Transcript
Speaker: So, Hawaii was annexed by the U.S. in the late 1800s. Along with colonization by a Western nation came marginalization of the traditional diet, traditional crops, traditional agricultural practices.
Speaker: The decision to start this producer co-op really grew out of necessity. We couldn't make it by ourselves as a farm. Looking at our global economic system, the concentration of wealth, concentration of power, seems to only be getting more extreme.
Speaker: And therefore, these kinds of grassroots forms of collective action are going to be increasingly important to counter it.
Speaker: We often talk about how the food system is broken, but what would it look like to build one that is better? This mini-series from Agrarian Futures reimagines a food system rooted in cooperative principles.
Speaker: What if we didn't live in a winner-takes-all economy, but one where cooperatively-owned enterprises worked in partnership with each other across the food supply chain? Through deep dives into examples on the ground, we'll chart a path from our present moment to a better food future.
Speaker: So far in this mini-series, we've looked at community-owned land and why that is important in a world where land is ever more financialized. This week, we're talking about farmer cooperatives, and in particular, an incredible farmer cooperative called Ulu Co-op in Hawaii.
Speaker: Today, Hawaii imports around 90% of its food. But it wasn't always this way. For a thousand years, the islands fed themselves. Then came colonization and the sugar and pineapple plantations, which turned all of that into an export economy, growing food for somebody else.
Speaker: The last pineapple plantation closed in 2016. and left behind degraded land, little processing infrastructure, and a population living on imported food. Which brings us to ulu, or breadfruit, a canoe crop carried across the Pacific by the first Polynesian settlers, and culturally significant to Hawaiians for generation.
Speaker: It should be the perfect staple for the islands, but for most of the last century, it has been commercially worthless. On the Agrarian Futures Podcast today, we are talking to one of the founders and current CEO, Donna Shapiro.
Speaker: In 2016, Donna and nine other farmers started Coop. Ten years on, and the Hawaii Ulu Cooperative has more than 220 farmer owners across four islands and close to 10,000 trees planted.
Speaker: Donna, welcome to the show. Thank you. Happy to be here. To get us started, i was wondering if you could set the scene a little bit about the Hawaii food system. I've read a number of places that 90% of all food is imported from the mainland. Could you talk a little bit about how that came to be and how an island that used to produce all of its own food is now so dependent on on imports from abroad? Sure. i mean, I think a big reason why we're so import dependent is globalization.
Speaker: You know, when you look at many elements of our economy, including food, it's globalized and that's not unique to Hawaii. But the other dimension that is more specific to our case is the history of colonization.
Speaker: So Hawaii was annexed by the U.S. in the late 1800s and became the 50th state in the late 1950s. But along with colonization by a Western nation came ah marginalization of the traditional diet, traditional crops, traditional agricultural practices.
Speaker: All those things that make up the food system. There was also a huge amount of Native Hawaiians dying post-contact with Europeans just because of the introduction of diseases. Traditionally, historically, you know, there was a large Hawaiian population that was farming and maintaining these robust agricultural systems that, as you said, were really abundant and also self-sufficient.
Speaker: And then over over the decades post-contact, a lot of people died and there wasn't the same labor force to maintain those systems. So, you know, it's not any one thing. It's a complicated set of events and consequences that unfolded over a couple of centuries. Yeah.
Speaker: But I will say that today there's definitely a resurgence of interest here and awareness among locals that it's really important to bring back more food self-sufficiency.
Speaker: So that's a great thing. I find that it's a good time to be involved in agriculture in Hawaii, not because it's easy or profitable, but because I feel that there is community support for it. And that goes a long way.
Speaker: That's great. And I'm really excited to get a little bit more into the food sovereignty movement and the energy around that. But you mentioned a more traditional diet and agriculture system pre-colonization. Could you sketch out like very roughly a little bit what that looked like and what were those crops? Yeah. Sure. So Hawaii didn't have any food crops that were native to the islands. All the food crops that were part of the traditional diet were actually brought here by the first human inhabitants, the Hawaiians, who sailed, you know, on voyaging canoes from Tahiti, most likely. But there were probably multiple waves of immigration from different parts of Polynesia. Hawaii is like the northernmost part of Polynesia.
