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Building Collective Power in the Rural South with Terence Courtney image

Building Collective Power in the Rural South with Terence Courtney

S2 E7 · Agrarian Futures
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Across the south, generations of Black farmers and business owners have faced losing not just their land, but their livelihoods - pushed out by discriminatory lending, land theft, and the consolidation of power. Yet from that struggle has grown something powerful: a movement rooted in cooperation, where farmers pool their resources, share their knowledge, and build wealth together instead of competing for survival.

That spirit of collective power is what drives the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, where Terence Courtney works to support Black-owned farms and rural businesses through education, advocacy, and cooperative enterprise. The Federation’s model flips the extractive script of traditional capitalism, proving that shared ownership and community investment are sound economic strategies.

In this episode, we dive into:

  • The long history of Black cooperative movements in the South.
  • How cooperative models help farmers build wealth and autonomy in the face of systemic discrimination.
  • Why collective economics is key to sustaining rural communities.
  • The Federation’s approach to balancing profitability with community values.
  • How policy and history continue to shape access to land and opportunity.
  • What true self-determination looks like in agriculture.

More about Terence and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives:

Terence Courtney began organizing with the Service Employees International Union to improve economic conditions for working people. He led union campaigns and later became the union’s statewide representative in Georgia. He’s co-founded and led coalitions such as Atlanta Jobs with Justice and a community group focused on the public sector called the Atlanta Public Sector Alliance.

Expanding from a city to a regional focus, Terence organized US born and foreign born (immigrants) of African descent to educate and raise consciousness about immigrant rights and mass incarceration from a Black Diasporic perspective for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. He co-developed the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy and served as the Director of Organizing overseeing campaigns against school privatization, as well as its spin off project: Cooperative Atlanta. Currently Terence serves as the Director of Cooperative Development & Strategic Initiatives for theFFederation of Southern Cooperatives

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

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Transcript

The Role of Cooperatives in Community Wealth

00:00:03
Speaker
economic power comes from and is embedded in our collective capacity. The current economic system, one person just can't hope to overcome.
00:00:16
Speaker
So in many respects, cooperatives are a helpful tool to disabuse us of false consciousness and fantasies. and to help us realize that in the real world, you know, we're going to have to work together and build collective prosperity, community wealth and collective wealth.
00:00:36
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:48
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.

Interview with Terrence Courtney on Cooperative Development

00:01:03
Speaker
So I'm super excited to be interviewing Terrence Courtney today for the Agrarian Futures podcast. Terrence Courtney is Director of Cooperative Development and Strategic Initiatives at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which was founded in 1967 to support black farmers, landowners and cooperatives in the southern United States.
00:01:23
Speaker
So welcome Terrence to the podcast. To start it off, I would love to talk a little bit about cooperatives. Cooperatives have long been a tool for building self-sufficient, resilient communities, especially in the South.
00:01:34
Speaker
Can you paint a picture of what cooperatives look like today? Why you think the cooperative model still matters, maybe even more than ever before?

Funding Challenges for Community Organizations

00:01:44
Speaker
For me personally, i got involved with cooperatives more than 11 years ago, back in 2013, 2014. And it it really came out of an interest that I had for the work I was doing.
00:01:57
Speaker
at that time, i was leading organizations here in Atlanta, community-based organizations. that were interested and bringing together, organizing local folks around issues that they cared about.
00:02:11
Speaker
And we kept running into ah big challenge, how to resource these activities, how to support the work. of regular everyday working class Black and brown people who wanted to improve their community or their society.
00:02:27
Speaker
The challenge was finding the resources to do that. People would pool their resources and we had some successes. But by and large, the way most people would go about trying to fund a project like that is is' by setting up a 501 and trying to to raise money.
00:02:47
Speaker
And what we found is that the giving for the work that we were trying to do was very minimal. And oftentimes the funding for the work pitted organizations against one another in in sort of a competitive process.
00:03:01
Speaker
Myself and other folks here in Atlanta thought that was less than ideal. So we started to think about other organizational models to help working class black and brown folks gain economic power.
00:03:15
Speaker
And we settled on cooperatives.

