Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
The landscape of agriculture is transforming and cooperatives are at the heart of ensuring a sustainable and resilient future for food and fuel systems around the globe. But how do these cooperatives empower farmers, strengthen communities and drive innovation in the supply chain? Our guest today brings a wealth of expertise and perspective to help us explore these critical questions. Get ready for an insightful and thought-provoking conversation. Let’s dive in. Hello and welcome to the show. Welcome to the Whole Grain Podcast.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
My name is Jim Lenz, your host and producer of the show and the director of global education and training at GEAPS. We’re the mission of the Grain Elevator and Processing Society to champion, connect and serve the global grain industry and our members At GEAPS. We work to be the global community and thought leader for the grain industry, which feeds and fuels the world. Thanks for joining us today and for being part of the network of thousands of grain handling and grain processing professionals across the globe taking strategic steps to grow professionally. The Whole Grain Show will give you the competitive advantage to win at work so you can make more of an impact. Thank you for continuing to share the news of the Whole Grain Podcast as an easy to access and easy to share resource for learning on the go. Your influence has helped support listeners and grain professionals like you from 86 countries in just a couple years of production. You can continue to share the Whole Grain episode with your colleagues.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Whole Grain is easy to access. We offer two easy ways to connect with the show. You can do that by going to the Jeeps website at jeepscom, slash whole grain. You can also find us in your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Youtube Music, Pandora and wherever else you find your podcasts. Just do a search for Whole Grain, hit subscribe and you’ll be all set to get the latest episodes as soon as they’re released. Plus, you can catch up on all past episodes. You now have access to the fan mail link or you can send me a message or james@geaps. That’s , we may even feature your comments on the show.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Our special guest in today’s episode is Dr Keri Jacobs. Dr. Jacobs is an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Missouri. Her expertise and passion for empowering cooperatives make her the perfect guest to discuss the critical role of cooperatives in global food and fuel systems. In today’s episode, we’ll explore the historical significance and modern-day importance of agricultural cooperatives, how cooperatives empower farmers and communities. We’ll also examine the challenges and opportunities for cooperatives in today’s evolving landscape. Get ready for an engaging and insightful conversation that highlights the power of collective action in agriculture. Let’s dive into the conversation.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
All right, we have Dr. Carrie L Jacobs. She is Associate Professor of Agriculture and Applied Economics at the University of Missouri and holds the Partridge Chair in Cooperative Leadership. In 2021, she was named the Executive Director of the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership. In her outreach role, Jacob’s partners with cooperatives and their associations to create and deliver director and talent development programs in cooperative governance and finance, and to engage with cooperative boards and leadership in strategic planning and through collaboration with industry and key stakeholders, she pursues research that seeks to inform and elevate producers’ opportunities through collective action within their supply chains. Jacobs was raised on her family’s hog and row crop farm in eastern Iowa. She earned her BA in economics from Cole College and her PhD in agriculture economics from North Carolina State University. That’s why we are so excited to bring Dr. Keri Jacobs here to the show. Thank you very much, carrie, for joining us.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Thanks, Jim, I appreciate you having me.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Well, it is great to have you because you bring in a fresh new perspective, a topic that we have not done today. It’s about cooperatives. We’re going to dig in that deeply. But to start the show with a bit of positive spirit, I sometimes ask guests in the Whole Grain show if they have a mantra or success quote that they live by professionally, sometimes personally as well.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question, and so I’ll share something. I don’t know. I can see how it applies to my personal life at times as well, or maybe in families, and I’m stealing this, by the way, I have a gentleman I work closely with. His name is Richard Fagerlund.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