Speaker: And so there were 26 crops that Hawaiians brought on their canoes, and those are now referred to as canoe crops. And so all the staple foods were on the canoes, and it included kalo or taro. That's probably the most significant.
Speaker: And breadfruit, or ulu, and that's the crop that I work with most closely, as well as sweet potato, which is uala in Hawaiian, and banana, maia in Hawaiian. Those four crops were the primary staple starches.
Speaker: There was also a variety of fruits, nuts, Resource crops, you know, that were used for building or clothing, stuff like that. There was one native, actually an endemic plant that was used to make a medicinal tea. That's called mamaki. It's in the nettle family.
Speaker: So that's the one native crop that was here, but it wasn't a food. It was used as a drink and as a medicine. That gets us to ulu, one of the original canoe crops, like you said, and also the focus of your co-op.
Speaker: Could you tell us a little bit more about ulu? What is it? What is it used for? And what is its significance culturally? Yeah. Yes. So ulu is a long-lived tree, and it's one of the only trees on Earth that produces a starchy staple food.
Speaker: It's a tree, so the food is a fruit. It's not technically, you know, a starch the way most starches are considered, you know, grains, tubers, roots.
Speaker: Those typically make up starches as we know them. This is different. It's a fruit. But it has a starchy stage, which we call mature, and then it has a ripe stage where it actually gets softer and sweeter.
Speaker: Similar to a banana, if you think about a green banana can sort of be eaten like a savory food and then a ripe banana, of course, can be eaten like a dessert. So it's sort of like that. But the tree, it's a beautiful tree, first of all. It's majestic. The leaves, they have these deep lobes to them. And depending on the variety, the leaf can take a really different shape. But in Hawaii, you'll see the leaf on clothing, bedspreads, art, earrings, jewelry. It's like a beautiful design. So that's one thing. They're beautiful trees.
Speaker: And the fruit itself looks kind of like a large dinosaur egg. It's about the size of a melon, like a really large cantaloupe or honeydew melon.
Speaker: Not sure what else to compare it with, but the pattern of the skin is also beautiful. So for those listeners who have never seen breadfruit, Google it and you will see what I mean. It's a pretty cool looking plant.
Speaker: The fruit itself, when it's mature, which is how most people eat it, it's kind of like a potato. It is sappy. So when you harvest the fruit, you need to either let it rest for a day or put it in the fridge for a day.
Speaker: Or you need to be sort of careful about how you cut it, what materials you use, because there is a sap that comes out of it. Then you can basically prepare it how you would a potato. You can steam it, boil it, bake it, fry it. And it tastes very similar to a potato in pretty much every application. But unlike a potato, it can ripen. And it can also be eaten before it gets mature, like when it's immature.
Speaker: The fruit is sort of like a spiky ball. Like imagine the size of ah of a baseball or a softball. And at that stage, you can cook it and it tastes just like an artichoke heart. And you can marinate it or pickle it. So it's an incredibly versatile food.
Speaker: Traditionally, it was one of the main staple starches, but the plant was used for other things as well. I mentioned it had latex. It has latex. And the whole plant has latex, not just the fruit, but through the trunk, even the leaves.
Speaker: And so the latex was used as a caulking for canoe building. And it was also used as like a glue to trap birds. And there's probably other uses. I've heard it was actually consumed medicinally and it helps digestive problems.
Speaker: The flowers of the tree can be burnt like a punk. And they deter mosquitoes. The wood is very lightweight and it was used to build canoes.
Speaker: Even the bark, traditional clothing was made from bark. And ulu is one of the plants that the bark was used to make clothing. So the tree is useful in you know many ways beyond food.
Speaker: But our main focus in the co-op today is food. And you mentioned earlier in the episode that today is a you know as a good time to get involved in agriculture in Hawaii, mainly because of the energy, I guess, around rediscovering or And reclaiming food sovereignty, I guess, to a certain extent.
Speaker: And obviously, ulu like, is a big part of that. Could you talk a little bit about the kind of origins of the Ulu Co-op and perhaps kind of the broader cultural educational campaign that it came out of?
