Farm machinery-sharing arrangements are reached by self-organised groups of farmers willing to share machinery, equipment, and occasionally labour. While the presence of such arrangements is uneven in the agricultural sectors... [ view full abstract ]
Farm machinery-sharing arrangements are reached by self-organised groups of farmers willing to share machinery, equipment, and occasionally labour. While the presence of such arrangements is uneven in the agricultural sectors of Western countries, their significance proves to be huge in some countries. For example, the French National Federation of CUMAs (Coopératives d’Utilisation de Matériel Agricole) identifies 13, 400 machinery cooperatives, and estimates that around half of the French farmers are members of a CUMA. In spite of their potentially great economic magnitude, these special arrangements have been largely neglected in the academic literature. Our paper aims to bridge the gap by presenting a comprehensive review of the existing work, which essentially consists of technical reports and case studies (e.g. Artz et al., 2010), and by outlining research perspectives on the topic. In addition, we contend that these community-based machinery sharing experiments provide a fertile ground for investigation in order to gain additional understanding of the diversity and complexity of inter-organisational cooperation at the grass-roots level.
Our findings are threefold. First, the case studies we reviewed highlight the variety of legal and institutional arrangements that govern machinery sharing schemes. The latter can be essentially captured in a two-dimensional taxonomy involving the degree of formality (i.e. from informal, verbal agreements to written contracts or distinct economic entities) and the level of cooperation (i.e. from simple equipment exchange or borrowing to highly integrated forms of equipment and labour sharing involving common property of assets). Second, we identity the benefits and costs of being member of a machinery sharing scheme. Benefits stem directly from sizeable reductions in machinery and equipment costs (e.g. Harris and Fulton, 2000; de Toro and Hansson, 2004), or indirectly from experience transfer among members (e.g. Ingrams and Simon, 2002) and a facilitated access to more skilled labour (e.g. Johnson and Ruttan, 1994). Since these benefits are economically significant, the level of cooperation largely depends on the extent to which members manage to address the various “transaction” costs inherent to these cooperative agreements, such as monitoring, free-riding, decision-making and timeliness costs. Drawing on Ostrom (1990), we show that the minimisation of these costs depends on a subtle set of implicit practices and explicit governance rules. For example, the rules governing the access to machinery in critical cropping seasons are decisive to ensure efficiency and fairness among members. We also identify more general factors that foster sustainable and successful levels of cooperation. For instance, the existence of charismatic leaders, high levels of social capital and trust, frequent interpersonal communication, membership homogeneity and adherence to common values seem to play a critical role (e.g. Valentinov, 2004). Third, we unambiguously observe that a threshold effect exists in the intensity of cooperation among farmers: while they sometimes achieve very high level of cooperation, they never reach full, “Kibbutz-style” integration. Interestingly, factors acting as an impediment to full integration are not necessarily of an economic nature but may rather be social, ideological and cultural. Paradoxically, farmers are ready to accept the constraining rules inherent to collective action, since they view cooperation as a necessary condition to ensure and strengthen their own autonomy in the face of markets and public policies (Pierre, 2013).
