San Vicente Yerba Mate Cooperative Votes to Admit Forty New Member Farms

The vote, held at the council chambers on May 23, followed three months of applications and background reviews. The forty new members bring the cooperative's total to two hundred and twelve farms, most of them in the interior valleys where yerba mate grows in the shade of native forest. Council president Martín Flores, who has overseen the cooperative for six years, said the intake reflected both the quality of the applicants and the market demand that has driven prices upward since the federal exchange shifted its trading hours in March.

But the expansion also poses a logistical puzzle. The cooperative's drying and packaging facility in San Vicente, built in 2014, was designed for a membership of one hundred and eighty farms. Processing an additional forty producers' harvest—roughly two hundred and fifty tonnes of fresh leaf per season—will require either a capital investment in new equipment or a negotiated arrangement with a second processor in the region.

Flores acknowledged the constraint in an interview after the vote. He said the council would present three options to the membership at the June general assembly: a bond issue to fund facility expansion, a revenue-sharing agreement with a processor in the interior town of Oberá, or a phased intake that would spread the new members across two seasons. The decision, he added, would rest with the membership vote, not the council alone.