Cooperatives as a Business Model for Oppressed Communities

00:03:17
Speaker
And it was really simple in a way, because one, cooperatives are a form of organization, and people who are oppressed by various conditions like white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, need to be organized in their efforts to overcome something so systemic and institutional.
00:03:37
Speaker
But the second thing that really interested myself and a group of others was the fact that co-ops were businesses, that if you assembled them correctly and if you had a good business model and it was meeting the needs of the community in which it was situated, then there was a chance for success.
00:03:59
Speaker
And moreover, an opportunity to create a self-sustaining source of economic viability and economic funding. So we thought, wow, cooperatives is something that we really need to delve more into.
00:04:13
Speaker
The unfortunate thing about cooperatives is that they are somewhat known, but not well known. Even here in Atlanta, we have cooperative grocery stores, but no one really knows how they work unless you're involved.
00:04:27
Speaker
So the knowledge about cooperatives was not common. So what I did is I brought together progressive folks in Atlanta, folks who were also interested in economic empowerment for working class Black and brown folks.
00:04:43
Speaker
And we came together and we started a study group. And that study group looked cooperatives and we really educated ourselves. We communicated with other folks throughout the nation who were interested in cooperatives.
00:04:57
Speaker
And one of the great fortuitous things that happened was, you know, one of the people who joined the study group, her name was Heather Gray. She happened to be the director of communications for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.
00:05:13
Speaker
And she made that connection for us. She said, you know, the things you're studying, the things you're doing, you know, cooperative buying and whatnot. Those are things that the Federation of Southern Cooperatives does, which I guess it was very enlightening for me personally, because I had never heard of the Federation up to that point.
00:05:33
Speaker
And through Heather, I got to learn more. got to meet the executive director, Cornelius Blanding. For the next three to four years, I just followed the progress of the Federation and tried to attend events and and just stayed close.
00:05:48
Speaker
So back in 2018, because of the relationship I had developed, there came an opportunity from the Federation. They were looking for someone to kind of help kind of consolidate a lot of their regional ambitions around cooperative development.
00:06:03
Speaker
And i was asked to join the team. And I jumped at the opportunity because, know, I had been following the Federation. I was seeing the work that it was doing. And i was really interested in the fact that the Federation, you know, focuses on rural communities and rural black folks and brown folks in particular.
00:06:23
Speaker
I thought that was interesting because even as bad as conditions can be in the urban setting, for working class communities of color. In a rural setting, things can be even more extreme and dire.
00:06:36
Speaker
And that's on any metric you want to look at poverty, unemployment, you know incarceration rates, all of those things are quite a bit more extreme in rural communities.
00:06:49
Speaker
So I was really intrigued because the work they were doing was really fulfilling a need and and attempting to fill gaps that weren't being met by the public or the private sector.

Barriers to Cooperative Development

00:07:01
Speaker
So joined the team in 2018 and since then, seven years later, I've grown even more committed to the work that the Federation does. And so the landscape out there is one, just broadly speaking, most people don't know about the co-op option, right?
00:07:21
Speaker
They don't know there's an opportunity for them to come together and work with others to build an organization that they own and control that can generate resources from themselves. That's ah one of the unfortunate realities. There aren't a lot of universities or schools here in the U.S. who intentionally and outwardly teach about cooperative development and cooperative businesses.
00:07:46
Speaker
So the landscape out there is is one is, I would say, a large degree of ignorance about the co-op option. But then even here in the South, for those who are interested in developing cooperatives, there are some barriers.
00:08:01
Speaker
The first barrier I'll describe is is structural, and that is to say that throughout the South, there is a highly uneven landscape of cooperative laws.
00:08:13
Speaker
From state to state, they differ. They can differ dramatically. But most frequently, they are narrow in their scope.
00:08:23
Speaker
Most of the cooperative legislation here in the South really is built around agriculture. So most of the co-ops that you can build from a legal point of view are narrowly defined. They really focus on agriculture.
00:08:40
Speaker
And some of them actually, you know, kind of demand that the co-op be a nonprofit. Those things are challenges because people are interested in developing businesses in more than one sector.
00:08:53
Speaker
There are folks interested in manufacturing. There are folks interested solar panel installations. There are all kinds of business ideas that people have that don't fall within that category of agriculture.
00:09:09
Speaker
That's somewhat limiting for most people. Now, for the Federation, it's not as big as a problem because our history and our membership is rooted in agriculture.
