Cooperative managers and directors will be confronted with a number of changes as we move forward into the coming decade. I am going to touch on four developing trends which I feel are important. Trends that are likely to create forces for change in local cooperatives. They will raise difficult issues to be settled in the boardrooms of Iowa's local cooperatives now and later in the decade of the 1990s. The list of trends includes the following: 1. Fierce competition among locally owned agribusiness firms. 2. Declining population and economic activity in rural communities. 3. Development of more consumer-oriented less commodity-oriented market channels. 4. Trends toward integrated and industrialized agricultural production.