CISA

Posted November 5, 2021 by Addie Rose

Thank YOU for 20 Years of Real Pickles!!!

It is hard to believe it has been 20 years since the first batch of Real Pickles was created! This year, through the rainy days of cucumber slicing, now into the season of cabbage coring, shredding and mixing, and looking forward to more beets and carrots in the colder months…. we’re reflecting on the simplicity of that first year and how far we’ve come as a social enterprise. The summer of 2001, Real Pickles was just one young person slicing cukes in the early hours, fermenting in 5-gallon buckets, and driving around the valley to sell a few jars out the back of an old Saab to a handful of willing shops. It was a short-lived season too – the 1,000 jars produced were sold out by Thanksgiving!

However, the simplicity is only in hindsight. Starting a business is NOT a simple task, as many of you know. Real Pickles’ success and stamina have much to do with the fabric of a supportive community, and the many elements that came together to help a burgeoning business survive… and eventually thrive.

We write today to say, “THANK YOU to our community for supporting Real Pickles for the past 20 years!” We mention here just a few of the organizations that made our path viable, though there are countless individuals and groups who have supported us over the years. We can only trust that offering a colorful and nourishing line of ferments – combined with an ongoing commitment to making positive social change – is an acceptable return.

Local Farms, Local Heroes

When the idea of Real Pickles was first conceived around a kitchen table in Somerville, MA, founder Dan was working at Iggy’s Breads and I was finishing up my last college semester, ready to embark on a career in geology. Dan had taken a workshop at the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) summer conference, a convergence of practitioners and students engaged in organic farming and homesteading. NOFA has built a culture of knowledge sharing, skill-building, and advocacy; it was a fitting atmosphere for a future entrepreneur to find inspiration in the near-forgotten art of lacto-fermentation. As a couple, we were wondering, “where to next?” To start a fermentation business, we knew it had to be a place with strong organic agriculture and appreciation for local food and economies. Western Massachusetts fit the bill better than we could have imagined.

Cabbage at Red Fire Farm — Cabbage ready for sauerkraut (credit: Red Fire Farm)

Not only does this area have some of the best farmland in the country, it is a training ground for skilled organic farmers. The growers from whom we source our vegetables bring deep expertise to cultivating the highest-quality vegetables with top priorities of improving the health of the soil and surrounding ecosystems and supporting the workers that grow our food. That first year, we bought cucumbers from Chamutka Farm and Red Fire Farm and have continued to buy their vegetables every year since, while expanding our network to include a half dozen other local farms. These partnerships are integral to our business, especially given our commitment to 100% regionally-grown and organic vegetables.

The Connecticut River Valley is also a hub for community appreciation of local and organic food. Full of food co-ops, farm stands, and independent markets, there were many shops that were ready to take a chance on a tiny food business producing an unusual but nourishing product. The first day of deliveries included stops at Leverett Food Co-op, Green Fields Market, Foster’s Supermarket, and Brookfield Farm. All are still important partners for us, and we deeply appreciate their early and continued support. In a valley with sweeping farmland views, this community is invested in the success of food grown and produced here. Much of that appreciation stems from the important work of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA). Shortly before our arrival, CISA had launched the Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown marketing and education campaign that grew our community’s appreciation and commitment to local food. Local Heroes are the farmers, food producers, and consumers who choose locally-grown products and support our local agricultural economy. CISA has continued to be one of our most important community partners in spreading awareness of the benefits of a vibrant local farming and food culture.

FCCDC’s Western MA Food Processing Center, circa 2004

That first summer of pickle production we relied on generous offers from local business people, such as an Amherst restauranteur who loaned her commercial kitchen in the early morning hours for our production and a Greenfield ice cream maker who lent refrigerator space. We greatly appreciated these critical opportunities and soon found that we needed a new option to scale up production. Luckily, another crucial partner in the Real Pickles story, the Franklin County Community Development Corporation (FCCDC), was about to unveil their brand new Western MA Food Processing Center in Greenfield. For the next seven years, we made excellent use of this incubator kitchen, plus the lending and technical assistance provided by the FCCDC to grow our product line, hone our business skills, and develop relationships with other food and small business owners.

Thinking back, it is hard to imagine that Real Pickles could have lasted long without these initial community partnerships.