00:09:19
Speaker
It's rooted with Black farmers and landowners. Most often, we can take advantage of that. But that's not the totality of who we represent or who we want to represent.
00:09:30
Speaker
You know, we work with folks in urban spaces as well. And we even in rural areas, people are interested in different types of businesses that don't fit within that narrow scope that these laws have. And as I said, from state to state, even those can be uneven.
00:09:47
Speaker
So that's a big barrier and we're working to fix that. What we would love to see and what we work toward is something we call universal enabling legislation where co-op laws would be robust, supported throughout the South in many respects, like what you might see in New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
00:10:06
Speaker
So one is lack of knowledge, two, these structural barriers. And I would say the third challenge is a kind of a growing disinterest among Black folks, at least, in agriculture.
00:10:20
Speaker
One, because of the, ah guess, the stereotype that comes along with that, which invokes a picture of enslavement in many people's minds. And so many Black folks are disinterested in that because it reminds them of a past that they don't want to really relive.
00:10:39
Speaker
But once you get into Black farming and meet actual Black farmers, then a lot of those stereotypes are really kind of discarded because most Black farmers that I've met are some of the most intelligent people you'll encounter.
00:10:55
Speaker
They're often polymaths. And they have to be. They have to have knowledge of soil chemistry. They have to have knowledge of weather. They have to keep their books and account for their finances.
00:11:09
Speaker
They have to understand how seeds grow and how animals grow. So there's a level of biological knowledge that they have. and even to certain degree chemistry. So I really respect black farmers. They are some of the most capable people you can meet and they they are nothing like any kind of stereotype one might imagine, but you have to actually be in the environment and meet them.
00:11:33
Speaker
Nonetheless, even among their children, there's a growing disinterest. Though many farmers can be successful, it's extremely challenging. There are some hurdles even as an individual farmer.
00:11:45
Speaker
And young folks sometimes look for easier life, one that is less dependent on good fortune and good weather. So those are some of the challenges to cooperative development because that is the foundation for our cooperatives, members and and farmers.
00:12:03
Speaker
And we're working to overcome those. And I can talk a little bit about that if you want. Yeah, and and we'll get later in the interview to talking a little bit more about what does it look like today to be a black farmer and in the South. But before we go there, to outline to the listener that might not be familiar with what a cooperative is, like you alluded to, you have different forms of cooperatives. You have consumer, worker, and farmer, the one that we're really talking about today. But it's basically a business, effectively, that unlike a traditional business where you have a owner or
00:12:38
Speaker
a group of owners that are technically, at least speaking, profit maximizing. In a cooperative, you have the stakeholders, in this case, the consumers, in the case of a grocery co-op, or the farmers, in the case of a farmer co-op, that are the owners and decision makers of the business. By making the main recipients of the business, the owners and decision-making powers, you're kind of aligning the economic trajectory with their goals and their needs.
00:13:07
Speaker
Well, absolutely. i mean, for the Federation, all conversations around cooperative development start with asking, what is the need? We don't start with how we can make money or profit, though we want our cooperatives to generate surpluses and be successful.
00:13:25
Speaker
It's really about meeting a human need that we've identified. So that makes them different from traditional businesses, because, you know, as you mentioned, you know, often they're owned by investors, people who don't actually need what the business produces, but use it as a means to generate more profit.
00:13:45
Speaker
Whereas on the co-op side, we're we're really interested in meeting a need, as you mentioned, you know with our producer co-op, right? It's really about helping farmers go from growing something by themselves to aggregating with dozens of others.
00:13:59
Speaker
to increase volume, right? And then you can engage in economies of scale and you can have better access to various markets. Or, you know, some people join cooperatives to lower input costs, right? As an individual farmer, you will find that the input cost per unit is higher than if you were to pool your resources with others, right? So you can lower your costs and all of these things can increase the personal incomes of the members, but also the collective economic power of a cooperative in its community.
00:14:35
Speaker
So quite a bit of ah advantages, but, you know, people have to understand that at the end of the day, we do treat it as a business. So we we want to have a strong business model. We want to meet a need, which is a demand out there.
00:14:50
Speaker
And from there, we try to build something that's very self-sustaining and long-term. And despite the fact that most people don't know what a cooperative is today, it has a long history in general, especially among farmers, but particularly in the black community.

