Cucumbers in yogurt. . . green bean salad. . . ham salad. . . Santa Fe chicken salad. . . and thoughts on keeping cool in the extreme heat. . .
106 degrees today, 110 degrees tomorrow and the next day. . . IT IS TOO HOT TO SHOP! That's why I'm going to the online coop store for groceries this month. Yes, it's true, the August order of the Oklahoma Food Coop is open and I can sit here in my nice cool house and order away online. It sure beats driving to a big box supermarket, parking and hiking across 60 acres of blazing hot asphalt to the front door, and then repeating that process when I am done.
The vegetable aisle looks a little lean this month. But then, it is August, and this is the hottest and driest summer since modern record-keeping began in the last decades of the 19th century. We still have onions, and it looks like there are lots of potatoes available, so remember the first rule of local foods: Buy when in season and store for eating later. You will want some of those potatoes and onions in November and December for your Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, so plan ahead. You could buy a whole year's worth of onions, and caramelize them by the pot-full in your crockpot, and then freeze them in recipe-size portions for eating later.
Remember also that it pays to shop the Coop often during the order period. Producers with both eggs and vegetables will often wait until later in the order window to post their products, since they may not be sure what will be available 3 weeks from now right this very day. But over the next week or so, it will become more evident to them and then we will see some inventories start to increase.
And then there is also the little detail that there is quite a bit of non-seasonal food available year from from the Coop. Buffalo, Beef, Pork, Lamb, Cheese, Yogurt, Grains, Flours and Meals. . . you can certainly make many meals out of these deals.
Don't forget your non-food items. Laundry soap? Check. Bath soap? Check. Yes it costs more but yes it is also a superior artisinal product so actually, these body care products cost less than their store-bought cousins, if we could just figure out how to give a figure for "cost per bath", lol. The hard part about buying our artisinal bath soaps and such is deciding which "flavors" you want. Which is fine, you could buy more than one you know.
So what are we going to cook this month?
Well, once thing I like is cucumbers and yogurt, both of which are available this month. Sometimes I shred the cucumber into the yogurt, and add a bit of fire like a chopped jalapeno or cayenne or powdered or crushed red pepper. Those who have been reading my recipes for a while are well aware of my deplorable habit of adding heat to everything, so go ahead, add more than you think you need since the dairy tends to cut the heat of hot peppers anyway.
Or. . . I peel the cuke and quarter it, and then slice it into thin quarter moons. Add this to some yogurt and then if you are making (for example) one cup, add about a half tablespoon of your favorite home-made or locally made jam or jelly. It adds just a bit fo sweetness and some fruit flavor, peach and strawberry both seem really nice for this, without adding a bunch of carbs and such.
Another summer favorite is green bean salad. so pull some of those green beans that you picked and canned earlier this year off the shelf, drain the liquid and dress them with vinegar and oil and just a hint of sweetness. You could use sugar or Splenda. . . or here again you add a hint of fruit to the complex of flavors by using some peach or strawberry or grape jam. Jam making is much easier than most people think, but you can also buy great jams from our coop's artisanal prepared food producers.
What's that you say? You didn't put up any green beans, in fact, you didn't grow any green beans at all. Well you are certainly missing out. Green beans are one of the best vegetables to grow in Oklahoma. You can raise them in the spring and in the fall. The more you pick them the more they produce, and you can pressure can them for eating later. But if you don't have any on hand, you'll want to store-bought cans, a quarter cup each of vinegar and oil (extra virgin olive, please!), and sugar, Splenda, or jam to taste.
What else sounds good. . . hmmmm. . . how about some Minced Ham Salad? Great hams are sold hereabout these parts, so get one and chop some of it very finely. Maybe about a half pound. Then mince some onion finely, and add some good relish. I highly recommend the varioius relishes available from our coop for this, including the zucchini relish, also for egg salad, deviled eggs, hot dogs, and anything else you would put relish on. Many people think relish can only be made from cukes, and while fine relishes are made from pickled cukes, it is rather pedestrian to limit our choice to just cucumber pickle relishes when there are so many other fine relishes out there, like zucchini. Then add some mayo and go ahead and get some organic celery from the store and put some of that in there too.
If you're starting with a half pound of ham chunks, you'll want a half cup of mayo, 1 celery stalk, 1/4 cup relish, 1/4 cup minced onion. If you can't get organic celery, don't add celery, as conventional celery is one of the worst veggies in the supermarket for pesticide residue. Celery is one vegetable that must always be bought organic, and it's not something that really will grow well around here. Lovage, on the other hand, has kind of a smoky celery flavor, and it will grow quite nicely hereabout these parts and is a perennial, which makes it a double value for the price of planting. I have used lovage in just about everything that I would use celery and it was fine.
Extra chicken? Well, substitute chicken for ham. Add some chili powder and a little heat and call it "Santa Fe Chicken Salad".
Let's say a quick final word about energy conservation. As folks know, we've done a lot of work to make our house more energy efficient. Because of the 9 inches of insulation in our walls and 14 inches in the attic, plus our R-20 interior insulated window shutters, we can cool our entire 1548 sq ft house with only 20K btus of AC equipment. that amount of AC equipment is designed to cool about 600 sq ft, and we rarely have all those btus going at the same time. So we're saving money every month on our electrical bill, and reducing our global warming emissions, and thus making out like a moderately fat rat during these hard times. It also helps that we planted extensive landscaping outside that shades the house. It hurt us a bit this summer when the city made us cut down five of our fruit trees due to their bogus claim of "view obstruction", but oh well, I forgive them for their sins just as O hope to be forgiven for mine, which are many.
So while the summer is brutal, never think that we are totally at the mercy of the elements. With smart work we can adapt our dwellings to meet the new extreme normals of this age of climate and economic and social chaos. But the thing is -- none of this happens on its own. We didn't wake up one morning and find our house adapted. We made a plan and we implemented it and now we get to harvest the fruits of those design decisions.
Don't know where to start? Caulk and weatherize. Caulk is cheap. Heat always moves towards cold, so in the summer, all those leaks around your doors and windows and other places are letting HEAT in to turn your nice interior coolness into hotness, and thus forcing your AC to work harder and harder. Next, shade your windows and doors, from the outside. Curtains are fine on the inside, but your goal should be to keep the heat from hitting your windows in the first place. Once the sun hits the glass or the frame, the heat gets inside by conduction, even if you have interior curtains.
So order up some tasty local foods, that do good as well as taste good, and start making your own household plan to adapt your own dwelling to meet the extremes of the future that is coming at us.
In 2005 I said that things were going to go from bad to worse, when we did our extreme green renovation, and I am sorry to say that I was write. That process is going to continue. The sooner we adapt our dwellings to the looming realities, the safer we will be -- and the less money we will spend on energy.
For more details, see my printable flyer on keeping cool during the extreme heat of summer at http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/summer2007.pdf .
