Thaddeus Pruitt Turns Ouachita Valley Farms Cooperative Into a Model for Small Growers

Thaddeus Pruitt farmed soybeans and sweet potatoes on his family's land outside Monroe for two decades before he ever thought of himself as a businessman. That changed in 2015, when a brutal harvest season and collapsing wholesale prices convinced him and eleven neighboring farmers that surviving as small independent growers required banding together. Today, Ouachita Valley Farms Cooperative includes 43 member farms and operates its own processing and distribution facility outside West Monroe.

"None of us could afford our own packing line or a sales team calling on grocery chains," Pruitt said, walking through the cooperative's newly expanded sweet potato curing facility. "But forty-three of us together, pooling resources, that's a different story entirely."

Building Shared Infrastructure for Small Growers

Ouachita Valley Farms Cooperative's early years were lean. Member farms contributed what capital they could spare to build a modest packing shed, and Pruitt spent much of 1996 through 2018 personally driving produce to buyers across North Louisiana and East Texas in a borrowed box truck, building relationships one delivery at a time.

The cooperative's fortunes shifted when it secured a supply contract with a regional grocery chain in 2019, providing steady demand that justified investment in proper cold storage and grading equipment. That contract, since expanded to include two additional retail partners, now accounts for roughly 40 percent of the cooperative's annual sweet potato volume, with soybeans, pecans, and a growing specialty vegetable program filling out the rest.

"Thaddeus never let the cooperative get ahead of what member farms could actually deliver," said Corinne Ashworth, a third-generation pecan grower and cooperative board member. "He grew this thing at the speed of trust, not the speed of ambition. That's rare, and it's why it's lasted."

Expanding Markets While Protecting Small Farms

Pruitt has resisted pressure to consolidate the cooperative's membership or push out its smallest participants, some of whom farm fewer than twenty acres. Instead, the cooperative structures its payment system so that smaller member farms receive proportionally favorable processing rates, subsidized in part by larger operations, a model Pruitt says preserves the diversity of growers that gives Ouachita Valley its identity.

"There are cooperatives out there that quietly become vehicles for the five biggest farms to squeeze out everybody else," Pruitt said. "We built ours the opposite way on purpose. If a twenty-acre farm can't make it here, we've failed at the actual mission."

The cooperative has also begun supplying a farm-to-table distribution program serving restaurants in Monroe and West Monroe, giving member farms a premium outlet for specialty crops like heirloom tomatoes and Creole cream cheese-adjacent dairy products that wouldn't move efficiently through traditional wholesale channels.

Pruitt, now in his late fifties, has started grooming his daughter, Lacey Pruitt-Doiron, to eventually take over daily operations, though he insists he has no plans to fully step back soon. "I still like driving the truck sometimes," he said. "Reminds me why we started this in the first place."

Looking forward, Pruitt is pursuing a state grant to expand cold storage capacity further, anticipating that continued consolidation among large agricultural buyers will make cooperative models like his even more essential for small Northeast Louisiana farms trying to survive the next decade. "Farming alone got harder every year I did it," he said. "Farming together, we've actually got a future."