Dairy Cooperatives in the 21st Century — The First Decade

Dairy cooperatives continued to dominate the milk industry at the first-handler level during 2000-10. The number of dairy cooperatives shrunk by a net of 60 cooperatives during 2000-10. Of the 83 cooperatives that exited, 49 were sold or otherwise went out of operation, 30 had merged with another cooperative, and 4 no longer had producer milk. Twenty-three new cooperatives formed during 2000-10. There were eight more cooperatives with diversified operations, mostly due to existing cooperatives expanding the scope of their operations. There were few fluid processing cooperatives in both 2000 and 2010, even with a net decline of just one cooperative. Niche marketing cooperatives were the most dynamic among the manufacturing/processing cooperatives with many entries, exits, and operational changes. The number of bargaining-only cooperatives continued to far out-number the other operating types of dairy cooperatives, despite declining by a net 49 cooperatives during 2000-10. Small cooperatives (those handling less than 50 million pounds of milk per year) no longer represented a majority of the Nation’s dairy cooperatives. The North Atlantic region continued to have the most dairy cooperatives headquartered there, though a majority of these were small cooperatives.