Monday, August 1, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Down to the wire on the July order.
Nice rain today in Okie City, caught me with clothes hanging out on the line, lol. By the time I noticed it was raining, it was too late to dash to the line. Oh well, they just got an extra rinse with pure rainwater. It's been so long since it rained I had almost forgotten what it was like to see water falling from the sky.
We are down to the wire on the July order, which closes tomorrow evening at midnight.
I still see LOTS of onions available. Now is the time to remember one of the first principles of Oklavorism: buy when available and store for eating later. In other words, probably in January there won't be any onions for sale through the coop. But if you buy onions now, you could be eating local onions in January 2012. Of all the vegetables, onions are among the "best keepers". Onions are among the most healthy and nutritious of vegies, low in carbs and calories.
I also see potatoes, summer squash, and eggs and red and green tomatoes still available.
As to recipes for onions. . . check out our new online forum at http://www.oklahomafood.coop/smf . You can remember its location by noting that “smf” is an acronym for “Sell More Food”. (Hat tip to Lisa Weissenbuhler who told me that.) You have to register to post, but it's not hard. Add your favorite recipe in the recipe section. We often think of onions as an ingredient in various prepared dishes, and not about how the onion can be a star of the feast. But just google “onion pie”, and you will find about a million recipes, and then there is also French onion soup. Make that with some home-made stock using soup bones from the coop.
And the meat counter is well stocked, as is everything else, pretty much.
Don't forget to get some of our artisanal soaps. If you've never tried them, just buy one bar this month and check out this great luxury product at a working class price. You'll be surprised at superior quality of the product and also at how much "wash" you get out of one bar. If there was a way to compare bars of soap in terms of "number of washes", there is no doubt that our locally made artisanal soaps would win that battle hands down, which makes them a much better value than the cheap soaps that are loaded down with chemicals that are typically available in the big box stores. Don't delay, order today!
I hope people will take advantage of our new online forum for discussions. Besides recipes, there is a thread on the coop’s new strategic plan, which provides a place to make suggestions and discuss the plan.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
It's STILL Summertime. . . .and the livin' is HOT.
What can I say about a month like June. How many days on the wrong side of 100 degrees Farenheit? How extreme is the drought? How much problem is this for our producers?
Well the drought is extreme, officially so, over half the state, and getting worse everywhere else. The fact that we don't see giant dust clouds in the air is a testimony to what farmers have learned since the 1930s, but the problems that drought presents to rural producers and communities remain the same today as they were in the 1930s.
Right now the grass and hay crops should be growing, putting on height and weight. There should be plenty of grazing for cattle and other herd animals, the farm ponds should be full. But the pastures are not growing. They are turning brown and dry. As hay crops shrivel and die, those responsible for livestock look ahead to the winter months, estimate the dwindling supply of hay in their barns and sheds, wonder about what they will be able to cut this fall. . . and then they count their cattle and try to figure out how many head of cattle they can afford to take through this winter into an uncertain spring. Will the drought break this fall? This winter? Next spring? Or is this part of a multi-year drought cycle?
We in cities are not so far removed from our pastoral ancestry, where wealth was measured in cattle, or sheep, or goats, or horses, or some combination thereof. We are steeped in those stories in the Bible -- the Hebrew word for cattle appears 56 times in the book of Genesis! My father certainly measured his wealth in cattle -- the cattle count was a regular feature of our regular round of chores.
The number of mother cows a producer can maintain is determined by how much feed they can produce and/or buy. "Feed" includes pasture and hay crops (alfalfa, etc), it may include some grain and/or soybeans. Cattle also require water, and in the heat of the summer, that means more water, not less. All of this is true of other livestock -- sheep, goats, pigs, I habitually talk about cattle because that's what my family raised in southwest Oklahoma.
During drought years, the amount of feed produced on a given farmer's pastures and hay fields will be less than a good year with sufficient moisture, unless the producer has access to irrigation water, which is not the case for many Oklahoma farmers and ranchers. There's also less water in the farm ponds and prolonged drought can effect the underground water table that feeds wells. Less feed plus less water equals fewer mother cows and fewer mother cows mean fewer steers and fewer steers means less revenue for farmers and ranchers.
This problem adds up fast. Every mother cow sold into the marketplace is the destruction of productive wealth. That mother cow will produce no more mother cows or steers. The destruction of productive wealth is not good for farmers and ranchers and its not good for rural communities and its not good for our urban communities either. It's called "eating your capital" and it is a sign of desperation wherever it occurs.
What happens at your house when there's less money? What happens if it becomes a permanent decline because some of your productive effort is simply no longer there?
What can people in cities do about this?
First and foremost, we can buy food directly from our farmers. With less revenue in farm country, any money siphoned off to the giant corporate food aggregators like Cargill and Archers Daniels Midland is money taken out of rural Oklahoma to enrich giant corporations. There is little enough going around this year anyway (this drought also killed the Oklahoma wheat crop this year). Buying food from farmers strengthens rural economies and that is good for everyone.
Meats are among the most well supplied items in our local food online supermarket. Ground meats of all kinds, in particular, are competitively priced, high quality, and taste very good. All of us need to increase our purchase of these food items in order to support our farmers who are going through this climate crisis.
And not only meats. I'm encouraging everyone to look at what they bought from farmers a year ago, and then increase that this month and every month left this year. Could you increase your purchase by 10%? 20%? Don't forget the non-food items too, many of our producers are making excellent body care products and they are such great values that when compared straight on with supermarket products, the initial price might be a bit higher, but since they last so much longer than store-bought soap, the artisinal soaps of our coop producers are actually "cheaper per wash" than anything in the big box supermarket.
This is the month of the "aliums and potatoes" in the coop; and I hope that when the order ends, there isn't an onion or a potato left. Now is the time to buy onions for the rest of the year. They will keep just fine in most air conditioned homes these days, even without refrigeration. Localvorism requires "looking ahead" and buying when the harvest is upon us, for eating later once the harvest is past.
Everyone needs to work together to mitigate the on-rushing impact of climate change/weather weirding by reducing carbon footprints and fossil fuel usage. One easy and simple strategy is to cook outside this summer! Sure, you can afford to air condition your house, and cook inside, and just run your AC overtime to get rid of all that heat and humidity -- but can the Earth afford it? Look at the brown and dry pastures and fields throughout the state and tell yourself that what you do doesn't matter, except that you won't believe that because you know it isn't true. The truth of the modern dilemma is that EVERYTHING that we do matters -- for good, or for ill.
Cooking outside isn't the One Solution to climate change, but there isn't any such thing as the One Solution. Instead, there are ten thousand little things that need to be done, or done differently, and cooking outside is one of those. Do that, get good at it, and then move on and do something else, meanwhile, tell others about how they can save money and help the planet by cooking outside during the summer so they do the same and can move on to something else too.