Speaker: Yeah. So we talked about how Hawaii now imports 90 percent of its food and how that's the result of multiple generations of societal changes, really.
Speaker: And many of those changes not ultimately being for the best when you think about, you know, community health and environmental resilience and stuff like that. But there's another element, which is the colonization of culture and diet and familiarity and relationship. By that, I mean that Ulu has fallen out or had really fallen out of the mainstream.
Speaker: So it wasn't just that Ulu wasn't consumed. It was that people no longer had a relationship with it. Not everybody, to be sure. But the average person resident of Hawaii probably rarely consumes ulu, and that's probably true to this day. There haven't been a ton of studies into this, but there was one published, I think, in 2018 that surveyed residents' consumption of ulu, and it found that on average, Hawaii residents eat ulu three times a year. And even that average was sort of skewed upward by a small percentage of residents, mostly Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, who eat it on a regular basis. But the movement that the co-op was born out of probably started...
Speaker: in the early 2010s, if not a little bit before. and that movement really came out of Dr. Diane Ragoni's work. She's the founder of the Breadfruit Institute, which is an institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, or NTBG.
Speaker: Diane did her PhD at the University of Hawaii and ended up traveling across the world, really collecting varieties and bringing them back to Maui, to an NTBG site.
Speaker: where she established what is now the largest repository of breadfruit varieties in the world. And they have almost 200 varieties there. I got involved in the movement after i was recruited by a colleague to volunteer at a breadfruit festival in 2011.
Speaker: And prior to that, i hadn't had many experiences with breadfruit. I'd cooked it a couple times. been somewhat intrigued but didn't know a whole lot. The festival had a cooking contest, and I love to cook, so I decided to enter it.
Speaker: And that required a lot more R&D than I had ever done before in the kitchen. And that's really what hooked me. It was just the fact that this fruit, this ingredient, this food is so versatile, more than any other crop I know. So I entered the cooking contest.
Speaker: I got third place, and I was pretty committed to sticking with it. And that festival was a collaboration between the Breadfruit Institute, a local ethnobotanical garden on the Big Island, and a nonprofit.
Speaker: The next year, they had another festival, and I joined the steering committee where I ended up meeting my husband, who's a professor at UH in indigenous cropping systems. And together we started our breadfruit farm.
Speaker: And once we had the farm, we saw firsthand how hard it is for farmers, especially trying to grow an indigenous crop for which there is not really a market. And that was the reality back in 2015 when we started our farm.
Speaker: So, you know, the decision to start this producer co-op, which is a bunch of producers coming together to own a business in common, that really grew out of necessity. It was like we couldn't make it by ourselves as a farm. And our farm, by the way, is structured as a worker co-op. But on that level, that scale of a co-op wasn't going to cut it.
Speaker: Because we needed multiple farms banding together, pooling our resources, pooling our crop to have a bigger impact, you know, if we were ever going to really grow the market.
Speaker: And it's very chicken and egg. Like you need enough supply to convince people to actually buy from you. But you need enough demand to justify growing that crop. So the process of value chain development and cooperative development, it's very chicken and egg. It's I think of it almost like a ladder, you know, supply grows a little so you can grow the market a little and then demand outpaces supply and then demand and supply jumps again. and And that's kind of how it is.
Speaker: And why for you and for the original group that played a ah role in starting this co-op, was it obvious from the beginning that it needed to be a cooperative versus just a Ulu brand?
Speaker: You know, it was obvious to me because i my background is in co-ops. My both personal and professional background is in co-ops. So I tend to see the world's problems through a lens of cooperative solutions.
Speaker: Once in a while, I can't think of a cooperative solution, but usually that's what clicks for me. And I think ultimately the organizational structure that a new initiative takes on, you know, it needs to resonate with the founder.
Speaker: I don't think that the cooperative model is the right model for everybody or every group, including groups pursuing some form of collective action. The cooperative model is a very specific organizational model.
Speaker: It comes with many benefits, but it also comes with many challenges and some really real limitations. Again, i think, you know, the cooperative model has worked for us in large part because that's what makes sense to me as the founder, investing a lot of her time in in building it from the start.
