When 320 dairy farmers came together in St. Paul, Minn., back in 1921 to form the Minnesota Cooperative Creameries Association, they likely didn’t have big dreams of becoming a cooperative powerhouse. They simply wanted to market their milk effectively.
But almost 100 years later, that small operation — rechristened as Land O’Lakes Inc. in 1949 — has grown to almost 4,000 member-owners (almost 2,000 of which are individual dairy producers or other dairy cooperatives).