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Forty One Farms, One Contract

DO Delia Okonkwo

How eleven farms that kept losing mill contracts turned into a 41 member cooperative with its own grading standard, its own food safety program and a school district route. This is the short version of ten years, written mostly so the next group of farmers trying to do this does not have to invent it again. Numbers are real and the mistakes are in here too.

01 Why we pooled

In 2015 four of us bid separately on the same masa mill contract and all four of us lost it to a broker in Kansas. That was the meeting that started this.

The number that made the case

A single 120 acre white corn grower could not fill a monthly tote order. Eleven of us could fill it four times over, with a month of slack for a bad dryer.

The mill wanted 40 totes a month, every month, November through May. My white corn acres in 2015 were 118 and they would have carried the order for six weeks. Six weeks is not a contract, it is a favour. We put eleven farms on a legal pad in the Arlington fire hall in January 2016 and the same acres added up to 1,340. That covered the order with room for one member to have a wet year and drop out entirely. The mill did not care that we were eleven farms as long as the grade was consistent and one person answered the phone. That last part is the whole thing. The buyer wants one invoice, one certificate and one person who will call back. Everything the cooperative does behind that phone number exists so the buyer never has to know there are 41 of us.

What we got wrong first

We tried to pay everyone the same price per bushel regardless of grade, to keep it friendly. It nearly ended the co-op in year two.

Our first pooling agreement paid a flat pool price on delivered bushels. It seemed fair and it kept the meetings short. Then in 2018 two members delivered corn at 16 percent with cracked kernels and heavy foreign material, we spent 9,000 dollars cleaning it, and every careful farmer in the pool paid for it out of their own settlement. We lost three members over it. They were right to leave. We rewrote the agreement in 2019 with a published grading standard, a sampling protocol at intake and discounts that are printed on the wall at Arlington so nobody can claim surprise. Settlements got slower by about a week and complaints dropped to almost nothing. Fairness is not everyone getting the same cheque, it is everyone knowing the rule before they plant.

The full intake and discount schedule we published in 2019, moisture, test weight, foreign material and damage, with the sampling protocol. Copy it if it helps.

🔗Our grading standardplattebendgrowers.coop↗
02 The school route

Eleven thousand pounds of sweet potatoes a year into two districts, and the two years of paperwork it took before a single case moved.

What the district actually needed

Not a story about local food. A bid, a case count, a delivery window, two million in liability cover and produce a sixteen year old can handle at 6am.

I went into the first meeting with photographs of the farm. The nutrition director was polite about them and then asked what my case yield was per 40 pounds and whether I could deliver on a fixed Tuesday between 5 and 7am to four buildings. I had no answer to either question. What we built after that: a 40 pound case at a uniform 8 to 14 ounce size, Harmonized GAP on the vegetable ground, two million dollar liability, a delivery van with a temperature log, and a bid submitted on their form in their format in March for the following October. We now move about 11,000 pounds of sweet potatoes and 3,000 pounds of winter squash a year at 68 cents a pound. It is a small line on our books and it is the most reliable one we have.

Crops that survive a school kitchen

Sweet potatoes, winter squash and collards. Everything soft, wet or fast is a loss waiting to happen on an institutional route.

We tried salad greens in year one. They went out on a Tuesday and half of them were unusable by Thursday because the walk-in in one building runs warm and nobody was going to rebuild a school kitchen for us. What works is anything that stores. Sweet potatoes hold to February after a proper cure. Winter squash holds to January in a dry room at 55 degrees. Collards go out weekly October through December and get cooked the same day, which suits them. The general rule we use now is that if a crop needs the kitchen to be careful, do not sell it to a kitchen that is feeding 900 children in 22 minutes.
03 What is next

A shared seed cleaning and cold storage hub at Arlington, currently in front of the members for a vote, and the reason freight to Kansas has to stop.

The freight problem

We paid 31,000 dollars in 2025 to truck our own beans to Kansas and back to be cleaned. That is a down payment on a cleaning line.

Dry beans have to be cleaned and picked before anybody will buy them for food. There is no food grade bean cleaner within 190 miles of Arlington, so every load goes to Kansas, waits its turn behind bigger customers, and comes home. In 2025 that was 31,400 dollars in freight and about six weeks of lost selling window when prices were good in December. A modest line, gravity table, destoner, colour sorter and a small cold room, prices at 640,000 dollars installed on the Arlington site. Spread across the members who actually grow beans it pays back in about seven years on freight alone, faster if we clean for non members, which we intend to do. The vote closes 12 September. I have made my case and I am not going to make it again in the parking lot.

The three site options, the amortisation table members keep asking about, and the road easement question that is still unresolved on option B.

🔗Hub proposal and budgetplattebendgrowers.coop↗