 This is my farm, our great, so this is pretty much what I'm going to talk about, but what our great idea was for this cooperative, the people, the process it took to get the grant, you know, what you do once you get this grant, how you comply and doing the work. And then I'll probably spend more time on the going forward part. I have already presented some of this in another SAIR forum. So this was our great idea that we wanted a farmer-owned distribution system that benefits the farmer. Farming is a business and I wanted this to be a business for farmers that farmers benefited. So we said why don't we just collaborate, organize a multi-farm CSA. This was our mission statement to increase the production and sales potential of our local small scale farmers to the urban areas and to provide the urban customers with healthy food. So this is where it goes, to develop sustainable and profitable cooperative. So it was a distribution system. This is what the cooperative would do, would aggregate from all farmers and then distribute to other people. And then where producers are invested and participants in the distribution system and I say invested because that's an important word. So we just increase sales opportunities and educate our customers about healthy eating. This was the three of us that started this farm with Connection Cooperative. She stopped farming after about two years, one year into the project. So she kind of dropped out and she started growing her farm in another direction. So I was kind of the lead person here. This is the other cooperative. This one was founded in 2009, local roots marketing cafe in Worcester. And since I was very involved with this, I was one of the original founders and they had space there. Let's say let's partner with them, that can be our hub, because we didn't want to invest in infrastructure. So let's work out of local roots. We have a place to pack and coordinate and do that stuff. The other important thing while we partner with them is because a lot of the producers were the same. A lot of the people that sold local roots were going to be selling with us. At that time they had an online system. When we did this, local roots does not have an online system anymore. So basically pay up from for the deliveries, become a shareholder, sign up for a specific time of frame and then we would deliver. We would pack and deliver the veggies to our customers. What we pay producers are percent upfront, collect a commission. So let's say we talk to markets and say we're going to need carrots. So we'll pay you 20% of your carrot crop now and then we'll keep paying you as you bring it along. We actually never did do that. It was very hard to get a commitment from farmers to say they would produce all the carrots. So we came to a system where we were taking 20% commission from all the distribution. That was the cut that we took to keep managing, pay people. We had a writer, a marketing person, so that's where they were getting paid from. I'm going to go through these slides pretty quick because I think you're going to talk about how to apply for a grant. We asked for funds to pay a manager, a driver, and a marketing person. We asked for money for farmers to host field days, for marketing materials and mailings. That's really important. Computer printer, we did buy the packaging materials. There was a lot of packaging materials we bought. Warehouse and cooler space, we had an agreement with local roots where we could use their cooler and pack with them. So our agreement was out of that 20%. They were taking 5%. So they took 5%. We took 15%. That 5% paid for our storage and the cooler and using the space to pack. So that's what we asked for. We applied for the grant. There's a lot of things when you apply for these grants that you have to keep track of. So these were the things we were keeping track of. This is that we did the farmer rancher grant program. It was 22,000 at the time. For a group of 20,000 family? Yeah, at this time. And this is how the grant gets distributed. We also applied to the Ohio Cooperative Development Center. I don't know if there's something like that in Indiana. There might be. But if you are thinking of doing cooperatives, it's good to look for this type of places because they gave us money that we were able to use to pay a lawyer to file our incorporation papers and write the bylaws and do all that legal stuff that we're not very good at. So one of the things I learned from the local roots, maybe not as well as I should have, is that you need a really good team to make this work. So we had a board of directors because we were a cooperative. So we needed to have a board of directors. We had a manager. We needed to get the producers. We needed to get marketing. We needed an accountant, somebody to be our treasurer and sort of keep us accountable so that not everybody was handing the money or looking at the bank. So it could give us an audit, make sure that we're doing everything cleanly, and then set up a place to do the work. So we filed business papers. We opened a bank account. We purchased insurance. Once you start getting into this, you realize there's so many more things that you didn't think you needed, but you purchased a computer, the printer, we created budgets. We wrote guidelines. Super important. Don't skip that step. If it's not really clear what the expectations are, you're running to problems. And not just guidelines, but membership agreements, preliminary bid sheets, marketing agreements, contracts. We did the brochures. There's a nice resource from SEAR where I got a lot of information, local