Speaker: But, you know, I think it made sense to the other founding members as well. So our farm was one of the nine founding farms. And it didn't take a ton of convincing to get the other eight farms to go along with this idea. We initially assembled a group of more like 15 or maybe close to 20 farms and had a meeting. And the concept didn't resonate with everybody.
Speaker: It resonated with nine, eight if you don't count us. So that was about half the group. But for that half of the group, it made sense. And most of those founding farmers are still co-op members.
Speaker: And for you and the other eight founding members for whom this resonated with, what are the strengths that you experience in the cooperative model?
Speaker: For one, it provided a structure for us to build the value chain equitably. You know, it's very transparent. Of the founding nine, five were elected to the board.
Speaker: And then the board decided to hire me as the manager to get the project off the ground. The board sets the pay price, the crop pay price.
Speaker: And they're all farmers. So it's farmers, you know, deciding how this was going to work for themselves. It wasn't someone else dictating that for them or, as is so often the case, you know, the rest of the value chain really crunching them down and squeezing as much out of them as possible. And then even looking at the business model overall, beyond farmer pay price, the whole economics of the business model are transparent and any profits left over at the end are either reinvested in the business to grow it or redistributed back to the farmers according to patronage.
Speaker: And patronage in a producer co-op means that The relative contribution of crop that each farmer gives. And I think that felt like a very fair way to build the business and to build the industry. So I think that's a huge benefit.
Speaker: Another one is, you know, the empowerment. Like every member has an equal voice, an equal vote. no matter how big or small their operation.
Speaker: And that's empowering to feel like, okay, you're building this together and my opinion matters as much as anybody else's, even if I only have 10 trees and my neighbor has 100 trees.
Speaker: That's very empowering. Another maybe more tangible benefit is as a co-op, I think we are better positioned raise capital or appeal to even like certain landowners than individual farms are.
Speaker: We also can go to a larger customer than we could on our own and say, like look, it's not just me. There's 10 of us. We're serious. you know We have all of our fruit combined. We can make bigger commitments to you.
Speaker: So we're able to leverage all the resources that we bring to bear. to gain more traction in the market than we could by ourselves. And that was very clear to all of us from the start.
Speaker: Farmer first focus within the supply chain, along with the empowerment that comes from having a voice, is very key and in a system where like the producer is the last pretty much across the board and gets squeezed.
Speaker: We talked to a coffee cooperative called Pachamama Coffee, And same there, but you know across the coffee supply chain, like extremely extractive, globalized supply chain where like the farmer gets crushed over and over again by these large distributors and and buyers and gets paid you know five cents a pound and you know when you can organize a co-op and kind of... embed that price support and that farmer first focus to drive that price up. i mean, that's, it's, I mean, a really powerful way of building collective power for the farmer.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think it's completely critical. And, you know, just looking at our global economic system, the concentration of wealth, concentration of power seems to only be getting more extreme, you know, and therefore these kinds of grassroots forms of collective action are going to be increasingly important to counter it.
Speaker: And I want to get to the challenges as well, because I'm sure, as you mentioned, cooperatives can also be hard and maybe not the right solution for everything. But before we go there, could you talk a little bit about where the co-op is at today, number of producers and how it's organized, how farmers supply to the co-op, how do they have their voice heard, how do you run major decisions, kind of just the basics of how the the mechanics of how the co-op is working at its at its current scale? Sure. So today we have about 230 farmers across four islands. The first nine were only on Hawaii Island, where I'm based. So it's grown in membership. It's also grown geographically. Our farmers...
Speaker: Basically supply their raw crop to the co-op and are paid that, you know, farm gate price that the board sets. The board is still 100% farmers that the members elect from the general membership. In terms of how the business model works, so farmers deliver their crop, they get paid.
Speaker: The co-op processes almost all the crop we received. That was pretty much part of the original business plan. And we do that because, well, I mentioned that ulu isn't widely consumed anymore as a staple.
Speaker: And so most consumers need it a little bit value added so that at a minimum where we call it minimal processing, we're taking this, you know, five pound fruit, we're peeling it chopping it, cooking it and freezing it. And then it's really easy for people to cook with at home.
