A few years ago, I took my wife on a Valentine’s Day date to the Owyhee County Courthouse in Murphy, Idaho. I know, all of the ladies are seething with jealousy, but my wife was researching a book on the municipalities of Three Creek, Idaho … and I took the day off, so she wasn’t going to waste it.
In the musty piles of county records, we discovered a leather-bound ledger with the early records of the Three Creek School. Established in 1886, my great-great-grandfather was on the first board of trustees for the school district. In its early days of statehood, the dispersed population of Idaho worked cooperatively to fill some of the community's needs.
Rural America is full of rugged individualists, so cooperation is not in our nature. We sink our own wells, maintain our own septic systems, and our recreation is whatever we do individually; there aren't enough people for a team, much less a recreation district. Cooperation is against our nature, but sometimes it’s necessary.
In agriculture, we’re all familiar with a co-op. It’s the place in town where we can fuel up, buy fertilizer, livestock feed, a 3/8-inch wrench, electrical nuts, a tag knife, horseshoe nails, baby chicks, grease zerks and a plastic dam. (This may or may not be an actual list that I took to our local co-op.) The customers are the owners.
The first cooperative in the U.S. was a mutual fire insurance cooperative established by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1752. By 1810, dairy farmers formed cooperative creameries to process and market their milk.
In 1844, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers codified seven principles that define a cooperative (and no, a ridiculously long name is not the first principle). The seven principles are: open membership, democratic vote, distribution of surpluses in proportion to trade, payment of limited interest on capital, political and religious neutrality, cash trading (no credit extended) and the promotion of education.
In the 1870s, an organization called the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (again with the long names) was formed. Better known as Grange, they formed hundreds of agriculture marketing and procurement cooperatives.
In the early 1900s, the American Farm Bureau led the cooperative movement, and many of us get insurance and financial services from the Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Companies.
There are other economic niches exploited by cooperatives today. The most obvious may be procurement with Valley Wide Cooperatives. Others are farmer-owned sugar processing with Amalgamated Sugar, rural electrification with Fall River Rural Electric, telephone service with Project Mutual Telephone Cooperative and financial services from Northwest Farm Credit Service (now AgWest Farm Credit). We interact with cooperatives every day.
Rural America tackled innumerable problems with the scale of cooperatives. And there are other examples of cooperation outside the Rochdale principles – neighbors buying a truckload of an input (feed, fertilizer, fencing supplies, pipe) to share a bulk discount, neighbors banding together creating a truckload for a video auction, farmers pooling equipment for harvest. Farmers and ranchers are very independent, but one thing will force cooperation … money.
This brings me to my point. From 2005 through 2012, there were a series of devastating wildfires in our neighborhood. For seven straight years, more than 100,000 acres were burned. We would joke that we were burning more grass than we were grazing; that may be more of a tragedy than a comedy. Wildfires with that many acres are too big for any one person to solve, or even one agency. If we wanted to solve this problem, we had to work cooperatively.
In 2012, the state of Idaho created the framework for Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (RFPA). With RFPAs, ranchers pool their resources and collaborate with state and federal wildland firefighters.
RFPA volunteers must be trained with an annual refresher. The physical fitness requirements are relaxed, thus allowing fat old guys like me to participate.
The RFPAs incorporate four of the seven Rochdale principles: voluntary membership, democratic voting, political neutrality and education or training. None of the fiscal principles apply because RFPAs are non-profit.
Because we work on the range, RFPAs are charged with initial attack and logistics. We are often the first ones to see smoke, to be on scene, and we know where roads and water sources are. The RFPAs are often at the fire before it’s too big and unmanageable. We get the professional firefighters on scene more quickly. Our most valuable tools are our radios for coordinating firefighting in a wildland setting.
And it is no mistake that I use personal possessive pronouns. I am a member of the Three Creek RFPA. In fact, I am a founding member and was on the original board of directors. We have completed a full decade of firefighting and are training the next generation of volunteers … including my son.
Rural America faces several large-scale problems today. Access to broadband, labor shortages, wildly fluctuating commodity prices and access to food processing are a few examples. Too often, we follow the lead of our more urban neighbors and beg a solution from a government to solve a problem too large for one person. Perhaps we should dust off the old Rochdale principles and solve the problems ourselves … cooperatively.
