Albert Peterson (1892-1973) was a prominent farmer and cooperative leader from Larrabee, Iowa. He was born Carl Oscar Albert Petersson in 1892 on Knutskog, a small farm near the village of Asa in a forested region of the Småland province of Sweden. He was the second child in a family of six boys and two girls. His early life was typical for a youth in Småland at the time: upon confirmation in the Lutheran Church at twelve years of age, his schooling ended, and he left home to work as a farmhand on a neighboring farm.
In 1912, when he was twenty years old, he and his older brother Alexis immigrated to Canada, where they homesteaded north of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, near a former neighbor in Sweden. Albert farmed a small acreage, tilling the soil with oxen. In winter, he attended school to learn English. Two years later, disillusioned by their exploitation by private grain companies in the area, the brothers abandoned their homesteads and left for the United States in search of fertile soil and a better climate.
They told a railroad agent they were looking for good farmland, and he sold them tickets to Sioux City. There, they were directed to Meriden, a small town in Cherokee County. While walking from the train station, they were approached by a local farmer seeking help with the corn harvest. Although unfamiliar with the crop, they accepted the job and continued to work for the farmer as hired hands.
A year later, in 1915, Albert moved to a neighboring farm and began farming on his own, using his employer’s machinery in exchange for labor. During winters, he and Alexis worked as carpenters in Sioux City. It was there that Albert met Ruth Wilhemina Lindstrom, also a Swedish immigrant, whom he married in 1918. After their father died in 1919, Alexis, as the eldest son, inherited the family farm and returned to Sweden.
Shortly after his marriage, Albert became severely ill with Spanish influenza. The disease permanently damaged his kidneys, necessitating the removal of one. After farming outside Meriden for several years, Albert and Ruth moved to a farm near Larrabee, where he would soon begin acquiring land. Although Albert’s earlier illness had reduced his stamina and increased his reliance on hired labor, it did not deter him from expanding his farming operations. He would eventually farm 1,200 acres of land and feed over 1,000 steers a year.
Albert became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1931. He and Ruth raised two daughters, Phyllis and Mary Louise. Although his own opportunities were limited growing up in rural Sweden, Albert valued education and ensured that both daughters received college educations. Phyllis became a registered nurse, and Louise taught home economics. Tragically, Louise died from lupus in 1945 at twenty-five years of age. Phyllis married Ralph Gosmire, a social sciences instructor at Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge. They had two children, Ruth Ann and Carl. After Ralph was killed in an automobile accident in 1968, Phyllis and the children moved to Cherokee to live with Albert, who was by then a widower. He died in 1973 at the age of eighty-one.
Influenced by his experiences with private grain companies in Canada, Peterson was a stalwart proponent of cooperatives. During the second major wave of cooperative expansion in the United States, from the early 1920s through the early 1930s, he played an important role in the establishment of nineteen local farmer cooperatives in northwest Iowa. While an earlier wave of growth had seen the formation of cooperative grain elevators and creameries, this second, larger wave saw the creation of cooperative oil companies, farm supply firms, and livestock shipping and marketing associations. This growth was boosted by passage of the Capper-Volstead Act, which authorized agricultural producers to form cooperatives to market their products and provided them qualified protection from federal antitrust laws.
In 1941, Peterson began a twenty-eight-year tenure on the board of directors of Consumers Cooperative Association (CCA) of Kansas City, Missouri, which became Farmland Industries in 1966. At its peak, Farmland was the largest agricultural cooperative in North America.
During World War II, Peterson, as a director, was actively engaged in expanding and strengthening the relationships between CCA and local farmer cooperatives in northwest Iowa. Stronger ties benefited local cooperatives by improving their access to farm inputs under wartime rationing and allocation rules, facilitating transportation and distribution, and providing administrative guidance, financial coordination, and organizational support during a period of resource scarcity. They benefited CCA by stabilizing demand and coordinating distribution as it sought to create a coordinated cooperative system in petroleum, fertilizer, and feed. After the war, this groundwork accelerated the expansion of local cooperatives affiliated with CCA, growth in its petroleum and fertilizer capacities, and equity participation by locals.
Peterson also served as a director of Mutual Service Life Insurance Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, for ten years. Other cooperative businesses for which he served as a director included the Cooperative Farm Chemicals Association in Lawrence, Kansas; Farmbest, Inc. in Denison, Iowa; the Farmland Insurance Agency in Kansas City; the Big Four Cooperative Processing Association in Sheldon, Iowa; and the Cherokee County Rural Electric Cooperative.
His public service extended to other local organizations. He was elected to the Cherokee County Board of Supervisors four times, serving as a supervisor for sixteen years and as chair for eight. He also served on the advisory committee of the Cherokee County Farmers Home Administration and the church council of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Cherokee.