JANUARY 2017 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC
41 Kootenay Food Producers Co-op goes non-profit by TOM WALKER
NELSON – After a 180-degree turn this fall, the Kootenay and Boundary Food Producers’ Co-op (KBFPC), hopes for better access to funding to build on their success from the summer of 2016. That change in direction has led the co-op to switch from a for-profit to non-profit organization. “The over-arching goal of the food producers’ co-op is to increase food production in the region and to help support farmers so they are more economically viable,” explains Kim Charlesworth, founding member and chairperson of KBFPC’s board. “Every time we would talk with people, they would ask, “Why are you for profit? Those are not for-profit goals. So, it made sense to become a non- profit organization.”
“We’ve had a lot of success this past year,” Charlesworth points out. “We have grown from three to 12 members. We are up from seven to 16 customers we are serving, including Save-On Foods, who are wonderful to work with.”
They have a lot of administrative foundations in place including developing a database to manage transactions such as invoicing.
“We’ve had a couple of well-known producers sign on as members who decided it’s worth it for them to not do all their own deliveries,” says Charlesworth. “But that just didn’t translate into breaking even.”
“What we found over the summer was that the market brokerage and distribution service we had designed only paid for itself with large bulk orders,” Charlesworth explains. “What we have are a lot of diversified farmers with a range of different products and not necessarily a consistent supply.” Trying to get that product into restaurants and
small stores took a lot of time. Indeed, the co-ordinator was working 20 instead of the estimated 10 hours per week.
“We knew we were going to lose money for the first couple of years,” Charlesworth admits. “But we underestimated the difficulty of getting any funding at all to help us over that period as a for- profit co-op. We hope the change will help us.”
Labour issues
A second major challenge they have is labour. “You can do a certain amount of work yourself,” says Charlesworth, “but to expand beyond that, you have to find labour. It is very difficult to find labour you can afford to pay in the Kootenays. We knew this from when we first started with our surveys.” Their intention was always to have a subsidized labour pool, Charlesworth says. The KBFPC would be the employer and take care of all the paper work and would assign workers to member farms as they were needed.
“But we found that as a for-profit we were not eligible for as much financial support. We hope the switch to non-profit will help us acquire funding for labour.”
“We already have an idea of what we can sell at a better price and what we can’t,” says Charlesworth. “We started thinking about what our small diversified farmers could do to help build a consistent supply of enough volume to serve our customers.”
Save-On, for instance, needs at least 20 pounds for a delivery.
“In order to increase production in the region, we need to have our farmers move towards producing larger quantities but we realized that it is risky for them,” Charlesworth acknowledges. “What if one
crop fails?”
Charlesworth notes that specializing might require a different method of farming than what growers were used to.
“A couple of large bulk crops might require different infrastructure and if nothing, it requires a different mind-set and a different timing,” she says. “What we came up with, first of all, was to encourage those of our membership who wanted to, to continue on with their diversification, be it a CSA or farmers market, but plant one or two crops in a large amount that they talk to us about first,” explains Charlesworth. “They will specialize in what suits their land and farming style. We will spread it out between producers, but that helps them move towards becoming a larger producer.” Members also wanted a shared table at farmers markets so they wouldn’t all have to go every week , and they are developing a co-op CSA box program.
“We need an aggregation point,” says Charlesworth, who notes that New Denver uses a shipping container for the job. "Then we will be able to consolidate, store food overnight and standardize any food safety, packaging and tracking procedures that we need for our customers. That includes the operating procedures we have for Save-On and the label that we put on our packaging.”
They would also like their own truck, as the retailers their members work with prefer to deal with just one supplier. The distribution function would further support members.
“Agriculture in this area is not on a level playing field,” says Charlesworth. “We have a solid business plan, we know what needs to be done. We just need a leg up to get going.”
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