The Food Commons is a networked system of physical, financial and organizational infrastructure that allows small to mid-sized food enterprises to compete and thrive according to principles of sustainability, fairness, and public accountability.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness of biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. Today I'll be interviewing Larry Jim Cochran, co of food comments and large national project dedicated to designing and developing a new economic paradigm and whole systems approach for regional food. Welcome to the program, Larry and Jim. [00:00:30] Thank you, Lisa. Hey Lisa. I'm going to start out by asking you what is the food comments and why should I care?
Speaker 2:The Food Commons is an alternative food system for local and regional food. Primarily. Right now there's tremendous amount of demand and growth skyrocketing in local and regional food, but yet there's, there's not much infrastructure that exists to actually bring that kind of [00:01:00] high quality food from the farms, the fields to our tables. So the Food Commons is creating the infrastructure nationally to be able to bring this kind of food to people's tables so that people can have easy access to high quality fresh food. This is not just about bringing local food from local farms to local tables. Uh, this is, this is a whole lot more than that. It's, you know, it's about jobs creation, revitalizing [00:01:30] main street. We have created a whole fully integrated system, uh, that hopefully we'll be able to do this.
Speaker 3:It's important to understand that it is going to require a large number of people with very high skill sets in order to be able to create a new kind of food system. It's not some small project that a handful of people are going to be able to pull off. An important part of what we're doing is figuring out how to assemble [00:02:00] the right people and put them together in the right places to be able to design the kind of system that will be able to grow and expand in a way in sort of similar in the way that the Internet expanded where once you've got a really solid operating system that enables all sorts of people all over the world to build structures that are new and different based on that different operating [00:02:30] system. So what we are trying to do is first to articulate a new operating system and then to build a prototype or two or three of those food systems that operate under a different set of rules than the current system.
Speaker 1:What are the components of this operating system?
Speaker 2:The three interlocking core elements that comprise the basic structure of this, this new food comment system? Those three very quickly [00:03:00] are, uh, food Commons trust a food Commons bank. And the word bank is in quotes because, uh, it's not really a bank, but it's a way to do community financing and investing. And then the third element is what we call the food commons hub. So essentially what we're doing is, is treating the three essential elements of any economic system that is land, labor and capital. So on the Food Commons trust, it's a way for us to actually deal with the Commons that is [00:03:30] to own land and or physical facilities that can be used by food enterprises in the Food Commons local system. So for instance, the Food Commons trust could own some farmland that it could then lease to a young farmer who wants to be a part of the Food Commons system.
Speaker 2:And then if you, if you just scale this up nationally, you could think of a national food Commons trust that would be able to hold property all over the country for [00:04:00] local and regional systems to use. So that's the trust the bank, the Food Commons bank is a way to capitalize and finance the different enterprises within the food common system. If you look across the country right now, there are a number of people who are working hard on various elements of local and regional food systems, especially focusing on food hubs. And a lot of these efforts are in our way of thinking are subscale and [00:04:30] largely under financed. We think the Food Commons bank is a very critical element to the whole system because without money, without financing and without investing, these new enterprises just aren't going to go anywhere. And we also say that the Food Commons is going to be locally owned and locally operated.
Speaker 2:So we're trying to come up with a new type of bank model or vehicle so that we could have small on accredited investors putting their money [00:05:00] into a food commons. Think of the, uh, the Green Bay packers who owns the Green Bay packers. Well, not some fat cat gazillionaire, but the people, the citizens of green bay. And so, uh, for instance in the Food Commons where we're trying to design and, and build our first prototype in Fresno. So who's going to own the Fresno Food Commons? Well, the people of Fresno. So that's, that's the bank. And then we have the third important element, the food commons hub. [00:05:30] Um, and it's actually more than just a hub. It's actually a, what we now refer to as the vertical spine of food enterprises that will bring the food products from farm to, to market. So this spine is really the, the old supply chain made up of farms, processing, operations, distribution markets, restaurants, and so on.