Community with Big Hearts and Know-How

Addie Rose and Dan with Real Pickles — Addie Rose and Dan at the 2011 Peck Slip Pickle Fest, NYC. (credit: Paul Wagtouicz © New Amsterdam Market)

Over the next few years, I jumped in and together we grew the business at the Food Processing Center with help from a network of informal advisors and advocates. These included other small business owners who had experience with manufacturing, accounting, sales, marketing, and growing pains. We attended food and farming events to introduce our products and talk to people. In our social time, we went to contra dances where the community readily embraced Real Pickles and spread the word across New England. The late caller-fiddler David Kaynor would frequently hold up our bartered jar to a crowd of 200+ dancers and wax eloquently about the flavor and benefits of fermented pickles. We feel so privileged for this community of enthusiasts and spokespeople that helped to garner support for our products across the region.

And then there are all of the eaters of fermented foods. Thankfully, this area is full of people with adventurous palettes! We had the added challenge of trying to build consumer awareness of fermented foods, which 20 years ago was not the trending natural products category that it is today. There were only a handful of producers across the country making products like ours, and in many stores ours was the only line. An effervescent thank you to all our early customers willing to give fermented vegetables a try!

As we began to outgrow the incubator kitchen, it took a broad array of community support to help us make the leap to our own facility. In 2009 we purchased a century-old industrial building in Greenfield and transformed it into a solar-powered, energy-efficient, organic pickling facility. It was a challenging transition to say the least, one that we managed to pull off only because we had community partners who believed in us. A crucial element was the financing, of course. In spite of our already high debt load and a new global recession, our outstanding local bank and two mission-driven nonprofit lenders (Equity Trust, and FCCDC) came through for us just as we began to wonder if it was time to give up on Real Pickles. We are deeply thankful for all of the individuals and organizations who helped Real Pickles make it past that critical juncture.

Multiple bottom lines… into the future

Real Pickles worker owners May 2021 — Real Pickles worker owners, May 2021 (credit: Matthew Cavanaugh)

Since that time, Real Pickles has grown and developed into an organization that relies on many hands to operate. Our growing staff over the years have been an essential component of the business, and we are forever grateful to all those who have contributed by packing sauerkraut, chopping carrots, and building a strong culture. In 2013, along with three other staff (Brendan, Kristin, and Annie), we made the decision to convert Real Pickles to a worker-owned co-operative. This transition offered strong mission protection, opportunity for staff to benefit from owning their workplace, and assurance that Real Pickles will remain a community-oriented business far into the future.

To make this transition happen, we relied on the support of 77 community investors to join us in this endeavor. Folks were excited about supporting a business committed to healthy food, regional agriculture, and workplace democracy. By becoming a worker co-operative, we are building ownership in our community and creating good jobs in an inclusive work environment. We’re proud to be in a place where so many people value these things and are willing to invest in building a better food system.

As we move forward into the next 20 years, we do so knowing we are a community business. Our community partners – farmers, customers, investors, vendors, lenders, and many more – continue to play an essential role in our success. We in turn take responsibility for operating a truly mission-driven business that tracks multiple bottom lines – financial, social, and environmental. One important piece of this is acknowledging the role of social privilege in our founding success and a commitment to applying our resources toward building a more equitable society for the future. Building on the strength and values of our community, we will continue to make the world a better place and we commit to this for the long term.

THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to our story over the past 20 years — we’re lifting a glass of Organic Beet Kvass in your honor!

Posted January 30, 2014 by Dan

Beyond Local: The Case for Regional Food

Where should we get our food from? How far need it travel?

These are essential questions for anyone who wants a better food system – one that is ecologically sound and socially just. After all, a big impetus for the rapidly growing movement to transform the food system is the modern-day reality that places like New England – quite capable of raising such crops as apples or tomatoes – will instead import them from thousands of miles away and burn up large quantities of climate-changing fossil fuels in the process.

Long-distance food transport brings other drawbacks, too. By getting our food from California or New Zealand, we’re often giving up on flavor and nutrition because those distant farms are growing crops that were bred, first and foremost, to be shipped. Farms supplying national or global markets also tend to become big and concentrated, and thus are more likely (organic or not) to be engaged in industrial, monoculture practices, rather than the kind of agriculture that supports healthy soil, healthy crops, and healthy ecosystems. And, of course, eaters in this kind of food system are left hopelessly disconnected from the source of their food, which brings all sorts of unintended consequences.

