CLIMATE CHANGE

Posted January 19, 2017 by Dan

Creating Social Change, Together

The extraordinary political events taking place in our country are affecting us deeply here at Real Pickles Co-operative, as they are for so many others. They highlight how far we have to go to build the just, democratic, and sustainable society we wish to see. We are reminded why all of us here take Real Pickles’ social mission so seriously, and why we must continue to work as hard as we can in pursuit of it. It is also now as clear as ever that we cannot do this work alone.

One essential lesson of the 2016 presidential election – among many others – seems to be that our economic system is truly not working for many millions of Americans, and that this fact cannot be ignored. The Dow Jones may be up, the economy may be growing, corporate profits and the 1% may be doing great. But many are being left behind. Real change is needed, and the big question is what kind of change will we work toward?

At Real Pickles, we are committed to creating positive social change based on an inclusive vision that prioritizes equality, justice, health, democracy, and sustainability. We are seeking to build a system that offers real opportunity to all people to live healthy and fulfilling lives. This means moving away from corporate capitalism and toward an economy where small, community-oriented businesses are the norm. It means making hatred and discrimination things of the past. And – urgently – it means doing whatever we can to avoid disastrous climate change.

Thankfully, we are far from alone in these efforts. A strong example is the New Economy Coalition (of which we are a proud member), whose vision is “a new economy…that meets human needs, enhances the quality of life, and allows us to live in balance with nature…a future where capital (wealth and the means of creating it) is a tool of the people, not the other way around.” As a diverse array of 175 member organizations, each is pursuing these goals in its own ways, and also coming together wherever and however possible to build on each other’s efforts. So much essential work is happening within this network, and we are grateful for the opportunities we’ve had to collaborate with such members as Equity Trust, Co-op Power, Cooperative Fund of New England, Cutting Edge Capital, Tellus Institute, Slow Money, and Project Equity.

Our work of creating a more sustainable food system is supported by many thriving organizations. Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), for example, has been paving the way for countless food and farm businesses here in western Massachusetts to reach success as a result of their highly effective marketing of the “buy local” concept. The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG), a 12-state network of over 500 organizations, is leading the way in building a vibrant regional food system. The Northeast Organic Farming Association and Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association are each in their fifth decade as influential developers of the organic agriculture movement.

We are also encouraged to be seeing the rise of the co-operative movement which is building a valuable alternative to the traditional corporate model. Worker co-operatives are sprouting up here in western Massachusetts (and elsewhere), with the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives providing a forum for area worker co-ops to collaborate as well as offering assistance to start-ups. Around the Northeast, we are seeing more and more consumer food co-ops both getting started and expanding, with support from the Neighboring Food Co-op Association – a regional network of food co-ops representing combined memberships of over 107,000 and annual revenue of $240 million.

While the primary focus of Real Pickles’ work is the Northeast U.S., we recognize the importance of maintaining a national and global perspective, as well. We admire and support the grassroots climate activism of 350.org, and have participated in climate marches in NYC and Washington DC. The National Co-op Business Association, a national trade group of co-ops, is doing important work developing and advancing co-operative enterprise both in the U.S. and internationally. The Cornucopia Institute is providing the public with essential reporting highlighting both the problems of industrial agriculture and beneficial practices of family-scale organic farmers. Over the past year, thousands have been camped out on the front lines protesting plans to build the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation (we recently made an exception to our Northeast-only distribution commitment to send a donation of fermented vegetables to the protesters).

We’re deeply fortunate to be working with so many effective partners who share our commitment to a just, democratic, and sustainable society. At the same time, we know that our approach to creating social change, as well as the scope of our own network, represents merely a narrow slice of what is happening and what must happen if we are to truly achieve our vision. In the months and years ahead, we commit to redoubling our efforts to create real and positive change by building on the work we’re already doing and by seeking out new connections and partnerships across our region, nationally and globally. We hope you will join us.

