 I've been involved for 15 years now with the Women's Environmental Institute. So when I retired, I was able just to lean 150% into the work of the Institute. So we've been around for about 15 years and we've been thinking about this North Circle project for about 10 years. Very early on, we sort of thought, this was crazy. We've been listening to Ken Leder looking for food in farm country and it's so hard to find healthy food in farm country. So there's something not quite right. Could an institute like ours have a role in finding food in farm country, distributing that food, supporting small local farms, farms that are devoted to sustainable and organic agriculture, and creating a regional system. We've heard a lot of talk over the last day or two about local and regional as the way that we have to go, as the way out. And so I think our project fits exactly into that kind of trajectory. So I'll run through these slides. The idea, as I said, occurred to us quite some time ago. We have many smaller farms in our area. Our last count was about 50. Not all of them are producing food, but they're producing something. We're definitely dominated by commercial ag and there's very limited access to the products of these smaller farms. Starting with kind of an urban middle class idea of buying organic food does not fly in our area. There's a lot of bias prejudice against this notion of organic, namely that it's unaffordable, but also it's a city thing. So we came out to the area as city girls, or often called the wee girls, people in the area. And we really wanted to move our farm, our farm campus in a direction that met our mission of environmental food and agricultural justice. So we were kind of stuck in trying to figure out what to do. Mostly when you find organic food in our area in a grocery store, it has been flown in, it's imported. So we're buying broccoli from China and we could grow it right there. So there's all these contradictions and also we're in a very odd geographic location. We're not quite urban and we're not quite rural. So finding funding for a para-urban with just over 10,000 in population is difficult. Also, I think the models for the kind of system that we wanted to build are very city-centric. There are problems in rural areas that just are different. For example, transportation. When we deliver, we deliver to little towns. So getting people even to those sites in the towns are difficult. So here we go. We decide to take it on and so we apply for an NCR Sarah Grant. And we said our problem in 2017 was how to effectively increase rural consumption of organic and sustainably grown produce from our local farmers. So you see what kind of regional system we're trying to build. Many reasons to go online. It's kind of unusual, especially in a rural area, to get folks to go online to order their food. But people were convinced it's going to be more convenient. I can do it three days a week that the markets open. All I have to do is find a computer. Of course, sometimes that's difficult in a rural area. And the farmers loved it. All they had to do was farm. And then we would pick it up and administer it, pack the boxes, and send it out. So when we applied for the Sarah, we said we have four challenges here. How to motivate an interest. How to create internal motivation to buy this food. How to do better outreach through what we call community messengers. How to find the EBT snack consumers. So from the very beginning, we were able to do that, but finding folks was difficult. And then how to educate. Our urban communities are, to a certain extent, more educated around issues of food. So without seeing the latest, right? How do you go into a rural area and communicate that? We had a logo way back when. The first thing we did ten years ago was create a logo. We still didn't know what we were doing, but we still use it and I kind of like it. So we were stuck with the development problem. We had to find growers. We had to find an online platform. We had to figure out how to market. We had to find eaters, consumers. We had to figure out how to do deliveries. And we had to do the administration and we had almost no money. So we're working with a budget that's very small compared to the nature of this project. We did find 20 farms. And it was everybody who was pretty excited about this because it would be supplemental income. We said, you know, just bring whatever extra you have. The online platformer uses Farmer's Web out of New York. We worked with the programmer a lot because it used to be a wholesale platform. So he worked with us to create an individual order platform. Works very nicely because it reduces our administrative load a lot. Marketing, we're just not very good at it yet. I'll say that's one place where we could use a lot more money. And our eaters, they began to show up. We have nine drop sites in little towns around North Branch, Minnesota, including the Stark Winery, which is my favorite delivery. In fact, he even offered a free glass of wine for people who picked up it on the winery. All the deliveries were volunteer. So we're cutting costs as much as we can to make this thing possible. This is what we look like in Flyers. And I'll just take you on a brief excursion to our website. Uh-oh. We just switched the fire. Oh, that's interesting. That's a preview of friends. Oh, here we go. We have to drag it over. Oh, okay. Oh, because it's not on that one. I just... That's interesting. Yeah, but we can see it, but they can't. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, so... So drag it over to the garage. How many people does it take to drag it? Probably all the time. I can skip it. There we go. Well, that's not it. Yeah, it's right there. Oh, it is. I'm not sure how to advance it though. Okay, so now we're just going to advance it. So people go in. They can place their order there electronically. Snap, EBT users. And then information on how it works, how to pick up your order. We generally kept the online system open Monday through Wednesday. Actually, it opened up Sunday night. Farmers had to get their availability list to our social media person by four o'clock on Sunday. We posted everything out. It stayed out until about four o'clock Wednesday. Consumers bought online using credit cards. If they're EBT snap, we had an offline procedure that we could use. And then Wednesday at four, we call the farmers and we say, hey, you've sold this and this and this and we need it tomorrow. Right? And that was our agreement with the farmers. So they were more or less counting on certain props. And it worked. These are our drop sites around the low town of North Branch. So you see, we have a north circle, right? And we're hoping if this thing actually grows to go more into east-central. But we are very happy with the amount of work we have right now. And then we always did our best to introduce the farmers. This is my farm. Amador Hill Farm. Bula Land Farm. Bone Lake Aviary. Our mushroom farmer. Our flower and strawberry farmer. Our hog farmers. Cheese farmer. Vegetable farmer. Air loom vegetable farmer. And vegetable farmer, vegetable farmer. Eggs and chickens. And then Rita, Rita, the flowers, sunny side didn't squash. We have an extraordinary flower mill. In North Branch that also provided our flower. Okay? So now I'll just put it down on the screen. Do it. Just so I can see. So part of what we're doing is helping the consumer see the farmer. And we had a dinner where we invited the farmers and local community people to come to dinner. And it's truly the case that people didn't know there were so many farmers around. Farmers didn't know that they would have this opportunity to talk to people who might want to buy their food. So it's a real hidden system that's crushing these small farms. And of course like everywhere else, these small farms are going down by the minute. So part of our work was to create some sort of safety net for these farms. Whoa! The power. So we visited our website. What are some of the results? I've only shown you 2017, 18 because those were the two years of our grant. You can see we started out really poorly in 2016. We thought, well we'll start the North Circle food project and then we'll go to the North Branch Farmers Market. And the customers will pick up from us there. That did not work, right? It really didn't work. So you'll see how with the coming of the online service from 2016 to 2018, a really enormous increase in purchasing power, right? Number of sales, we're still not large, right? But we're growing. We need customers. I think this is kind of interesting. These are people who buy once and never come back. We don't know why, but that's the issue for this year. So what this means is that the increase in our revenue was largely due to returning customers, right? We felt good about that. So what we accomplished with the NCR Cerebran is the streamlining of the process actually took a long time to figure out how to get step by step by step during the week so that we were efficient. And then we streamlined connections between our institute with this one magical person because we wanted to have just one person sort of communicating with the farmers, picking up from the farmers or having the farmers deliver and then collecting all that produce and boxing it up. We found that person, right? And then of course we had all the issues of protocol to work on. What are the farm practices? If they're not certified, we had a farmer's oath that they had to take. Do they have liability insurance? What are the food handling practices? We tried to monitor that as best we could. We also had traceability issues as we were worried should something go wrong, right? There'd be one problem that we had to be really careful with. Quality control in the standardized quantities. How many in a bunch, right? Or how big should a zucchini be? So all of these things are just typical farmers market things. This is our one superwoman who did the job. And let me just say this. The Women's and Viral Institute is a 501c3 Chisauville County charity organization. So when we fell short, we said that's our charity work, right? Because we are helping build this community and a food system in the community. Now I hope that doesn't go on forever. But certainly it helped us rationalize the first two years and even last year. We're still falling short. We need to triple our revenue to actually hit a sustainability level. And we're trying to figure out this year how to do it. We found an incredible software platform that I talked about that did so much of the administrative work that all we had to do was write checks for the farmers. It was all done for us. And we had to change the word food hub. Nobody like that. Nobody understood what it was. So we used online farmers market and then it became a much more legible sort of project. We tried to do as much meet your farmer. We had a meal, meetings and so on. We've developed a customer list. We worked at marketing and we secured, got said, ship funding to help with some of the advertising. Next year we're very headstrong with SHIP as we head out all year. SHIP is an organization that works on healthy eating and reduction of diabetes and things like that. So actually the woman that I'm going to co-partner with the project next year is 150% behind us. So we have a good shot. Here's another thing that we did. We created farmer storyboards. These are big pictures of the farmers and