As a supporter of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, I hope that the expansion of worker cooperatives is as wide as the marketing cooperatives were in an earlier time among farmers. I would like to see market organizations spend some of their time searching for funding to add new farmers and especially encourage new cooperatives. Cooperatives might be especially useful within certain types of markets, like food security markets.

“Each person manages a specific part of the farm. Barnett is in charge of the harvest and what gets included in the CSA shares, as well as some aspects of crop production such as irrigation. DiLorenzo does the bookkeeping, office work, and creates daily and weekly plans to make sure production is on track. Harro oversees the greenhouse production and seeding, and Man takes care of the chickens, maintains the equipment and oversees the apprentices.The four worker-owners, who all live in Hadley, receive equal monthly stipends as pay and if there are any profits at the end of the year, they will get dividends. They declined to say how much their stipends are.”

Four young farmers start Stone Soup Farm Co-op, on front of worker-owned farm trend | GazetteNet.com.