Speaker 2:So if you can think of a in a local community holding [00:06:00] company that would have all of these different enterprises in one type of vertical cooperative arrangement. And the center piece of that is maybe the, the food hub. So those are the three, the three elements. So to just give you an example of, um, the potential for local and regional food systems. The 10 counties of southern California from about Kern county south to the border, we consume $57 billion of food a year. Less than 1% [00:06:30] of all of that food consumed is actually actually comes from the region itself. And so here we are in one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world and yet only 1% of that food is being consumed by the region itself. So all of the, much of the food that, uh, is produced in the region is export it from the region.
Speaker 2:A lot of it does come back and it goes out, gets processed and comes back in one form or another. You know, if we were to to think about creating a regional food [00:07:00] system for southern California and to increase that consumption of locally produced product from let's say 1% to 5% you suddenly have a $4 billion regional food economy. That's huge. It's another choice for people in a community who are seeking food of high quality that's really fresh and comes from a local source and people would know who the farmer is and the farm that it was grown on and much more about the food than just some commodity apple [00:07:30] that's in the bin at the supermarket. So what happens to the big agribusiness concerns and are they still there? There you're side by side where we're side by side. You know, our intention is not to supplant the global industrial food system, which is heavily centralized and consolidated, but rather to create an alternative.
Speaker 2:And in the Ohio Valley we produced some of the finest Pixie tangerines in the world. Right now we have about 35 tangerine growers and they produce about a million and a half hounds of tangerines a year. Now. How [00:08:00] difficult do you think it is to get Pixie tangerines from the orchards in the Ohio valley that are half a mile away from the big Vaughn store in the Ohio Valley? How difficult do you think it is to get tangerines from the orchards into that bond store? Well, this is the way it works and this is just a small example of how the big industrial food system operates. So the tangerines get picked in the Ohio valley. From there they go down to a packinghouse and Fillmore, which is about 50 miles away and they get minimally processed there. And then Melissa's specialty produce in [00:08:30] Los Angeles buys the tangerines and they go down to Los Angeles to Melissa's and then von Central, wherever that is, calls up Melissa's and says, I want to buy x number of pallets of tangerines.
Speaker 2:And so off the tangerines go to some central Vons distribution center. Then Oh, hi. Vaughn's. When placing their daily order calls up Vaughn central and says, okay, we'd like some Pixie, so throw on a couple boxes and back to the Ohio valley, they come well traveled to [00:09:00] entry, well-traveled, tangerines no, that is, that is a small example and probably you know, not even nearly indicative of what happens to a lot of the food that we consume. The 1930s we had over 7 million farms in this country. Today we have just over 2 million. The 5 million farms that we've lost over the last 75 years are predominantly these mid size family farms. Right now we either have very small farms, many of them hobby farms or we have very [00:09:30] large agribusiness, corporate types of operations. So we're, we're targeting and we're trying to in a sense, revive the mid size family farm operation.
Speaker 2:And then if you just follow that all the way through the value chain, we're aiming at other kinds of midsize enterprises, so mid size distribution centers, mid size processing plants. We've lost many, many, many. In fact, most of the, the re the smaller regional [00:10:00] meatpacking processing plants that we used to have in this country. Now we, the meat industry is controlled by predominantly for corporations that had these mega size meat packing operations. So, you know, we want to bring back those, those regional scale kinds of operations. And then I'm on to the market side. We're, we're aiming at the mid size supermarkets or grocery stores. You know, an average size grocery store these days is what, June 40,000 square feet or so, [00:10:30] probably half that size. You know, we're looking at, uh, maybe 12 to 20,000 square feet. So yeah, if you go to a whole foods, for instance, not even that size, maybe something a bit smaller than that, they're probably around 30, 25, 30,000 at least. Sounds like it would be good for the economy and create some jobs. We are really trying to bring back main street as you really think about it, where we're trying to restore, revive locally economies, bring back a lot of business [00:11:00] and, and resources and investments. So on to main street.
Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness of biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Day area innovators. I'm your host Lisa Kiefer. And today I'm interviewing Larry Yee and Jim Cochran, Co founders of Food Commons, a large national project dedicated to designing and developing a new economic paradigm [00:11:30] and whole systems approach for regional food. Well tell me a little bit about your own histories, your backgrounds. You have to talk about Swartland strawberries cause they're my favorite. I love them. They're the best strawberries in the market. Swat
Speaker 2:and the best berry farm in the world. Both Larry and myself have been in the business
Speaker 3:in one form or another for over 30 years. So I got into farming by being involved with [00:12:00] um, farm worker owned production cooperatives in the Salinas and Watsonville area. About 30 years ago I approached farming from the social justice perspective. What was interesting to me was the fact that farm workers are farmer, farm workers became owners in their own farming operations. And so I did that for about four years and then went out on my own around 30 years ago and started farming and had been doing that ever since.
