 The ballot boxes are open. So you still have time for this hotly contested election. So there will be three three-year spots and the person that gets the least amount of votes will get the two-year spot. Okay, better. You can tell them a real performer. And let's go. The ballot boxes will close at 8 p.m. tonight and the drama will be tomorrow. You'll hear the exciting results. The raffles, putting your raffle tickets in, you have to be present to win. Dan Jones, who I think ran one numerous last year, but he was not here, three, three. So you have to be here to win. We need to have a quorum. We're gonna establish a quorum right now. Mr. Secretary, do we establish that we have a quorum for voting? Okay. Okay. The 190 registered, and I think we have at least that many in the room right now. So we do have a quorum and we have an official annual meeting. I need, we now need to approve the minutes for the last year's 2017 annual meeting. Copies are available at the registration if you wanna read them or you haven't read them. And we now need a motion to accept the minutes. So moved, okay. Bill right here will make the motion and do I have a second for the minutes, Dan Jones? All those in favor of accepting the minutes, please signify by saying aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Okay. Excuse me. Oh, there's a correction. Okay. Seems that on page five, a few remarks were left out. So towards the end of the meeting. Okay, there seems to be a few comments that were left that were left out. Can we accept them? Okay, we'll go back and there was video last year, video recording. So we'll go back and we'll and we'll mend the minutes appropriately. Oh yes, I'm sorry. Stephanie, you wanna come up? Our moderator for the evening. Stephanie Lahar, we'll take you. Close enough, great. Thanks Scott. Okay, so we have a quorum, we have a slide for the agenda which can come up now to show us what we're gonna do. All right, so we're already partway through. We established the quorum and this is how the meeting's gonna flow between now and eight and being present to win for the raffles is an incentive to stay for the whole time but we'll try to keep it fun and fast moving and we do have grand awards to announce and then we have a guest speaker, Philip Ackerman Leist who's going to take us on a tour of the Italian Alps on this dark and rainy Vermont night. I'm really looking forward to that part and we'll have some reports. There'll be a section where we're gonna have community comments and questions. That's your chance to have an opportunity to say things and ask what you'd like to of the council members and the staff leadership and we're doing something new this year which is we're incorporating viewers who are watching this live, right, on Orca Media tonight. Do I have that right? But it's, yes, okay. And there's an option for viewers to submit online comments and so we'll include some of those in the community discussion and then we'll have closing and the raffles. So that's our plan. So to move us on, I'm gonna introduce Matt Levin to announce the Hunger Mountain cooperative community. Thank you, Stephanie. Good evening, everyone. So I'm Matt Levin. I'm the chair of the committee that oversees the Cooperative Community Fund and we're very pleased to be able to make some modest contributions to the local economy through our philanthropy that we do for the co-op. So the fund, just a little background, the fund was started in 2005 to offer financial support to organizations, businesses and initiatives that are aligned with the co-ops mission. We were gratified this year to receive 27 applications and are very happy to announce that we were able to award $7,650 in grants to seven different very deserving local organizations and businesses. The Community Fund Advisory Committee, of which I'm the chair, is made up of member owners, council members and staff. And the committee makes grant recommendations to the council, which has the final approval. The criteria we use for reviewing the applications includes alignment with our mission, the anticipated project impact and the applicant's access to other resources. That is, if they have other places to go for funding that they're looking for, we encourage them to do so. We focus on smaller organizations and small projects that need the kind of support that we can offer. The fund is supported with donations from you all, from members and from the co-ops operations. Thank you to all of you who made donations to the fund this year. The council this year did elect to donate uncashed patronage refunds to the fund. And so all of that together meant that we were able to support all these projects that we know are making a real difference in our community. So we did the whole photo with a big check thing before the meeting tonight. So we won't have that portion of it at the meeting. And it's a little dark, so we won't ask the folks who are there are some recipients here. We won't ask them to stand because I'm not sure people will be able to see them, but I'll go through the whole thing and then we can give them all a big round of applause. How about if we do that? So I think we have slides showing. So the first set of recipients. So for Ananda Gardens, $500 for the barn retrofit for their wash and pack station. Another way community center, $1,500 for their commercial kitchen stove upgrade. Capstone Community Action, $1,000 to add freezer capacity to their food shelf. And then $1,150 to Good Samaritan Haven Charitable Meals Program to purchase a new commercial freezer. $1,500 to Salvation Farms for the cooler for their LaMoyle Valley Gleaning Program. $500 to Steady Foot Farm to increase their cold storage capacity at their farm. And finally, $1,500 to the Twin Valley Senior Center to allow them to purchase a commercial freezer. These projects