Sometimes accepting this kind of responsibility is scary. It was sure scary when we decided to build new walls 5-1/2 inches inside of all of our exterior walls so we could 9 inches of insulation in our walls and 14 inches in the attic. But we have never regretted that work and that expense, not even once. It was, in fact, the best financial investment I have ever made. It is certainly a better investment than the money market account that presently holds my 403b retirement fund.
It was scary when the founders of this food coop came together and one day in the hot summer of 2003 decided, "OK, we are going to start this thing in November 2003." Is there anyone who regrets that decision? Not me, even though it has hardly been a smooth ride, indeed, it has often been a rough, bumpy, and contentious ride, but that's fine, because the cause is just and the food is tasty and those two things make it possible for us to persevere through times of difficulty.
And then there's the "invisible structures" which make it easy to do harm and hard to do good. We need fewer of the "easy to do harm" situations, and we need more structures which make it "easy to do good and hard to do bad." For example. . . The state of Oklahoma owns over 800 miles of railroad. Isn't it time we put that resource to work and thus reduce our fossil fuel dependence? Wouldn't it be nice if our producers could send their products to delivery day by train? What about passenger and freight rail service uniting our regional cities with Tulsa and Oklahoma City? There is much that could be done, but the squeaking wheel is the one that gets the grease.
So that's the story of the July Bobaganda. Everything that you do matters. For good, or for ill. There's very little neutrality these days. I'm hoping that more people will decide this month that they are part of the solution and buy some food from local farmers and then cook it outside to keep from working their AC so hard. No pressure folks, just a frank realization of our own personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
Joining the Oklahoma Food Coop, and buying some of your food from local producers,. is a HUGE part of the constellation of solutions we need today. So thank you for that, and know that this month, just like every other month, you can get from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative -- for an honest and reasonable price -- good food that tastes good and does good.
PS. If you pray, please pray for our farmers and ranchers and coop producers. Pray that they will receive the grace of fortitude to make it through these hard times. Pray for rain, and for protection for all life from the climate craziness that is even as we speak come upon us, for the drought is as hard on the wildlife and birds and bees as it is on the livestock. (I don't know about anyone else, but I have seen very few bees and other pollinators this year.)
Well the drought is extreme, officially so, over half the state, and getting worse everywhere else. The fact that we don't see giant dust clouds in the air is a testimony to what farmers have learned since the 1930s, but the problems that drought presents to rural producers and communities remain the same today as they were in the 1930s.
Right now the grass and hay crops should be growing, putting on height and weight. There should be plenty of grazing for cattle and other herd animals, the farm ponds should be full. But the pastures are not growing. They are turning brown and dry. As hay crops shrivel and die, those responsible for livestock look ahead to the winter months, estimate the dwindling supply of hay in their barns and sheds, wonder about what they will be able to cut this fall. . . and then they count their cattle and try to figure out how many head of cattle they can afford to take through this winter into an uncertain spring. Will the drought break this fall? This winter? Next spring? Or is this part of a multi-year drought cycle?
We in cities are not so far removed from our pastoral ancestry, where wealth was measured in cattle, or sheep, or goats, or horses, or some combination thereof. We are steeped in those stories in the Bible -- the Hebrew word for cattle appears 56 times in the book of Genesis! My father certainly measured his wealth in cattle -- the cattle count was a regular feature of our regular round of chores.
The number of mother cows a producer can maintain is determined by how much feed they can produce and/or buy. "Feed" includes pasture and hay crops (alfalfa, etc), it may include some grain and/or soybeans. Cattle also require water, and in the heat of the summer, that means more water, not less. All of this is true of other livestock -- sheep, goats, pigs, I habitually talk about cattle because that's what my family raised in southwest Oklahoma.
During drought years, the amount of feed produced on a given farmer's pastures and hay fields will be less than a good year with sufficient moisture, unless the producer has access to irrigation water, which is not the case for many Oklahoma farmers and ranchers. There's also less water in the farm ponds and prolonged drought can effect the underground water table that feeds wells. Less feed plus less water equals fewer mother cows and fewer mother cows mean fewer steers and fewer steers means less revenue for farmers and ranchers.
This problem adds up fast. Every mother cow sold into the marketplace is the destruction of productive wealth. That mother cow will produce no more mother cows or steers. The destruction of productive wealth is not good for farmers and ranchers and its not good for rural communities and its not good for our urban communities either. It's called "eating your capital" and it is a sign of desperation wherever it occurs.
What happens at your house when there's less money? What happens if it becomes a permanent decline because some of your productive effort is simply no longer there?
What can people in cities do about this?
First and foremost, we can buy food directly from our farmers. With less revenue in farm country, any money siphoned off to the giant corporate food aggregators like Cargill and Archers Daniels Midland is money taken out of rural Oklahoma to enrich giant corporations. There is little enough going around this year anyway (this drought also killed the Oklahoma wheat crop this year). Buying food from farmers strengthens rural economies and that is good for everyone.
Meats are among the most well supplied items in our local food online supermarket. Ground meats of all kinds, in particular, are competitively priced, high quality, and taste very good. All of us need to increase our purchase of these food items in order to support our farmers who are going through this climate crisis.
And not only meats. I'm encouraging everyone to look at what they bought from farmers a year ago, and then increase that this month and every month left this year. Could you increase your purchase by 10%? 20%? Don't forget the non-food items too, many of our producers are making excellent body care products and they are such great values that when compared straight on with supermarket products, the initial price might be a bit higher, but since they last so much longer than store-bought soap, the artisinal soaps of our coop producers are actually "cheaper per wash" than anything in the big box supermarket.
This is the month of the "aliums and potatoes" in the coop; and I hope that when the order ends, there isn't an onion or a potato left. Now is the time to buy onions for the rest of the year. They will keep just fine in most air conditioned homes these days, even without refrigeration. Localvorism requires "looking ahead" and buying when the harvest is upon us, for eating later once the harvest is past.
Everyone needs to work together to mitigate the on-rushing impact of climate change/weather weirding by reducing carbon footprints and fossil fuel usage. One easy and simple strategy is to cook outside this summer! Sure, you can afford to air condition your house, and cook inside, and just run your AC overtime to get rid of all that heat and humidity -- but can the Earth afford it? Look at the brown and dry pastures and fields throughout the state and tell yourself that what you do doesn't matter, except that you won't believe that because you know it isn't true. The truth of the modern dilemma is that EVERYTHING that we do matters -- for good, or for ill.
Cooking outside isn't the One Solution to climate change, but there isn't any such thing as the One Solution. Instead, there are ten thousand little things that need to be done, or done differently, and cooking outside is one of those. Do that, get good at it, and then move on and do something else, meanwhile, tell others about how they can save money and help the planet by cooking outside during the summer so they do the same and can move on to something else too.
