farmers

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 July 13, 2018 by Tamara

Supporting a Regional Food System: An Interview with Myers Produce

As you may know, here at Real Pickles we are deeply committed to buying our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and selling our products only within the Northeast. One way in which we are able to achieve this, and in turn help to build a strong, organic and regional food system, is by working with small independently-owned regional distributors who bring Real Pickles to our Northeast neighbors.

With this in mind, we began partnering with Myers Produce in 2016 as a way to bring our ferments deeper into the urban areas of the Northeast, and we’ve been thrilled with the results!

Myers Produce has been in operation since 2013. As a regional distributor based in Vermont, they buy vegetables and value added foods primarily from small, mostly organic farms in Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. They then truck and sell to stores and restaurants in the New York City and Boston areas. Everything they offer has been produced in the Northeast. It’s a beautifully closed loop!

I recently chatted with Annie Myers, owner and founder of Myers Produce, about her experience delivering delicious regionally-grown food to cities in the Northeast. Read about it here, and let us know your thoughts on how regional food fits into your life.

How did you decide to start a food distribution business?

AM: I had been working on a farm in Northern Vermont for about three years at the time, and it had become clear that the farms in my area were struggling to reach markets outside the state. After the local wholesale market was maxed out, our farm considered major supermarket chains to be the best option for increased sales, and the demands of those large supermarket chains were not well-suited to the structure and diversity of our vegetable farm. Although I had been living in Vermont, I am originally from Brooklyn, and had spent some time working in the food industry in New York. I had friends in the city who I knew were looking for a better way to source food grown in our region, and who could afford to pay reasonable prices for that food. After a few years of seeing the disconnect between Vermont farms and high-end urban wholesale customers, I decided to start a business that might connect the supply in Vermont with the demand in the city.

Who are your main customers?

AM: Our produce goes to retail stores and restaurants throughout NYC and the Boston area. Our largest customers are a food co-op, an online retailer, and a fast casual restaurant chain, all in NYC.

How many truckloads of regionally-produced food do you deliver to New York City & Boston each year?

AM: We deliver in NYC four times per week throughout the summer and three times per week throughout the year. We deliver to the Boston area five times per week through the summer and twice per week throughout the year. All told this is about 330 truck loads per year!

How has Myers Produce changed over the years since you started?

AM: When we started, the business consisted of me, a van, and a computer, and I was delivering exclusively to NYC customers once a week. We have grown a lot since then! We are now a team of ten employees operating four box trucks. Our mission has remained the same since the beginning – we work to increase Northeast farmers’ access to regional urban wholesale customers, in order to support the strength of agriculture and the regional food system in the Northeast.

How does the seasonality of our Northeast agriculture impact your business?

AM: We have a much less diverse list in the winter than we do in the summertime. We don’t source any products from outside the region, so as soon as a product goes out of season in the Northeast, it is no longer offered on our list. That said, many of our farmers do an amazing job of season extension, and our winter offerings are probably more diverse than you might expect! We have greenhouse-grown spinach, tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes year-round, and we generally have kale, fennel and leeks well into January. And we have added value goods made with locally-grown produce available as well, like products from Real Pickles!

In a relatively short period of time, you have built up a great reputation as a regional distributor. What are the integral aspects to your success?

AM: We don’t know the answer to this entirely, but I think we have prioritized efficient systems, clear communication, and good customer service from the very beginning. I know these things mean a lot to our farmers and producers, and to our urban customers.

With all the farms and food producers in Vermont and the Pioneer Valley, how do you choose your offerings?

AM: We don’t have an exact formula, but we try to keep our list diverse and to offer a consistent high quality. We try to source the products that we consider to match growers’ strengths, while also balancing location, price point, seasonality, and scale.

What do we need to be thinking about as consumers and shoppers, in terms of building a strong regional food system?

AM: I know that all of our customers are constantly competing with huge corporate sources of food (Amazon/Whole Foods in particular), and that they are challenged to differentiate themselves in the eyes of consumers. I think the most important thing is for shoppers to be intentional about where they spend their money, and think about who they are supporting by where they buy their food. If we want to support local growers in the Northeast, we need to make sure to spend money where it will stay in regional circulation.

