Those who are longtime readers here at Northview Diary will remember how long and hard we agonized over the hostile takeover of the cooperative we had long shipped our milk to by a financially struggling cooperative in New England.
We felt that we were being sold a bill of goods by the new owners, so we called for our contract and moved to another company. It doesn’t pay as well as Allied Federated Cooperatives did and we miss having good people working hard to negotiate favorable prices for us. However, this news story from the Burlington Free Press, made us awfully glad we changed. Seems Agri Mark, the folks who shut down our old cooperative are in big financial trouble and they are taking the cost of their problems right out of their members hides.
We may be experiencing record low milk prices right now, but at least nobody is dipping into our check book to pay for what looks an awful lot to me like bad management. A number of farmers are leaving as soon as their contracts are up.
We are glad we never joined.
Still it will be a terrible shame if Agri Mark goes under. They are one of the few independents left in the region. The demise of each small coop results in a worse monopoly on processing and marketing dairy products than already exists and this does not mean good prices for producers.
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2 comments:
Well said! I was really shocked at the amount of money the producers are paying to keep Agri Mark afloat.
They absorbed a lot of equity from Allied as well, as far as I can see. As soon as they took over they fired all the Allied office staff so, although there was supposed to be a state auditor watching the books, there certainly weren't any people friendly to Allied producers overseeing the merger process. We got a small check for our equity in the coop, but it was not detailed as to where it came from or how they arrived at the amount.
It scares and depresses me to see everything we predicted at all those meetings we went to come true. And so fast. We were thinking everything they got from Allied would prop them up for a while. Guess not. Just my opinion, but I really blame the problems AGriMark is having on bad management and lying to farmers...but that is just me. I tend to think of them as being better named AgriShark.
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