Land O'Lakes, Inc. is an American member-owned agricultural cooperative based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Arden Hills, Minnesota, United States, focusing on the dairy industry. The cooperative has 1,959 direct producer-members, 751 member-cooperatives, and about 9,000 employees who process and distribute products for about 300,000 agricultural producers, handling 12 billion pounds of milk annually. It is ranked third on the National Cooperative Bank Co-op 100 list of mutuals and cooperatives. The co-op is one of the largest producers of butter and cheese in the United States through its dairy foods business; serves producers, animal owners and their families through more than 4,700 local cooperatives, independent dealers and other large retailers through its Purina Animal Nutrition business; and delivers seed, crop protection products, agricultural services and agronomic insights to 1,300 locally owned and operated cooperative and independent agricultural retailers and their grower customers through its WinField United business.
Processing plant in Kiel, Wisconsin
The recursive image long shown on the Land O'Lakes butter packaging (an indigenous woman, here in a 1970 ad) is an example of the Droste effect
An agricultural cooperative, also known as a farmers' co-op, is a producer cooperative in which farmers pool their resources in certain areas of activities.
Agricultural cooperatives in Guinea
Headquarters of Hokuren Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives in Sapporo, Japan
A smallholder coffee farmer in Colombia contributing her coffee to an agricultural cooperative. Cooperatives give small farmers an opportunity to be more competitive in markets, especially commodity crops like coffee and cocoa where many of the purchasers are large businesses who can manipulate markets.
Sugarcane weighing at a cooperative sugar mill in Maharashtra, India
