Cooperatives on the Revenue of Farmers in Keea Municipality of Ghana

Marketing of produce has become an important socio-economic constraint to farmers. And as Futrell and Shepherd put it "Agricultural production is a big business but agricultural marketing is even bigger". Most farmers produce only small quantities and can only deliver them to local stores and sell to the village or district markets (Peter Robbins, 1999). Traders offer low prices to farmers especially at the scale of the harvest season. This is a discouraging factor since profitability from a crop is an incentive towards increasing production and hence output.From literature, agricultural cooperatives have been deemed to raise production and productivity and enhance marketing opportunities of its farmer members. This research has thus been necessitated to find out which of the two groups of farmers; members and non members of marketing cooperatives obtains more revenue and for the period of the cooperative, which group enjoys market opportunities and profits from the sale of their produce. The major objective of this study is to find out if the formation of marketing cooperative societies has benefited the farmer members. Benefits here refer to easy access to markets, etc