Sometimes accepting this kind of responsibility is scary. It was sure scary when we decided to build new walls 5-1/2 inches inside of all of our exterior walls so we could 9 inches of insulation in our walls and 14 inches in the attic. But we have never regretted that work and that expense, not even once. It was, in fact, the best financial investment I have ever made. It is certainly a better investment than the money market account that presently holds my 403b retirement fund.
It was scary when the founders of this food coop came together and one day in the hot summer of 2003 decided, "OK, we are going to start this thing in November 2003." Is there anyone who regrets that decision? Not me, even though it has hardly been a smooth ride, indeed, it has often been a rough, bumpy, and contentious ride, but that's fine, because the cause is just and the food is tasty and those two things make it possible for us to persevere through times of difficulty.
And then there's the "invisible structures" which make it easy to do harm and hard to do good. We need fewer of the "easy to do harm" situations, and we need more structures which make it "easy to do good and hard to do bad." For example. . . The state of Oklahoma owns over 800 miles of railroad. Isn't it time we put that resource to work and thus reduce our fossil fuel dependence? Wouldn't it be nice if our producers could send their products to delivery day by train? What about passenger and freight rail service uniting our regional cities with Tulsa and Oklahoma City? There is much that could be done, but the squeaking wheel is the one that gets the grease.
So that's the story of the July Bobaganda. Everything that you do matters. For good, or for ill. There's very little neutrality these days. I'm hoping that more people will decide this month that they are part of the solution and buy some food from local farmers and then cook it outside to keep from working their AC so hard. No pressure folks, just a frank realization of our own personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
Joining the Oklahoma Food Coop, and buying some of your food from local producers,. is a HUGE part of the constellation of solutions we need today. So thank you for that, and know that this month, just like every other month, you can get from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative -- for an honest and reasonable price -- good food that tastes good and does good.
PS. If you pray, please pray for our farmers and ranchers and coop producers. Pray that they will receive the grace of fortitude to make it through these hard times. Pray for rain, and for protection for all life from the climate craziness that is even as we speak come upon us, for the drought is as hard on the wildlife and birds and bees as it is on the livestock. (I don't know about anyone else, but I have seen very few bees and other pollinators this year.)
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
While you're reading the news connecting ROUNDUP with BIRTH DEFECTS. . .
While you are perusing the latest news about the suppressed research that connected Roundup with BIRTH DEFECTS IN CHILDREN. . .
. . . Look at this list of ROUND-UP FREE vegetables available from the Oklahoma Food Coop RIGHT NOW!
Buy extra! Preserve some now for winter eating. Cabbage? Think saurkraut. Greens? Think cooked greens, frozen in meal sized containers. (Wagon Creek dairy containers are great for recycling as frozen vegetable containers.) Radishes? OK, I can’t really think of a way to preserve them. . . well, it was only last month that I discovered that you could FRY them, so maybe fry them and then freeze them? WHY NOT? Yellow and zucchini? I have dehydrated a large pile of these veggies in the past and used them during the winter in soups, stews, and casseroles. Plus people in my house developed a liking for them as dehydrated munchies. (OK, you knew everyone at my house is sort of weird, so why are you surprised about this?)
It's times like this that give real meaning to the phrase -- "EAT WITH THE SEASON!" Eating the same food, 24/7/365 is BORING. As the season changes, so should our diets. The producers of the Oklahoma Food Coop are rolling out a bountiful feast of food. We are lucky that we have the Coop which provides us with such easy access to such great food. Let's make sure the Coop AND our producers stay sustainable for the long term by buying some local food every month. Like today!
- beets
- cabbage
- microgreens
- kale
- bok choy
- arugula
- leeks
- choi choi
- swiss chard
- lettuce
- cabbage
- celery
- red onions
- white onions
- garlic
- candy onions
- elephant garlic
- purple garlic
- mushrooms (maitake, shitake, reishi, lion’s mane, oysters)
- red radishes
- green onions
- shallots
- turnips
- baby beets
- full size beets
- green knob onions
- watermelon radishes
- yellow squash
- zucchini squash
- patty pan squash
- tomatoes (red and green)
Monday, June 6, 2011
It's Summertime. . . and the livin' is easy and the eatin' is good.
For some ambience, click on this link and put this music on (from Porgy and Bess, the iconic song -- Summertime, and the livin is easy, fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.) http://youtu.be/vWFJLUBwpSY
Next, fix yourself your favorite cool summer beverage. While regular tea is not an Oklahoma product per se, the Coop's fine beverage producers have fine teas blended right here in Oklahoma. Or, make a quick trip through your "tea garden" and bring in a variety of mint leaves, some bee balm, crush them a bit and steep them in hot water. Pour over ice and relax. Don't have a tea garden? Put that on your list of things to do. Don't have land for a garden? That's fine, herb tea plants grow great in containers and typically will do fine in dappled shade or on a sunny windowsill.
Third. . . before we get to FOOD, let's talk just a bit about energy conservation. Here are my two bestest and most effective ideas for energy conservation:
The less money you spend on energy, the more money you can spend on local foods! And eating local foods is much better than making energy corporations rich, don't you think?
Now for some summer foods.
One of my favorite summer salads is cucumber, tomato, and onion salad. Well, the way I am, I also add some chopped jalapenos. Chop up the vegetables, mix equal parts oil and vinegar, add a dash of salt, and voila, great summer salad. As to amounts. . . I typically do two medium cucumbers (sliced as half moons), one medium onion (roughly chunked), and 4 tomatoes (use a serrated knife, slice in half, then slice each half in quarters. I would add 2 large jalapenos sliced in rings. For this much veggie, I would use 1/4 cup oil and 1/4 cup vinegar and 1 teaspoon salt. It's good freshly made, and it's really good the next day. And yes, you can use a chopped up walking onion from your garden instead of a regular bulb onion, or a handful of chopped fresh onion or garlic chives.
Since summer time is not much of a time to heat your oven, my favorite summer breads have always been skillet top breads. I would simply use my regular bread recipes, only instead of forming into loaves, I would pinch of a bit of dough about the size of a golf ball, roll it out, and then bake it on a cast iron skillet. I do this with AND without oil, getting subtle differences in the taste and surface texture. Sometimes I deep fry the dough to make a yeast-raised fry bread. That's "to die for" as they say these days. And if you want cornbread, just make your favorite cornbread batter and but cook it like a pancake batter.
One of the best summer foods is the simple hamburger. Make it from ground beef, ground buffalo, ground lamb, mix it half and half with ground pork or even sausage. You can be creative with the seasonings. I often mix finely chopped herbs with the ground meat before forming the burgers (sage, thyme, rosemary, crushed red pepper) and maybe add just a dash of teriyaki sauce. Form into balls and press out with your hands, or put a ball of ground meat on the back of a saucer and place another saucer over it and lightly press to form a patty.