harvest, a multi-form CSA handbook. It must still be available from 2010. So we use that. So the first thing we do is you've got to have customers. So we went to churches. I went to a lot of meetings, so a lot of churches, the OERDC, Ohio Act Research Development Center, business sites, Cleveland Clinic. We are in Worcester, so we're within about an hour of Cleveland, an hour in Facker, and so lots and lots of people there. That's the customer base we wanted to target. We're really hoping to be able to work with the Cleveland Clinic, and we have thousands and thousands of employees that I gave a lot of talk, but we never got to get there. We created brochures, just tell everybody, keep talking, keep spreading the word. We also looked for alternative customers. So not just your basic CSA customer, but customers who would normally not have access to fresh, local and sustainable grown produce, people that didn't have the money to pay for it or didn't get to it. So my idea here was to collect donations from people and use that money to buy the shares for the food banks, the food pantries. So for a while we had a really nice collaboration with people-to-people ministries in Worcester is a food pantry, not a food bank, and a lot of the folks in Worcester, a lot of the local Roots customer, when we set up our little donation brochures, gave us money just for that. So I was still paying the farmers the same amount of money, because I think farmers need to sell their stuff. That's their business. They are not charity. And I would buy them, it would just like it would be, buy the produce as if it was buying for anybody else, no discounts, nothing. And then we would just pack the shares and take them to people-to-people ministries. The shares were a little bit different, you know, where CSA customers got a bag with 10 different things into the newsletter. What I would do with them is, you know, I'd call my farmers and say, who has access stuff? So if they had a lot of peppers, you might just take two bins of peppers and a recipe for peppers to the food pantry. So the dollar amount would be the same, but we were not. The way they work in the food pantry, they couldn't just give little bags to people. You know, the clients would come and the food pantry would distribute the food. So that was a very nice outlet. I thought it was pretty much a good win-win situation. We were not a nonprofit. So really, we cannot take donations like that. So what arrangement I had is the donations were-to-people-to-people. And I wrote the thank you letters and the donation letters, but they signed them with their things. So they were actually not donating to us, they were donating to people-to-people. But then they didn't receive money, they received food instead of money. This was one of our little brochures, food for thought and thoughts for farms. We have gift cards for holiday donations for people-to-people. So what we would go is to the alternative gift fairs to collect these donations. So during the Christmas times, there was one of the Presbyterian Church, and that's-so we got a lot of them just sitting at a table. One morning, we got like $3,000 in donations just for the people-to-people ministries, just from the folks in Wooster. So we had a very small trial CSA, that's when we got the grant. We just kind of wanted to work the kinks and the membership guidelines and all that stuff. We got like six customers then, but we just kind of wanted to kind of get our dots in a row before we got a little bit bigger. We created this nice little newsletter. So this was our actual customer base. In 2013, it was about six shares. 2014, Smokers Corporation has their headquarters in Orville, Ohio, which is about 30 minutes east of us, maybe 20, they're pretty close. They're not quite the urban core we were trying to reach, but a lot of people from Cleveland and Akron work there. And it was great. We had 45 shares to employees there. So we were taking every Tuesday, I think we would go out there and they were super supportive. We could go to the lunch hour and set up our little booths and talk about our program. They did not do it through payroll. They were paying us directly. So Smokers didn't really want to be responsible for this business. They wanted to make sure that we were separate. And this is where the insurance comes. If we wanted to work with Smokers, we needed to have insurance of so much. Then we went to the Highland Square Market in Akron. And we had maybe 10 to 12 customers there, but we also had a farmers market table. So we were taking turns between farmers to go to that market and sell produce. So when I went to the farmers market, I would sell some of mine, but if Tom had extra mushrooms, I'd take his mushrooms. So it was kind of a cooperative farmers market table there. And then we just keep track of whose stuff is what. And then people-to-people ministries food pantry and local roots customers. So we also, when we pack our shares, we take some to Smokers and we leave some in the cooler for the local roots customers. 2015, about the same, less shares to Smokers. It always comes to people. And we had our contact person at Smokers. And we started in 2014 just adored us and was super helpful and made sure we got the attention. When she left, we lost that support. I tried going to other businesses, didn't make that many inroads. So that's almost, you know, it always really does come to people and who's helping you. So that kind of started to drop our Smokers support. We still, you know, we're retaining some of the older customers that liked the CSA, that knew what we were doing. But it was almost like the company didn't want us there. The customers wanted, but the new management wasn't sure that we should be there. And local roots customers and the people-to-ministries food pantry. 