Historical Roots and Challenges in Black Land Ownership

00:15:09
Speaker
I'd be curious to hear if through the the study group that you you mentioned joining to learn ah more about cooperatives and its history, whether you could touch a little bit on its history and in particular, it's how it intersects with the traditions of mutual aid in black rural communities.
00:15:26
Speaker
I mean, arguably, cooperative economics goes back hundreds of years. People certainly in Britain and Europe were interested in cooperative. But I would say even in African communities, right, there are examples of collectivism.
00:15:42
Speaker
And most certainly here, once Black folks were brought to the United States as enslaved labor, mutual aid became something of a necessity when you're living in a deprived condition, often in areas of ah violence and intimidation, your chances of survival and prosperity are locked to your ability to work with others.
00:16:09
Speaker
And in fact, that's that's really kind of the history of the Federation. We started in 67, as you said, but it wasn't something that, you know, happened magically. It really was...
00:16:21
Speaker
young organizers, civil rights workers who went into Black and brown communities in rural United States and encountered, at least in the Federation example, Black landowners and farmers who were already working together.
00:16:38
Speaker
You could call what they were doing sort of proto-coops mutual aid. Nonetheless, they were pooling their resources, lowering costs, buying in bulk,
00:16:50
Speaker
distributing, right? And what I think those young organizers from organizations like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and and CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality, is they help them organize that on a broader scale.
00:17:05
Speaker
So in 67, 22 co-ops from throughout the South, 13 states came to Atlanta and said, we want to form a federation of co-ops, a co-op of cooperatives, a second tier co-op to help us build on what we started.
00:17:23
Speaker
And so that. 57 years later, we now represent more than 70 co-ops, most of them still agriculturally based, but thriving. And I'd like to say that would not have occurred, in my opinion, but for the kind of regional organization that we've been able to build and living one of the co-op principles, and that's co-ops cooperating with one another.
00:17:50
Speaker
So I think that has been one of the the secrets to the the history of success in the black community with cooperatives. I think the Federation just represents one aspect of that. But, you know, the history of cooperating is long in the United States. And I would say it has sharpened and perhaps accelerated in the last 60 years as organizations like the Federation and others have gotten out there and kind of spread the word about the co-op options.
00:18:19
Speaker
And so the Federation of Southern co-ops is a co-op of co-ops, like you said, ah a federated model that represents many cooperatives across the South. You guys do cooperative economic development, like you mentioned, advocacy, and also land retention.
00:18:36
Speaker
I would love to go to that final piece for a second. Black land ownership peaked in 1910 with about million and held by about 280,000 farmers.
00:18:47
Speaker
Today it's closer to 2 million acres and under 18,000 farmers might be even lower now, because that data is probably a little bit outdated. What are the key drivers of this decline?
00:18:58
Speaker
That's one of the key missions of the Federation. I mean, when we started in 67, as I mentioned, what the impetus was, was really civil rights and human rights.
00:19:10
Speaker
These civil rights workers were really interested in connecting with folks, in particular landowners, to participate in civil rights work. Why landowners?
00:19:22
Speaker
they had a higher degree of freedom than, say, a sharecropper. Since they owned the land on which they farm, the reprisals were mitigated. The landowner couldn't throw them off the land and impoverish them. So they had a higher degree of ability to participate. But what was found is that As you mentioned, ah since 1910, 12 and a half million acres have been lost. Nearly 90 percent of the holdings black folks once had.
00:19:50
Speaker
mean, think about that. Fifteen million is around 14 percent of all the land, U.S. farmland at that time. So which is representative roughly of the black population as a percentage of the total U.S. s back then.
00:20:04
Speaker
Exactly. So, you know, that land loss was not accidental. As you may know, the Federation was one of the leading plaintiffs in the Pickford versus Glickman lawsuit that really exposed USDA practices that were discriminatory in terms of providing support for Black farmers in terms of loans and other supports.
00:20:26
Speaker
But also, let's not forget this 1910 through the 60s was the height of the Jim Crow era. So racialized violence and intimidation was another factor. i mean, people were simply run off their lands.
00:20:40
Speaker
not to mention other exploited measures by speculat land speculators, buyers, developers. And then the unfortunate other aspect of this is just not enough education in our community about issues like heirs, property, wills and and estate plans. So A lot of factors went into the land loss, most of which were external, right? And most of which were highly unjust in what took place.
00:21:08
Speaker
So here we are, you know, with, as you mentioned, about two and a half million acres left with, you know, fewer and fewer Black farmers. And for us, it was that recognition that got us into this land retention work.
00:21:22
Speaker
You know, the question we ask is how do we mitigate this loss? And I argue that since we began in 67, the work that we've been able to do has really had an impact.
00:21:32
Speaker
I would say that the two and a half million acres we have today is here in large part due to the efforts of organizations like the Federation. working directly with families to help them develop wills and estate plans.
00:21:47
Speaker
But we've also worked to do advocacy. As I mentioned, you know, that Pigford lawsuit where we actually took on the USDA and won the largest civil rights settlement in history because we actually exposed decades of systemic discrimination.
00:22:04
Speaker
But then the work doesn't stop there. You know, we're starting to work with landowners who say, you know, My heirs, my children, want you they don't want a farm. They don't want the land.
00:22:15
Speaker
ah So we're starting to work with folks to think about ah cooperative trust that they can start to you know hold the land in and that we can then help black farmers with, right? By providing them with access. So we have several strategies, but it was really inspired by what you described, this recognition of of a systemic attack on black land ownership.
00:22:37
Speaker
you know We think that what we've been able to do is is slow the tide But lot more work is needed, especially if we're going to ever reverse what's taking place.
00:22:48
Speaker
And I think that if you talk about land consolidation, that's a trend that's true throughout the United States among all farmers, but something that is particularly extreme among black farmers for the reasons that you mentioned, and in particular, the kind of legal discrimination that has happened, as well as kind of issues around the heirs, property laws, and other issues there.
00:23:11
Speaker
In preparation for this interview, I relistened yesterday, the two episodes on discrimination, by agricultural banks of black farmers in the in the series 1619. Are you familiar with that?
00:23:23
Speaker
no i The New York Times did a six-part series called 1619 on a snippet of the legacy of Black culture in the United States. And and they have two episodes that talk about discrimination against Black farmers and namely their inability to get loans to plant their crops.
00:23:42
Speaker
There was a few large lawsuits that basically unveiled that there had been kind of this like blatant drive to basically marginalize Black farmers by preventing them from getting the loans that they needed to get the inputs and be able to plant.
00:23:55
Speaker
Last year, you know, we were one of the organizations involved in a program called the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. It was a again, a USDA program that we really had to put pressure on them to to implement.
00:24:13
Speaker
The idea behind it was to recognize exactly what you just said, that decades of of systematic discrimination in the area of loans and and other supports had to be confronted.
00:24:27
Speaker
What we were able to do was put pressure on the USDA to create a ah short-term program. Unfortunately, was short-term. But what it did was it compensated some farmers for their losses. I don't know the exact numbers right now, but tens of thousands of farmers were able to participate in this program, some winning awards of up to $200,000.
00:24:50
Speaker
These are still meager sums when you really think about the extent and depth of the loss, but the program itself is a recognition of past harm. And I think that's an indication that, you know, what we're talking about really occurred. These are facts and that, you know, it takes organizations like the Federation's groups of people to even bring pressure to get some kind of meager kind of compensation.
00:25:17
Speaker
And the work continues. We want to continue to spread the word about cooperatives. We want to build our capacity and and bring more landowners into this conversation. It's our belief that the more voices that are out there talking about this work, putting pressure on decision makers, I think the more results we'll get.
00:25:38
Speaker
And could you paint for someone that isn't intimately familiar with the agricultural situation in the South? What does it look like today to be a black farmer in one of those states?
00:25:49
Speaker
Well, the average black farmer today is in their 60s. So in many respects, we have something an existential crisis in our community because there isn't a ready-made pipeline of young folks coming behind them to do this farming work. As I mentioned, there's a growing disinterest among young people for doing this work.
00:26:12
Speaker
But it's complicated by this that oftentimes what we're seeing is the the children of farmers are those who are disinterested. but there are growing number of urban working class Black folks who are growing more interested in agriculture.
00:26:31
Speaker
The irony for them is they are often landless, right? So those people who have access to land, they are growing less interested in farming and those without it are growing more.

