This interview was conducted by Conscious Company Magazine.

Mission-driven business might be trending right now, but George Siemon has been running one since before it was popular.

He’s the longtime CEO of Organic Valley, the Wisconsin-based cooperative of organic farmers that sells dairy products, eggs, and produce at mainstream grocers nationwide. In 2015, Organic Valley became the first organic-only food company to pass $1 billion in revenue. We spoke with Siemon about Organic Valley’s secrets to success, and the unique challenges and opportunities that come with scaling a co-op model to that size.

What inspired you to start Organic Valley?

George Siemon: Organic Valley is a farmers’ co-op that came out of the farm crisis of the mid-80s. It was a terrible time, with a lot of foreclosures and suicides, and there was a tremendous amount of upheaval in the family farm movement. There was a lot of activity around the 1985 Farm Bill to get some solutions out of Washington, DC, and that was a complete disappointment. Out of that, the same farm movement groups started looking for other ways to help family farms.

I was a child of the ’60s, raised in the city, but I had family from the country and farms. I studied to be a forester, but I realized I wanted to be more outdoors and not work for the government. I moved into agriculture, became part of the back-to-the-land movement, and ended up buying a farm in the hills of Wisconsin in ’76 and went to organic farming.

In 1987, one of the board members of our home region here in Wisconsin had the idea to start an organic, value-added vegetable co-op. The idea was using organics as a vehicle to try to get sustainability and fair pricing into supporting family farms. Pretty exciting, really, and very idealistic — and it probably would have failed quickly, but fortunately we had a lot of good things go our way.

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