Business
Organic Valley
Also known as: CROPP Cooperative, Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer Pools
The largest farmer-owned organic cooperative in the United States. Founded 1988 by seven Wisconsin farmers in the Driftless region as the Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool (CROPP); rebranded as Organic Valley in 1990. Today a $1.2B+ business with 1,800+ member farms across 34 states and 4 Canadian provinces, producing organic milk, butter, cheese, eggs, produce, and meat under the Organic Valley brand. The cooperative remains farmer-owned: every member is also a part-owner, with one farmer/one vote governance regardless of farm size. The single most important substrate-builder in the American organic-agriculture economy and the existence proof that cooperative regenerative ag works at national scale.
What's happening now
from their newsletter
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Cultural
In 1988, seven family farmers in the Coulee Region of southwestern [[viroqua|Wisconsin]] founded a small cooperative to pool their organic vegetable production for wholesale markets. They called it the Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool — CROPP. The early years were hand-to-mouth: a single milk-truck route, a small office in La Farge, organic certification a niche concern most consumers didn’t yet care about. Through the 1990s and 2000s the cooperative grew with the organic dairy market — adding member farms across the upper Midwest, then nationally, then into Canada — without abandoning the founding cooperative structure.
What makes Organic Valley distinctive among American food businesses is the governance: the cooperative is owned and democratically controlled by its member farmers, not by outside investors. Every member is a part-owner. Every member gets one vote on cooperative decisions, regardless of farm size. Decisions about pricing, sourcing, brand strategy, and capital investment are made by farmer-elected boards. When the cooperative makes profit, that profit returns to the member farms as patronage payments rather than to shareholders.
The model has been studied as a case in cooperative economics for decades and remains the largest functioning example of farmer cooperative ownership in American food. The headquarters in La Farge — a [[viroqua|Wisconsin]] town of <800 people — is now the largest employer in Vernon County and the operational center for a national supply chain that runs through small towns most American consumers will never visit.
Practical
Organic Valley products are sold nationally in conventional and natural-food grocery stores, restaurants, and online. Buying Organic Valley directly supports the cooperative’s farmer-owned model — patronage flows back to member farms in a way that doesn’t happen for products sold by conventional food corporations. The cooperative’s transparency is unusually high: the website lists member farms, regional pools, and certification details, and the company publishes farmer-pricing data that would be proprietary at most food businesses.
Member farms range from <50-cow grass-based dairy operations in Wisconsin [[driftless-area|Driftless]] coulees to larger pasture-based dairies in [[berkeley|California]] and Vermont. The cooperative’s pasture rule (>30% dry matter from grazed pasture during the grazing season) exceeds the USDA Organic minimum and is the cooperative’s signature animal-welfare and grass-based-management commitment.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Shares approach with: [[equal-exchange]] · [[stone-barns-center]]
- Counterpart to: [[industrial-agriculture]]
- Member of: [[business]]
- Contained by: [[driftless-area]]
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Practical
contains
- Driftless Area headquartered in La Farge, WI; the largest farmer-owned organic dairy cooperative in the U.S.
shares approach with
- Jasper Hill Farm two dairy-side operations restoring farm-economics through aligned channels — Organic Valley at the cooperative scale, Jasper Hill at the artisan-cheese scale
- Lundberg Family Farms two large-scale family/farmer-owned organic operations that have held to mission across decades and consolidation pressure
- Maple Hill Creamery two Northeast/Midwest organic dairy operations; Organic Valley the larger farmer-cooperative-and-grain-feed-permitted operation, Maple Hill the smaller 100%-grass-fed operation
- Siena Farms kindred operations protecting working farmland at the scale that sustains a regional food system
- Straus Family Creamery two organic-dairy operations holding mission across decades; Organic Valley the multi-state cooperative, Straus the single-family-anchored creamery and partner-farm network
- Vital Farms two large family-farm-network operations holding the line on welfare and pasture-based production at national grocery scale — Organic Valley on dairy, Vital Farms on eggs
7 inbound links · 5 outbound