we put them in the libraries and we put them in the clinics. So that sort of gave a presence. We weren't there. But nonetheless people would come up to us and say, hey, I saw you in the library. So it worked. So this is get your flu shot and go buy your food. This is our list of what we're going to do this year. I don't think I have a lot of time to go through it. But we certainly learned a lot from these first two years of working very hard now. We're visiting each and every farm right now. And that has been such a good experience because we're really getting the farmer perspective on what worked and what didn't work. And what strategies we can use for this coming year. So I won't do that all list for you because it's probably more internal to us than external for you. The main problem that we had was in outreach. How to advertise this, how to get the word out. Because we had like four or five different towns. We were very strong in North Branch where we all live. But getting word out to start or to Taylor's Falls or the other local towns, very difficult to do. So this year we're looking for the community stakeholders, what we call people who have leadership roles in those communities. And can help us get the information out. Plus probably joining all the chambers and moving through the chambers. The other good thing that has happened to us recently is we've been invited to deliver. To veggie RX boxes. And yes, I am so excited about this project. We deliver to twice a month to Rush City. Rush City is a food desert. There's no grocery store at all. I have a quick trip. And the clinic prescribes these boxes. So as medicine, food is medicine. So we're very hopeful because this is actually the break that we need for a really larger market. And we think that makes coming in fact money. We never need it. So that is exactly what we want to be doing. Is getting food, the folks who are food insecure. Right, low income. And having the clinics and the medical profession behind this move. So it solves some of the class issues that are still part of this project. Let me tell you what the class issues are. In our rural area, the major oppression is class. Is so white you can hardly, you know, stand it. But it's very white. So the issues have to do with disability, with age, with illness, with certain incapacities and certainly class. So imagine bringing an online food system to that area. It's problematic. We thought about going to libraries and running small tutorials on how to use the computer. It's a possibility. But still, it's a class privilege to have that computer. So reaching out through the food shelves. We started working through food shelves. We're going to be advertising our EBT SNAP stuff through the food shelves. And that system becomes more accessible. You know, it's sort of like, there's also, I think, a different notion of local in rural areas. You can grow local or your own food. You can shoot local. We don't think about that in urban areas. But there are ways of getting local food that don't involve the system. But how can we support the small farms? And how can we get this food out to our community? So this, the VeggieRx project, is really positioned just right for us in terms of what we want to be doing with our work and our mission. So just to recap this, our mission, the WI mission, is to grow resilience and community partnership for a livable planet. This is our address going out to climate crisis for a livable planet through environmental farming and food justice. And then the mission of North Circle is to grow healthy food and community together through a regional food system where local small scale farmers using organic and sustainable farming practices are supported by our local communities from market sales to emergency food systems. It's kind of a little mission statement. But it really fits exactly where our heart is in terms of the kind of justice work that we want to do. And just as a footnote, WI was actually formed 15 years ago by a group of us activists from the 70s. And we really wanted to know what are we going to do with the next two or three decades as probably all we have left. So at that time, the word environmental justice was coined in reaching currency in social activist circles. So we started out as an environmental justice organization in the city. And this has all been kind of organically unfolded as we were able to acquire this rural property by no money whatsoever. We just had friends contribute certificates of deposit. And then we acquired a farmland. Basically, it's a land that's owned by a group of women. And we plan to entrust all that land to the institute when we pass on. So we're looking for succession if anyone here is interested. And so the origin in its heart has always been social activism. And now it's agriculture as social activism. That is the part of what we're trying to do. So that's the end of my presentation. We're going to continue this work. And we have actually the institute has two different websites. The one that you're probably most interested in is northcircleonline.org. You should visit us. We open up in June. And they happen to have you come out and visit the farm. And if you're a farmer in our area, please do contact me. Thank you. Yes. How do you make the connections with the clinics that work with the GRX? Did you meet? Well, this woman who works for SHIP, she's also the retired mayor of North Branch, which means she has a lot of really good social connections. So she was able to pull this out of the hat. And they actually approached us and said we need to do something about Rush City because those people had no fresh food. So I think they were getting some boxes from Second Harvest but it was