Frank interviews Narendra Varma, founder of Our Table Cooperative located in Oregon. Narendra explains the genesis of the cooperative, and the cultural norms that prevent more cooperative development in the United States. He also describes a food system that is structurally broken, and the challenges individuals and groups face when confronting structural injustice. Narendra outlines the unique elements of Our Table as both a consumer and a producer cooperative, and offers insights into how we can make these organizations successful.
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3 responses to “Episode #154: Our Table Cooperative”
This was a solid interview. It would be nice if Varma were tracking his numbers very closely and publicly, but at least he’s being honest when he says he’s not but that he’d like to. I would gladly volunteer to numerically quantify Our Table for a month or two, and I’m sure dozens of better qualified students and wwoofers would do the same for room and board. The New York Times said he invested $2 million in the whole operation, and somewhere else put the 58 acres of land at $1.2 million. For at least a third of America, especially in the rust belt and New England, ~60 acres can be had for under $250k ($2k-$4k/acre) within 15 miles of many cities. (You can sometimes buy a whole town if you look hard enough.) The infrastructure to service a 200-person CSA is well under $100k — $10k if you do everything yourself with 2000 hours of labor. 20-50 shares/acre, 1-2 laborers per acre, depending on how crazy you are. High tunnels are $2/sqft in retail materials, $1/sqft for tunnels with wooden or bamboo hoops; and a 1000sqft earthship is less than $5k in materials and machine rental; grow crops without irrigation, save that cost.
Some of Varma’s documentation is in the middle of this page:
http://www.ourtable.us/our-cooperative.html
Some possible productivity calculations:
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c3-65.html
My first reaction is: Woah, you’re crunching numbers. How dare you! Permaculture is about warm fuzzy things like soil microbes and chicken tractors.
But seriously, if you are interested in working with Our Table to crunch some numbers, I encourage you to do it. I mean really strongly encourage you. I will support you, get the word out, share the data, and maybe even be able to provide some spreadsheet and data management support if you need it. We need people to take this bull by its horns. Clearly cooperative extension won’t or can’t, the non-profits mostly aren’t, and USDA, NRCS, ARS…well…
I think if we started to build a model around numbers like this, we could have the chance to go out and collect more data. Build a real data-driven story, and actually begin to see what a true path to transforming agriculture looks like based on numbers and cooperative business development models.
Thanks for this interview – there was a lot of great ideas. I am currently perusing the Our Table docs to see what ideas we could use here in on our date farm in Central Australia. It is especially interesting to ponder how you can encourage people to invest their energy and expertise in developing a farm business when they don’t own the land. Is a ‘living wage’ enough? Or maybe it is more than enough if you can’t earn that being a farmer who owns the land? We have gone down the road of setting up a Cooperative to own the title of the land we farm and then a company runs the business, leasing the land from the Coop. But it is still a concept in development!