Flex²B for COOP & Small growers

An agricultural cooperative, also known as a farmers' co-op, is a cooperative where farmers pool their resources in certain areas of activity. A broad typology of agricultural cooperatives distinguishes between 'agricultural service cooperatives', which provide various services to their individually farming members, and 'agricultural production cooperatives', where production resources (land, machinery) are pooled and members farm jointly. 

The default meaning of 'agricultural cooperative' in English is usually an agricultural 'service' cooperative, which is the numerically dominant form in the world. There are two primary types of agricultural service cooperatives, 'supply cooperative' and 'marketing cooperative'. 
Supply cooperatives supply their members with inputs for agricultural production, including seeds, fertilizers, fuel, and machinery services. 
Marketing cooperatives are established by farmers to undertake transportation, packaging, distribution, and marketing of farm products (both crop and livestock). Farmers also widely rely on credit cooperatives as a source of financing for both working capital and investments.

Flex2B can perfectly be implemented by CO-OPs (COOPS). It will generate elevation, trustworthiness, higher benefits for the individual and a shared investment. The central  hub from the COOP always have an accurate view on availability of stock and raw material. Multi-stock locations are auto-maintained. The Flex2B solution protects the individual information for other members. The tenancy info is built in into the solution. 

The investment for the individual member is minimal. They should just have a computer with a modern web browser and a classic printer at hand. Windows, Mac, Linux,... and a PDF reader should be sufficient for the individual member.

The central hub of the COOP will host the cloud solution, foreseeing a single investment and maintenance of the master data.


The COOP will arrange the Supply Chain or SCM-Flow for the entire entity. It can be visualized as



As in many agricultural industries, a typical recurring combination is the collaboration between Coops (cooperatives) and their relationship with the smaller growers. Typical a grower is member of a particular Coop. 


- The grower has a limited produce and relatively minor budgets for improvements. 

- The Coop has too little information on the characteristics of the produce in a very early stage.

- Handling facilities are integrated in the system

- The Coop does the efforts for sales, marketing, export, regulations...


Both have the same interests. Making their supply better, improve data, easier collaboration, trustworthy relationships to the markets, ... We have some customers that have implemented this Flex²B methodology into their Supply Chain and Logistics system.


A simple way to use Flex²B in the supply chain for all parties might become easy to understand. We just give an impression on how it might look.


Parties involved:

- COOP: 1 central entity - implementing party of the Supply Chain system

- Growers, defined per cold store. Can be hundreds!! Investment for these parties is relatively small. Computer with browser, pdf reader and local printer should give a fully workable early solution

- Handling plants, cold stores: have an own decentralized system, or work on the central system (relatively limited count)

- Forwards, ports, ...  


Simple inter company flow:

- The Coop invests in a central Flex2B system with a Cloud interface

- The grower / cold store gets an account on the environment. He registers his (raw) produce and early harvest characteristics.

- The grower ships or delivers it to a warehouse, packaging plant, sorting and handling plant.

- The handling plant does a goods receipt on the produce and takes it into their stock. Already all early characteristics are inherited and can be used in a traceability exercise. 

- That handling plant will do the quality definition, sizing, grading, handling, packing or producing...

- Inner cold store movements can be streamed by the system.


A sample Mind-map for implementing a COOP can be


Simple representation