Speaker 1:But there's something unique I read about you and that is that you don't [00:12:30] own your farmland.
Speaker 3:That's actually not at all unique. Most farmers along the coast do not own their farm land. And why is that? Well, it's expensive. And so most of the food that's produced in California is grown on leased farm land and generally and very large tract.
Speaker 1:You were always using sustainable practices all these years, or did you grow into that? I grew into it at the very beginning.
Speaker 3:There was no way of [inaudible], no known method of growing strawberries organically. [00:13:00] And so I spent, you know, five, six years figuring out how to do that.
Speaker 1:And, and isn't your farm the first certified organic strawberry farm? Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. It's the, it was the first commercial strawberry farm that was certified organic. In other words, the first farm that grew strawberries and sold them into the commercial market as their principal crop in California.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And another first is you're the first organic farm with an AFL CIO contract. Yes. Guaranteeing worker wages and benefits. That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 3:Well, of course, what was important to me [00:13:30] was not just the farming practices themselves per se, but also the labor practices on the farm. That's why built into the food comments design is the notion that not only do workers all along the value chain and from farm workers to people in packing plants and people in retail stores own a part of the system. It's not just a system that's controlled by a few farmers or even a large number of small farmers. The Food Commons [00:14:00] is designed to provide an opportunity for ordinary people who do not possess access to capital or great and amazing talents and, or an abundance of good luck to just be able to get a job in some sort of enterprise that is growing and selling food. Then to be able to build wealth equity in. Um, I mean, let's face it, I don't, nobody's gonna get rich doing this, but to be able to live, yeah. To be able to live [00:14:30] and build up some equity. And some stock on shipping in a company that is growing food. And that's an integral part of the Food Commons concept is that it's not just for farmers or small processors or small retail stores that are individually owned or even family owned. It's also for the people who work in those enterprises so that they have
Speaker 2:a path to being able to have a normal life.
Speaker 1:And that's why your strawberries really are the best listeners I tell you. Find them. They're the best [inaudible]
Speaker 2:[00:15:00] no, Jim is a typical farmer and in the sense that he's way too modest about his, uh, successes and accomplishments. But I can tell you he has been absolutely a pioneer in the organic farming world and a, a pioneer of businessmen with a lot of the business practices that he has put in place in his farming operation. So it's no surprise that Jim now is continuing in that vein, in his pioneering a whole new alternative food system. What's your background, Larry? I had a career [00:15:30] with the University of California in agricultural research and education. I worked for the cooperative extension service and for the last 25 years of my career I directed the Ventura County office. So I had a number of staff, uh, underneath that, uh, that were involved in agricultural research and in other kinds of programs related to food and farming for the last 20 to 25 years, I've been involved nationally in sustainable food system work back in the 80s, [00:16:00] when I was in business school at the University of Santa Clara.
Speaker 2:This is probably what started me on this quest. Uh, I had a professor that would come into class every day and he would say, now students don't ever forget in this food system that we have, farmers are always price takers. That's the way it is. That's the way it will always be. And he would come in every day and like pound that into our heads as if it were some universal law. And there's just enough rebel in me that after a while I began to really question [00:16:30] that why do farmers in this system always get the short end of the stick? Why don't they have more power and control? You know, over the prices, you know, for the, the products that they produce. And so that really began my quest into looking more into how this food system really works and how we might change it to better benefit, uh, especially the farmers. After, uh, I finished my MBA at, at the University of Santa Clara that I got involved on a number [00:17:00] of national projects and national committees and so on. So began to, to see the food system from a much broader scope than the work I was doing in Ventura County.
Speaker 1:And where did you two meet each other and come up with this innovative idea?
