More recently, however, agricultural cooperatives have been facing survival challenges as a result of the agricultural industrialization process.1 Competitive strategies pursued by agricultural cooperatives in response to environmental and structural changes in the food system, including value-added processing, brand name development, and entry into international markets, require sub-stantial capital investments. In order to acquire the necessary risk capital to implement these growth-related strategies and remain competitive, agricultural cooperatives are using organizational innovations to adapt to agricultural indus-trialization. These organizational innovations include but are not limited to new generation cooperatives, base capital plans, subsidiaries with partial public own-ership, preferred trust shares, equity-seeking joint ventures, combined limited liability company–cooperative strategic alliances, and permanent capital equity plans. These new organizational and capital formation experiments have created considerable interest among producer leaders, cooperative management,finance institutions, and organizational scholars. We assert that the basic issues in examin-ing these new models can be reduced to an examination of ownership and control rights.