2016, I got a full-time job. And I said, I can't do this anymore. I hired one of the pharmacists, he said, I'll do it. And he did it, but it was just local roots because he could only manage so much. We recruited producers. There's always a lot of things you need to do with producers. Make sure that when you have a co-op, everybody has to kind of have the same standards. You can't have some people bringing wilted stuff and some people bringing good stuff. This was a big challenge, the packaging requirements, and actually just getting them to bring their stuff to local roots in time so we could deliver it in time. So there's a lot of going after people, nagging people, reminding people. The packaging was an issue, you know, they just bring their berries in little pine containers. Well, if you put it in a bag, they spill. So they had to have lids or they had to be closed. I did all the paperwork, the bookkeeping, I paid producers in time. We had guidelines. We didn't ask anybody to be organic certified, but we were also not necessarily inviting the big sprayer growers. We were trying to keep it to small-scale farmers. And it was only for growers in Ohio. We had a website, so you could download all your stuff there. This was our WordPress website, I think, I think that, and then you could keep track of your recipes. And then the other thing that was really important is to have people know us. So we created the website, we did a Facebook, we had local, you know, I put our name in all the other listing places that I could think of that were free. Word of mouth meetings. Just have somebody be real nice there at the CSA, pick up sites, talking to people. And then brochures and other marketing materials. Some of the press. We got, I do know a lot of reporters in the area. So I got in the plane dealer and the Wooster newspaper, that's easy to get into. They're always looking for something to put in there. So there's Martha and I packing, that was the Cleveland dealer, that's Debbie Snooke. That was one of the markets we went, the Cuyahoga Valley Conservancy, the Highland Square Market, that's in Akron. And then we just sent holiday cards to our customers, just tried to remind me, remind them that we still existed, that we were looking for them again. Now what happens when your grant money runs out? That's when you're on your own. So we did generate income, we had a 20% commission. So we actually did not, you know, we did have money in the bank that we could keep going. Not a whole lot, not enough to, you know, make everybody just rare to keep this business going but we had enough. Our customers were always, you know, we, our repeat customers are, retention rate was about 90% of our customers, which is really good for a CSA. We started with about 10 producers, we ended up with about five or six that were consistent and reliable. So that would always happen. And we tried to, you know, maintain appropriate size. So 2017, 2016, I got a job, we downsized because it couldn't manage it. 2017, when you know what to do, I got approached by the college of Wooster, which is in Wooster. It's a nice college. And they said, well, these kids are taking this special class, it's a business class where they're going to develop a business plan. I thought maybe, since you don't know what to do with farm roots, that could be a good project. And I said, sure, let's develop a business plan. So this is the business plan they developed. They had a lot of, I mean, it was about 12 kids and we met with them many times and they presented and they were divided into groups and talked to, like one group talked to producers, wanted to talk to consumers. One of them was my group about management. And this was like 23, how many pages is that? I cannot read that. Like 35 page business plan. It was very comprehensive. So that's just their table of contents. You can see that they, this is what they came up with. They called it the harvest share and it was what their final goal is to sustainably and consistently channel produce purchase at fair market price from local farmers to community food pantries. So they completely eliminated that CSA model there. So they just farmed to food bank, farmed to food pantry. They decided in their business plan that this would be a nonprofit. The business model would be a nonprofit. I was honestly a little disappointed because farmers were not charitable organizations, were businesses. We like to make a profit. We need to make a profit. But in a way I said, well, that, you know, we always did have that little bit altruistic portion to our business and I like that. But, you know, it can't be your whole business. That's not how you survive. So what happened is that 2017, I sent a request for the solution of our cooperative to the state of Ohio. And as members, we approved that we were transferring the remaining funds to a new nonprofit with similar objective to ours. So we had about $3,000. We say we're just going to do it for a food to pantry. We'll donate the money so we don't have to fight about the money. We don't have to argue. I mean, I can easily say, okay, this is what percentage, you know, but I have good records that I know what percentage of business every single farmer did and how much money they sold. We could divide it that way. We decided that we would do this instead. So why did this not work? Why did farmers' connection fizzle out like that? These are two cooperatives. I've