The 10 Largest Agricultural Cooperatives in the United States

Agricultural cooperatives are the backbone of American farming. They allow individual farmers — who on their own have limited bargaining power — to collectively market grain, process dairy, press oil, and manage supply chains that would be impossible to operate independently. The US has approximately 1,700 agricultural cooperatives handling more than $250 billion in business annually, according to USDA data.

The largest of these are not small community organizations. They are Fortune 500-scale enterprises, some with more employees and greater revenue than many of the corporations their members compete against. What distinguishes them is ownership: farmers own and govern these businesses, and the economic returns flow back to the farm, not to external shareholders.

Here are the 10 largest agricultural cooperatives in the United States, ranked by approximate annual revenue.

1. CHS Inc. — ~$31 Billion in Revenue

CHS Inc., headquartered in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, is the largest agricultural cooperative in the United States and a consistent member of the Fortune 100. It operates across grain, energy, and food ingredients.

CHS is a "federated cooperative" — its members include individual farmers and other regional cooperatives. This two-tier structure means a local grain elevator might itself be a cooperative, and that cooperative is a member of CHS. This is a classic example of a secondary cooperative. CHS in turn handles export logistics, refining (it co-owns a major oil refinery in Laurel, Montana, through CHS Laurel, LLC), and global trading operations through its TEMCO and Multigrain joint ventures.

The cooperative markets grain from member farms through terminal elevators and export facilities. It also operates a retail network — Country Convenience stores and Cenex branded fuel stations — in rural communities across the northern plains.

CHS was formed through a series of mergers, with the most significant being the 2003 combination of Cenex and Harvest States Cooperatives. Total membership represents hundreds of thousands of American farmers, primarily in the grain belt states of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and neighboring states.

2. Land O'Lakes — ~$15 Billion in Revenue

Land O'Lakes, based in Arden Hills, Minnesota, is best known for its branded butter — one of the top-selling butter brands in the United States. The cooperative's actual scale extends far beyond consumer dairy.

Founded in 1921, Land O'Lakes operates in four business segments: dairy foods, crop inputs and insights (through its Winfield United subsidiary), animal nutrition (Purina Animal Nutrition), and international operations. The crop inputs business is one of the larger distributors of seed, crop protection products, and agronomic services in North America, serving farmers through a network of independent retailers.

The cooperative has roughly 1,600 direct member cooperatives and individual farmer-members. This makes it another federated structure where local dairy cooperatives are members of the larger Land O'Lakes system.

Land O'Lakes has invested heavily in agricultural technology through its Truterra sustainability platform and data analytics services — a notable example of a farmer-owned cooperative leading, rather than following, on agricultural technology adoption.

3. Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) — ~$19 Billion in Revenue

Dairy Farmers of America, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, is the largest dairy cooperative in the United States by volume. DFA processes and markets milk from approximately 11,500 member farms across 48 states.

DFA was formed in 1998 through the merger of four large regional dairy cooperatives: Mid-America Dairymen, Milk Marketing Inc., Western Dairymen Cooperative, and Southern Belle Dairy. It has since expanded through additional acquisitions, most significantly its 2020 purchase of the former Dean Foods processing plants — which made DFA a major fluid milk processor in addition to its marketing role.

DFA operates over 50 manufacturing facilities producing fluid milk, cheese, butter, powder, and other dairy ingredients. Its Class I (fluid milk) marketing operations span much of the country. The acquisition of Dean Foods' assets, while controversial within some parts of the dairy industry, gave DFA direct control over the processing infrastructure needed to ensure market access for its member farms.

4. Blue Diamond Growers — ~$1 Billion in Revenue

Blue Diamond Growers, based in Sacramento, California, is the world's largest almond processor and marketer. Its 3,000+ member growers produce roughly 80% of the world's almond supply — California grows the vast majority of commercially traded almonds globally.

Founded in 1910, Blue Diamond has built one of the most recognizable nut brands in the US market, along with a substantial international export business. The Almond Breeze branded almond milk line, launched in the 1990s, was one of the first plant-based milk products to achieve mainstream US retail distribution.

Blue Diamond manages the complexity of a genuinely global commodity — California almonds are exported to over 90 countries — while maintaining a cooperative structure in which grower-members set direction through elected boards. The cooperative operates processing facilities, handles its own brand marketing, and maintains a research and development function that has contributed to varietal development and processing technology.

5. Ocean Spray — ~$2.5 Billion in Revenue

Ocean Spray Cranberries, headquartered in Lakeville, Massachusetts, is the world's leading producer and marketer of cranberry products. Its roughly 700 member-growers supply cranberries from bogs in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Canada and Chile.

Founded in 1930, Ocean Spray created the modern cranberry juice market — the cranberry was largely a seasonal commodity before Ocean Spray's marketing campaigns made it a year-round consumer product. The cooperative's brands include Ocean Spray cranberry juice, Craisins dried cranberries, and various juice blend products.

Ocean Spray operates multiple manufacturing and processing facilities and licenses its brand internationally. Its governance reflects the concentrated membership structure: with fewer than 1,000 grower-members, individual members have meaningful direct influence over the cooperative's direction in a way that is less practical at cooperatives with tens of thousands of members.

