. We also feared that under an extremely segmented marketing system that independently, we lacked the ability to realize a competitive price.