What is the most interesting behind-the-scenes aspect of Myers?

AM: We really only have one physical warehouse space. But, to cover the distances we cover while adhering to regulations – and also create jobs that we think are sustainable – we have drivers based in NYC, Western MA, and VT. All of these drivers start and end their days in the same locations, but they drive from VT to Western MA and back, from Western MA to NJ and back, from Western MA to VT and back, and from Western MA to Boston and back.

What has been your favorite aspect of your job over the years?

AM: I have always loved puzzles, and I’ve grown to enjoy creating systems that are physical, flexible, efficient, and full of moving parts. I love it when an opportunity or inquiry comes up on a given morning, and I get to think about how that opportunity fits into our current operation, send a few emails, make a few phone calls, and be able to take advantage of that opportunity (often by the next day) in a way that makes sense for all parties involved. It keeps me on my toes, and it helps me feel that Myers Produce is providing a real service that can adapt to the needs of the folks that we are trying to serve.

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 April 21, 2015 by Kristin

Behind the Scenes at Real Pickles: An Interview with Heather Wernimont, Fermentation Manager

At Real Pickles, we’ve been fermenting Northeast-grown vegetables for well over a decade. When Real Pickles got started in 2001, there were only a small handful of commercial vegetable fermenters anywhere in the country. We’ve learned a lot over the years!

I recently talked with Heather Wernimont, our Fermentation Manager and newest worker-owner of the Real Pickles co-op, to get the latest on fermentation at Real Pickles. Among other things, we chatted about the 2014 production season, what it’s like to get paid to taste pickles, and the similarities between cucumbers and baby goats.

Heather organizes jars for new product tasting!

KH: What do you do as Fermentation Manager?

HW: I work in a team of three production managers. My role is to oversee the making of Real Pickles products from start to finish. This includes planning for all of the vegetables that we buy from area farms, figuring out when we want them delivered, and processing the vegetables. I monitor the barrels during fermentation, tasting them to determine when the product is done fermenting and making sure we are consistent in the way we pack them into jars. I’m also responsible for maintaining our organic certification and working on new product development.

KH: Real Pickles fermented 300,000 pounds of vegetables in the 2014 production season. How do you go about doing that?

HW: Our season usually starts in late June when the local cucumber harvest starts and ends in January or February with our last batches of beets and carrots. So we have seven or eight months to do all of our processing of fresh vegetables. We have a production staff of eight or nine people each day who do the work of prepping vegetables, from washing and peeling to coring and shredding. We have a processing machine that we use to shred cabbage, slice onions, grate carrots and that sort of thing. We wash a lot of vegetables and cut all of our cucumbers by hand! We mix the vegetables with salt and spices and pack them into barrels to ferment. All of this work is very labor-intensive. Our kitchen crew is pretty amazing!

KH: Was there anything unusual about this past growing season that impacted Real Pickles?

Delivery! Bins of fresh cabbage waiting to be sliced and spiced.

HW: Every growing season looks a little different so we know ahead of time that we’ll need to be flexible and not get stressed out when the days don’t go as planned. This past summer started off nice and warm with lots of cucumbers coming in at the end of June. Somewhere around the last part of July, temperatures at night became very cool and caused the cucumbers to slow down significantly. Once we start getting into August, downy mildew is a threat so we really need to make as many cucumber pickles as we can as early in the season as possible. We were pretty nervous going into August but ended up being able to source the cucumbers we needed from a grower in the middle of the month.We try to stay a step ahead and have some backup work for staff in case there are gaps in our vegetable deliveries. We sometimes fill days peeling and prepping garlic, or we’ll get some summer cabbage for an early batch of sauerkraut. We can also pack finished pickles into jars, which is the work we typically save for winter and spring when we don’t have fresh vegetables coming in.Sometimes, we have the opposite problem. At the start of the season this past summer we were expecting a delivery of around 800 pounds of cucumbers from Atlas Farm. Instead, Gideon called in the beginning of the week and said, “I have 3,000 pounds. Can I bring them over?” We said yes — and it was intense!

KH: Do you ever have to change production plans in the middle of the season?