largely processed food. There's a very small, small, small food shelf up there run by a woman who runs a secondhand store and raised money for the food shelf. So it's a struggling population. And I love it. I have to tell you, I drive up on Monday morning with 15 boxes and the nurses run out. They're all so excited about these boxes and they say, the clients are here. I'm usually here. You're late. But it's so much more powerful for me than a CSA. And we run a CSA. But I'm beginning to feel like running a CSA to the Twin Cities is more like being a grocery store. And we have to work hard at building community with those people because they don't want to necessarily come out to our farm necessarily. But this is just very rewarding and it's heart to heart when we make those deliveries. It's a lot of work because I'm growing greens all winter. Yes. What kind of money comes from this shift for that? The shift has given us money for advertising. They won't pay any salaries. So that's actually wonderful. We have a couple thousand dollars to work with this year. But the truth is I'll be working with our very much local in their roots. So that will help us. Last year we slipped back. The woman we hired had a full-time job, came up and did the work, and then went home. And that didn't work for us. I mean, she was a brilliant social media person. But we sort of need that person who can say, hey, George, what do you think about North Circle? And I think we'll have that next year. So it's this person we need who has great social media skills, who knows the local connections. And then we can work it. Otherwise, we need more money. So it's doable. I don't know if you can replicate it, because it does a lot of work. But if we can triple our income, we've reached a sustainability level where we could continue to do this work. Have you defined your service area that will only do within a certain radius? Well, have you reached that point? My co-partner has very ambitious ideas. I think we're fine if we can really localize at least little towns this year. But she says, well, it should be for East Central. And she wants a big brick and mortar thing. It's like, I don't know. This is doable right now. Yes? Paige Acoski, we're talking about Molly's here, driven, delivered sort of stuff, picked up or whatever. Does anybody pay for that? Or do you take that cost out of what you're getting from the... Good point. No. The staff goes home, and the staff takes a number of boxes with them. So right now, we can't afford an extra delivery service. Eventually, we would. I mean, if we expand, we will have to hire a delivery person. But right now... So it's just the farmers who are participating. Taking the things home that are transferring them to the delivery sites? The farmers bring everything to our farm. Okay. We pack it almost instantaneously. This is a very short window. We have no inventory risk involved. It's just a short turnaround. And then we, the staff, NWI, there's a few of us, we basically just radiate out. Because people go home in different directions. So that's all volunteer. I guess one could say it's on staff time. Yeah. We probably sort that in the back. So do you have a processing facility at the farm that it gets delivered to? Or was that something you didn't see before? We are the packing facility. The farmers bring in produce that's clean. It's not clean. We don't put it in. Okay. And then we've talked to them about food handling procedures. We've talked to them about presentations. And oftentimes farms will run. You know, this is my farm and I hope you really enjoy this. So we've been very lucky in the way in which farmers have worked with us in providing produce that's actually ready to go. So do you own the version of produce that you said you mentioned farmers that have meat and eggs? We have meat as well. Okay. Meat comes in bone hard frozen. Okay. So they process it before it gets to you? That's all done. All of that's done. And then we put it in the cooler. Cooler goes out. We call the customer. We say you have meat this week. All right. Yeah. So you need to get there right away. Yes. Two questions. One is farmer, was it called farmer web? Farmer's web. Yes. Is it free to use or how? No. 75 a month. Okay. And then all season we don't pay anything. Okay. One more question. This is sort of like a big picture question but I know you mentioned that you need to triple your revenue to be sustainable. Do you think that food hubs are viable under capitalism? That's such a good question because even though we're a non-profit we still need a profit margin unless we become completely sacrificial in what we're doing. That's why we have this kind of charity plan that we can wait and not feel too bad about losing all that money. But you know, I mean the problem is obviously price point. Farmers want to hire price point. Consumers want to lower price point. We use basically sort of farmer's market price points. And then for EBT SNAP we also have a discount. So we're trying to meet all those needs within a justice framework. Okay. Is that friendly capitalism? I mean, I think maybe capitalism is the problem. Well, that's another story. We can talk about that for four hours. But yeah, it's sort of like, you know, what can we do now? Yeah. We've got hungry people. We've got farms going down outside. We've got young people who want to farm. We have a lot of energy that's coming into local, local, local food by local. And we don't have a mechanism. So this is a pathway. That's all I can say. And certainly, if we had a socialist system, it might be different. No, I mean, it's about ethics. And it's about creating a community of trust. Creating a community of people. A community of trust. Yeah.