1401 New York Ave. Together, through their cooperatives, producers can market their products efficiently and meet consumer demand. Today's cooperatives integrate processing, canning, concentrating, freezing, packaging and storage of dairy, grain, fish, meat, poultry, fruit and vegetable products. The cooperative assists members in meeting market and government standards for their products.
Quantity purchasing realizes savings and assures quality for the cooperative members.
These cooperatives frequently affiliate with other cooperatives in the United States and overseas to own phosphate deposits, fertilizer plants, research laboratories, petroleum refineries and other similar facilities. Working in conjunction with other types of agricultural cooperatives, service cooperatives provide specialized programs such as feed mixing, pesticide applications, crop harvesting, artificial breeding and dairy herd improvements for their members. Rural electric and telephone cooperatives providing electricity and phone service to their members in the rural areas of the United States. Today there are approximately 4,100 agricultural cooperatives with 3.9 million memberships. This number has been slowly decreasing since the 1970s due in part to mergers, acquisitions, consolidations and dissolutions reflecting similar activity in many industries during a period of economic tightening.