We have a podcast together and he’s really you know, he’s a, he’s a talent leadership guy, he’s a strategy guy, and increasingly in the work that we’re doing, I realized how much this resonates. And it’s this he says culture is the sum of what you permit and what you promote. And so in board work that I do and that we do, you know, one of the things we’re really focused on is the culture boards of directors of agricultural cooperatives, but others create inside the boardroom, and so for me, that really resonates as as just an important thing to keep in mind is that when you’re building culture and we all understand the one that dovetails with this, jim, is something that another friend of mine says, and it’s you know she turned me on to, but it is that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and so there’s a lot running around the culture realm or in the culture realm that I think is so important to keep in mind in the work that I do anyway.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Thank you very much for sharing that. So, carrie, many of the listeners today have heard of cooperatives. Not all grain facilities are cooperatives, but many listeners are associated with cooperatives in one form or another. Maybe a cooperative is their employer or again, they’re associated with that in the grain industry in one way or another. To provide a big understanding, what is a cooperative? Why are they important? What’s the history of them? I think that’d be a good way to start the show today.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Sure, so, at the very highest level, a cooperative is an organization that is member owned, member controlled and member benefiting.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
So those three dimensions and you can substitute the word user owned or member owned, but specific in this model has has been applied in the? U and worldwide to all sorts of industries, from the home healthcare to house cleaning, to tutoring, to rideshare, to agriculture, financial, like credit unions. It’s a model that has a lot of flexibility and I think today we’re going to speak primarily about agriculture and so, therefore, agricultural cooperatives and that’s really where my focus is and specialty is how that applies to agriculture is what that means is these cooperatives are owned by the members, the farmers that use them, so there’s an ownership piece there as an equity, and we can talk more about that. It means they’re capitalized by them, it means they’re controlled by farmers, so farmers serve in the boardroom, farmers are directors, they’re elected from the membership of farmers who are members. However, membership is defined and the purpose of to agricultural cooperatives, what that means is control and ownership and the purpose. The organization is aligned around its farmer members, farmers and ranchers.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
That’s a great introduction to this. Thank you for sharing, Carrie. Now you have a very special, unique background. You certainly started in the agriculture area. Kind of tell us a little bit about your history and kind of the work you’re doing today.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Sure, you said this in the introduction. I grew up on a family farm in eastern Iowa and my family did business with the co-op in that part of the state. It was Swiss Valley for a while and now it’s Innovative Ag Services. So as a farm kid I thought I knew what a cooperative was.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
I had kind of a unique path to academia, kind of went and got my graduate degree late and my first job out of grad school was at Iowa State University. Between my undergrad and graduate work I was not in the ag field and it was. I guess you can take the kid off the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the kid. And I really wanted to get back to agriculture and that’s why I chose to do my doctorate work, an emphasis in agricultural economics. And when I started Iowa State grad school it was in a research and teaching role related to agribusiness and so I was getting to have that connection to agriculture but really moving into a role when I was at Iowa State and now at the University of Missouri where my job is really focused, I have an outreach and extension role related to agricultural cooperatives specifically and the reason I love that is it feels like every day in my job.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
I get to work with farmers, usually as directors of agricultural cooperatives, but it feels like I’m working with my parents or my grandparents. It’s just a very comfortable thing to do. So it’s how you know. I think my eight-year-old self would have thought maybe I would have been a farmer. That’s what I wanted to be, but that wasn’t in the cards for me. But what I get to do is I get to be in a role where I feel like I can support farmers through their collective action through agricultural cooperatives. It resonates with my upbringing and my value system and it’s a big honor to be able to do this.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
And you’re driving big impact by the work you’re doing and the folks that you associate with. That’s terrific. I hope so. I hope so. Now, how do cooperatives empower farmers and enhance their collective bargaining power?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
That’s a great question and it’s one that is relevant today, but it’s been relevant for a hundred years. So, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to go back a little bit of a history lesson, because I find this fascinating. It’s part of what, when I do outreach to cooperative employees, I want them to understand the foundations of the agricultural cooperatives here in the US and, I think, to really understand why we have them and the value they provide. You really got to go back to the late 1800s. So this was our second industrial revolution. It was about 1870 to 1914, that period. Some of the hallmarks of that period were we were able to finally manufacture machine tools.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
