Country Natural Beef started with 14 ranching families marketing 200 head of natural beef cattle in 1987. In recent years, the cooperative has nearly 100 member ranches in multiple states that raise more than 100,000 brood cows, manage more than 6 million acres of land and sell almost $50 million of products.

Begun in 2005 by Mike and Deb Hansen in central Wisconsin, Good Earth Farms
includes five operations that sell nearly all of their certified organic meat through the internet.

The vast majority of dairy cattle in the United States never see the outdoors while they’re lactating. Over 50% of the milk produced in
the US comes from just 1750 large farms, primarily in California, Idaho, New Mexico, and Texas. In contrast, about 22% or more than 3000 of Wisconsin’s dairy farmers use managed grazing. Can the unique features of milk from pastured cows contribute to the resurgence of an artisan dairy tradition?

In the mid 1980s, a pair of wheat producers, Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming, became convinced that the conventional dryland wheat farming they were practicing was not sustainable in the Palouse region of eastern Washington.

In 1988, a small group of organic vegetable growers in Wisconsin formed a cooperative to provide stable and fair prices to its members. It evolved into Organic Valley, the largest organic, farmer-owned cooperative in North America.

Co-op Partners Warehouse was established in 1999 by the Wedge Natural Foods Co-op in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This certified organic wholesale distribution warehouse serves retail stores, food service businesses and buying clubs throughout the Upper Midwest.

Idaho’s Bounty was founded in 2007 as a cooperative with both customer and producer members. It provides logistical support for a direct-to-consumer, Internet-based food buying club.

The national Agriculture of the Middle initiative has produced three sets of curricular resources on value-based food supply chains for university-level business and economics courses.

The Driftless Region Food and Farm Project is a coalition of farmers, consumers, institutions, agencies and organizations. Together, they aspire to meet the growing demand for local food by scaling up the production, aggregation, processing, distribution and marketing of food in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

From farmers’ markets to supermarkets, there is a spectrum of relationships between consumers and the businesses that grow, process, distribute and market their food. Small-scale, local food production is often contrasted with the anonymity of global, industrial food production, resulting in a black and white portrayal of local and global food systems. In reality, the food system is far more complex than local versus global and artisanal versus industrial.