HW: Around the beginning of September, we realized we were going to need to make much, much more kimchi than we had originally planned to keep from running out in the spring. We had made all of our contracts with vegetable farmers in March. Then all of a sudden customers couldn’t seem to get enough kimchi, and we needed to make more.Sauerkraut would be easy — you find some cabbage, salt and spices and figure out the staff schedule and you’re done. Kimchi is complicated – it takes two days to make one batch and there are lots of ingredients to source from multiple farms. We have to look for napa cabbage, carrots, leeks, garlic, ginger, habaneros. Luckily, this year the leek and carrots harvests were good so those were easy. Finding enough napa and garlic was harder but we found what we needed and made an extra 20 barrels — that’s about 800 gallons of extra kimchi!

KH: What are the biggest challenges in your job?

HW: At our peak production, we may have about 425 barrels fermenting at once. I need to stay on top of all of them, tasting them when I think they might be done fermenting. Right now, we have two fermentation rooms and we can control the temperatures in both of them. So if we have a lot of barrels that might be ready all at once, we can move some of them into a cooler room to slow down the fermentation a bit. That way we spread out when the different batches are ready. We don’t have a lot of extra space at our facility and have to manage space carefully. We have to make sure we get batches out of barrels and into jars to sell so we can use that barrel again. My job requires a lot of planning, flexibility and creative problem solving all at once. I love the challenge.

KH: How do you figure out whether a batch has finished fermenting and is ready to pack into jars?

HW: I’m looking for taste and texture. We want the flavors to have melded properly so they don’t taste like raw vegetables, I make sure whatever spices we’ve used have blended in with the vegetables. The level of sourness needs to be right. The sugar levels in the vegetable vary over the season and this contributes to how quickly the vegetables ferment so each batch is different. I can’t just assume that it will be ready in a certain number of months.Taste and texture is most important, but lately we’ve done some testing of acid levels and remaining vegetable sugars to deepen our understanding. We also pH test every batch as an extra step to make sure the finished product is safe.

KH: Do you ever experiment with different vegetables?

Superchiles awaiting placement in Spicy Dill Pickle jars…

HW: Yes! We canceled production a couple of days because of snow storms this past winter. I used the time to make 28 different experiments! I focused on some different kimchi recipes and tried some vegetables fermented with hakurei turnips and radishes. We have some great orchards here in western Massachusetts so I also made some recipes with apples and pears, which can add some sweetness to fermented vegetables. I wanted to try some new flavors while also staying in line with the simplicity of our current product line.

KH: You did all of the vegetable purchasing for Real Pickles this past year. How did that go?

HW: I really enjoy working with the growers. We have some amazing long term relationships that Dan and Addie Rose started over a decade ago. All of the farms we buy from are small to mid-size family farms, but the growers’ operations are quite different. For example, I do most of my planning directly with Casey at Old Friends Farm over email. Dave Chamutka, on the other hand, is hard to catch by phone but I know he’ll be making the delivery himself so we always talk in person. With Red Fire Farm, I make arrangements early in the season with Ryan, one of the owners, and then later work with the wholesale manager. We are lucky to have such great people to work with.

KH: Before you started at Real Pickles you worked as the Education Program Manager at Sprout Creek Farm, an agricultural educational center and maker of award-winning cheese, in the Hudson Valley. Do you see any similarities between these two jobs?

HW: Kidding season and cucumber season are remarkably similar! You can know that fifteen goats are going to give birth but you can’t control when the kids are going to come; it’s the same with cucumbers. You may know cucumber season will be starting soon but everything changes when the first truck pulls up with bins of cucumbers!

KH: What’s been your favorite aspect of the job?

HW: Here in the Pioneer Valley, we have access to so many high quality organic vegetables that ferment in such amazing ways. I’ve loved learning about the subtleties of fermentation and working with a live product. There may be differences in how the vegetables ferment as a result of the amount of rain a farm received, the time of year the carrots were harvested, the variety of the cabbage, or the soil profile of a particular farm. We aim for consistency, but due to the nature of a wild fermentation, some variations between batches occur. I like to think that these differences are what make our products so interesting and delicious!

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.