Difficulties Faced by Black Farmers and Cooperative Solutions

00:26:46
Speaker
So there's a ah big gap that we're we're trying to bring together.
00:26:52
Speaker
But be that as it may, 60s is the average age. there They're aging out. Also, you know, in today's economy for an individual small family farm, you really are competing against giants.
00:27:07
Speaker
Big agricultural corporations and companies really dominate our food landscape. You know, 90% of the farms in the United States are small family farmers, but that's less than 10% of the food that gets to our table.
00:27:23
Speaker
Most of the food that gets our table comes from big ag. So some small old family farmers have a difficult time with market access because they just don't, as an individual, operate with the kind of volume that would raise the interest of a grocery store or or school system.
00:27:41
Speaker
So they are burdened by high input costs per unit. As I mentioned, they're burdened by a lack of real infrastructure oftentimes and and modern equipment.
00:27:53
Speaker
By all accounts, you know, most of them are looking at operating profit margins of less than 10 percent, and that can put them jeopardy of losing that business. So they deal with this. And then now we're talking about tariffs.
00:28:08
Speaker
Now we're talking about more inflated costs for seeds and other things. And so you combine all those factors and it's it's a ah big challenge for the small family farmer.
00:28:19
Speaker
And again, that in some ways is why the young folks are becoming more disinterested because they see this and they don't want that life for themselves. And so that's why we try as much as we can to introduce the idea of a cooperative. We try to spread the words. We do ah social media.
00:28:38
Speaker
We do outreach. We try to help these individual farmers who are often struggling to understand that if they work with other farmers, collectivize their health, then their profit margins can go up, their personal incomes can go up, the sustainability of their farms can go up.
00:28:57
Speaker
I mean, here at the Federation, we're investing 700,000 in infrastructure for our cooperatives, right? That's going to be shared infrastructure for these farmers. We're helping them to lower input costs collectively right by buying in wholesale and buying in bulk.
00:29:13
Speaker
And then aggregating what they grow or raise actually helps them compete in these larger markets. So for the individual farmer, it's tough. For the small family farmer, I'm talking about people with 10 acres or less, really their their main hope for success is to collectivize and work together and form cooperatives.
00:29:34
Speaker
And we're talking here predominantly cotton, sugarcane, corn, like large row crops. We're not even talking about that. A lot of the co-ops, a lot of the farmers that we deal with, very few are into the cotton. Because that that takes a lot of land, a lot of land to grow cotton.
00:29:55
Speaker
Yeah, most of our people are vegetable growers. Some do row crops. A lot of them are ranchers. They raise animals, cattle. goats, pigs, sheep.
00:30:08
Speaker
So it's a mix, but I would say the majority of our folks are vegetable growers. We do have some people who do pecans. I'm working with some cooperatives in Texas who are doing cattle and even some fishermen.
00:30:23
Speaker
But by and large, it's mostly vegetable crops. Now, having said that, there are some soy farmers and some cotton farmers, but they're not the majority.
00:30:36
Speaker
Those products, those commodities are pretty in intense and take a lot of land. And could you maybe give an example of a cooperative that you're working with today that really illustrates its potential by what it's able to deliver for farmers?
00:30:51
Speaker
There's one cooperative I'm really excited about. I'll talk about that one. Maybe more will come to mind. But I may have mentioned just now kind of the cattle co-op in Texas. This co-op is made up of five families, cattle, ranchers.
00:31:07
Speaker
And they were already growing animals. But what we were able to do with their co-op was help them work together and to start to raise the same type of cattle along the same schedules.
00:31:20
Speaker
And that by itself has helped them aggregate their, guess, production. And they are now have contracts where they're providing calves to various outlets.
00:31:33
Speaker
And that has created a really sustainable process for this co-op. It's called AgriUnity Texas. But they don't want to stop there. What's really exciting is what they want to do beyond that. And and we're working with them to do that is they want to get into meat processing.
00:31:51
Speaker
And this will be an opportunity for them to not just raise cattle, but now they can move into processing of different meats, that they can then create what we call a value-added product that will be something that will increase the the revenue for the cooperative, increase incomes, and and hopefully generate higher surpluses and margins.
00:32:16
Speaker
And then beyond that, they said to themselves, what if we got into the leather industry? And what's so exciting about that, M, is that I can't think of another example of a cooperatively owned majority Black processing for facility for cattle or any other product.
00:32:35
Speaker
And so it would be the first of its kind, and it will give them a really powerful opportunity to own and control something in an industry that seems to be growing still, even in this economy.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, we just released an episode with a ranching cooperative in Montana called Old Salt. And there seven Montanian ranchers, but similar principle organized together the seven founding members to build ah a vertically integrated model to take back control from the monopolization of of the beef industry. And yeah, we talked little bit about The commoditization of the beef industry and the insane ways in which we've kind of erased farmers and identity and culture from the supply chain in a way that has marginalized ranchers in a massive way.
00:33:25
Speaker
Absolutely. It's run people out of business. and And I would go on to say that, you know, it has an impact on the quality of the food that we're eating. Absolutely. I'd be curious to hear you give an example of a a vegetable cooperative, if you have one.

