The Whole Farm Cooperative sells vegetables, grains, meat, eggs, cheese, maple syrup and a myriad of other farm products produced by about 50 family farms in Central Minnesota.
We started three years ago in a basement. We’re still in a basement. A bigger basement. In our first year we sold about $30,000 worth of products. In our third year sales were at $250,000. We still can’t afford to hire a manager. But our members get between 70 and 85 per cent of the retail value of the food we sell. For livestock producers that’s a 60 percent improvement over regular commodity marketing channels. We’re darn proud of that.

Rural Minnesota has a deep tradition of farmers marketing cooperatively. From 1859 to 1939, farmers formed more than 600 cooperative creameries, 150 mutual fire insurance companies, hundreds of cooperative telephone associations, and 270 farmers’ elevators.

It is little wonder, then, that farmers who wanted a better price for our products would form a cooperative. What has been a surprise is the fact that our greatest success has come from our relationships with churches. We call it CSA – that’s Congregationally Supported Agriculture, not Community Supported Agriculture.Although we have a number of marketing initiatives – we sell to restaurants, neighborhood grocers, neighborhood groups, and the staffs of non-profit organizations – our most successful effort has been our CSA effort.

Our CSA work is based on the idea that food – eating it and growing it – is an exercise in spirituality. I don’t know altogether what that means yet. And, as often as not, we farmers conduct both eating and growing in ways that are certainly profane. But we have approached our customers, and ourselves, believing the truth that food is spiritual stuff.

Here’s how Congregationally Supported Agriculture works for us.

Usually some one from a congregation contacts us because they’ve heard about us. They’ve heard about us because of the superb media coverage we had three years ago. Or they heard of us because we formed a relationship with Dale Hennen, of the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul, when we started. Dale has done a tremendous job of promoting our project. Word of mouth referrals fueled by excellent media coverage has helped us establish relationships with eleven congregations in the last three years.

Relationships with a congregation take different forms. When we receive that first call we tell the person as much as we can about the cooperative and our relationship with other congregations. We send them a brochure and newspaper clippings. Maybe a list of our products and prices. But no church congregation has ever started ordering food from us without a personal visit or two to the church.

I have spoken from the pulpit about Whole Farm Cooperative. I have made presentations to Peace and Justice committee meetings. Pot lucks, bazaars, bible study, and church festivals have all been venues for explaining what the farmers of our cooperative are about.
The message, in different words, is always the same: Customers and farmers are equal partners in agriculture. Eating is an inseparable part of agriculture. And it is a sacred exercise. I tell the people stories from our cooperative. I tell them how we protect the land. How we care for the animals. I talk about how we have diverse farms in an attempt to mirror natural systems. I tell them how we try and make the farms safe for our children.

And always these people respond with warmth and they communicate a need. They need to know that their eating is good for the earth and that what comes from the earth is good for them. Our partnership is based on that.

Always, always at the end of a presentation is a table groaning from the weight of our products. At that table we talk one-on-one with our new customers and sell them things. At every opportunity we try and sell things to eat. Farmers, we’ve found, don’t like to sell stuff. We’ve got to. Everybody eats with regularity. They should eat our food. Sell, sell as if your farm depended on it.

While we’re selling the products from our farms we tell them how the system works:
*We deliver to your church once a month on a predetermined day.
*Two weeks before delivery customers receive, usually by email, an updated price and product list.
*You can order anything you want from the list. One pound of ground beef or 100 pounds of potatoes.
*Send your order to us by the agreed upon deadline.
*We deliver the food in bags with your name on it, and with an invoice in your bag, to the freezers and refrigerators in the church.
*You and volunteers or staff at the church must agree on a time or times when you can pick your food up.
*Send us a check.

That’s it! The rest is just details. But the devil is in those very details.

Big detail #1: A dedicated volunteer or staff person at the church is essential. That person should be an organizer and a cheerleader. They can distribute price lists to parishioners without email and they can help track down lost orders. We call them site coordinators. I think most of them are saints. We couldn’t do it without them.

Big detail #2: On our end somebody has to receive, organize, and fill all those orders. We’ve hired a sales representative who answers the myriad of email questions promptly, signs up new customers, and tracks down the lost carton of eggs. Friendly and timely customer relations are essential. We’ve discovered it is much less expensive to keep a customer than to find a new one. We pay our sales representative a wage plus a small commission to make sure those hard-won customers stay with us.

Since we can’t afford to hire a manager we’ve got a management team. We pay three board of director members $8 an hour to attend a once-weekly, two-hour meeting, to solve problems that a manager would deal with. They take care of everything from inventory issues, new product introductions, and delivery problems. Our operations manager, Dave Verdoorn, also attends those meetings as does our sales representative. Dave – also a saint – is in charge of packing orders, maintaining inventory, and bookkeeping. Part of Dave’s job is the all-important joy of paying farmers.

Management, however, requires hours and hours of volunteer time. Running a cooperative business requires passionate commitment, good friends, luck, creativity, business sense, and some un-namable elements that border on craziness. There is a very strong temptation to just turn it all over to managers in suits. But for now the members and customers and staff at Whole Farm Cooperative are determined to return the sacred back into the food system.
We sell our food based on the principle that our customer should know as much as possible about the food, whether it’s an onion, t-bone steak, or jug of maple syrup, as possible. To accomplish that we have a newsletter, a web page <http://www.alexweb.net/wholefarmcoop> with profiles of many of our farmers, and we regularly invite our customers to field days and celebrations. Being actively transparent in our farming practices and processing activities has been both time consuming and expensive. Since we’ve had significant financial assistance from the United States and Minnesota Departments of Agriculture, as well as the Minnesota Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, it is not altogether clear whether we can really afford to have the close relationships with our customers that we do.

It is true that Minnesota has a strong cooperative history. It is also true that many Minnesota citizens are advanced spiritually enough to recognize the sacredness of food. The other truth that has made Whole Farm Cooperative succeed in Minnesota is a deep tradition of actively engaged non-governmental organizations. If you don’t have that where you live you’ve got one tough row to hoe in this globalized, over-competitive economy.

Tim and Jan King raise vegetables at Maple Hill Farms in Long Prairie, Minnesota.