Fair Pricing at Seward Co-op

“A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life’s vitality out of most farms.” ― Joel Salatin

With our growing season approaching, great local produce will soon return to our tables. We hope for another long growing season like last year. Join us in the parking lot at the Franklin store on Saturday, April 16 for our 15th annual CSA (community-supported agriculture) Fair and meet many local farmers. Whether it’s from your share box, a farmers’ market or from the shelves in our co-op’s Produce departments, a new season of abundant local flavor awaits us.

 At the co-op, the P6 program embodies our goal to source as many products from small-scale, local and cooperative producers as we can. We are proud to support these growers who care deeply about the quality of the soil, the food they produce and the community it sustains. Because they are small-scale, the cost of growing produce from these farms results in relatively higher production costs. This leads to higher prices. Unlike commodity growers, small farms do not benefit from federal crop insurance or other subsidies to keep them in operation when they have a bad year; their earnings are derived from their sales and our support. We started the CSA Fair 15 years ago to support and ensure our farming friends get needed startup capital for the season so they can better succeed in the face of these pressures. Additionally, the co-op strives to pay local producers a fair, sustainable price so that they will continue to provide us with food for years to come. We believe that when there is economic fairness, we nourish a healthier community.

This commitment to paying our suppliers a fair price, along with paying our employees a living wage, often bumps up against concerns about the price of food at our stores and restaurant. We are frequently asked “why not just lower your prices?” We struggle with this question and the dynamic tension around price every day. For comparable natural and organic products we are often the lowest priced option in the market. Our menu prices are fair and include the price of staffing. We don’t ask diners to subsidize café employees through tips. Compared to fast food or conventional groceries, however, we are more expensive. The truth is that cheap food is made possible by eliminating costs somewhere else in the food chain through efficiencies, the use of unhealthful ingredients and worker exploitation.

 From buyers to stockers to accounting staff, sourcing from a number of small-scale producers instead of one wholesaler is less efficient and involves more staffing. An “efficient” grocer shuts out local farmers because doing business with them costs too much. An “efficient” farm is one that plants one crop on hundreds of acres or confines thousands of animals in a small space. To maintain the productive capacity of the land, an “efficient” farm requires chemical inputs that maintain high yields but also compromise the groundwater, the soil, and the natural environment for generations to come. Highly concentrated animal feeding operations do the same.

 Cheap food costs less by using highly processed ingredients that are derived from tax-payer-subsidized corn and soy. Processed foods also include chemically created ingredients that are unnatural and should never be ingested. The use of these artificial ingredients and corn and soy fillers in cheap processed and fast foods are primary contributors to obesity and other health crises that exist today.

 From farmers and farm workers to grocery clerks and servers, food industry workers are some of the lowest paid people in our globalized economy. Many in the industry do not earn a living wage or have basic rights such as paid time off and health insurance. The most vulnerable often have their wages stolen from them by the most flagrant abusers. When you scratch the surface of these issues, you begin to see that the cheap food system has a lot of costs that are not factored into the price. At Seward Co-op, we strive to minimize these externalities. When we shop at the co-op, we vote with our dollars for a solidarity economy that values natural food, fairness for farmers and living-wage jobs.