NEW ULM (AP) — When his wife, Florence, died six years ago, Mert Gustad wanted to give her the kind of funeral she’d wanted — at a cost he could afford.

That’s often out of reach in many parts of the country — but not in New Ulm, Minnesota, where the local funeral home is community owned, a sharing arrangement more common to farming than the funeral business.

About 5,000 people in this southern Minnesota city are members of the Minnesota Valley Funeral Homes & Cremation Services cooperative. Co-op members pay in a little money when they join; any year-end profit is returned to members.

Funeral director Eric Warmka said it pays dividends in more ways than one, strengthening community ties while helping keep costs in check. The funeral home has also defied industry standards: Warmka says it hasn’­t raised its prices in three years.

“We operate the exact same as any for-profit funeral home,” Warmka said. “It’s just we’re unique that if at the end of a given year, Minnesota Valley Funeral makes a profit instead of it being kept by an owner or ownership or partnership or anything along those lines, it’s given back to every family we serve that year.”

The co-op was founded by a group of residents in 1929 as a way to help provide proper, affordable burials to people in Depression-era New Ulm. For a one-time payment of $5, members could help offset the cost of funeral services, and vote on how the business should operate.

“Back then, that was more a pooling of funds to help alleviate the financial burden and that’s what we’ve stuck with for all of these 90 years,” Warmka said.

Today, it still costs $5 to become a member, Minnesota Public Radio News reported.

Once all the funeral home’s bills are paid for the year, the profits are paid out to member families that used the co-op’s services that year. The annual checks help defray the costs of a funeral, which average about $6,000 for cremation and $10,000 for a traditional service.

Since revenue varies year to year, Warmka said it’s hard to know exactly how much each family’s check will be, but he said they often range from $500 to a few thousand dollars.