The legal and organizational evolution of the dominant current means of agricultural producer collaboration in the United States can be divided into three distinct periods: pre-1925; 1925 to 1985; and post-1985. Alternative ownership forms, for example, investor-owned, patron-owned, or mutual firms, are characterized by the way property rights are assigned to owners. Chaddad and Cook propose a typology of discrete organizational models, in which the traditional cooperative structure and the investor-oriented firm (IOF) are characterized as polar forms. Additionally, they identify five nontraditional cooperative models that user-owned organizations may adopt to ameliorate perceived financial constraint problems. The legal diversity and complexity in state incorporation laws of the United States have led to a multiplicity of organizational forms that primarily differ in the residual claims legal domain. Consequently, most of the observations address the remnant of the hybrid form.