We had this railroad movement. The railroads were largely built in the US, at least the coast to coast commerce, by 1910. And it was when we started to see this business trust activity. And so business trusts are important to understand, because when you had this industrial revolution, you then had a concentration of business activity and control and domination of that business activity in the hands of very few, and they tended to be in the commerce centers. Business activity in the hands of very few and they tended to be in the commerce centers. And so we were in a period this late 1800s, early 1900s, the situation and I’ll get to ag co-ops the situation that rural areas found themselves in is one where a lot of the commerce was dominated by and was thought about for the cities, and so think of big trusts like Standard Oil and US Steel, international Harvester in 1902, even Northern Securities Company controlled most of the railroads in the US, and so the problem that presented. We saw that problem and it was eventually overcome through the Rural Electrification Act. But the problem we saw is that investor-owned organizations were making decisions that were good for the investors and they worked well for cities, but they didn’t work well for rural areas.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
And specifically thinking about farmers, farmers were in a situation where imagine hauling your cart of corn that you harvested to the elevator or the railroad the nearest railroad to be able to access markets and get it out of the area to where it needed to be, the nearest railroad to be able to access markets and get it out of the area to where it needed to be and you show up with an open wagon pulled by a two horse, and it’s an open. You know it’s not a cab, you’re not sitting in and it’s it’s winter and you’ve come to the railroad to sell your grain, and maybe the going price for a bushel of corn is 25 cents, and the railroad operator, who has an agreement with the, with the monopoly or with whoever owns the railroad, says well, I’ll give you 20 cents. And as a farmer, what are you going to do? You don’t really have any power. You either sell it for the price they’re offering or you take it back to your farm where you don’t have the use for it.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
And so farmers, that played out over and over and over, whether it was getting access to supplies they needed on the farm or was getting their product off the farm they realized that they had no power. They had no say in DC, they had no market power and really no control over their own destiny because of this burgeoning, this big difference between the market power of the collective business activity and the individual market power of producers. And so that’s where we begin to see, you know, organizations that this group, listening, might recognize as, like the grains, used to be called the patrons of husbandry. This was a social group of farmers started in 1967 to figure out how they were going to promote the social and economic needs of farmers in rural area. And then you know even central Iowa, for example. There I think the oh it’s called, it’s the Marcus elevator. It’s now it’s now, I believe, an ag state location. Ag state was formed with a merger of Alceco and first cooperative association. Marcus Iowa was one of the oldest operating grain elevators in the country and still has that. It’s still operating on a cooperative basis.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
So farmers all over were trying to figure out how are we going to do this collectively to have our own market power?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
And so we see that happening in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that story rolling out over and over.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
And I think it’s really interesting that by 1910, kind of the end of the Industrial Revolution we only had about 3,000 agricultural cooperatives across the country then and by 1930, we had 12,000. So it was a model that farmers realized that if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to have a say in our market, in the markets, we’ve got to figure out a way to do this collectively, because individually we don’t have the market power to do that. So skipped around a little bit. But there’s a really important history there and I think that helps us translate to today, to your question about collective bargaining power and the history. The history is exactly that Our agricultural cooperatives were formed because they needed the ability to have more market power and more say in their markets, and that’s not to say dominant market power. But they needed a level footing on which to trade, on which to agree on terms of trade and make sure that they were getting fair prices, both what they’re paying for inputs and for their outputs. And I think that still exists today.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Yeah, I was just about to bring that. That’s a great historical perspective that you started with and, as you said, still effective today. I was going to ask how are agricultural cooperatives crucial? I believe markets are. In most cases, markets work.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
