Why Join Fedco as a member?

• Membership = ownership. Own a piece of our new Fedco Trees warehouse and office facility!

• Your membership equity will help finance our new facility, reducing our interest expense.

• Like our products, prices, service and catalogs? Help us to endure and thrive for many more years to come! Keep that humor, those bad puns and occasional rants coming!

• Like our politics around food policy and seed issues? Help us fulfill our mission!

• Enjoy benefits such as a 1% discount on all your orders, and member-only specials!

Fedco Launches Consumer Membership Drive
(If you'd like to become a member, please download our membership form and mail it to us with your membership deposit. Thank you.)

In 1985 we organized Fedco as a hybrid consumer/worker cooperative. Even though consumers share 60% of the cooperative’s profits each year, we have never campaigned to attract consumer members or required them to pay meaningful equity. This reluctance was mostly a matter of timing: in 1985, both in Massachusetts and Maine, food co-op warehouses had suffered major financial reverses that left them unable to return their members’ equity.

Since then, Fedco has enjoyed steady growth. Sales have increased every single year, and each year without exception our cooperative has run in the black. In 2010-2011 we filled more than 33,000 orders, with orders exceeding $4 million for the first time in our history. We have never been financially stronger.

In February 2011, with Fedco Trees having outgrown the basement in our converted chicken barn warehouse and Moose Tubers way short of sufficient space in the facility we built for it and OGS a scant dozen years ago, we purchased an additional warehouse building down the hill, less than a mile from our present facilities, and next to Interstate 95. In 2012 Fedco Trees and our office moved into the new space so that all our operations are in close proximity, Moose Tubers is using the vacated basement for potatoes and we held our annual spring Tree Sale down the hill where we now have more space to display our products and twice the parking capacity.

With the renewed interest in gardening, farming and local food, and our continued emphasis on meeting the needs of our customers and maintaining efficient operations, we believe our future is bright. What better time to launch our first consumer membership drive?

We aim to attract enough consumer members over the next few years, members who will have a real financial stake in the cooperative, to help us finance the estimated $600,000 cost of our new acquisition.

We are asking for a $100 membership equity (if this would be a hardship, there is a $25 low-income option), refundable at any time upon request. Please note that membership is by household (only one membership per household please) or by farm or organization.

Members will receive several benefits including a 1% discount on all orders from all our divisions, an invitation to our Annual Meeting each September, the opportunity to vote on any proposed bylaw changes, and to vote for and serve on our Board of Directors. Each year some divisions will offer a few varieties that we know will be in very short supply only to members on a first-come, first-served basis. Other benefits are still being planned.

Join as an member-owner of one of the most successful and enduring cooperatives to come out of the new wave.

CR Lawn
President, Fedco Seeds, Inc.

If you'd like to become a member, please download our membership form and mail it to us with your membership deposit. Thank you.