6. Sunkist Growers — ~$1.2 Billion in Revenue

Sunkist, headquartered in Sherman Oaks, California, is one of the oldest and most globally recognized agricultural cooperative brands. Its citrus-growing members are concentrated in California and Arizona. The cooperative was founded in 1893 — making it over 130 years old — and adopted the Sunkist name in 1908.

Sunkist operates primarily as a marketing cooperative. It does not own processing plants in the way that DFA or Blue Diamond do; instead, it acts as the collective marketing and licensing arm for its approximately 1,700 grower-members. The Sunkist brand is extensively licensed to juice manufacturers and food companies worldwide, generating royalty revenue in addition to fresh fruit marketing income.

The cooperative has navigated significant changes in the citrus industry, including competition from imports, shifts in consumer preferences toward certain varieties (notably Navel oranges and mandarins), and the long-term decline of California citrus acreage due to urbanization and water costs.

7. GROWMARK — ~$9 Billion in Revenue

GROWMARK, based in Bloomington, Illinois, is a regional federated cooperative serving farmers primarily in the upper Midwest and Ontario, Canada. Its member cooperatives number over 160, operating through the FS brand in Illinois and neighboring states.

GROWMARK handles grain marketing, fuel, crop inputs, and farm supply distribution. Its grain elevator network handles hundreds of millions of bushels of corn and soybeans annually. The cooperative is particularly strong in Illinois, where it originated as the Illinois Farm Supply Company in 1927.

GROWMARK is less nationally known than CHS or Land O'Lakes but is a major regional force in agribusiness, competing directly with large investor-owned input suppliers and grain traders. Its member cooperative structure means it competes while returning patronage dividends to the local cooperatives — and ultimately to individual farmers — that would otherwise go to shareholder returns in a conventional company.

8. Ag Processing Inc. (AGP) — ~$4 Billion in Revenue

Ag Processing Inc., headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, is one of the largest soybean processing cooperatives in the world. AGP processes soybeans into soybean meal (for animal feed) and soybean oil (for food and industrial uses).

Founded in 1983 as a merger of several smaller soybean processing cooperatives, AGP operates processing plants across Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Missouri. Its membership is itself made up of grain cooperatives rather than individual farmers — another federated structure in which the AGP cooperative sits at the second tier.

Soybean processing involves significant economies of scale, and AGP's creation through cooperative consolidation was an explicit attempt to give farmer-owned institutions the scale needed to compete against investor-owned processors like Bunge, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill. Whether cooperative processing achieves fully competitive economics against these giants continues to be debated within the industry, but AGP has maintained its position as a major processor for over four decades.

9. Southern States Cooperative — ~$2 Billion in Revenue

Southern States Cooperative, based in Richmond, Virginia, is the largest agricultural cooperative headquartered in the southeastern United States. Its member farmers and affiliated cooperatives span Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina, and neighboring states.

Southern States focuses on crop inputs, farm supplies, and grain marketing. Its retail stores — the familiar green Southern States outlets throughout the mid-Atlantic and upper South — sell feed, seed, fertilizer, and farm supplies to both commercial farmers and rural homeowners. The cooperative operates grain facilities and handles commodity marketing for member farmers.

Founded in 1923, Southern States has operated through periods of significant agricultural transformation in the Southeast, including the decline of tobacco as a primary crop and the rise of poultry and grain production. The cooperative's retail presence in smaller rural communities has also made it a meaningful economic anchor in areas where consolidated agribusiness has reduced local options.

10. Welch's — ~$700 Million in Revenue

Welch's, headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts, is owned by the National Grape Cooperative Association, whose approximately 1,000 member-growers farm Concord and Niagara grapes primarily in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington.

Welch's is best known for its grape juice and grape jelly — products that have been in continuous production since the cooperative's founding in 1945. The cooperative licenses the Welch's brand to Promotion in Motion for some product categories and operates its own manufacturing for juice and jelly.

The Concord grape is a challenging commodity. It has limited uses compared to wine grapes or table grapes — Concord grapes are too tart for most fresh eating — and demand for its products is relatively inelastic. Welch's has responded by extending the brand into fruit snacks and other categories, though the cooperative's economic health remains closely tied to the grape juice and jelly market.

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Why Scale Matters in Agricultural Cooperatives

The size of these organizations reflects a core economic reality of modern agriculture: commodity markets are dominated by a small number of very large buyers, processors, and trading companies. Individual farmers dealing with Cargill, ADM, or a major dairy processor have no meaningful negotiating power. Cooperative aggregation changes that calculation.

When thousands of corn farmers sell through CHS or GROWMARK, they collectively have the volume to negotiate better contracts, access export markets, and build the storage and logistics infrastructure that captures value rather than surrendering it. When California almond growers pool through Blue Diamond, they can fund brand marketing that no individual farm operation could afford.

The cooperative form does not solve all the structural challenges of American agriculture — farm income remains volatile, consolidation continues in processing and retail, and many smaller cooperatives struggle to invest in technology. But the 10 organizations above demonstrate that farmer-owned institutions can reach genuine scale while maintaining democratic governance. For how these cooperatives distribute earnings back to members, see patronage refunds.

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Revenue figures are approximate and based on publicly available cooperative annual reports, USDA Rural Development cooperative data, and NCBA (National Cooperative Business Association) statistics. Figures reflect recent fiscal years and may vary year to year based on commodity prices.