Speaker: Or schools, cafeterias, you know, restaurants, even hospitals, all kinds of different users. They really appreciate having this indigenous staple in just a more convenient form. So that's most of what we do.
Speaker: We do some further value-added processing. We make a gluten-free flour out of it and a pancake mix and some ready-to-eat foods. But the other reason why value-adding is key is that ulu has a very low shelf life.
Speaker: So back to the fact that it's a fruit and not a grain or, you know, a tuber, it actually will start to ripen within sometimes 24 hours, depending on the temperature outside and if there's no refrigeration.
Speaker: and then it it could start to rot within a few days on your counter. So being able to capture the fruit in that like perfect form and get it shelf stable, either frozen or dried, is really important. And so the co-op has invested in building its own processing infrastructure where we have cold storage, you know, the machinery, basically agricultural processing factories.
Speaker: And we have two of them on Hawaii Island and then on the other islands where we have members. We partner with other organizations that have commercial kitchens. So everything pretty much gets processed.
Speaker: From there, it's distributed out. I think, you know, our biggest customers right now are ah everyone is in Hawaii. All of our crop stays here. That's part of our sort of value-based decision-making that like Hawaii imports the vast majority of its staple food. We really shouldn't be exporting the little bit of staple foods that we grow.
Speaker: So it all stays here. Most of it is going to institutions or food service. also local manufacturers who are using our product as an ingredient for something further value added.
Speaker: But it also ends up in grocery stores. We do a little bit of direct sale. Mostly we do wholesale. And then, as I mentioned before, you know anything left over at the end of the year is either being reinvested to help scale the business because our volumes have been growing significantly year after year. You can imagine that must be the case since membership has grown so much. But tree count has also grown a lot from about 2,000 to 10,000 trees in the ground.
Speaker: They're not all freeing yet. So over the next five to 10 years, our volumes will continue to increase a lot. And it's taken a lot of investment to just keep up with that growth. And on the market side, as you mentioned, Ulu, you know, it it's kind of fallen out of favor, I guess, unfortunately, due to colonization and kind of just the eradication of kind of like local cultural context. How did you guys go about building out basically like a new market that no longer existed?
Speaker: Yeah, so we do a lot of education for all segments of the population. You know, we do education for chefs, education for cafeteria staff, education for home consumers.
Speaker: We focused a lot on youth, thinking that, you know, if you don't grow up eating something, you're much less likely to adopt it later. But if you have this relationship with a crop and you like it from a young age, it's like a part of what you're used to.
Speaker: So starting young and integrating education with tastings has been a big part of our approach. So that's one. You know, all marketing is basically education starting from square one.
Speaker: And one of the ways we've gone about that, which has been effective, is partnering with Well, we have we call it Ulu ambassadors, but we you know, there are other people out there who are very passionate about Ulu. Again, the co-op was the product of an initiative and a movement that started before we existed.
Speaker: And so there are a lot of people in the community that are really passionate about Ulu and we partner with them as much as possible. Many of them are chefs. Some of them are teachers, community leaders, cultural practitioners.
Speaker: And so we're not doing it by ourselves. We are doing it in in community with others who feel the same way as us and want to get the word out. And I think that's been really effective.
Speaker: Those are the main things. Obviously, persistence is important. Just knocking on doors, not accepting no, giving away a lot of free samples. But, you know, that first year when the co-op was formed, and the next week we had fruit.
Speaker: My main job was like I was like an ulu peddler. You know, I would go from store to store, restaurant to restaurant, cold calls, just, oh, you know, we're a startup organization. co-op would you like to try some ulu we're processing it and just every little chance we got you know delivering a sample talking to the chef seeing how we could put it on the menu so a lot of persistence and not giving up and one of your major wins a few years in was to get into the public school system how is that going today
Speaker: Yes. The way it started was back in 20, want to say maybe 16, 17, DOE had an an initiative and they were very intentionally trying to find more local products to serve in cafeterias.
Speaker: And the way the school system was going about it, and I should preface this by explaining that Hawaii's public schools are a single school district. So I think it's actually one of the largest school districts in the country, even though Hawaii is a really tiny state. We only have like 1.2 million people.