Posted September 24, 2015 by Dan

Calculating Food Miles at Real Pickles

In the course of preparing our latest annual report, we learned some interesting things about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork!

Since Real Pickles’ beginnings in 2001, one of our key social commitments has been to source our vegetables only from Northeast farms and to sell our products only within the Northeast. We do this because we want to promote the development of strong local and regional food systems. There are so many good reasons to be getting our food from closer to home – freshness and nutritional value, food security, strong agricultural economies, climate change, and more. And, as I’ve written about here, it’s not just local that’s important but regional, too.

We’ve always had some sense about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork, but we’d never before really tried to figure it out. For our most recent annual report, we decided to go for it. We posed the question, “What can a business do to build a strong local & regional food system?” We offered up our answer: “source locally & regionally…sell locally & regionally!”. And, then we got to work with the calculator and spreadsheets to ascertain just how far – on average – our vegetables traveled from farm to fermentation last year, and how far our products then traveled from fermentation to fork.

Upon delving into the project, it quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to come up with precise numbers. The reality of food transport involves all kinds of complexities that we could never fully sort through. But, we could arrive at some useful estimates that would illustrate the difference it makes when a business commits to sourcing and selling within a region.

Farm to Fermentation

Determining the average distance that our vegetables traveled last year from farm to Real Pickles was the more straightforward of the two calculations. We received a total of 128 vegetable deliveries from ten farms – beginning with the first load of cucumbers from Atlas Farm in late June, ending with our last drop-off of storage beets from Red Fire Farm in February. For the purposes of the calculation, we assumed that all vegetables traveled straight from the farm to Real Pickles, with no other deliveries along the way.

Organic. Local. Cabbage. Ready to ferment!

The result? The 285,000 pounds of vegetables used to make Real Pickles products from the 2014 harvest traveled an average of 17 miles from farm to fermentation!! We’re very excited by this number. Of course, it’s also what we’d expect given our commitment to working with suppliers like Riverland Farm (13 miles away), Atlas Farm (7 miles away), and Old Friends Farm (22 miles away).

What if we made no commitment to sourcing from Northeast farms? Real Pickles would likely be buying vegetables from much farther away. Most of our cabbage, for example, would be coming from major cabbage-producing areas like California, Texas, and Mexico. In that case, our cabbage would be traveling thousands of miles from farm to fermentation.

Fermentation to Fork

CJ loads the Real Pickles van for local deliveries!

Figuring out the average distance from fermentation to fork was a more challenging task. Nearly 20,000 cases of Real Pickles products traveled to over 400 stores last year. Retailers here in the Pioneer Valley – like River Valley Co-op and Foster’s Supermarket – receive their pickle orders via the Real Pickles delivery van. While those further afield – such as the Park Slope Food Coop and Martindale’s Natural Market – get their Real Pickles products through our distributors or via UPS. We couldn’t possibly know exactly what route each jar of kimchi or sauerkraut took to get to each store last year, nor can we know the route each jar traveled to get to our customers’ plates!

We do, however, have good data on how many cases of Real Pickles product were sold to each store last year. So, we mapped the driving mileage from Real Pickles direct to each of our top 50 retailers – which together sold about half of our product last year. (We made the assumption that doing the calculation based on this group of stores would yield a reasonably accurate result, while saving quite a bit of time.) Then, we used our sales data to calculate an overall weighted average for distance traveled. Based on this approach, the final result was pushed higher by fast-selling stores in places like New York City (~175 miles away), while kept lower by nearby stores selling lots of our pickles in such towns as Northampton, MA, and Brattleboro, VT (~20 miles away).

When all the math was done, we learned that Real Pickles products traveled an average of 131 miles last year from fermentation to fork!

We’re pretty excited by this number, too. As a growing business producing an ever more popular food (fermented vegetables), we know we could easily be shipping our Real Pickles products thousands of miles all around the country. But, we also know there are so many important reasons to be sourcing and selling regionally. When we consider that our 20,000 cases last year traveled an average of 131 miles – rather than 1,000 or 2,000 miles – we know we’re making a difference.