There’s a wisdom and a power for markets to adjust, and I believe in markets. I also believe that the healthiest supply chains have a diversity of ownership models, and so I’m someone who’s dedicating my professional career and professional life to agricultural cooperatives. That’s not to vilify privately owned, it’s not to vilify publicly traded. I think our best supply chains have diversity of ownership in them, and co-ops has a place, and cooperatives have a place for that as well.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
The reason I think cooperatives are crucial to this modern, to our modern supply chain is because, when you look at the investments that are needed, the capital structure that’s needed, these cooperatives are able to make investments on behalf of producers. I mean, the cooperatives are owned by the producers and it makes sure that there’s an alignment of interest there that you don’t necessarily have when you have a publicly traded or a closely privately held maybe family organization, a supply chain. Rightly so. Their interests are different than a farmer’s interest might be, and so, for me, I think having farmer’s interests represented by an organization that’s directed by them, owned by them and who, fundamentally, will funnel benefits back to them, make sure that we have that representation of interest and alignment of interest all the way through the supply chain.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Representing the producers, representing the farmers, yeah, so important. Now let’s turn to some examples of what you believe is and how cooperatives help rural and local communities today.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Yeah, there’s a number of examples and some of these are very easy to see, and maybe maybe it’s because I spent a lot of time looking at this and in this world but I think the one that’s easiest to see is these agricultural cooperatives. It’s no surprise to anyone that they operate assets probably, if I could say, if I’ll be honest with this, perhaps even a redundancy of assets in local communities and the reason they do that is they make decisions about assets not necessarily with a profit maximization mindset. Now, that is controversial to say that, but here’s what I mean by that as an economist profit maximization is a very clear, very defined area where you’re maximizing the firm’s profits. Marginal cost equals marginal revenue. Cooperatives have to be profitable. They do, but I see over and over that they make decisions that perhaps a publicly traded company would not make. A privately held family corporation would not make this decision, because there’s a different way to profitability for them. But agricultural cooperatives had that mindset. Yeah, we have to be profitable because we need to be able to grow and invest, but we also have to make sure we’re doing what the farmer needs. And so we have, for example, redundancy of assets. I’ll use that term and perhaps there’ll be pushback on that, but it’s why we have grain elevators still every 10 miles or 12 miles In some cases. We have quite a network. That alone has a huge benefit. It’s employment in the local communities, it’s driving tax dollars back to the local communities with agricultural cooperatives. The profits that are earned oftentimes are reinvested back in these local communities, whether through philanthropic giving Many of the agricultural cooperatives have foundations or annual giving to fire departments and police departments and schools and sports programs. So it’s important that the profits, that the revenue, is generated in local communities and it stays in those local communities. So that’s one way in which there’s really a benefit to agricultural cooperatives that you don’t necessarily see play out in parallel for other organizational types Also and I think this is an underappreciated one, one we don’t think about enough but agricultural cooperatives are governed by and controlled by their farmers and there’s a real opportunity here for leadership, building and fostering leadership in local communities through these boards and through these cooperative governance.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
And so you know if you’re a beginning or young farmer listening and I won’t define young because that age is wide. Listening and I won’t define young because that age is wide but there is a real opportunity to have a leadership role in an agricultural cooperative, serving on the board of directors or maybe it’s a delegate body, and I think that benefits our communities when we have that kind of leadership coming directly from our rural communities. So there’s a number of ways and I probably haven’t listed them all and I hope I haven’t forgotten the biggest ones, but that this idea of rural communities are better off with cooperatives in them. There’s just a lot of benefit there.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Great clarity in your message. Thank you for expressing that you spend a lot of time with cooperatives, oftentimes with the board of cooperatives, right and so you have a real strong beat on what’s going on, successes and challenges they have. And I don’t know if you’re willing, but would you be able, just broadly speaking, what do you believe are the current challenges faced by agricultural cooperatives in today’s economic and agricultural landscape?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