Speaker 2:Well, we were both a pioneering members or charter members of the roots of change council here in California. Roots of change was started by several west coast foundations that were trying to figure out how the held their philanthropy could [00:17:30] better support changes in our food system so that the food system will become more sustainable. So these foundations put together a roots of change council back in 2002 and Jim and I were both asked to serve on this council. People like Alice Waters was on the council, a rich Roman, who was he, who's a very prominent, a yellow county farmer and eventually became the under secretary at USDA. It was those kinds of people you know, that were on this council [00:18:00] early on, we spent a fair amount of resources creating a vision for a sustainable food system in California. By the year 2030 this was called our vivid picture project or the new mainstream.
Speaker 2:And so Jim and I, along with the rest of the council, spent many hours discussing and debating and whatnot about, you know, if we could recreate a food system in California to make it more sustainable, what would that look like? We finished the vivid picture project and the last part of 2005 [00:18:30] and then as a council, we set about beginning to, um, to implement the vision. So the Food Commons really is an outgrowth of a lot of that work in many respects. It actually is the tangible part of that vision. When 2008 came along and the recession hit, we looked at each other and thought maybe this is now the opportune time to actually get off our butts and do something. Jim Actually had written a paper a little while before this, which [00:19:00] really laid out the initial concept for the Food Commons, but with that and a few other things, we, we put some ideas together and presented it to the roots of change council. This was three years ago here in Oakland. The council at that time, they were quite intrigued by the concept there was, but there was still a healthy amount of skepticism about it, but they gave us a small grant to to flesh out the concept and explored and so we took it from there. We really are focused on, [00:19:30] on building the best possible prototype in Fresno and maybe in a couple of other places to actually demonstrate to people how this can work.
Speaker 3:We just received a little bit of money here a few weeks ago and are meeting with people in Fresno. I'm starting to look at land and buildings president. Well, one of the people that we were working with on the rates of change council is a member of the food activist community [00:20:00] in Fresno. And she liked what we came up with in the Food Commons and um, brought it to the Fresno Business Council and the people in Fresno liked it. And um, we're moving forward with it. You know, there are a number of community leaders who now know they're gonna want to work to do in terms of things around Fresno's, the Detroit of California Congressional district that frozen Zune is the poorest congressional district in the country. I heard that a little while ago. I thought, are you kidding me? [00:20:30] You owe me more than Mississippi. Or Appalachian is like, really? When is it going to actually happen? Do you have a timeline?
Speaker 2:Maybe within a year we'll have something starting to show in Fresno
Speaker 3:in order to design a system that works for the maximum number of people. It takes a while to actually do that. Have we spent some, a good amount of time already doing that? And so now we're ready to implement. I know that the people in the audience are saying, well, let's call it, let's do it right now. You know, I mean it takes a while to roll this out [00:21:00] and it's not going to be instant. And in fact it's incredibly complex and involves a lot of different people and a lot of re purposing things and doing things in new ways.
Speaker 2:If it was just one simple little grocery store that we were developing or one newt kind of farm, you know, that would be one thing we were trying to bring, you know, into reality, a whole new complex system. And we're trying to do it in a new and different way. You know, we're not just simply recreating what was, you know, 75 or a hundred years ago, but we're trying to bring that back. [00:21:30] But with a 21st century spin to it, which we're actually trying to create a whole new economic paradigm. You know, now that the economy has brought us to the bank and who knows, we may go over, you know, we don't want to just duplicate that particular, you know, economic system. We want to try to do it in new and different ways. The concept that we came up with is really at the 50,000 foot level and now as we're bringing the concept, you know, into reality, we're starting to get closer to the ground and as we get closer to the ground, we are [00:22:00] running into all kinds of difficult challenges in questions and complexities and so on that we never, you know, thought about really at the 50,000 foot level.
Speaker 2:Can you give some examples? Well, for instance, if we want this to be locally owned and locally operated, that's not an easy thing to do because the way our whole financial system is set up and the way that people do investments and capitalize businesses and whatnot, the securities laws [00:22:30] in this country do not allow for small on securitized investors to, to buy into enterprises. So we're trying to be very creative and very innovative to, to figure out how we create that Food Commons bank that I mentioned earlier and how to do it in such a way so that the food commons can be like the Green Bay packers locally owned and locally operated. It's Fresno project. Have you zeroed in on a couple of alternative financing methods for people? We're working on [00:23:00] that right now. So the three major areas that we are focusing our efforts right now is one we know we have to create prototypes, we have, we have to actually show people how this can work.
