Recent reorganizations of agricultural cooperatives have created concern that the cooperative form of business may not be well suited to the agribusiness environment of the 1990s. Potential institutional changes in the cooperative form of organization require objective analysis of the etiology of these reorganizations. Previous research evaluated internal features of the cooperative that may create economic incentives to convert the co-op to a corporation. This article focuses on external factors that may also be related to cooperative conversions. Informal evaluation of the limited evidence suggests that these factors merit further study.