Food, Power, and Cooperatives

“To begin the global task to which we are called, we need some particular place to begin, some particular place to stand, some particular place in which to initiate the small, reformist changes that we can only hope some day will soon become radically transformative. We start with food.”

-Kloppenburg et al., 1996

Being a relatively new member of the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative CSA team, I find myself regularly answering questions about local food and why it’s important when chatting with curious friends and family wanting to know about the organization I work for. While I’m always happy to give the rundown on LFFC (“We’re an organic farmer’s co-op consisting of 80 plus small farms. Community Supported Agriculture is a model of local agriculture that allows community members to subscribe to the season’s harvest...”), these answers barely tell the whole story of what we do as a Cooperative and why our model of agriculture is so important as a foil to the conventional industrial model that fills so many American grocery store shelves and bellies. There are real implications for our food choices, both when we choose to participate in the corporate, industrial chain of agriculture and consumption, and when we choose to support the alternative.

In Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (a book that helped lead me on my journey to LFFC in no small way), he reports that Philip Morris and Nabisco collect nearly 10 cents of every dollar an American consumer spends on food, just one example of the consolidation of the American food chain. This consolidation of food spending to a handful of corporations means farmers participating in the industrial model have prices dictated by the powers that be, only to have their produce transported, processed, packaged, transported again, stored, shelved, and sold- each step resulting in an additional expense passed along to the consumer for a lesser quality product, while profit is siphoned away by the many hands that helped put the item on your grocery store shelf.

While many local food venues (farmers’ markets, farm stands/markets, and CSAs) allow for increased contact between producer and consumer, it can be a challenge for farmers based in rural locations reach out to a consumer base which is large enough to support family farms. By uniting into a cooperative and delivering to regions outside of the immediate area, our farmers are able to increase access to sustainably grown, organic produce for neighboring community members while finding direct markets for their goods, allowing them to continue farming in a sustainable way, preserving family tradition, and farmland as farmland. Organic, natural farmland at that.

Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative farmers have decided to take a different path than the conventional industry. By joining forces to share storage, transportation, marketing, and administrative tasks and costs, our farmers are able to do what they want to, which is devote their energy to farming with integrity, with concern for the environment and the health of their families, their customers, and their animals at the forefront of all that they do. By eliminating industry middlemen and reducing the miles between farm and fork, LFFC farmers ensure they receive a fair price for the crops they have grown, for the hard work that keeps them busy from dawn to dusk, in the heat of summer and the cold of winter. They ensure customers receive only the freshest, healthiest food possible, food that is produced not to withstand transport and storage for thousands of miles and many days, but to nourish the body and delight the taste buds.

 The industrial food network is only able to function when farmers are paid as little as possible and forced to make cost cutting measures often resulting in worst environmental, farm worker, and animal care practices becoming standard operating procedure to ensure some profit can be squeezed out of the convoluted production chain. By cooperating to market directly to the consumer, our farmers maintain power over the food they have worked tirelessly to produce while giving you, the consumer, increased power as well. By deciding to be a shareholder with Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative, our members assert their right to fresh food, their right to food not treated with chemicals, they signal their belief in and support of the right of animals to live a pleasant and peaceful life. Our members have a direct contact with the producers of their food and if they have questions or concerns, they have the power to directly address the issue.