Put it all together and throw it on the grill or into the skillet. For the classic "onion burger"... after you put the patty on the skillet, cover it with thinly sliced onions. When you flip it, the onions caramelize as they cook. Handle the meat as little as possible. Don't "massage" or "knead" it, mix it only enough to combine whatever you are adding to the ground meat or to mix the different kinds of ground meat. One of the interesting things about the ground meat bought from the coop is that it is typically very lean, so there isn't a lot of shrink during the cooking.
And please, make extra! You're getting the grill or the skillet hot, so why not cook twice the number of burgers that you need and refrigerate or freeze the others for eating later? A great lunch is simply a cooked hamburger patty, smeared with some mayo or mustard, layered with onion, pickle, cheese, and wrapped in a leaf of romaine or slid into a bun. Burgers with eggs for breakfast? WHY NOT? Burgers with eggs AND chili AND bacon for breakfast? WHY NOT? INVITE ME! If you're worried about your ability to eat such good food, I'll help.
I am really impressed with the amount of vegetables available this month through the cooperative. It is obvious that there has been tremendous growth in the capacity of the local food system between this year and last. I am writing this Monday evening, and you'll find LOTS of vegetables still available. Many vegetable producers add to their listings as the order progresses and they become more certain about what they will have available.
Right now you can find various kinds of greens, cabbage, onions (several kinds), radishes, tomatoes, beets, turnips, cucumbers, microgreens, leeks, celery (this is a FIRST), carrots, garlic, fresh herbs, mushrooms, potatoes, jalapenos, zucchini and yellow squash. Makes me hungry just to write about this. But extra, while the buying is good, and preserve for eating later! Your freezer is your friend when it comes to eating local. You will want some nice local veggies this winter, won't you? Well, buy now so you can eat later.
And speaking of extra. . . how is your food storage doing these days? We all know how I preach on this subject and in fact I can hardly write any bobaganda without reminding everyone that there are a hundred and one things that could happen tomorrow that would interfere to the point of ruination with the orderly working of our just-in-time food system. Troubles on that scale would likely impact the coop. If terrorists have hit the fuel supply, we wouldn't have fuel to run our delivery days just as the supermarkets wouldn't have for their supply trucks. So always remember this ancient wisdom. . . "Remember the time of hunger in the day of plenty." The world is consuming MORE GRAIN every year than it is producing, and that means that we are slowly drawing down our world food security grain stocks. This year's wheat harvest in Oklahoma was gravely harmed by the unstable weather we experienced (severe cold coupled with extensive drought), and there is no guarantee that this troubled weather cycle will not continue.
As an experiment. . . do an inventory of all the food in your house, and then realistically ask yourself how long you could feed your household with that amount of food. Would it be a radically different diet from what you're used to? If so, that's a danger sign, since a time of trouble is typically not a good time to start a new way of eating.
Store what you eat, and eat what you store. If you eat hamburger, then store hamburger. And make sure you have a backup way to keep your freezer cold. I have a marine battery, an inverter, and a small generator, spent about $300 total.
Summertime, the living is easy, enjoy it while it lasts! Don't delay, the June order closes this coming Thursday! Log in right now and get some of this good Oklahoma eatin' for your own household. Y'all bon appetit, you hear?
Next, fix yourself your favorite cool summer beverage. While regular tea is not an Oklahoma product per se, the Coop's fine beverage producers have fine teas blended right here in Oklahoma. Or, make a quick trip through your "tea garden" and bring in a variety of mint leaves, some bee balm, crush them a bit and steep them in hot water. Pour over ice and relax. Don't have a tea garden? Put that on your list of things to do. Don't have land for a garden? That's fine, herb tea plants grow great in containers and typically will do fine in dappled shade or on a sunny windowsill.
Third. . . before we get to FOOD, let's talk just a bit about energy conservation. Here are my two bestest and most effective ideas for energy conservation:
- Cook outside! Every BTU you cook with is a BTU that your air conditioner will have to remove, so you pay TWICE for the energy to cook inside: Once when you cook the food, and then again when your AC works overtime to remove the heat and humidity.
- Shade the outside of your windows and doors. For that matter, shade ALL of the exterior envelope of your home, but if you can't do that, get some shade over your windows and doors. These are typically the worst insulated systems in your building envelope. Even an expensive double pane/argon filled/low E coated window is still only R-3 or 4 at the most, compared with R-19 of the typically insulated 2 x 4" frame exterior wall. (Or compared with R-33 of my 9 inch thick walls.) If nothing else is available, duct tape some auto sun shades together and hang over the exterior of the windows.
The less money you spend on energy, the more money you can spend on local foods! And eating local foods is much better than making energy corporations rich, don't you think?
Now for some summer foods.
One of my favorite summer salads is cucumber, tomato, and onion salad. Well, the way I am, I also add some chopped jalapenos. Chop up the vegetables, mix equal parts oil and vinegar, add a dash of salt, and voila, great summer salad. As to amounts. . . I typically do two medium cucumbers (sliced as half moons), one medium onion (roughly chunked), and 4 tomatoes (use a serrated knife, slice in half, then slice each half in quarters. I would add 2 large jalapenos sliced in rings. For this much veggie, I would use 1/4 cup oil and 1/4 cup vinegar and 1 teaspoon salt. It's good freshly made, and it's really good the next day. And yes, you can use a chopped up walking onion from your garden instead of a regular bulb onion, or a handful of chopped fresh onion or garlic chives.
Since summer time is not much of a time to heat your oven, my favorite summer breads have always been skillet top breads. I would simply use my regular bread recipes, only instead of forming into loaves, I would pinch of a bit of dough about the size of a golf ball, roll it out, and then bake it on a cast iron skillet. I do this with AND without oil, getting subtle differences in the taste and surface texture. Sometimes I deep fry the dough to make a yeast-raised fry bread. That's "to die for" as they say these days. And if you want cornbread, just make your favorite cornbread batter and but cook it like a pancake batter.
One of the best summer foods is the simple hamburger. Make it from ground beef, ground buffalo, ground lamb, mix it half and half with ground pork or even sausage. You can be creative with the seasonings. I often mix finely chopped herbs with the ground meat before forming the burgers (sage, thyme, rosemary, crushed red pepper) and maybe add just a dash of teriyaki sauce. Form into balls and press out with your hands, or put a ball of ground meat on the back of a saucer and place another saucer over it and lightly press to form a patty.
Put it all together and throw it on the grill or into the skillet. For the classic "onion burger"... after you put the patty on the skillet, cover it with thinly sliced onions. When you flip it, the onions caramelize as they cook. Handle the meat as little as possible. Don't "massage" or "knead" it, mix it only enough to combine whatever you are adding to the ground meat or to mix the different kinds of ground meat. One of the interesting things about the ground meat bought from the coop is that it is typically very lean, so there isn't a lot of shrink during the cooking.