will have a real difference for members of our community. And let's give ourselves a big round of applause for our generosity of the community. Thank you very much. This is an annual program. We are always looking for folks who are interested in participating and helping get the word out and participating in the committee. And if you'd like to do so, you can get in touch with Kari and they'll tell you all about it. So Steph, I'm happy to pass the mic off to whoever's coming next. Thanks everyone. I'll just introduce council member Carl Etnire who's going to tell us about our guest speaker tonight. Thank you, Stephie. I guess so many farmers have jobs off the farm. And for some reason, maybe because I'm a book guy, I'm especially impressed by people who manage to combine raising food on a farm or a big homestead with writing about farming and food systems. People like Wendell Berry and Gene Logston have written poetry and prose literature on farming. While farming in one way or another. Here in Vermont, Heather Darby farms while conducting research on Vermont food systems and publishing the results. Jack Laser in recent years has shared and writing wisdom from his years of farming while continuing at Butterworks Farm. I could go on for quite a while with other names, but the point here is to introduce our next speaker. He's very much one of that group. Philip Ackerman-Leist homesteads now and he has farmed in Vermont, North Carolina and the South Tyrol area of Italy. He's written about farming and local food in his books Up Tunket Road, The Education of a Modern Homesteader, Rebuilding the Food Shed, How to Create Local Sustainable and Secure Food Systems and what we'll hear about from him tonight. A precautionary tale, how one small town banned pesticides, preserved its food heritage and inspired a movement. And in addition to doing all this, he also teaches at Green Mountain College. His recent work has been in the Italian Alps. He's been looking at how a community that's very much economically dependent on raising apples, a very pesticide intensive industry, has managed to fight the use of pesticides. We can expect to hear from our speaker, both an international and a local perspective on the local food economy. So please join me in welcoming Philip Ackerman-Leist. I'll get my pieces together here. Excuse me, set this. There's parts there. Great. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here and just it's been amazing to learn more about the Hunger Mountain Co-op and all of the things that you all are doing and seeing the obvious community that's come out and the amazing food that's part and parcel of that and recognize a lot of faces from NOFA Vermont and other places and rural Vermont as well. See Andrea there. And so obviously a great community of folks and it's really quite a pleasure to be here with you. So what I'd like to do is share a story with you and any story requires irony. And as you'll see pretty soon, I'm gonna introduce a lot of irony in terms of cooperatives for you here in just a minute. So this is the website. If you'd like to look at any of the images that you see around here, if you'd like to see the timeline, the chronology of the story that I'm about to tell you, if you'd like to learn more about the book, then you can check this out. So I've been very fortunate to be able to really research this story with a friend of mine, Douglas Gaten, who he and his wife, Laura, co-founded the Lexicon of Sustainability. And as they founded the Lexicon of Sustainability, part of what they wanted to look at was, how is it that words matter so much? How do words tell us what we need to know about the environment, about sustainability, and really words as tools? And so this is the website, which is www.toplinggoliath.org. You can check it out and you can learn more about the story I'm about to tell you. So Douglas is here, really a phenomenal multimedia artist. I just wanna make sure to give credit to Douglas because he's been such a powerful piece of really gathering this narrative and then trying to spin it out. And one of the things that Douglas has taught me along the way is that we need to always be thinking about information waste, just like we think about food waste here. So if we're gonna travel this many miles, like him from California, me from Vermont, and then our other collaborators, Pierre Giorgio is Italian, but he's in London, Mickey is local, whereas Mickey, Mickey is right here. If we're gonna travel that far, then we need to be conscious of information waste and gathering all of the assets that we could. And one of the things I think as you're thinking about cooperatives, we're thinking about food and organic food, sustainable agriculture. You know, the trend lines are fantastic in terms of the growth of the organic food industry. I think most of the people here understand that, that it's the fastest growing sector in the economy. However, we're struggling to hit the 5% margin by almost any measure in terms of the things that we care about, local food, sustainable food, organic food. It's a real struggle. And part of my view is that we failed in the storytelling. And one of the other pieces that Douglas has taught me along the way is that we have to be platform agnostic if we're gonna get to people in a community in all kinds of ways. So the website is one piece. The story I'm about to tell you is another. The book certainly is another. And then also this traveling pop-up show that I've been taking all over the world with me that you'll see here around the room. And these images that Douglas creates, and that's what he's very famous for, these kinds of images that you see here, don't be intimidated by the German words that are there because we made them up. And do you know how Germans like to just sort of squish words together? Well, we decided