This paper explores the long-run transition of collective agricultural institutions in India from credit focused cooperativism towards market-based producer entrepreneurship today. Following a historical-institutional and document analysis research methodology, it traces out institutional transformations of forms and goals of farmers collectivisation in rural India from the turn of twentieth century, to the recent surge of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs). It conceptualises four key stages - institutionalisation of co-operative credit, diversification of the co-operative’s tasks, co-operative for development post-independence, and farmer driven producer entrepreneurships today. The paper contends that FPOs constitute a form of institutional innovation: whilst retaining the basic principle of group action, they provide higher premium to Aggregation, Market Access, Professional Support, Value Addition and Enterprise Development. Current FPOs can be understood to be institutional experimentation in the context of addressing scale and market power challenges of small and marginalized farmers.