And please, make extra! You're getting the grill or the skillet hot, so why not cook twice the number of burgers that you need and refrigerate or freeze the others for eating later? A great lunch is simply a cooked hamburger patty, smeared with some mayo or mustard, layered with onion, pickle, cheese, and wrapped in a leaf of romaine or slid into a bun. Burgers with eggs for breakfast? WHY NOT? Burgers with eggs AND chili AND bacon for breakfast? WHY NOT? INVITE ME! If you're worried about your ability to eat such good food, I'll help.
I am really impressed with the amount of vegetables available this month through the cooperative. It is obvious that there has been tremendous growth in the capacity of the local food system between this year and last. I am writing this Monday evening, and you'll find LOTS of vegetables still available. Many vegetable producers add to their listings as the order progresses and they become more certain about what they will have available.
Right now you can find various kinds of greens, cabbage, onions (several kinds), radishes, tomatoes, beets, turnips, cucumbers, microgreens, leeks, celery (this is a FIRST), carrots, garlic, fresh herbs, mushrooms, potatoes, jalapenos, zucchini and yellow squash. Makes me hungry just to write about this. But extra, while the buying is good, and preserve for eating later! Your freezer is your friend when it comes to eating local. You will want some nice local veggies this winter, won't you? Well, buy now so you can eat later.
And speaking of extra. . . how is your food storage doing these days? We all know how I preach on this subject and in fact I can hardly write any bobaganda without reminding everyone that there are a hundred and one things that could happen tomorrow that would interfere to the point of ruination with the orderly working of our just-in-time food system. Troubles on that scale would likely impact the coop. If terrorists have hit the fuel supply, we wouldn't have fuel to run our delivery days just as the supermarkets wouldn't have for their supply trucks. So always remember this ancient wisdom. . . "Remember the time of hunger in the day of plenty." The world is consuming MORE GRAIN every year than it is producing, and that means that we are slowly drawing down our world food security grain stocks. This year's wheat harvest in Oklahoma was gravely harmed by the unstable weather we experienced (severe cold coupled with extensive drought), and there is no guarantee that this troubled weather cycle will not continue.
As an experiment. . . do an inventory of all the food in your house, and then realistically ask yourself how long you could feed your household with that amount of food. Would it be a radically different diet from what you're used to? If so, that's a danger sign, since a time of trouble is typically not a good time to start a new way of eating.
Store what you eat, and eat what you store. If you eat hamburger, then store hamburger. And make sure you have a backup way to keep your freezer cold. I have a marine battery, an inverter, and a small generator, spent about $300 total.
Summertime, the living is easy, enjoy it while it lasts! Don't delay, the June order closes this coming Thursday! Log in right now and get some of this good Oklahoma eatin' for your own household. Y'all bon appetit, you hear?
Friday, May 20, 2011
Radish Home Fries
Radishes were in abundance on the May Oklahoma Food Coop order, and most people just slice them and put them in salads or nibble on them raw. Weelllll. . . that's just the beginning of the possibilities.
Why not try cooking them?
Radish Home Fries: a LOW CARB treat
1 pound radishes, washed, trimmed
1 small onion diced (or as I used this AM, one Walking Onion from my garden, the white onion at the bottom plus the scapes at the top, chopped)
2 tablespoons butter (From Wagon Creek, of course)
1 tablespoon EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)
Salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and/or cayenne pepper, to taste and preferred heat, which in my case was a LOT, if I had had a jalapeno, it would have gone in there too!
Quarter and slice the radishes, put everything in the pan, fry 5 to 10 minutes until nicely browned on both sides. Serve in place of hash browns. Found online at one my favorite recipe sites, http://www.genaw.com/lowcarb/radish_home_fries.html
Why not try cooking them?
Radish Home Fries: a LOW CARB treat
1 pound radishes, washed, trimmed
1 small onion diced (or as I used this AM, one Walking Onion from my garden, the white onion at the bottom plus the scapes at the top, chopped)
2 tablespoons butter (From Wagon Creek, of course)
1 tablespoon EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)
Salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and/or cayenne pepper, to taste and preferred heat, which in my case was a LOT, if I had had a jalapeno, it would have gone in there too!
Quarter and slice the radishes, put everything in the pan, fry 5 to 10 minutes until nicely browned on both sides. Serve in place of hash browns. Found online at one my favorite recipe sites, http://www.genaw.com/lowcarb/radish_home_fries.html
Monday, May 2, 2011
Structural Issues for the Oklahoma Food Cooperative
The board of directors and management of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative are working through a visioning process to develop some ideas for strategic direction and development of our operations going forward. One of the issues that has emerged from that discussion is the thought that we have some structural issues.
In 2003, we incorporated using the legislation that was available, a cooperative organization statute originally enacted in 1919. It did not allow for much flexibility in organizational structure and has a particular limitation on indebtedness as we go forward. Under our statute of incorporation, we can't borrow an amount greater than our paid-in capital. This means that when we have 4,000 members, the most we could borrow would be $200,000, unless the value of our shares increased, at which time the limit would be 4,000 times the new value. Since the value of our membership share, according to our Articles of Incorporation, must have some reference to the value of the cooperative, the board can't just arbitrarily increase the value of a share to say $500 thus allowing us to borrow a lot more money.
The reason this is a problem is in the context of buying a location for our operations center, which is one of the alternatives we have when our lease expires in a couple of years. We wouldn't be able to buy much of a warehouse if the most we could borrow was $200,000.
In 2009, a new cooperative statute was adopted by the legislature, the Limited Cooperative Act of 2009, which provides for a more flexible organizational structure for cooperatives. Before I get to a discussion of the opportunities that it offers us, I want to spend some time on some details of our present incorporations that are in my opinion essential for our future going forward.
Incorporated to provide a benefit to the membership.
Cooperatives exist to provide benefits to their members. In our case, the direct benefit we provide is a marketplace, a space where willing buyers and producers can meet and make exchanges. Our present articles of incorporation say:
This is the most basic aspect of the cooperative form of business organization. A cooperative is an organization that is democratically controlled by its members. While the cooperative may at some point issue additional classes of stock for the purpose of raising capital, those shares are non-voting. Our articles of incorporation say:
The cooperative, as a business entity, has a value. This is described on the financial reports of the cooperative, in particular, the balance sheet. Our articles of incorporation provide that the value of a share is related to the value of the cooperative, with a minimum par value, as required by Oklahoma law, which is set by our Articles of Incorporation as $50. The March 2011 balance sheet shows that the total assets of the cooperative are $211,220. The membership of the cooperative is about 4,000 people so the actual value of a share (assets divided by membership) is about $52.80. This ratio has fluctuated quite a bit over the years, in the beginning it was way low. It is a sign of our historic strength that the value of a share has now risen above the par value. If this continues, the board will need to recognize this and adjust the value of a share accordingly. Like the stock market, a slow but steady increase in the value of a share is an indication of the growing strength of the coop, just as a declining share price would be a sign of problems. This mandatory ratio is important for the long-term health of the cooperative.
