We help agricultural clients meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry.
Our Agribusiness and Cooperatives lawyers understand the industry’s unique needs. While our clients grow and produce the food that feeds the nation, we leverage our extensive legal experience to help their businesses thrive.
We have advised agricultural clients on numerous complex legal issues, including hybrid or hedge-to-arrive grain contracting; cooperative antitrust exemptions; the structuring and operation of one of the largest egg producers in the United States; and the revision of cooperative corporate statutes in several states, including the current Ohio Cooperative Law.
Our Clients
- Specialty producers of fruits and vegetables
- Egg producers
- Farm cooperatives
- Purchasing, health care, credit union, utilities/telecommunications, food, service, housing (condominium), and employee/worker cooperatives
Our Services
- Mergers, acquisitions, and asset dispositions
- Real estate due diligence, acquisition, sale, and structuring, including sale/leasebacks
- Financing and capitalization
- Land leasing for farming, livestock, recreational, and conservation activities
- Business formation and strategic planning
- Environmental compliance and permitting, including water use and water storage permitting and livestock permitting
- Conservation and land stewardship, including conservation easements and governmental land management programs
- Taxation and succession planning
- Governance, member, patronage, and equity ownership issues unique to cooperatives
- Marketing agreements and negotiations
- Labor and employment
- Worker’s compensation
- Intellectual property, including clearance, development, prosecution, registration, protection, enforcement, and transactions relating to patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, and other proprietary rights
- Health care, occupational safety, food safety, and other regulatory issues
- Commodities marketing, including cash and futures contracting, warehousing, and transport of commodities
- Credit and secured transactions
- Securities placement and regulation
- Government relations with federal, state and local governments
- Non-governmental organization and citizen group relations
- Antitrust
- Litigation