Machinery Rings in UK Agriculture: An Example of Opportunistic Cooperation

Machinery rings are cooperative organizations through which farmers share agricultural machinery. Over the last three decades in Europe there has been significant growth in the number of machinery rings, and today they play a critical role in certain countries. In this paper we examine the development of machinery rings in Europe and the subsequent transfer of the idea to the UK. Our starting point is the poorly developed tradition of agricultural cooperation in the UK. What becomes clear is that the growth of machinery rings in the UK over the last decade has apparently not been constrained by this lack of cooperative tradition. It is also evident that farmers join machinery rings for economic reasons such as increasing access to and reducing the cost of agricultural machinery: the social and political agendas often associated with the cooperative movement play little if any part in the decision to join a ring. This example shows the opportunistic use of a cooperative structure to fulfiII a need arising in a competitive and individualistic commercial context.