The Articles of Incorporation say:
In one of the earliest meetings of the Committee to Organize an Oklahoma Food Cooperative, we found unanimous agreement on a set of core values: social justice, economic viability, and environmental sustainability.
The struggle for operations revenues.
The cooperative struggles to have enough operations revenue to pay for what needs to be done. Most regular food cooperatives operate on a margin of 35% - 40%, whereas we make do with 20%. We are able to do this because of the sweat equity our members invest. But that has become in itself an on-going issue. First, we are expecting more and more work from a relatively small group of very committed people, and we periodically burn people out and they drop out. Second, a volunteer work force means things like --
Our sales have increased every year of our operation, and my hope has always been that our sales would catch up with our need for operations revenue, but that's just not happening at the present time. As sales revenues have increased, so have operations expenses. When we sell more meat, we need more dry ice and ice chests. When we sell more food, we need more people to sort it and move it around. We desperately need some systems analysis of our work, but funds to pay for that kind of professional evaluation are scarce. We are trying to do something -- operate on a 20% margin -- that no other food cooperative in the United States has succeeded in doing. A couple of years ago I calculated that to replace our volunteer work force with paid staff would increase our budget by about $250,000. Or in other words, the value of our sweat equity two years ago was $250,000/year. It is probably more than that now. And we could pay that by the simple expedient of increasing our margin to 35%, which would be a coop charge of 17% for producers and 17% for customers, not quite a doubling, but pretty close.
Or, we could double our sales without doubling our costs.
Or, we could find some additional sources of revenue. That's why we're doing the classified ads. Sure, we think they will be a good service to our members, but they also bring in money.
One of the ideas for additional revenue would be to invest some of our cooperative cash into products that are not produced by local producers in Oklahoma and will never be produced by local producers in Oklahoma, and make them available to our members. This could be things like toilet paper, tropical spices, Texas citrus, Arkansas or Louisiana rice, Caribbean bananas. The coop would buy those items wholesale and add a regular retail mark-up.
This has always been my favorite way of increasing coop revenues, but some people really don't like the idea. I am obviously all for the development of a local food system, but I don't get all of my household's foods from local sources. We buy orange juice and bananas and toilet paper. And even though we generally shop at independent stores, that money pretty much vanishes quickly and doesn't do the local economy that much good. We would much rather buy our citrus and bananas and toilet paper from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, and have that money support the system that makes it possible for us to buy hamburger from the Semkin family and eggs from Calvan Parker. And I'd that the profits from the sale of toilet paper and citrus and rice and bananas go towards keeping those products from the Crains and the Rinks and the Lusbys affordable.
Yes, it would increase our costs, but these products would also make it easier for us to pay employees.
This is a structural issue insofar as it would take a serious debate and action by the board to do this.
So the search is on for additional sources of revenue to complement our sales revenue. Raising the amount of the cooperative's commission charged to producers and customers is always an option, but in my opinion it should be a real last ditch thing, since that raises the costs. Of course, the price of everything else that we buy is going up and the cooperative may not be able to insulate itself from the impacts of inflation forever.
Required Patronage. One structure issue that might be resolved by changing our method of incorporation would be to add a requirement of patronage. That is, to be a member in good standing, you would have to buy X amount of product from the cooperative each year, and/or pay an annual fee or assessment, and/or volunteer X number of hours either on delivery day or on back-office work. The board could invite members to pay a voluntary fee now, but to make a mandatory rule regarding patronage would require re-incorporation under the Limited Cooperative Association Act of 2009.
As always, there are some devils in these details. We don't necessarily have an absolute shortage of volunteers. What we have is a shortage of people willing to show up at a definite date and time, work as instructed, be accountable for their results -- AND a shortage of cash to properly compensate them for their work. This of course sounds a lot like employees, and unless we are going to have actual employees, we have to be careful what we demand in this regard lest a government agency decide we are evading our legal responsibilities somehow.
Governance issues. In the beginning, all we had was the board of directors, so the board was governance and management altogether. Now we are way beyond that, but we still have some problems determining what is governance and what is management and the end result is an on-going problem with board involvement with management issues. We are getting better at making those distinctions, but we still have a ways to go. And part of our problem may be our governance structure. If I had the opportunity to go back and change one thing in our original incorporation paperwork, it would be to drop the election of a president, two vice presidents, a secretary, and the board appointment of a CIO and treasurer, in favor of electing all members of the board at large, and then the board would elect its own presiding structure and make provision for legal and financial records. The general manager would be unambiguously in charge of operations and the board in charge of governance. But we didn't know then what we know now and hindsight is of course always 20-20.
Conclusion
This is a brief outline of some of the issues going forward. Everyone in the cooperative need to be thinking about these things since they will be on the agenda going forward. The earliest that any juridical change could occur would be the 2012 Annual Meeting, but if we decide on structural changes those details will be hammered out in advance of that. Thus, we need an on-going discussion in our cooperative discussion groups about structural issues.
In 2003, we incorporated using the legislation that was available, a cooperative organization statute originally enacted in 1919. It did not allow for much flexibility in organizational structure and has a particular limitation on indebtedness as we go forward. Under our statute of incorporation, we can't borrow an amount greater than our paid-in capital. This means that when we have 4,000 members, the most we could borrow would be $200,000, unless the value of our shares increased, at which time the limit would be 4,000 times the new value. Since the value of our membership share, according to our Articles of Incorporation, must have some reference to the value of the cooperative, the board can't just arbitrarily increase the value of a share to say $500 thus allowing us to borrow a lot more money.
The reason this is a problem is in the context of buying a location for our operations center, which is one of the alternatives we have when our lease expires in a couple of years. We wouldn't be able to buy much of a warehouse if the most we could borrow was $200,000.
In 2009, a new cooperative statute was adopted by the legislature, the Limited Cooperative Act of 2009, which provides for a more flexible organizational structure for cooperatives. Before I get to a discussion of the opportunities that it offers us, I want to spend some time on some details of our present incorporations that are in my opinion essential for our future going forward.
Incorporated to provide a benefit to the membership.
Cooperatives exist to provide benefits to their members. In our case, the direct benefit we provide is a marketplace, a space where willing buyers and producers can meet and make exchanges. Our present articles of incorporation say:
The purpose of this cooperative is to provide retail marketplaces that sell Oklahoma grown and/or Oklahoma processed foods and non-food items, for the mutual benefit of its producer and customer members.
Acting as the agent of producer members, the Oklahoma Food Cooperative will publicize to its members the products that its producer members have for sale, receive orders from customer members, provide a way for products to be delivered to other members of the cooperative, collect payment from the customers and forward the payments to the producers. Acting as the agent for customer members, we will provide them a catalog of available local food products that includes information about how and where the product was grown or processed. We receive their orders and notify the appropriate producers, arrange for the food to be delivered, receive and process their payments. For both producer and customer members, we will provide a basic screening of products and producers based on our published parameters, and education and training regarding the use and the advantages of local foods. The essential business of the cooperative is to provide a marketplace where our members who are willing buyers and sellers can meet.One member, one share, one vote.