agricultural cooperatives in today’s economic and agricultural landscape. Sure, and I’ll speak, you’re right, my lens. Increasingly, I don’t often get involved In fact I try very hard not to and it’s easy because I don’t have the expertise but get involved in the operational side. So I really do try and stay on the governance and strategy side of agricultural cooperatives. And cooperatives are agribusinesses and no different than any other agribusiness, except in their structure. And so, in addition to all the challenges that agribusiness today faces and the decisions and how fast change is happening, they face that there are certainly size and scale realities that challenge agricultural cooperatives differently than non-cooperatives and what I mean by that is publicly traded companies or privately held differently than a cooperative. In order to invest in today’s infrastructure, whether it be AI, whether it be technology, whether it be employees or rising costs of insurance, other companies, non-cooperatives can go out and they can get access to capital investor capital, right they can raise money, they can bring in into their ownership structure investment capital. Cooperatives are not able to do that in most cases. Now there’s state by state statutes that do blend, like this hybrid investor model, with the cooperative model. It’s constrained, though, there’s limitations on that, and so when you think about the incredible changes that are happening, the investments that are needed, the cost of regulation that are happening, the investments that are needed, the cost of regulation, the cost of doing business and just the cost of reinvesting in the business. Cooperatives are challenged uniquely because their capital has to come from their members, and I’ll pause there. It’s easy to say, but if you really think about it, if you think about the balance sheet of an agricultural cooperative and you’re looking at that equity section, how are we going to grow the equity? We can only really grow the equity two ways. We can’t invite investor capital in. We can only grow it if we have profitability to put on the. You know profitability to maintain in the business. But we know that our members expect some of that profitability to be shared with them. It’s part of the cooperative model the sharing of profits through patronage. Or we can go to our members and ask for a special capital raise or debt Debt’s always on there.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
But there is this sense that co-ops may move slower and are more challenged when it comes to accessing capital because it has to come from within. And then you layer that on top of. Chs is the largest agricultural cooperative in the country. You layer that on top of CHS is the largest agricultural cooperative in the country, I think recently revenue it’s fluctuating anywhere from like 42 to 47 billion, depending on where commodity prices are. That’s the largest ag co-op in the country and they have a national. They have a worldwide footprint. Adm their competitor is more than twice their size in annual revenue. Coke Industries is 125 billion in annual revenue. So when you think about even the largest agricultural cooperative is dwarfed in size by many of its main competitors in its marketplace. That highlights another challenge for co-ops, just when you layer that on top of how they’re able, you know their constraints in investing sometimes and access to capital. So it’s this capital intensivity that that creates a lot of challenges and and there are challenges that are unique to cooperatives.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
I would also add from you know these are member organizations. So if I could, the other thing I would pivot to is you know co-ops are member organizations and the reality is they do make decisions differently and because of that, because they’re member organizations, I think they’re held to a different standard by farmers and ranchers than non-cooperatives. And it’s interesting to hear farmers and ranchers talk about those who have a co-op in their marketplace and a non-cooperative, the expectations they have of the co-op versus the non-co-op, not in pricing, but just what they expect in terms of relationship and value proposition. So there is a challenge to today, to being a member organization and having that responsibility that a publicly traded company just doesn’t even need to worry about and their customers don’t ask them to worry about that. So there’s a lot baked into this model that is both. It’s a secret sauce, for sure, this alignment with producers, but it can be an Achilles heel as well.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Wow, great, great expression, great thoughts. Let’s turn to those are challenges. So let’s turn to opportunities for agricultural cooperatives. What are those opportunities for growth and innovation in the cooperative model? What are those opportunities for growth and innovation in the cooperative?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
model. Yeah, I’ll go back to what I said is that you know, the opportunities, I would say are the same as any other agribusiness and there are certainly a lot, I think, about what’s special and perhaps unique about that opportunity. So let’s take, for example, sustainability practices or climate smart practices, carbon markets, the ability to use data, so that opportunity exists for agricultural cooperatives and they’re trying to get their hands around that, just like their competitors are, as well as downstream trading partners. So when you think about a supply chain, let’s say, the farmers are the most upstream they’re not because there’s input suppliers ahead of them that are also co-ops in some case, because there’s input suppliers ahead of them that are also co-ops in some case.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