As local as possible

Buy local! This has been a primary response to the crazy, unhealthy, industrial food system we have in this country. Leave behind that bad supermarket food shipped in from who knows where, and go get to know your neighborhood farmer. The push to buy local is taking the burgeoning new food system far. Countless farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms have come into being. More and more restaurant chefs are buying ingredients from local farms. Local food has even begun to make its way into schools and hospitals.

The idea of buying local makes sense in many ways. If our food system is broken and a central problem is that we’re sourcing from thousands of miles away, the obvious response is to switch to getting our food from as close to home as possible. And if the disconnect between farmers and eaters is a serious problem, we should start buying our food from a farmer who we can actually meet face to face. There’s a logic to it, and this indeed is an important part of the solution to building a new and better food system.

Is “buy local”, however, the end of the story? Is the right way to create the food system we need to buy as local as possible every time? It’s an increasingly popular idea. These days it serves as the basis for commissioned studies and marketing slogans suggesting that single small states – even single towns – might feed themselves almost entirely. But, I think the real answer is more complicated.

Urban and rural

A trip to a pickle festival in New York City a couple of years ago got me thinking about the issue in a new way. Addie Rose and I traveled to the Lower East Side to set up the Real Pickles booth at the Peck Slip Pickle Fest, a special one-day event at a public food market called New Amsterdam Market. During a short break between pickle sales, I got a chance to walk the market, and was struck by how different it was than the farmers markets back home in western Massachusetts. In rural western Massachusetts, farmers and other food producers typically travel ten or twenty miles to get to a farmers market. Here at New Amsterdam Market, I noticed that the vendors – vegetable farmers, cheesemakers, maple syrup producers – were coming from a much greater distance. Some had driven 100 miles or more from various points in the Hudson Valley. Others had traveled even further, coming down from the Finger Lakes or Northern Vermont. There were a few vendors with products made in Brooklyn, but few if any were using agricultural ingredients produced local to the city.

None of this came to me as a real surprise. A place like New York City – with its urban development stretching for many miles – obviously can’t support many real farms anywhere close to its borders. But, it got me thinking about all the talk about being a “locavore” and switching to a “100-mile diet”.

For those of us living in rural places like Vermont or the Berkshires or Maine, it’s remarkably easy to become convinced that solving our food system’s problems can be wholly accomplished by the act of buying as local as possible – and organic – in an effort to create a multitude of insulated, local food systems. And, yet the point of changing the food system is not to create an elitist alternative for a limited subset of the population. The point is to bring about a transformation that gives everyone the opportunity to participate in and benefit from a healthy, just, and sustainable food system.

If everyone is to be part of the new food system, then I think we need to keep this fact in mind: the majority of the U.S. population lives in concentrated urban areas whose local agricultural resources are entirely inadequate to support the food needs of their populations. For those in and around cities, then, the task of sourcing food from much closer to home means re-building the food system on a regional level. Instead of local food systems with a 100-mile radius (as many choose to define “local”), this means focusing on regional food systems with, perhaps, a 250- or 500-mile radius.

Those of us in rural areas – rich in agricultural resources – thus have an inescapable responsibility. As we do the necessary work of helping to overhaul the food system, we must consider what part we can play in feeding the populations of places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. While it is surely tempting (and so much simpler) to focus inwardly and exclusively on how to feed merely ourselves, that is not, in the end, the way to build a better food system. It is essential to be actively promoting and supporting our local farm economies – and, at the same, we need to be thinking more broadly.

Resiliency

There’s another strong reason why we need to think regionally as well as locally, one that undermines the notion that it would even be possible for any one town or small state to securely depend on its own agricultural resources. It has to do with things like weather and pests – those unavoidable factors that make farming inevitably risky and unpredictable. Factors which also threaten to make farming even more unpredictable as a result of climate change.

The changing pattern of cucumber growing here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts helps to illustrate the issue. Dave from Chamutka Farm in Whately has been growing pickling cucumbers (among other crops) since 1980. Before that, as a kid, he helped out his parents and other local growers raise them for the old Oxford pickle plant in nearby Deerfield. Dave, who was Real Pickles’ first cucumber supplier, has witnessed the harvest season for local pickling cucumbers shrink dramatically in recent years. When he first started growing, he could harvest cucumbers all summer long, typically going into mid to late September. By the time Dave started supplying cucumbers to Real Pickles in 2001, cucumber harvests would last at least until early September. Over the last decade, however, it has come to be a crapshoot to expect a harvest beyond mid-August. For Real Pickles, that means pickling all of our cucumbers for the entire year (60,000 pounds in 2013) within a single six-week period.