if they do it, we can do it. And part of the reason is you start to see these words and you look at our so-called definitions below, it's to show the absurdity of so much of what is going on with our food system. So the words actually, they have a meaning but they're of our own. So I hope you'll take time to explore those images and take part in that a little bit through the rest of the evening. So this is a little bit of the work we were doing here in Malz. I'm gonna give you a lot more perspective on this particular spot. And this is me harvesting grapes in the same region in the South Tyrol, this is in 1993. This is a place I first went to in 1983. So I've been going for 35 years now. It was a place I went as an exchange student in college and I just, I totally got addicted. Growing up in Eastern North Carolina, I wasn't seeing the kind of agriculture that really inspired me. And when I went as a junior, it suddenly grabbed me. And so I went back to this place, Brunenburg Castle, ended up being virtually the farm manager because the farmer died six months after I was there to start working after being a student. And part of my job was spraying pesticides. And I was the only person in the village who wore a respirator. There's a lot of machismo that goes along with this. I was one of the only people that bothered to wear a rubber suit. And it was the part of the job that I just, I hated. We were fairly low impact. There was a lot of copper, a lot of sulfur. And then sometimes there were other things that were added. But it's the job that involved getting up at four or five in the morning spraying literally for eight hours in a rubber suit and a respirator. And that wasn't my favorite part of the job. So this is the Brunenburg Vineyard. This is Brunenburg Castle. This is where I still take students and other private tours as well. Brunenburg Castle is a 13th century castle. And there's just one of the first ironies to introduce you to is that as I was living here and farming here, right here, as you start there, the elevation is going up. This is the beginning of what's called the Finchgau Valley. Finchgau in German, Valvanosta in Italian. And that's really in many ways where the story begins is right here. So I'd like to take you there. So this gives you a little bit of a sense of where we are. This is the South's rural region. It's about half the size of Connecticut. It's just spectacular and all of the tiny valleys that are here. And this is the area of interest. This is where I was living at Brunenburg Castle right here up on the slopes. And this is the beginning of that valley, the Valvanosta. So it's going up in elevation. And the story that I'm about to tell you really is it's sort of a twin conspiracy in many ways. It's of the growth of the apple industry which actually was born out of cooperatives, interestingly. I'll tell you that. And then also climate change because as climate change has impacted here then slowly the apple growers that I'm gonna show you moved further and further up the valley. And that is what was coming and the town of concern here is malts right here. This is Switzerland, this is Austria, this is Italy. So it's at that nexus point of those three countries. So the apple industry started really in the late 1800s. I'll tell you a little more of that story in a minute. This I could have almost thrown a rock from the castle and hit these guys if I'd been there about a hundred years earlier. And so they're picking apples, getting ready to, this is from the 1930s. This is also from the 1930s. This is spraying pesticides, ironically with a team of oxen pulling a wooden barrel. Probably in this case it was visceral or adornment oil which is petroleum based and was probably used for tree lice. So pesticides have a long, long history, longer than we tend to think. And so here you see what I saw and this is the village Dorf to Roll where I've been going since 1983. This is what almost the entire village looks like now. It's not what it looked like when I first got there in 1983. The apples were just beginning to step in at that point in time. And so you start to see that there's a little teutonic influence just in how they're laying everything out here, very precision oriented. And this is the spindle tree trellis system which you're starting to see in the Northeast and throughout the United States more and more. These are dwarf trees which are trained with these trellises. So in a lot of ways it's highly efficient. They figured it out in 1973 when they went to visit the Dutch who were starting this and so they came back with a method. And so it's great from the perspective of harvesting, mowing, pruning, irrigating, spraying. All of those things are much, much easier because it's highly efficient. And this is where we are headed in the Northeast in many ways. And then you also have the hail nets which are interesting because it takes the cost of insurance for three years will pay for the hail nets, which will last 10 to 20 years. And so the hail nets protect from hail, they also protect some from birds, they also protect from sunscald. But you have to think about the way in which they also change the landscape which is an important piece of agriculture. So this is what it looks like from the side on a family farm, a friend of mine give you a little more perspective. And this is where they're actually doing the picking. This is an amazing machine in which you've got four different people, they each have their own conveyor belt. And so the apples in the South's roll, if you buy an apple in Europe, there's a one in seven chance that it's come from the South's roll. One million tons of apples in half the size of Connecticut. One million tons. And so that's about 600 to 700 euros per year. And typically the average size of the farm is about four to six