Speaker: Their menu planning and logistics are quite complicated because there's, you know, six different islands to serve and very rural schools and and urban schools. We ended up getting a USDA Farm to School grant in 2018, and the Department of Education happened to get the same grant the same year.
Speaker: And that program required all grantees to attend a conference together in Detroit, Michigan for like three days. And so it was quite difficult to like really strategize with DOE until we were stuck in Detroit together.
Speaker: And then we were sort of forced to sit down at the table and really get to know each other and understand, OK, what do you need? What can we supply? And at that conference in Detroit, we were able to make a list of like, OK, in addition to ULU, what other crops do our farmers grow that schools could use?
Speaker: And we identified three other crops in addition to ULU. And that was the start of our co-crop program, which is now super significant for the co-op and our farmers, where we don't only buy ULU, but we buy a whole suite of other crops that That really kicked off thanks to the relationship with DOE. It's important for our farmers because they're diversified, right? They're not monocropping ulu and we wouldn't want them to.
Speaker: But the relationship with DOE ended very abruptly with the pandemic. Schools moved to grab-and-go menu. The whole local food thing went out the door. And then between 2020 and twenty twenty three twenty four there was a lot of turnover and turbulence with the department in terms of personnel and leadership and infighting and stuff like that. And so there was no local purchasing for, you know, a good four years.
Speaker: And then, thankfully, there's very supportive leadership back in place. And the initiative has been revived under a different name, but it is back on track. And Hawaii State actually passed a law in 20, I think this was in 2018, called Act 175 that requires the department to spend 30% of their budget on local food by 2030. So they're trying really hard to get there.
Speaker: And so, yeah, we we are supplying them again in a actually much more, i think, like effective way than we were before. It's more integrated with educational initiatives.
Speaker: There's a lot more dialogue and open, like strategizing together how to make it work. It's still not a perfect fit. We need to grow to meet their demands still.
Speaker: They need to figure out how to project their needs better, more accurately with, you know, farther in advance and stuff so local farmers can plan and plant accordingly.
Speaker: But I think it's a really constructive relationship. So we're excited to buy about it. And, you know, from a mission standpoint, it's it's critical, again, to feed these crops to kids from an early age. And also the ability to get it in front of people of all economic classes, because often, you know, the local food movement, at least in the mainland, can unfortunately remain something that's only accessible to people that have a higher income. And so to get it in front of, you know, everyone publicly funded is obviously and incredible opportunity and alignment with values and mission.
Speaker: 100% true here as well. And we get that feedback from teachers. Sometimes they'll write to us and say, our kids would have never tasted this. You know, like this is the only place that they're experiencing these foods. So that's really awesome.
Speaker: And obviously, i mean, you guys have grown a lot and had, you know, some incredible wins. I imagine there's also been very difficult times and and difficult challenges. You mentioned one during COVID, which I'm sure was very, very challenging.
Speaker: I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about maybe some challenges that you had or still have, and especially ones that might relate to the cooperative model itself. That might be, you know, the challenges that come along with the strengths of the the cooperative model.
Speaker: One big challenge is capitalization. In Hawaii, most funders and banks don't know a lot about co-ops and aren't very comfortable financing co-ops.
Speaker: So that's a big challenge, you know, finding aligned funders that understand what we're trying to do and how the model works. You know, the model is kind of a hybrid between a nonprofit and a for-profit because we're never a going to exit, right? We're never going to go like we're never going to be sold. We're going to remain community-owned forever.
Speaker: Otherwise, we wouldn't be a farmer co-op. Secondly, a lot of the profits, most of the profits are going to go back to farmers. So there's just not a lot of extra profit for investors to get, you know, a 10x return.
Speaker: And so, again, just finding the right partners to help us grow is a challenge. There's not that many funders out there like that. I'm sure you know that very well, Emma.
Speaker: It's really your hyper sort of impact focused and oriented funder that's going to get it. And so that's one thing. Another challenge is, well, we talked about the equity in the co-op, not the capital, but that sort of egalitarian principle behind one member, one vote, no matter how big you are.
Speaker: Sometimes big farmers don't like that. And so I think, again, finding members who are aligned to the mission, that is tricky. And we've incorporated over the years different guardrails and procedures to help us vet new members and policies to make sure that if we do admit a bad apple, which has happened, you know, how do we keep them from spoiling the bunch? It's really important.
