NZ had a similar pattern; farmers there had to pool resources to process and export products (in their case, wool, meat, dairy, later on fruit too). Important

NZ had a similar pattern; farmers there had to pool resources to process and export products (in their case, wool, meat, dairy, later on fruit too). Importantly and probably like Canada these markets developed with the industrialisation of Europe and the British Empire and the organisation of labour, and followed on from earlier co-operative movements in the UK & France. These producers set up on co-operative lines, first locally i.e. most dairy areas had a creamery or something in each village. Over time these merged to take advantage of scale, especially in the 1970s and 1980s to compete internationally with the loss of the UK market to the EEC. Even today the largest NZ dairy company, Fonterra, is a supplier-owned co-operative, though it's now big enough to warrant a private segment on the New Zealand Stock Exchange for them to trade with each other. On the purchasing side a similar pattern emerged, and purchasing co-operatives are still common especially in the agriculture sector.