There was a moment at a Young Agrarians farm potluck many moons ago, where I felt in my gut, “I think these are my people.” Maybe it was the unabashed way folks were chowing down on food, or the laugh lines etched into tired suntanned faces. My guess, though, is that I felt like I was among folks who, like me, were unwilling to let the big problems of the world get in the way of carving out a solution: action-oriented, spirited, and full of grit.
Fifteen years later, whether due to aching backs, low profit margins, or the looming uncertainty of the climate crisis, many of those farmers (myself included) have left farming for other pursuits.
All the while, our food system continues to crumble, and the challenges I faced as a new farmer 15 years ago now feel almost insurmountable. These challenges remain:
- Affordability of Land Ownership
- Lack of access to capital, credit, and other sources of financing
- Low profitability of the agricultural sector
- Lack of agricultural infrastructure
- Lack of security of demand, markets, or distribution channels
A few years ago, Chris Newman, a small-scale livestock producer in Virginia provocatively asserted “small family farms aren’t the answer.” His back of the napkin math showed him that if all the farmers at his local farmers market pooled the cost (market fees, labour hours, wear and tear on vehicles etc.) of going to market, it would amount to $1 million USD a year (in 2019 terms). Accuracy of the numbers aside, Newman laments that farmer and consumer attachment to the romance of farmers markets keep small- and medium-sized farms from creating (and funding) the infrastructure necessary to address the five challenges identified above. What if each farmer managing the sisyphean task of reforming the food system joined forces with other farmers and consumers to build a just and resilient food system together?
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For the past eight years, I have immersed myself in the Japanese agricultural system. Although it too faces severe challenges, it is remarkable how successfully it supports the viability of small- and medium- (read: human) scaled agriculture.
The key? The same as identified by Newman in that controversial 2019 article: co-operation. Japan is home to a vast network of federated agricultural cooperatives. Amazingly, to this day, almost all farmers in Japan are members of an agricultural cooperative which range in size from a few dozen to over 20,000 members. It is in no small part due to the co-operative infrastructure that the average farm size remains close to 5 acres, and it takes no more than 3 days for produce to go from field to grocery store shelf.
I was particularly impressed by “chokubaijo” – directly translated as “direct sales place,” but similar in feel to roadside farm stands. These were usually managed and staffed by the local cooperative, but sold products that the co-op otherwise didn’t have a market for due to being mis-shaped or an unusual cultivar. Farmers could decide at any point to drop product off at the farmstand, where there was a barcode printing machine to print labels. The stand then sells the product on consignment, with the farmer getting an alert on their phone if their product sells out. The co-op pays out the farmer at the end of the month with all of their aggregate sales.
Aside from aggregation, processing, marketing, and distribution services, co-ops also provide extension support, access to machinery and farm inputs. Many also serve as community hubs, hosting festivals and cultural activities.
Co-operatives emerge in times of need. They are enterprises that enable a group of people to accomplish a common objective by joining forces, pooling resources, and building a collective solution. There are many different types of co-ops–consumer, worker, producer–each addressing the specific gap in product or service that the group members are experiencing.
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That co-ops are often seen as difficult, time-consuming, emotionally taxing operations is understandable – many of us have never had the experience of sharing ownership of anything with anyone other than perhaps family. But these skills are not impossible to learn; indeed they would serve us in starting to tend to the fractured social ecology at the heart of so many of the crises we are facing.
In the coming months, Young Agrarians will be exploring collaboration and co-operation as solutions for the challenges presented by our current food system. The folks at Guerilla Translation, a worker co-op and founders of the DiSCo movement, say that “crisis is a killer… but also a muse.” I hope you’ll join us in getting inspired at how we can, together, be inspired to generate collective solutions to some of the greatest challenges of our time.
You can read more about my cooperative journey in this blog post from 2014!
Find co-op resources here.
This initiative is funded by the British Columbia Co-operative Association, in partnership with the Alliance for Co-operative Development.