But all the way down that value chain data and what we get from data, the value that can be extracted from that I think there’s a huge opportunity here for producers and their co-ops to get their arms around that and make sure that the monetization of the value of data or the value of the practices the farmers are implementing, co-ops have an opportunity to make sure that that value stays either at the co-op or at the farm level and isn’t exported and extracted further down the supply chain and where others can capitalize and leverage that value.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
So I think there’s an important role for co-ops to play here. They’re closest to the farmer, they’re owned and controlled by a farmer board. They have a natural trust there or should I hope between the cooperative organization and the farmers, different than a non-cooperative would have all else equal, and so I think there’s a lot of opportunity there, just in how co-ops are positioned in terms of bringing and making sure value stays at the farm gate from, like I said, the conservation practices that are being put into place, sustainability practices, even data and AI, and how that’s going to drive decision-making on the farms.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
So you expressed your opportunities for growth and innovation in this cooperative model just now. Let’s now focus on leadership opportunities and talent development within cooperative landscape. Can you provide some details to what you see as opportunities in this space?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question, thanks. So when I talked about the challenges, I talked about the business challenges, capitalization challenges, and the other side is the member challenge and being a member organization, and I also said that that can be a secret sauce, a really great advantage that cooperatives have, and that’s what I would. So the flip side of the coin is it’s a real opportunity and I’ll share with something that I’ve been sharing more. I’ve been sharing this more because I think it’s particularly relevant now. When I was learning about agricultural cooperatives and cooperative governance in my role 2012 through 2015, when I was first starting to work with them, a director said something that has stuck with me and he said my grandparents built the co-op. My parents’ generation used the cooperative. My generation will kill it and what he was talking about, there is his generation, my generation out. There is his generation, my generation, making decisions differently and not understanding maybe not understanding the long game that a cooperative brings, the long perspective the cooperative brings, that his grandparents understood what happened when you didn’t have an agricultural cooperative in the market to be that disciplining feature in the marketplace, so to speak, and so, generations beyond the start of our agricultural cooperative, we’ve slowly kind of lost that understanding and my generation, I would say, is the same. This is a generalization, I understand, so there are cases when this is not true, but I think overwhelmingly. But what gives me a lot of hope is this generation.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
So, thinking about the millennials and Gen Z and I’m not an expert in either of those generations, but I’ve heard experts speak recently in what stands out to me and I see this with the students that I work with those generations are incredibly much more so, I think, than my generation community oriented. They have much better political awareness and want to be involved and I’m not talking just politics, I’m saying just like an awareness of the state of things and wanting to get involved. They are connected and and they value connections. And so I think, as an agribusiness, cooperatives have a huge foot to put forward and and a benefit to offer this generation who wants to make decisions that align with their own values. So we need, for example, labor is a challenge in all agribusinesses and historically agricultural cooperatives I would say probably relied on quote-unquote farm kids who understood agriculture to be employees, and increasingly we’re hiring employees who don’t come from agriculture, didn’t grow up on a farm maybe, are very far removed. But they’re coming to agriculture because in the millennial and Gen Z generation, they want to make a difference. They make decisions based on alignment of values. They want to be a part of something. They want to know that they’re making a difference, and so I think cooperatives have a lot to offer in terms of aligning with those generations, whether they be as members or they be as employees.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