Posted November 11, 2011 by Dan

Lessons from a Muddy Season

Dave Chamutka of Chamutka Farm recently harvested the last of his 2011 cabbage crop and delivered it to our door. By the next day, those cabbages were all peeled, cored, shredded, salted, and fermenting in barrels. It was the final batch of vegetables for the year for us. We’re now stocked up until next season – the cooler is full of packed cucumber pickles, the warehouse extra-full of barrels of fermenting cabbage, beets, and ginger carrots.

This particular November, it’s a bit of a relief walking through our warehouse and seeing all those barrels full of locally-grown vegetables on their way to becoming pickles. Given how heavily we depend here at Real Pickles on the success of the local farm harvest, there was a lot of uncertainty this season about how things were going to go.

The first concrete indication that 2011 might be a little different came in June when Gideon Porth from Atlas Farm called up to say that he was re-seeding his entire main crop of pickling cucumbers, and so we should expect a delay in the harvest this year. Many of the cucumber seeds had just rotted in the mud, as spring had been so cool and wet. As we got further into the season, we learned that the spring weather had affected many of the other crops we were waiting on, as well.

Once July hit, the weather got hot and quite dry for awhile. But, the dry weather, of course, was not to remain. In late August, Irene dumped epic amounts of rain on all the farm fields in the area. Within a couple days, the Connecticut River was overflowing its banks and flooding fields at three of the six farms we work with (among many other area farms). Harlow Farm, in Westminster, VT, was especially hard hit – a significant portion of the farm was underwater before the river finally receded. The sky was blue within a day of Irene’s passing, but many more inches of rain came down in the weeks following. By the time Dave Chamutka was ready to start harvesting his cabbage in late September, his fields were so muddy he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get in there to cut them.

In the end, though, we managed to fill all those barrels with top quality, delicious, locally-grown, organic vegetables. Amazing! Despite the odds, the area’s local farmers came through for us. Gideon re-planted those seeds and went on to grow us plenty of beautiful pickling cukes. Dave and his crew had to walk those first heavy crates of cabbage all the way out of the muddy field before being able to finally drive a truck in, but in the end managed to deliver to us what we needed to stock up on Organic Sauerkraut for the year. The losses at Harlow Farm included carrots we were planning to buy. But, we struck up a relationship with Joe Czajkowski, a third-generation farmer in Hadley, MA, who was able to fill in so that we could keep making our Organic Ginger Carrots.

We are always appreciative here of our local farmers, but in a year like this one we are especially thankful. This season we were reminded of the challenges of committing to buying our ingredients only from local farms. If we hadn’t been able to get enough cabbage, then come next spring we would be running out of several Real Pickles products. But, even more, we were reminded of how resilient a well-developed local/regional food system can be. After all, local farms still produced a tremendous amount of food this year, despite the adversity.

Resiliency is one reason why local/regional food systems make so much more sense than our dominant industrial one. This has much to do with diversity and decentralization, as opposed to monoculture and centralization. In our centralized industrial system, the majority of lettuce consumed in the United States is produced monoculture-style in Salinas, CA. As a result, when the weather in Salinas is bad for lettuce, suddenly an important food can become scarce and expensive as far away as New England. An even worse situation ensues when scary pathogens like E. coli 0157:H7 (whose appearance seems to be a direct result of industrial agricultural practices – see Michael Pollan for details) show up on a crop like lettuce. With agricultural production so concentrated, such contamination quickly leads to widespread illness and nationwide recalls.

But, the diversity and decentralization that come with local/regional food systems promise to make us far less vulnerable than that. On farms producing many different crops, rough conditions in a given year are likely to impact certain ones but are unlikely to impact everything. In the huge October snowstorm we experienced recently, Atlas Farm’s two-acre lettuce crop got squashed by the snow, but their other autumn crops survived. In a decentralized food system, a critical crop shortage experienced by a particular region in a given year could likely be rectified by sourcing from another region. No one need starve.

A food system’s resiliency does not stem solely from diversity and decentralization, however. As I think about all of those cucumbers the crew at Atlas Farm managed to harvest for us after such an inhospitable spring, and about all the heads of cabbage that were coaxed to maturity in the mud at Chamutka Farm, I am reminded that it is also the skill, tenacity, and creativity of the farmers that make a food system resilient. Those farmers worked especially hard this season. We at Real Pickles wish them a good winter’s rest!