Partnership Structure in Agricultural Cooperatives in Edirne Evaluation of Cooperative Activities

In this study, the characteristics of the cooperative partners in agricultural cooperatives and the effects of cooperative activities on the common in Edirne province were determined. There are 727 cooperatives and 85.091 cooperative partners in Edirne. Overall, 40.90% of the registered cooperatives located across Edirne agricultural activity. Of which, 75.06% of cooperative partners are located in agricultural cooperatives. The main material of this study was a questionare made up of the set of questions asked to the common agricultural cooperatives. A large number of farmers were interviewed in 160 different locations of Edirne. Overall, as the purpose of this study, 471 cooperative partners were used for the data collections. The analysis of the data, the tables made by the numerical size were formed and evaluated. Agricultural cooperatives in Turkey were named according to the previous articles of association activities. In Edirne, agricultural cooperatives conduct their activities with their registered names (agricultural development, agricultural credit, agricultural sales, irrigation and aquaculture) in accordance with their articles of association. In our study, it was found that 86,29% of the agricultural cooperative partners in Edirne were engaged in farming and the main source of livelihood was agricultural activity. Generally, 50.12% of agriculture cooperative partners were older than 51 with 51.57% agricultural cooperative members primary school gradutae and 73.65 % were more than one cooperative partners. The cooperative partners find the input sales and product purchase activities of the cooperatives effective. However, they found that the input prices purchased from the cooperative were high, while the product sales prices were not high enough.