So I see us kind of gaining some ground again in terms of the attractiveness of doing business with and also working for agricultural cooperatives. Is that value alignment and just how this generation is making decisions differently. I’ll be honest, my generation, the only thing I cared about coming out of school, was how much are you paying me? I took a job based on pay alone and I don’t see this generation doing that. I see them asking questions about what’s your culture, what’s your value? How do you, you know? Are you a certified B Corp? They care about things like that.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Wow, what a great overview about cooperatives and their role in our communities. They play such a big impact. What are some general closing statements you want to say before we conclude here today?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Yeah, you know this is going to sound corny, but I like to say this because I think it’s a good framing for what the cooperative model is. I say you know, we know cooperatives are an extension of their members farms, farmers and ranchers. But what I mean by that is it allows producers to benefit from the supply chains in which they are intricately involved. That money is not being exported out of communities, it’s not going to Wall Street, the proverbial Wall Street, and so you know, I think it’s really important that we recognize that. That’s the value of the model is it keeps those investments local. If we look back and put ourselves in the shoes of the founding farmers and ranchers more than 100 years ago we have 23% of our agricultural cooperatives are more than 100 years old we do realize how powerful and yet fragile this model can be. So success and failure, I believe, ultimately reflects the membership’s appetite, farmers’ and ranchers’ appetite for collective action, and I see that on the upswing today and I’m really encouraged by that.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Dr Kerry Jacobs. I don’t know if I could have had a person on here talk so eloquently and inform the audience so much about the role of cooperatives in agricultural communities, and so that’s why it’s so special. People may want to learn more about this and about you and about your organization and the people you work with. You mentioned earlier you have a podcast. Please mention that, how to find it, what it’s about, and any other resources so that we can direct those listeners to where you want them to go. Sure, yeah.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Thanks for that opportunity. So I’m on LinkedIn and the center that I run at the University of Missouri is the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership. Gicl is the acronym. It’s kind of a funny acronym. That’s also on LinkedIn. The podcast is accessible. We promote it on LinkedIn. It’s on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It is accessible on a website, buildbetterboardscom so that is the name of the podcast Build Better Boards and it’s co-hosted by me and my good friend Richard Fagerland of Peak Solutions. So appreciate that opportunity to mention those things. And we also have a website. It’s. If you search for Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership at the University of Missouri, you can find it.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Great, and people want some consulting services or want you to speak. Is that something you do?
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Yeah, we call it outreach at the university extension and outreach.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
All right.
Dr. Keri Jacobs:
Yeah, happy to.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
Use those resources you just shared to get ahold of you and your organization. Super Well, we will make sure that is in the show notes for each episode. Uh, and links are there, and it has been nothing but a delight. Thank you for spending time with the GEAPS Whole Grain podcast listeners thank you, joan, appreciate it that wraps up this episode of the whole grain podcast.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
A big thank Dr. Keri Jacobs for sharing her expertise on the role of cooperatives in strengthening the global food and supply chains. Her insights on cooperative governance, empowering farmers and driving innovation offer valuable perspectives for anyone in the grain industry. As we’ve heard today, cooperatives continue to be a powerful force in supporting farmers, enhancing food security and fostering sustainability. Stay informed and engaged with the evolving role of cooperatives is key. If you want to learn more, be sure to explore the work being done at the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership at the University of Missouri. We’ll provide details in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this episode valuable, share it with your colleagues, subscribe to the podcast and let us know your thoughts. Again, the fan mail is now available. You can also send me a message james@geaps. com. We may even feature your comments in the show. Whole Grain is easy to connect with. You can go to the GEAPS website at www. geaps. com/ whole grain. Find this also on your favorite podcast apps, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Youtube Music, overcast, pandora. Just do a search for Whole Grain, hit the subscribe button and you’ll get set on the latest episodes as soon as they’re released. Plus, you can catch up on all the past episodes.
Jim Lenz, GEAPS:
The Whole Grain Podcast is listeners tuning in from 86 countries and continues to grow in reach and influence. If you or your organization would like to sponsor an episode or be a featured guest, or if you’re interested in creating and placing an audio commercial for a future podcast episode, please reach out to me. Jim Lenz, director of global education and training at GEAPS. james@geaps. com. We’d love to connect with you. Until next time, keep learning, keep innovating and keep moving the industry forward. Have a great day and thanks for listening to whole grain.