acres. And so, and those farmers are able to net, not gross, they net per hectare. So two and a half hectares. They net between 25,000 and 40,000 plus euros per year. Which is extraordinary. So the reason that they've been so successful interestingly enough is because of cooperatives. And there's an interesting history that I'd like to just interject here because of who you are and what you're thinking about and what you're doing. You know, it's interesting when we go back and I wrote about this in the book and we look at the history of cooperatives. And many people go back to 1844 to the Rochdale pioneers in England. So 28 weavers who came together, they were being pushed into poverty because of industrialization, rural isolation, other things, 28 weavers came together. They each contributed one pound in order to create a store. A store that people could go into that was going to be owned by the weavers and then the other members. It was such a powerful concept that within 10 years there were over 1,000 of those cooperatives in England alone. It also spread throughout the rest of Europe. It was picked up in Germany, for example, by a guy named Friedrich Reifheisen. And in 18, from the winter of 1846 and to 1847 was really severe in Germany. And when that happened, he started to see, he was the mayor of three different towns. I don't know why you'd subject yourself to being the mayor of three towns, but he was the mayor of three towns and he saw that there was so much poverty that there had to be a new way for people to create businesses in which they could actually move themselves out of poverty. And one of the things that he believed that I think is really interesting is you can't address poverty until you deal with the issues of dependence. Dependence upon the middle person, dependence upon others to whom you're beholden that you have to actually be independent. And so he had what he put forward as the three S's that he came up with in that winter of 1846 to 1847. So the three S's in German are translated as self-responsibility, self-governance, and oh gosh, I knew I was gonna forget the other one. The, make sure I, yeah, sorry, self-help, duh. So self-help, self-responsibility, and self-governance, which was the basis of so much of what moved forward with cooperatives over time. And so that concept really took hold and so he began creating with others these rural credit unions and putting those forward so that people could start businesses on their own. So this cooperative movement in Europe has a long, long history. In fact, most of the banks, the bank that I have my account in in Italy is the Rifeisen Bank named after Friedrich Rifeisen. So it's interesting because cooperatives became very powerful. And so in the 1893, there were the first cooperatives in this region in the South's role for fruit growers, 1893. So they became very effective at conglomerating everything that they had in terms of what people were producing and then marketing those because otherwise people weren't, they actually weren't independent in that case. And so what happened as a result of that was they started to become very powerful. But then World War I, then World War II, but then in 1945, as the war was over, they started to come together. And they actually created an association of these small fruit growing cooperatives that were in these valleys. And when they did that, the magic started to happen. And by magic, I mean suddenly they created a product and an image that went international. So when you buy apples elsewhere in the world, you can be in Australia, New Zealand, Russia before three years ago, you could be there and find South Terrelian apples. And they're beautiful, they're big, they're beautiful, they're perfects, cosmetically. But they also spray about 42 kilograms per hectare of pesticides a year. And so obviously you start to get a sense of what that means. But it's got a longer history here. And so how many folks know the Iceman? Personally? So maybe you've seen him in Bolzano in the museum there. And so the Iceman was found right above the Finchgau Valley, right above the Valvanosta. And 5,300 years old, I was actually living there at the time and my boss was the chief archeologist for the South Terrelian, it was just total coincidence. First night he comes home, he says, well, they found this guy and it looks like he's from World War I. The next day it's like, maybe he's medieval. And then by the time it was all over they realized they had someone who was several thousand years old. So 5,300 years old, perfectly intact. And part of what I write about in the book that I find so fascinating is that you can see the food ways that still exist in this region in his gastrointestinal tract. So they were actually, and we don't have time to do it, but the last 72 hours of his life, ie 72 hours from here to, well somewhere else, that 72 hour passage actually told where he was, what he was eating, because of the pollen, they could figure out the elevations. But what's amazing about the Iceman is that, for example, the grains, there's been a grain renaissance in this region because it was considered the bread basket of the Terrel and the Vatican used the grains from this area from this particular valley. The royal family in England used the grains. And when you look at emmer, einkorn, barley, spelt, and millet, all of those were found either in his GI tract or on his clothes. So just the same things that are eaten. He came, actually, from the dairy culture. He also had charcuterie, you know, he was a gastronome. So he had two different wild sheep and then a domesticated sheep that he had with him, smoked meat. Also bread that was carbonized. So it's just extraordinary. All these things that still exist here in this particular valley. So this is where we are. The Iceman was found up here. He was