There’s a catchy tune any kid who went to Farmers Union Camp will remember.
I’ve got the Farmers Union spirit up in my head / WHERE? / Up in my head! …
I’ve got the Farmers Union spirit up in my head / WHERE? / Up in my head to stay!
It didn’t take me 10 years of camp, earning my Torchbearer Award or being a Farmers Union Camp counselor, however, to understand how interchangeable “Farmers Union” is with “cooperative” in that song.
I owe my early understanding of co-ops to Farmers Union.
The first day of Farmers Union Camp includes cooperative education and a bit of co-op history. Campers learn about the first cooperative formed in 1844 at 31 Toad Lane in Rochdale, England, which served as the prototype of the modern cooperative and set the cooperative movement afoot.
Here, poor cotton millworkers pooled their scarce resources to access groceries and goods at a lower price. Every customer became a member, which gave each a democratic say in the business.
Word of the cooperative movement began to spread, including to North Dakota, where farmers started organizing cooperatives in the early 1900s to protect their interests.
Credit unions, which are banking cooperatives, followed in the 1930s and 1940s.
Electric cooperatives formed in North Dakota by 1940, after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Act (REA), creating the lending program to set the REA in motion. Farmers and ranchers went door to door collecting $5 membership fees to build a power supply system and bring light to the prairie.
The first telephone cooperative in North Dakota, Dickey Rural Telephone Cooperative, was formed in 1950.
As students learn in North Dakota studies, “Co-ops have prospered in North Dakota more than in other states. With a small population and great distances between towns and between farms, co-ops offer greater efficiency than many other business models.”
A cooperative spirit helps, too. Would North Dakota’s cooperative success have been possible without it? I doubt it.
Today, my understanding of cooperatives is woven together with deep admiration for the co-op pioneers who came before me and a sweet love of the North Dakota communities made better by the cooperatives which serve them.
Little did fourth-grader Cally, who sang The Chick’s 1999 classic hit, “Goodbye Earl,” at the camp talent show, or sixth-grader Cally, who counted back the correct change in an interview to be general manager of the camp co-op store, know her early cooperative education from Farmers Union Camp would become such a large, defining part of her life.
___
Cally Peterson is editor of North Dakota Living. She can be reached at cpeterson@ndarec.com.