What’s steadily squeezing out our local cucumber season? It’s a disease called cucurbit downy mildew, which blows in from the southern states each summer and, just about overnight, wipes out the cucumber crop. These days it’s showing up much earlier than it used to, a trend that is likely to continue as the climate warms. As UMass Extension vegetable specialist, Ruth Hazzard, explained to me recently, human attempts to breed cucumber plants resistant to it have been failing to keep up with downy mildew’s rapid evolution via genetic mutation and natural selection. In the future, cucumbers could become a much less reliable local crop. And yet, as downy mildew does not typically reach all parts of the Northeast (check out these maps illustrating its recent impact), it may still be a reliable regional crop.

Differences in weather (and its effects) from one locale to another point us in a similar direction. Tropical Storm Irene barreled through the Northeast in August 2011 and brought epic amounts of rainfall. Small rivers flooded immediately, and within a few days, major rivers started overflowing their banks – leading to crops losses for numerous farms located along riverbanks (where the best soil is). Three of the six farms that regularly supply Real Pickles had flooded fields and ruined vegetable crops. It was a disastrous event for many farmers – though not for all farmers in the region. For one thing, Pioneer Valley farms located on higher ground tended to fare better during Irene. Looking regionally, the storm was a disaster for farms in such places as Vermont, the Hudson River Valley, and western Massachusetts. But, farms in many other parts of the Northeast – further from the track of the storm – emerged relatively unscathed.

Last season, farms in our area had to contend with one of the rainiest months of June in memory. About ten inches of rain fell here in the Pioneer Valley that month, adversely affecting our local food system in a variety of ways. The direct effect on Real Pickles was that 20,000 pounds of summer cabbage that we had planned to buy from one of our local farms rotted in the sopping fields. While our local farms had all experienced similar weather, farms in some other parts of the Northeast had not. The same week that we got the local cabbage news, we received a call from our friends at a farmers co-op in Pennsylvania and learned that organic farmers down there had produced a bumper crop of summer cabbage. We bought enough to fill up a tractor trailer – making the transport as energy efficient as possible – and were able to make the batches of sauerkraut and kimchi that we needed.

These examples all drive home the same point: While a global industrialized food system is clearly not a resilient one, neither is an entirely local one. If we are to build a better food system, resiliency must be among its central features. The inevitable conclusion, then, is that we need to make a shift toward regional scale. We must move away from the hopelessly unhealthy, inefficient, and insecure reality offered by our current global food system. And we also need to properly account for the impacts of weather, pests, and climate change – and do our best to ensure that everyone can be reliably fed.

Local and Regional

The work of building the new food system that we need involves a wide array of priorities – like reducing corporate dominance, expanding organic production, and shifting to healthy, minimally processed foods. Cutting back dramatically on long-distance food transport is another top priority. Here, we need to engage in food system development on two scales: local and regional.

How do we do this? CISA recently put out a fantastic guide, Eat Up and Take Action for Local Food, outlining all the many ways one can help build up our local food economies. Buy locally-grown food, support access to it for low-income folks, become a local foods entrepreneur, invest in a local foods business. There is plenty of important work to be done.

On the regional level, a key task is to build up the regional connections between farms, processors, distributors, retailers, and eaters. At Real Pickles, we enjoy working with and supporting three family-owned distributors – Angello’s, Regional Access, and Associated Buyers – all of whom do a great and efficient job of connecting Northeast family farms and producers with retailers throughout the region. (I mention “efficient” because regional food distribution can, in many cases, outcompete local food distribution when it comes to minimizing energy consumption, a key consideration.) We also make a point of keeping in touch with Northeast farms outside the Connecticut River Valley, so that we are prepared whenever those inevitable weather challenges arise. We primarily buy our vegetables from local farms, but we can turn to Pete’s Greens in Vermont or Tuscarora Organic Growers in Pennsylvania if we need to.

Encouraging retailers and eaters to support local and regional products is important, too. For years now, “buy local” marketing campaigns have been successfully raising awareness about the benefits of supporting local farms. It may be time for “buy regional” campaigns, as well. At Real Pickles, we honor our original commitments to buy our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and sell our products only within the Northeast. This is our way of publicly promoting the idea of regional food systems. We would love to see many more food businesses making similar commitments!