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 February 19, 2013 by Addie Rose

“We don’t want no climate drama!”

Who does? Dan and I traveled down to Washington D.C. this past weekend to be part of Forward on Climate, the biggest climate rally in U.S. history. We joined over 40,000 people on the Mall near the Washington Monument, and then marched to the White House to make sure that our message was heard. Our message was serious, but we had a great time conveying it.

The Sierra Club, 350.org, and 160+ other organizations sponsored theevent, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip-Hop Caucus emceed the show. We heard from author and activist Bill McKibben, tribal leaders from British Columbia, Alberta, and Oklahoma, and even a member of the 1% (a billionaire investor) who came out to let us know that he saw the Keystone XL pipeline as a very bad investment. All spoke out strongly against the pipeline that is proposed for transporting oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast for refining and exporting. The quantity of oil estimated to be locked up in the tar sands is equal to all the oil that humanity has ever yet used – and if burned would raise the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from an already dangerous 400 ppm to a frightening 600 ppm.

“You are the antibodies kicking in as the planet starts to fight its fever,” Bill McKibben told the crowd as we gathered on the Mall. Many people referenced Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to the Mall 50 years ago and the crowds of people who came to fight for human equality. The difference, Rev. Yearwood noted, is that now “we are fighting for existence.” Indeed, climate change is already picking up steam – as recent extreme weather events keep reminding us – and the stakes are high. The opportunity to convince President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline is an opportunity to impede the burning of that dirty Alberta oil – and to give us time to get on track reducing our energy consumption and switching to renewables. Dr. King’s famous words ring true today: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”

Climate change is a big deal to us at Real Pickles. Our work here is to strive to create a business that is sustainable and energy efficient, one that helps to build a strong and healthy community. Many of the principles on which we base our decisions are principles that also define the climate movement. Climate change is also central to the work I do outside of Real Pickles: managing communications and outreach for the Northeast Climate Science Center (NE CSC) based at UMass Amherst. The center is a federal-academic partnership that works to provide tools to natural resource managers as they plan for a future of changing climate. My two workplaces – Real Pickles and the NE CSC – span a broad spectrum between big picture and community scale action. In both, I think about the issues surrounding climate change on a daily basis and hope that our government will take action to prevent the worst, even as many citizens prepare for it. For these reasons, I was thrilled to join the 40,000+ protesters in Washington on Sunday.

The march begins

“Hey Obama! We don’t want no climate drama!” – chant from the crowd

We felt very inspired by the attendance and the vibe at the rally. People traveled from all over the country to participate and show their support for a low-carbon future. Together, we shouted and we shook our fists. We danced to the drum line and the brass band. And we danced extra hard to keep warm – did I mention that it was a crisp 25 degrees with a brisk wind?

There were signs declaring that “fossil fuels are SO last century” and stickers against hydrofracking (“No fracking way!”). The tribal leaders spoke of the incredible pollution risk posed by the Keystone XL pipeline: “Oil always spills. It is not a question of if, but a question of when.” And there were numerous chants in favor of solar and wind power, with Dan and I occasionally adding in a good word for conservation as priority #1.

Turnout for the event far exceeded expectations, and we left feeling particularly proud of the Western Mass contingent: we heard that 5 or 6 full buses traveled to the rally from the Pioneer Valley, yeah! We took a bus down from Greenfield and were serenaded in the parking lot by activists unable to join us – with songs like CSN’s “Long Time Comin'” – before we boarded the bus and set on our way. Amidst the enormous crowd, we didn’t run into many Western Mass folks but did see our neighbor Alden, owner of the People’s Pint, toward the end of the rally. We were hoping he would have 2 pints of his Farmer Brown and a couple of pulled pork sandwiches to offer us, but alas – we’ll have to wait until we get back to Greenfield.

We’re including a few photos from our trip – we hope that you enjoy!