Country Natural Beef started with 14 ranching families marketing 200 head of natural beef cattle in 1987. In recent years, the cooperative has nearly 100 member ranches in multiple states that raise more than 100,000 brood cows, manage more than 6 million acres of land and sell almost $50 million of products. [...more]

Begun in 2005 by Mike and Deb Hansen in central Wisconsin, Good Earth Farms includes five operations that sell nearly all of their certified organic meat through the internet. [...more]

In the mid 1980s, a pair of wheat producers, Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming, became convinced that the conventional dryland wheat farming they were practicing was not sustainable in the Palouse region of eastern Washington. [...more]

In 1988, a small group of organic vegetable growers in Wisconsin formed a cooperative to provide stable and fair prices to its members. It evolved into Organic Valley, the largest organic, farmer-owned cooperative in North America. [...more]

Co-op Partners Warehouse was established in 1999 by the Wedge Natural Foods Co-op in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This certified organic wholesale distribution warehouse serves retail stores, food service businesses and buying clubs throughout the Upper Midwest. [...more]

Idaho’s Bounty was founded in 2007 as a cooperative with both customer and producer members. It provides logistical support for a direct-to-consumer, Internet-based food buying club. [...more]

The national Agriculture of the Middle initiative has produced three sets of curricular resources on value-based food supply chains for university-level business and economics courses. [...more]

The Driftless Region Food and Farm Project is a coalition of farmers, consumers, institutions, agencies and organizations. Together, they aspire to meet the growing demand for local food by scaling up the production, aggregation, processing, distribution and marketing of food in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. [...more]

Michael Rozyne, one of the creators of the international fair trade company Equal Exchange, founded an organization called Red Tomato in 1996. The goals for Red Tomato were to develop a dual purpose non-profit to market sustainably grown fruits and vegetables in the Northeast, and to provide consulting services for regional food system development nationwide. This research brief focuses on the first goal. [...more]

In 1986, 14 Oregon ranchers formed a cooperative—Country Natural Beef—to escape the roller-coaster cycles of the commodity cattle market and achieve predictable, relatively stable, premium prices. For its rancher members, simply changing their mindset from producing for a commodity market to producing for a final consumer was a major challenge that paid off. [...more]