If we want a better food system, then we must be sourcing our food much closer to home. The food system is complex, however, and simple prescriptions will only take us so far. Responding to the reality of global food transport with the call to “buy local” is extremely important. If, however, we are to truly to change the food system – the whole system, not just the margins of it – we must also develop a regional perspective. By doing so, we will help to ensure that our food system can be healthy, secure, and sustainable. And that it can be so for everyone!

NOTE: If you’re interested in learning more about regional food systems, I recommend checking out the work of Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG). In particular, you’ll find excellent in-depth papers on the topic here and here. For a number of years now, NESAWG has also been helping to build a Northeast regional food system through their annual conference, It Takes a Region.

Posted March 16, 2013 by Real Pickles

A Community Perspective: Keeping It Local!

Margaret Christie is a rock star. Especially when it comes to our local food system here in western Massachusetts. As executive director of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) in the late 1990s, she oversaw the launch of the hugely successful “Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” marketing campaign. In her on-going work as CISA’s special projects director, Margaret plays an essential role as researcher, thinker, and organizer in the effort to build a better food system – locally and beyond. Here, Margaret offers her perspective on the social benefit of Real Pickles’ decision to go co-op. Thanks, Margaret, for your kind and insightful words!

by Margaret Christie, Special Projects Director, CISA

Why is Real Pickles’ decision to go worker co-op good for the rest of us? If they keep making good dill pickles, ginger carrots, and sauerkraut, do we care who owns them and how that ownership is structured? Yes, we do—not only because of the impact this business will have, but because the folks at Real Pickles are showing us how we can be involved in building a better food system.

The change in Real Pickles’ ownership provides a number of collateral
community benefits, but most important may be the model of business success they offer. As we work together to create a network of farm and food businesses that provide more of the food we eat every day here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts (and the surrounding region), we often focus on business start-ups, not on what follows success. But what happens to a business that starts with a commitment to sourcing regionally or sustainably grown ingredients as the business matures? When the owners are ready to do something else—or just to shoulder a little bit less of the burden of keeping the business going—how can their commitment to regional sourcing be maintained? Real Pickles’ decision to form a worker co-op models one answer to this important question.

Every month, I attend meetings of the PVGrows Loan Fund as CISA’s representative. When local farm and food businesses apply to us for financing, we review a list of criteria that represent our mission of “enhancing the ecological and economic sustainability and vitality of the Pioneer Valley food system.” Among our concerns is long-term commitment to the Pioneer Valley. If we finance a new business, will they continue to source from local farmers in the long run, or will they decide that it’s less expensive to find their ingredients in the global marketplace? Or might they move altogether, finding both cheaper ingredients and cheaper labor? When evaluating loan applicants, we often have no way to assess the owners’ long-term commitment to our region.

Real Pickles’ new ownership structure, in contrast, provides two clear answers to this question. First, the business will now have multiple owners, all relying on its success for their employment, and unlikely to choose to ship their jobs someplace else. Second, they’ve codified their commitment to regional sourcing and regional sales in their bylaws, and made those bylaws very difficult to change. Rather than getting big and getting bought out by a larger corporation with, perhaps, a stronger commitment to their shareholders’ profits than to our local economy, Real Pickles has strengthened their commitment to our region while restructuring their ownership.

Real Pickles’ action reminds me of a courageous step taken by another Franklin County business more than a decade ago. In 1998, a group of Franklin County dairy farmers decided to form a co-op and market their own milk to local consumers, becoming Our Family Farms. They introduced the milk by giving out lots of free samples, explaining that it came from their own farms, right down the road. There wasn’t much fanfare then about locally grown food, but the response was clear: the milk was delicious, and local residents understood that supporting businesses in their own communities benefitted the local economy. Many farmers and farm advocates in the region took notice. At CISA, when we started the Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown campaign the following year, Our Family Farms’ success gave us confidence that the campaign would resonate here in the Pioneer Valley. CISA is now celebrating our 20th anniversary, and the founding of Our Family Farms was a critical milestone on the road to the Local Hero campaign and the explosion of interest in local food and farms.

I expect that Real Pickles’ decision to form a worker co-op—and the campaign for investors which will finance the shift in ownership—will play a similarly important role in the growth of our local food system. Growth and success can lead to a renewed commitment to our region and the health of its farms, workers, and local economy. And as residents of this region, some of us can do more than applaud and eat pickles: we can finance this growth from within our own community.

For more information about Real Pickles’ co-op investment campaign, visit www.realpickles.com/invest.