Agricultural Marketing in Small and Micro Businesses: An Integrated Approach to Infrastructural Development

Small and private subsidiary farms are important members of agricultural community. However, they still lack good infrastructure to market their products because they remain beyond the scope of state interest. The agricultural infrastructure in its present condition neither gives farmers access to co-financing nor allows them to shape the list of services they need. The research featured program documents issued by the Government of the Russian Federation that determine the development of wholesale food markets and aggregators of farm produce. The author generalized the experience of retail chains and agricultural consumer marketing cooperatives, as well as studied the cases of small rural businesses merging into marketing cooperatives in agricultural regions. The bibliographic study covered best foreign practices in shaping infrastructure for small farm produce, which were compared with Russian experience. The author also developed an abstract-logical method of establishing the interaction between stakeholders in a new system of farm produce aggregators. In this research, agricultural regions demonstrated the most acute problems in small business marketing. A good system of agricultural infrastructure supports production in all sectors of small business with growth potential. Today, small businesses are alone in organizing their own sales as wholesale distribution centers are not available to them. These centers work with small suppliers through intermediaries, i.e., aggregators. In the Kemerovo Region, an example of such aggregators is the one created on corporate principles between the Magnit retail chain and the Kalina-Malina agricultural consumer marketing cooperative. The experience demonstrated some advantages and disadvantages. The article introduces conditions for successful financial relations in commodity circulation chains in different distribution systems, including farmers, aggregators, and wholesale distribution centers. This approach reduces prices on consumer markets while increasing the efficiency of small farms.