Speaker: And usually if there is just a total misfit in in terms of a member that comes on board, they will leave, you know, they will leave of their own accord, which is the best way that that could happen.
Speaker: But that that has happened and it has been very difficult, you know, to deal with it. So those are a couple of the examples. Another one that I think people would mention is the additional bureaucracy that comes with a co-op.
Speaker: There's a whole administrative side to the business that you wouldn't need if you don't. weren't structured as a co-op in terms of managing your members' equity and dues and all their information, you know, communicating to them, having a board made up of farmers, not professional board members. You know, it takes a lot more admin, training, communication, all those things I think some people would say that's a challenge or a downside. I actually think it's more of a positive than a negative because it fosters a community-oriented way of making decisions and of like assessing how we make decisions. One of our mentors over the years was from Organic Valley, the large dairy co-op in Wisconsin, and they have a saying.
Speaker: It's like, we or us are always smarter than, you know, me or i And I really believe that, that when you have group decision-making, obviously you need the right people in the group. But I think when you have group decision-making and group problem-solving, you arrive at better solutions.
Speaker: And so it does take more effort. it costs more. It takes more time. But I think at the end of the day, we actually get to a better place. That's incredible.
Speaker: And to finish off the conversation as a final question, Obviously, I think you and us also, we don't necessarily believe in like scale at all costs, but we do believe in replicability and thinking about how the cooperative model could be applied in other places and other contexts. From you know your experience with ULU Co-op, thinking about you know what that could look like if others took that model and applied it to their contexts, what would you tell people that are thinking about food systems in their place? And, you know, what would a food system that had more Ulu co-ops look like?
Speaker: Good question. Well, I think that one of the recipe... tips for a successful co-op is both bottom-up and top-down support at the same time and in the same place, which is sort of a unique circumstance. The ingredients aren't always there from both sides to meet at once.
Speaker: And what I mean by that is co-ops get initiated by different stakeholders. Sometimes The concept for a co-op, the the first spark of an idea will actually come from, you know, a nonprofit that's doing rural development or a legislator or, you know, someone working at the county or city level who sees the economic development opportunity.
Speaker: I would consider that top down. That can work for a spark. But if that idea isn't met with community interest or understanding, then it's not going to work, right? It's going to fall flat. They can invest plenty of resources in it and it's not really going to get off the ground. Likewise, there can be the initiative for a co-op just from grassroots community members.
Speaker: But if there's no institutional support, it can also have a really hard time getting off the ground. Maybe there's just no funding opportunities out there. Maybe there's no, you know, landlords that will lease to them or land owners willing to sell them a farm because they're not supportive of the model.
Speaker: So I think you do need some institutional support and you definitely need some grassroots level of understanding and initiative. And those things have to meet at the same time and place.
Speaker: And that was true for us. And I think in most cases where co-ops have succeeded and really made it over the long term, that was happening when they started. I know it was true for Organic Valley as well. You know, in the late 80s when they started, there was an organic movement among dairy farmers and there was some funding available, some other nonprofits or government agencies willing to incubate them for a while and and look where they are now. They have They're like a $2 billion dollars business with 2,000 members across the world. So co-ops do take more investment to get off the ground than normal businesses because they're harder to do.
Speaker: But if they're successful, they have a much bigger impact. Because they are community based and inherently not only focused on profit, they're focused on a triple bottom line and, you know, making sure that the people responsible for creating the good or service benefit from the success of the industry over time and therefore can keep it going. And if they're successful, they're probably also more resilient over time.
Speaker: Donna, thank you so much for your time. was incredible conversation. There's so many more questions I could ask you, but you have a co-op to run. And I know it's also the 10-year celebration coming up soon. So I'm sure you're incredibly busy.
Speaker: so we'll have to leave it there for now. But... Yeah, I just wanted to say a big thank you. I i really enjoyed this conversation. think our listeners will as well. So it's been really, really great to hear more about the Uluquot model and what it shows as an example for a better food system more broadly.
Speaker: Thanks, Emma. Great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
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