Speaker 2:And we were very fortunate that Fresno popped up to say we want to try this. So Fresno is going to be our first prototype, but we have other communities that are expressing serious interest. Um, Hawaii, Seattle, Atlanta, to mention a few, [00:23:30] but we're really focusing on Fresno to get a, a prototype of the Food Commons up and running there. The second area of activity is creating the national structures that will support these local food Commons, the Food Commons trust in the Food Commons. I'm Jim and I just came from a meeting of the people that we brought together from around the country, people who are extremely knowledgeable in finance and investing in that whole world, um, to help us figure out how to create the Food Commons Bank. So we're [00:24:00] working on, on developing these national support structures, we call them that will help support the development of food Commons in communities like Fresno.
Speaker 2:And the third area of work is just communicating our vision at educating people, uh, working with other communities that, um, may want to want to try this. So you're getting good response. We're getting tremendous response. Um, we completed our concept paper that we call the Food Commons 2.0 and, [00:24:30] um, October of last year, 2011 and we took that and just simply sent it to a lot of our friends and colleagues around the country. We got a call from a guy in New Zealand who've somehow picked up the paper and they said, we want to create the New Zealand Food Commons and they're working on it. So that's happened in a, in a lot of places. And we're very, we're very excited about all of these different possibilities and how this has begun to resonate with a lot of people is very exciting.
Speaker 3:If somebody listening [00:25:00] today wanted to find out a lot more about this and also maybe help you or get a get involved, what would you suggest they do?
Speaker 2:They could go to the Food Commons, all one word, the Food commons.org and there's actually a way to, um, to donate to the cause on that particular site.
Speaker 3:It's really important for people to start preparing their minds and thinking in different ways of, um, operating in different economic and cultural ways. Taking a look at the Food Commons document online would be a [00:25:30] good step in that direction. And just sort of looking at it and scratching your head and thinking, Gee, this is different, you know, who owns this and how does this get decided and where does the money flow and how, how does this all work and where does the environment fit into this and where it is social justice fit into this and ownership and governance and that sort of thing. Um, I think from that perspective it's a, it's a good place for people to start thinking
Speaker 2:this is a job creation operation. As we begin to create [00:26:00] these food enterprises and revive local economies, we could end up creating a lot of new jobs right now that is, you know, the number one hot topic in the country.
Speaker 3:If we're going to have regional food systems around the country, we're going to need to have people who are able to work in the fields. So for example, you might be in Iowa or Minnesota or someplace and people work in factories or they work in hospitals, but very few people actually work on farms [00:26:30] producing the kind of food that could be consumed locally. I mean maybe they work on a giant soybean and corn operation, but that's quite a bit different than growing local food. Food that is a whole of fruits and vegetables and animals and so forth that are consumed locally. A hundred years ago, the school kids and people from the community would take jobs for a few weeks during the summer and harvest a potato crop or a strawberry crop or apples or something. And [00:27:00] since the, all of those crops have disappeared for most regions around the country, the whole tradition of short term work in the field by local residents has also disappeared in one of the things that we've done a little thinking about is the idea that when we are able to establish regional food systems that one thing that might be appealing to young people, especially young people who have big loans from having gone to college, [00:27:30] would be to have some sort of a national service program where they could work off, um, a substantial part of their college debt by working on these farms for a couple summers.
Speaker 3:And they could also choose it as a vocation later. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great idea.
Speaker 2:Food can, is that something that everyone can relate to and therefore can be the gateway to deal with a lot of pressing issues of our time and to really begin to heal and restore the health of not only of individuals but of community. [00:28:00] Michael Pollan was asked a question if, if there was one thing that he would do to restore the health of our food system to change the global industrial system, what would he do? And he said, he thought about it that he said I would put animals back on farms. So my vision, you know, with the Food Commons, it's very simple. We put animals back on farms, we put farmers back on the land, we put people [00:28:30] back in their kitchens and we put families back around their dining room tables. If we can do that, I think we've done a lot. Thank you for being on the trow grant. Thank you, Louise.
Speaker 4:You've been listening to method to the madness. [00:29:00] Tune in again in two weeks at the same time.
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