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To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. I am assuming it’s too liberal for them.You might want to talk to some farmers in these small towns, because co-ops aren't what they used to be and farmers often don't have a kind word anymore for the local co-op.
As the food economy consolidates around large producers and the small farms that built the co-ops are going broke, co-ops are complicit in switching their support to the corporate producers and not sticking up for the little guys who built them, sometimes actively kicking them out to make room for larger contracts with the bigger producers.
Historically, co-ops were ran by and populated by workers who were ex-farmers or who had other close ties to farming. Nowadays they're managed by suits, and the workers have no ties to agriculture and could care less about inefficient practices burning through struggling farmers' capital. Ask a farmer who is working 18-hour days and can barely pay his bills how he feels about his local co-op showing up with 3 trucks to spread fertilizer and 2 of the trucks sit with engines idling for hours while the guys inside play slither.io.
Anyway the ignorant sweeping dismissals towards white* rural America I see so often from urban bugmen really disturb me. You think you have your finger on the pulse of "the country" because you have a vacation home there you visit once a year or you have some distant family members that live there (which you apparently secretly disdain?). Your brain is so infected with ideology rooted in urban leisure-time that you project that onto people who don't even have a grocery store and think it's perfectly logical they'd continue driving hours out of the way for supplies rather than patronize something with a "cursed word" in the name. You're living in la-la land if you think the majority of these people have the time to mentally masturbate to politics to your extent, much less burn time and money for some kind of political statement.
* Because you never ever see this kind of callousness directed towards poor minority communities, only whites deserve to suffer.