A farmer producer organisation is a company owned by its farmer members, formed to buy inputs and sell produce collectively and capture some of the margin that goes to intermediaries.
Several hundred have been registered in Punjab under central and state promotion schemes. A minority are functioning businesses and the rest exist on paper, which is the national pattern.
The ones that work are usually in a crop that is not procured, honey, vegetables, basmati, dairy, where there is a margin to capture and a reason to organise.
In wheat and paddy there is no margin to capture, because the government buys everything at an announced price, which is why collective marketing has never taken hold in Punjab's main crops.
Punjab's cooperative sector, Milkfed and Markfed and the credit societies, is older and larger than the FPO movement and is politically captured in ways the new organisations have so far avoided.
Collective action among Punjab's farmers is extremely effective politically and has been almost absent commercially, which is a puzzle worth more attention than it gets.
The legal form is a producer company under the companies legislation, which gives it limited liability and a share structure and also an audit and filing burden that a village body with no accountant cannot carry.
Most are small and many are inactive. The ones that work have a specific product, usually a horticultural or a processed one, and somebody competent running them.
The model is meant to give a small farmer the scale to bypass the trader. In a state where the trader is also the lender, the difficulty of doing that is not organisational.