Editor’s note: The author of this guest commentary is Seth Summerside, Farmer and CEO, Keo Fish Farms, Inc. The opinions expressed are those of the author.

Arkansas farmers are hurting. Recent reports show our state leading the nation in farm bankruptcies. When farms fail, the first instinct is to blame Washington. But the truth is harder to say out loud.

The biggest threat to Arkansas agriculture isn’t government policy. It’s institutional complacency.

For generations, cooperatives were created to protect farmers from powerful markets and corporate control. The cooperative model is one of the most powerful business structures ever created in American agriculture. Farmers working together built institutions that transformed rural economies across the Midwest and the Delta.

But somewhere along the way, many of these institutions stopped innovating.

Instead of leading the future of agriculture, too many farmer-owned organizations are protecting the past. Risk-taking has been replaced with bureaucracy. Vision has been replaced with maintaining the status quo.

The consequences are visible across rural Arkansas. As farms disappear, so do the towns that depend on them. Schools close. Main streets empty. Young families leave. Rural population decline isn’t just a demographic trend — it’s the direct result of an agricultural economy that is no longer working for the people who built it.

Meanwhile, many cooperative executives continue earning comfortable salaries while the farmers who own those institutions struggle to stay afloat. That disconnect should concern every farmer in this state. Cooperatives were created to serve farmers, not the other way around.

As a farmer who has worked on innovation in the food industry, including at Tyson Foods, I’ve seen how quickly agriculture and food systems are evolving. Technology, sustainability, and new production systems are reshaping how food will be grown and delivered in the decades ahead.

Yet many institutions created to serve farmers are still operating with a mindset designed for the 1970s.

If farmers are failing — and too many are — we need to stop pretending the problem only exists in Washington. Some responsibility belongs much closer to home.

The cooperative model itself isn’t broken. In fact, it may be one of the most powerful structures farmers have to compete in the future. But that future will require something many institutions have lost: the courage to innovate.

Arkansas farmers don’t just need hard work. We already have that.

We need old-school work ethic paired with new-school leadership and innovation.

Farmers built these institutions. Farmers should demand they lead again.