MFA Incorporated is the picture of modern agriculture. From fertilizer to feed, from livestock marketing to seed, the cooperative offers the products and services that today's farmer needs. In fact, with an annual sales volume approaching $800 million, MFA ranks as a leading cooperative in the nation.

But to understand a cooperative like MFA is to look past the scope and scale of today's operations. Our beginnings were more humble.

On a chilly March evening 90 years ago, a group of Chariton County farmers met at a one-room rural schoolhouse near Brunswick, Mo., with the intent of pooling their purchasing power. The principal goal of the seven farmers who met at Newcomer School that evening was to save money.

And they did. By jointly buying 1,150 pounds of binder twine and other farm supplies, the farmers saved nearly $400 that first year. Back then, they had no way of knowing that their local "farm club" would grow into the MFA we know today.

Prodded by William Hirth, editor of Missouri Farmer and Breeder (the forerunner publication of Today's Farmer), farmers in other areas established similar farm clubs. Hirth had long advocated farm cooperatives as a way to improve farmers' bargaining power. With the success of the Chariton County farm club, the idea spread quickly. Within 5 years, there were nearly 2,500 such farm clubs in Missouri. In 1917, delegates from these clubs met in a state convention at Columbia, where they established MFA and adopted the following resolution:

"We direct the attention of the Farm Clubs of the state to the building of farmers' cooperatives and also to the forming of livestock shipping associations."

Farm club members elected Bill Hirth president of the newly formed MFA. Hirth changed the name of his periodical to The Missouri Farmer, which became the leading publication of MFA Incorporated.

The cooperative movement got a shot in the arm with the passage of the Capper-Volstead Act (Cooperative Marketing Act) in 1922. Capper-Volstead exempted cooperatives from provisions of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and allowed for a different taxing system. Instead of paying corporate income taxes on earnings (profits), cooperatives now could retain earnings as capital savings or distribute earnings as dividends to member-patrons.

Since then, MFA has kept focus on the very ideas that brought the organization into being-that cooperation means power in the marketplace and that profit for farmers is profit for agriculture.

Armed with the power inherent in a cooperative and bolstered by the hard work of its membership-and employees-MFA has adapted to the changing landscape of agriculture for 90 years.

Today, serving more than 45,000 farmers, the cooperative is poised to continue its mission: to improve the economic position of its member/owners.