Enhancing Cooperative Capacity in Alabama's Black Belt

00:33:40
Speaker
We have a few.
00:33:41
Speaker
In Alabama, we have some really strong cooperatives. I'll talk about those. So there are three cooperatives that we're working with in Alabama. There's the Marengo Cooperative. There's the East Alabama Black Belt Cooperative.
00:33:57
Speaker
And then there's a Forkland cooperative, all of them in Alabama. And the reason we chose those cooperatives to work with for this infrastructure investment is because they were all situated along Alabama's Black Belt, which is a region in Alabama.
00:34:14
Speaker
Well, the Black Belt really extends through the Carolinas up to Texas. But in Alabama, it's a region in Alabama known for its dark soil, But also it's known as the area where enslaved Africans were doing plantation era work. But even today, African-Americans still reside in these communities.
00:34:37
Speaker
All of these co-ops are vegetable growing co-ops. But the challenge they face, even as cooperatives, is that, you know, people with leaguer resources, even if they pull them,
00:34:49
Speaker
They have a little more, but those resources still meager. and And those co-ops were having challenges each year, you know, during planting and harvesting season.
00:35:00
Speaker
They didn't have the kind of heavy equipment that they needed because it was still out of reach from these low-income farmers. We invested over six hundred thousand dollars in those cooperatives. And now, you know what they're telling me ah from the report backs is that, you know, really for the first time, they're really able to seize the moment in in the season.
00:35:23
Speaker
the plant on time. They're able to take this heavy equipment and share it. We're talking about planters, tractors, refrigerated vehicles, coal storage, pretty much everything you think you need. Facilities, you know, metal sheds, just ah kind of a wide variety of infrastructure. And that has meant the difference in their productive capacity. you know This year they're telling us that they expect to be generating more than they ever have.
00:35:51
Speaker
and And we really want to see them do that because we want to create across the South, a regional supply chain. And if we can enhance the individual capacity of our co-ops with investments like this to produce more vegetables, we think that's going to lead to eventually ah supply chain throughout the South that may lead us to engage into import-export market at some point in the future. But be that as it may, we're starting in the Black Belt of Alabama with these investments. And by all accounts, that has turned their productive capacity all the way around.
00:36:31
Speaker
I'd be curious to hear you expand a little bit on this vision around creating a regional cooperative economy. For someone that's not intimately familiar with the agricultural sector or how things are currently done, like what would that look like and what would it take to get there?
00:36:48
Speaker
What it would take is a regional marketing capacity. And that's something we have. We have ah a subsidiary here at the Federation that we call Southern Cooperative.
00:36:59
Speaker
We call it SOCO for short. It's a cooperatively owned subsidiary of the Federation. And it's really a tool that we're building to create that regional marketing capacity. So, for example, throughout the South, what we learned from the pandemic was the need for freshly grown, locally sourced food is intense.
00:37:24
Speaker
So during the pandemic, markets shut down all over the nation. States shut down. And what we saw was really two things. We saw many of our co-ops, when that happened, took losses, incredible losses, because everything was shut down. Their local markets weren't working.
00:37:43
Speaker
And so some of them experienced 70 percent losses in revenue. But also, From our partners, people reporting when folks would go to the grocery store in local communities, the food items and products that they were looking for weren't there, right?
00:37:58
Speaker
Because during the pandemic, some people bought and hoarded things and and took stuff off the shelves. And then we had these international bottlenecks that prevented supplies from getting to the United States. So when the food box program implemented by the USDA went online, that enabled us to see the true potential in our regional marketing system.
00:38:23
Speaker
What that regional marketing system was able to do is contract with the USDA And what it did was it bought food from our co cooperatives and our farmers.
00:38:34
Speaker
And that food was then distributed to local community-based organizations like churches and food banks. And that food was distributed for free. And we had cooperatives that I said were from 70% in revenue to generating surpluses.
00:38:52
Speaker
And what that told us is that if we had the opportunity to really optimize the productive capacity of all of our cooperatives and if we can link them together in a regional system that was supported by strong markets, because that's what that food box program represented, a market, right, that was paying fair rates for what people were growing and raising,
00:39:15
Speaker
I mean, it it totally gave our regional system legs and and it helped us see the strengths and weaknesses of our individual co-ops. And that was one of the things that we learned like from that experience. Like, wow, we saw these black belt co-ops in Alabama really struggling to help meet the demand. Right. You know, folks said, you know, they're in the Bronx.
00:39:37
Speaker
They wanted 40,000 pounds of watermelons. Right. We could get it what we needed from. Mississippi and louis Louisiana, but Alabama and Georgia, they struggled. So we saw the potential and and some of the weaknesses, but what it did was it convinced us that with the right type of planning and deployment of infrastructure, we could create a supply chain that could fill the needs of people throughout the South and perhaps engage in international trade at some point.
00:40:07
Speaker
Could you explain briefly the Foodbox program? That may be the colloquial term for it. i don't really know the full term, but call it the food box program.
00:40:19
Speaker
And what that program was all about was during the pandemic, as I said, and states shut down, companies, markets shut down, and food was being hoarded by some. Whatever the reason was, when people went to the grocery store, there was a lot less food available.
00:40:38
Speaker
So, you know, people were need. And I think the Biden administration saw that and they created a federal program ah called the Food Box program. And the way it worked was this.
00:40:50
Speaker
They allocated millions of dollars to buy food. And so they would allocate that money and organizations like ours that won contracts to partner with the USDA were then and a place where we could set up buying from our cooperatives.
00:41:11
Speaker
So our SOCO system, our regional system, partnered with the USDA and they would say, okay, we know that folks in Huntsville and other parts of Alabama have these community-based organizations and they're looking for food, food banks in Louisiana or elsewhere. The USDA would buy the food from the cooperative And then once that purchase was made, SOCO would work with the local community-based organization to distribute the food.
00:41:45
Speaker
So the USDA was sort of the market for these cooperatives and they paid fair prices. Farmers were very happy with that. They didn't feel exploited or shortchanged.
00:41:57
Speaker
So farmers, got what they needed, co-ops got what they needed. In fact, it helped them turn around into surpluses. But then people in food deserts or folks facing hunger at the local level got what they needed. They got fresh organic food, well, organic in the sense that it may not be kind of USDA official organic, but it was locally grown, locally sourced.
00:42:25
Speaker
And it was fulfilling a need, a hunger need. And we thought that was a great program. It was a win-win for our cooperatives and our and our farmers. And it was a win-win for the public because they got access to high-quality food that was grown locally, locally sourced.
00:42:43
Speaker
It was a great, great program. It then changed into a new program. The success of that was changed into a new program, and that program was called the LFPA, the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program.
00:42:59
Speaker
The difference, though, between the programs is the pandemic version was a federal program where institutions like the Federation was contracted with the federal program.
00:43:12
Speaker
The LFPA turned that into a state program. based programs. So dollars were allocated to each state, millions of dollars.