This is the most basic aspect of the cooperative form of business organization. A cooperative is an organization that is democratically controlled by its members. While the cooperative may at some point issue additional classes of stock for the purpose of raising capital, those shares are non-voting. Our articles of incorporation say:
This association shall be operated on a cooperative basis for the mutual benefit of its members as patrons and owners of the cooperative.The connection of share value with the value of the cooperative.
The cooperative, as a business entity, has a value. This is described on the financial reports of the cooperative, in particular, the balance sheet. Our articles of incorporation provide that the value of a share is related to the value of the cooperative, with a minimum par value, as required by Oklahoma law, which is set by our Articles of Incorporation as $50. The March 2011 balance sheet shows that the total assets of the cooperative are $211,220. The membership of the cooperative is about 4,000 people so the actual value of a share (assets divided by membership) is about $52.80. This ratio has fluctuated quite a bit over the years, in the beginning it was way low. It is a sign of our historic strength that the value of a share has now risen above the par value. If this continues, the board will need to recognize this and adjust the value of a share accordingly. Like the stock market, a slow but steady increase in the value of a share is an indication of the growing strength of the coop, just as a declining share price would be a sign of problems. This mandatory ratio is important for the long-term health of the cooperative.
The Articles of Incorporation say:
The purpose of this article is to ensure that all of the value of the cooperative is owned equally by the members, and that the value of a share reflects the member's ownership in the cooperative, thus dividing the ownership of the cooperative equitably among all its customer and producer members.Core values.
In one of the earliest meetings of the Committee to Organize an Oklahoma Food Cooperative, we found unanimous agreement on a set of core values: social justice, economic viability, and environmental sustainability.
The activities of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative are governed by its Core Values of social justice, environmental stewardship, and economic sustainability. The cooperative shall educate members, and the general public, regarding cooperative principles, the local food movement, its core values, and the practical implementation of these principles.Going forward, there are a lot of ideas and thoughts going around. Three of them are structural issues, at least in part and I'd like to talk a bit about them here.
The struggle for operations revenues.
The cooperative struggles to have enough operations revenue to pay for what needs to be done. Most regular food cooperatives operate on a margin of 35% - 40%, whereas we make do with 20%. We are able to do this because of the sweat equity our members invest. But that has become in itself an on-going issue. First, we are expecting more and more work from a relatively small group of very committed people, and we periodically burn people out and they drop out. Second, a volunteer work force means things like --
- people are not required to show up,
- people are not required to stay until a certain time,
- people don't always do what they are asked to do.
Our sales have increased every year of our operation, and my hope has always been that our sales would catch up with our need for operations revenue, but that's just not happening at the present time. As sales revenues have increased, so have operations expenses. When we sell more meat, we need more dry ice and ice chests. When we sell more food, we need more people to sort it and move it around. We desperately need some systems analysis of our work, but funds to pay for that kind of professional evaluation are scarce. We are trying to do something -- operate on a 20% margin -- that no other food cooperative in the United States has succeeded in doing. A couple of years ago I calculated that to replace our volunteer work force with paid staff would increase our budget by about $250,000. Or in other words, the value of our sweat equity two years ago was $250,000/year. It is probably more than that now. And we could pay that by the simple expedient of increasing our margin to 35%, which would be a coop charge of 17% for producers and 17% for customers, not quite a doubling, but pretty close.
Or, we could double our sales without doubling our costs.
Or, we could find some additional sources of revenue. That's why we're doing the classified ads. Sure, we think they will be a good service to our members, but they also bring in money.
One of the ideas for additional revenue would be to invest some of our cooperative cash into products that are not produced by local producers in Oklahoma and will never be produced by local producers in Oklahoma, and make them available to our members. This could be things like toilet paper, tropical spices, Texas citrus, Arkansas or Louisiana rice, Caribbean bananas. The coop would buy those items wholesale and add a regular retail mark-up.
This has always been my favorite way of increasing coop revenues, but some people really don't like the idea. I am obviously all for the development of a local food system, but I don't get all of my household's foods from local sources. We buy orange juice and bananas and toilet paper. And even though we generally shop at independent stores, that money pretty much vanishes quickly and doesn't do the local economy that much good. We would much rather buy our citrus and bananas and toilet paper from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, and have that money support the system that makes it possible for us to buy hamburger from the Semkin family and eggs from Calvan Parker. And I'd that the profits from the sale of toilet paper and citrus and rice and bananas go towards keeping those products from the Crains and the Rinks and the Lusbys affordable.
Yes, it would increase our costs, but these products would also make it easier for us to pay employees.
This is a structural issue insofar as it would take a serious debate and action by the board to do this.
So the search is on for additional sources of revenue to complement our sales revenue. Raising the amount of the cooperative's commission charged to producers and customers is always an option, but in my opinion it should be a real last ditch thing, since that raises the costs. Of course, the price of everything else that we buy is going up and the cooperative may not be able to insulate itself from the impacts of inflation forever.
Required Patronage. One structure issue that might be resolved by changing our method of incorporation would be to add a requirement of patronage. That is, to be a member in good standing, you would have to buy X amount of product from the cooperative each year, and/or pay an annual fee or assessment, and/or volunteer X number of hours either on delivery day or on back-office work. The board could invite members to pay a voluntary fee now, but to make a mandatory rule regarding patronage would require re-incorporation under the Limited Cooperative Association Act of 2009.
As always, there are some devils in these details. We don't necessarily have an absolute shortage of volunteers. What we have is a shortage of people willing to show up at a definite date and time, work as instructed, be accountable for their results -- AND a shortage of cash to properly compensate them for their work. This of course sounds a lot like employees, and unless we are going to have actual employees, we have to be careful what we demand in this regard lest a government agency decide we are evading our legal responsibilities somehow.
Governance issues. In the beginning, all we had was the board of directors, so the board was governance and management altogether. Now we are way beyond that, but we still have some problems determining what is governance and what is management and the end result is an on-going problem with board involvement with management issues. We are getting better at making those distinctions, but we still have a ways to go. And part of our problem may be our governance structure. If I had the opportunity to go back and change one thing in our original incorporation paperwork, it would be to drop the election of a president, two vice presidents, a secretary, and the board appointment of a CIO and treasurer, in favor of electing all members of the board at large, and then the board would elect its own presiding structure and make provision for legal and financial records. The general manager would be unambiguously in charge of operations and the board in charge of governance. But we didn't know then what we know now and hindsight is of course always 20-20.
Conclusion
This is a brief outline of some of the issues going forward. Everyone in the cooperative need to be thinking about these things since they will be on the agenda going forward. The earliest that any juridical change could occur would be the 2012 Annual Meeting, but if we decide on structural changes those details will be hammered out in advance of that. Thus, we need an on-going discussion in our cooperative discussion groups about structural issues.
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