been involved. One was Local Roots Market and Cafe. This is in a building in Worcester. It's fairly huge. It has probably does about $600,000, $650,000 grows every year. It's all local food. It's meats, dairy, vegetables, grains. It has a, it's built a lot of infrastructure. It's a processing kitchen there. So a lot of the stuff from growers gets canned or dried or processed and it gets sold retail in the store during the winter. It also has an artisan section. So Local Roots, local artists can sell their pottery, upcycle stuff. So it's kind of like a cute upscale Christmas story, you know. But wool, a lot of beautiful fiber products there. But farmer's connection fizzle out. One of the things I said before, it's all about people and who helps you and who's there to do their work. Unfortunately, this is kind of what the difference between the two cooperatives are. Farm Roots was initially successful. You know, we really did have a good trajectory going the first year, but then it just fizzled out. And then we transfer assets to a whole community and I'll talk about that in a little bit. Local Roots is still going there. I mean, they have nice infrastructure. I mean, they have 200 producer members right now. So that's, it comes down to people. Our team, for Local Roots, we had 12 people. And a few of us were farmers. Most of them were not. And I have to tell you, being a farmer, you cannot rely on farmers to do other businesses besides their own farm. That's kind of sad, but that's true. We have to take care of our farms first. There was very many diverse skill sets in the Local Roots boards. We had marketing people. We had business people. That was not the case in our board, which was only five people and it was mostly just our officers. It was the president by president treasurer and to the writer and the accountant. And most of us, only the treasurer was not a farmer. All of the others were farmers. And some of the people left, like one stopped being farming, they're not in town anymore. The other person, starting going in a very different direction with her farm, finding different markets and kind of lost interest. So it was just left to me. I'm a farmer too. And I have my own farming business. You have to prioritize. So I think that's probably the biggest reason that why it fizzled out. We did not plan for succession. We did not sign up new people. We were maybe too small. We needed to get a little bigger to get more people involved. There is a scale that makes businesses successful and perhaps this one was just too small. Because if one people doesn't wanna do it, this just leaves another person. That person doesn't wanna do it, you're done. But if you have 12 people, you have a lot of good turnover and a lot of good energy coming every year. We have, basically our labor was one part time farmer, contractual, not an employee. Local rules actually has only one and a half time employees but it's run by community volunteers which is amazing for the amount of business that they do. So there was a lack of labor. So what I think is that, when our mission stands for producers, not intermediaries are invested and participants in the distribution system, we were not invested participants. The farmers were not really invested. That was not a primary market. It was a secondary, maybe tertiary market. It was, if you didn't sell it at the farmer's market, well, we'll just sell it to farm roots. So unfortunately, that's where we are. But what's next? There is a new nonprofit. It's called Whole Community that just went on. It just started last year. The name is Karen Potter. It's the person that is running this. And some things, this is us and Marisa and now, sorry. So they were doing that, see, oh, lots of picture there. They're still doing shares. So this is the nonprofit that we gave our money to the Whole Community. And they are doing, and they're doing this alternative gift thing. They also picked up on that. So they went out to pick up some money and they are delivering to the food pantries in Worcester. So they are kind of, they took that part of our model to work with. They're doing some things better. They started working with the schools. So they have gotten a lot bigger than we were. So they buy a lot more produce, have a lot more farmers. And they started working with a local school, Northwestern School District, bringing chefs and selling the produce there. They had a pilot program there. So that's, it's good to see that all the work we did is you can just, somebody else has picked up. So in a way, I feel like we did not completely fail because it just keeps going on. It just has a different name, different people. This is a whole community. So they do a lot of, they work with this school, trying to bring fresh foods and teaching them how to do that. So this is just basically what it is. It's not about you or me. It's about us when you start working in these cooperative environments. And it's important. Did I pass these lessons to the whole community? They were actually one of our partners in the College of Wooster project. So that was kind of on the way. Yeah, I think, I think so. I mean, Karen came to talk to me and I said, hey, you got to go to this alternative gift fair. And she went, she did it, it worked. So she'll have different challenges and different things to learn. She also, I mean, I think it's her and her husband that are doing this. So that's, she doesn't have other people necessarily helping her with this and that could be a problem. But she's not a full-time farmer. She's a social worker. So maybe she's better suited for that than I was.