Systemic Racism in Food Programs

00:43:21
Speaker
Each state was empowered to engage with local cooperatives or producers and food banks for the food.
00:43:30
Speaker
We found that version of it to be more challenging because of the systemic, quite frankly, the systemic racism that still takes place in the South. In places like Mississippi, where we have some really strong, powerful co-ops,
00:43:44
Speaker
they couldn't engage their state on this LFPA. They would not allow these co-ops to participate. Their claim was these co-ops were too small, but in comparison, they would work with white producers who were sometimes at the same level or smaller. So uneven access across the states, when you change it from a federal program to one where some individual in the state gets to say yay or nay.
00:44:15
Speaker
And with historic racism, you know, that that could be a big hurdle. That's really unfortunate. So you're saying that the food box program during the COVID, the money was distributed directly from the federal government and your organization, other organizations were able to get that money, have purchase agreements with black farmers that were part of your cooperative and distribute that to the population through local food banks, food hubs, you know, other local food production stores and and and stuff.
00:44:47
Speaker
When that program got turned into a state program where the money is distributed from the federal government to the state government, Discrimination within the state governments basically prioritized other probably corporate producers that got these contracts instead of more local or cooperative organizations.
00:45:09
Speaker
Exactly. Yes. That's fascinating. I'd be curious to talk a little bit about the model that you're describing there is almost more of like a collective model for food production.

Food as a Public Good and the Role of Cooperatives

00:45:22
Speaker
The arrangement where you have basically public dollars that are contracting from growers food that then gets distributed to the people. That's not like a classic free market arrangement.
00:45:35
Speaker
I'd be curious to hear you talk about how you view food and food production with respect to its role within the economy and whether you you think it should be part of the private sector the way it is today or whether it should be more like healthcare in a way, kind of a public good.
00:45:56
Speaker
Well, from my perspective, and I'm i'm really speaking for myself because I don't think we as a Federation have had ah conversation where we say, okay, this is our view, but this is my personal view on that question.
00:46:09
Speaker
I think healthcare, food, air, water are human rights, right? And the degree to which ah government is not providing or securing those rights, then that government is really failing its people.
00:46:26
Speaker
And so, I do lump food in the same vein as healthcare. care And unfortunately, in the US context, both of them are really privatized to a high degree. I agree with you that they are both our public goods, but unfortunately, here in the United States, the private sector dominates our healthcare system along with our food system.
00:46:50
Speaker
And I think we see some of the impacts of that with our declining health. Life expectancy is is growing shorter. At the Federation, we really focus on how do we empower farmers and cooperatives.
00:47:05
Speaker
But I think one of the byproducts of that, speaking personally, is reclaiming control of our food system, claiming control of our health through our food.
00:47:17
Speaker
I would personally love to see more of what we saw with the Food Box program, because again, I believe that know one of the responsibilities of government is to meet the human needs of its residents.
00:47:29
Speaker
Programs like that do that. Not only they do that in a way that I think is is more egalitarian, but I think that it does stimulate the economy.
00:47:40
Speaker
I think the degree to which we can redistribute wealth and resources to working class communities so that they could produce wealth. cooperatives or collectives to build local economies. I think that's a ah fantastic way to approach food economics and the development of people's self-determination.
00:48:02
Speaker
And I'm curious if in a way your organization is kind of pushing for a a middle way in a sense between private sector, you have a bunch of corporations and companies that run our food system and a public model where you have the government running the food system, but rather like a kind of middle where it is in some sense common, common and collectivized, but it's not the government, but rather ah mosaic of cooperatives and mutual aid associations and and civil organizations that have a purpose beyond profit maximization, but that aren't necessarily these top-down governmental organizations either.

Cooperatives as an Alternative to Traditional Models

00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah, i and for us, I mean, we think that there is a ah place for government in this process. I mean, we pay taxes and lots of our resources go towards supporting the government. So I think we deserve and have a right to the resources collected by the government to help spur cooperatives and other businesses. I think the playing field should be far more level.
00:49:11
Speaker
I think you could say that is a middle way in as much as We at the Federation are really concerned with the ability for people who actually produce things in society to control and own that production.
00:49:28
Speaker
I think that's one of our big concerns. And to the extent that government will support that, we would accept that because the private sector, as it's run now, is not focused on human need or human rights.
00:49:42
Speaker
It's generally focused on the maximization of profits. And I think that has had a negative impact by and large because it really ignores the human aspect, some of the consequences of that kind of economic position.
00:50:00
Speaker
What we want to do is recognize that, you know, we don't necessarily have the power to control the entire economy of the United States, but what we can do is give folks an option and demonstrate the efficacy of a collective an economic approach.
00:50:20
Speaker
I love the term collective economic approach. Building off of that to finish. The American dream has long been about individual success. You know, this is the story that a lot of grew up with, you know, owning a home, climbing the ladder, building personal wealth. But when we think about models like cooperation or community care, it raises different questions.

Community Wealth vs. Individual Success

00:50:42
Speaker
So how do you think about prosperity today? And has your view shifted from the more traditional idea of the American dream? wow Well, I mean, if I'm speaking personally, I would say definitely. I've spent the last 30 years of my life organizing people in different capacities. My background is as a labor organizer, then a community organizer, and now I'm a cooperative developer. So the thread that runs through all of that is recognizing that Really, economic power comes from and and is in embedded in our collective capacity.
00:51:19
Speaker
And so when you think about labor organizing, that recognizes the power of the worker as the one generating economic power and activity.
00:51:30
Speaker
ah When you think about community organized, I recognize the resident people, the consumer, oftentimes as a component of this and now cooperatives as you know formations of people that are businesses.
00:51:43
Speaker
It's all about really trying to get a handle together on this because the impact on us individually is disempowerment, growing wealth inequality, and in many cases, impoverishment.
00:51:57
Speaker
the current economic system, one person just can't hope to overcome if that's an interest. Oftentimes people, as you say, aspire to be these billionaire entrepreneurs, but the reality is the majority of us, 99% of us, will never get there, though that dream is embedded in our consciousness.
00:52:20
Speaker
So in many respects, cooperatives are a helpful tool to disabuse us of false consciousness and fantasies and to help us realize that in the real world, you know we're gonna have to work together and build collective prosperity. So then I think that's where I am and that's where we are at the Federation. We're into collective prosperity, community wealth and collective wealth and building you know our mutual capacity.
00:52:48
Speaker
Well, that was incredibly well said. And I think a perfect place to to end it. Terrence, thank you so much for this interview and for talking about the work that you guys are doing at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and for building this future of a more collective economic power and collective wealth for people in the South and and across the country. And thank you, Emma. I really appreciate the opportunity talk with you today.
00:53:16
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.
00:53:26
Speaker
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