found because of global warming, of climate change, because the glacier was melting. There was a sandstorm that blew across the Mediterranean and blew these tiny little particles of sand. In Vermont, we know what that does to snow and ice. And so he was suddenly revealed. And so we suddenly had this insight into this history that was pretty extraordinary. So this is Malts that I'm about to introduce you to and we'll do a flyover. And it's my friend Brigida who told me when I went back in 2014 with graduate students from Green Mountain College, Brigida said, well, you have to go to Malts. I know it's one of your favorite places, but they're having a referendum and they're having a referendum to ban all pesticides. I was like, what? So retool the graduate study tour, hire the bus to go there instead of some other places. And this is Malts. Malts actually is 90 square miles. It's 11 different villages. And this one is Malts from which the entire township gets its name. And I'll show you a little more about Malts here. So this was the graduate study tour that we were doing. And this is Malts in the 1940s. So this is Malts with the grain shocks here, with the potatoes here. So people were growing things right up to the edge of the village because it was at that intersection of three different countries and these three different passes, it was always being invaded. And so the farms, the barns themselves, the infrastructure was held within the confines of the villages and the farmer's fields were outside, which means that the farmer's fields are smaller. They tend to be anywhere from about an acre to four acres, typically. And a farmer may have 10 or 12 of them scattered around. So this is Malts in the 1970s. You get a sense of the diversity here. These are the grains that are being grown throughout Malts and you start to get a sense of how they actually have some sort of stepped landscape. So these farms were here from 900 to 1200. They were settled. This is Malts just a couple of three summers ago. And what you see here with the dark spots, those are the apple orchards. So the apple orchards are making their way up, up, up, up, up because of climate change and because the cooperatives, the apple cooperatives banded together. They were so successful in the marketing and here is the irony. They were making so much money that they began what the locals say is land grabbing and moving up here. So these are the apple orchards that are starting to come in and take over. So I'll do a little flyover for you here. So this is Malts. This is the highest, oops, that was the highest mountain. This is one of the 11 villages, Plevein. This gives you a little bit of sense of one of the other villages tucked into this hamlet here. Actually it caught on fire a couple of years ago and everything burned because it's so close together. This is the highest Benedictine monastery in all of central Europe. This is the middle of Malts. This is the agricultural school where they teach very little organic agriculture so far. These are, this is the new biodynamic vineyard, the highest vineyard in all of Europe, which is organically managed. And you see the apples coming from there, moving their way up, so apples, apples, apples. They found pesticides in lakes that are above 2,000 meters. These are the grazing areas like the Iceman would have utilized. A guest house up in the grazing areas, sort of hidey-esque. This is the highest mountain in the South Tyrol, 3,900 meters, the Ortler. Cherry orchards right here as well as apple orchards. But you get a sense, this was the bread basket. This is where all the grains were grown, up to 1,700 meters in height, so over 5,000 feet. This is an ancient Neolithic cultic site, which we'll see again in just a sec. This is it. So they put a church on top, but they've found remains from Utsi's time there, Utsi the Iceman. So you start to get a sense here really of what the people of Malts had to protect in terms of beauty, in terms of what many of us call agrobiodiversity. Just a majestic landscape that they didn't want to give up. They didn't want to seed it to the apple monocultures, the pesticides, and all of the things that came from the outside. And this is the glacier on top of the Ortler. So thanks Red Bull. I don't know if you have that in a co-op, but... No. So this is where we are just as a reminder. And this is the middle of the valley. So right in here, this is what it looks like today. Nothing but apples, some cherries, and grapes. And as it turns out, this particular organic herb farm is a four generation herb farm. They started when they actually converted from a conventional apple orchard. They decided that they could actually, for their family, build a business off of about one and a half hectares. So just over almost four acres that they could utilize in order to have an organic herb business. Unfortunately, apple growers moved in on literally all four sides. And so they found themselves actually in a quandary where they're gonna move because they were doing the test. They were doing the analysis. Obviously there was pesticide residue everywhere all the time. So either it was move or actually spend over a quarter of a million euros in order to erect high tunnels over the entire farm. That's what they decided to do because they decided they had to stick it out for their community in order to really take on the pesticide industry. So that's what they do. I was here there this summer. Gets to be 114 to 117 degrees under there while they're harvesting. When the rain comes, they have to channel the rain water away because of the pesticide that's on the top of the high tunnels. They can't, the display gardens on the outside, they can't utilize any of the materials from there. So they were the canary in the coal mine for what was about to happen to this town of Malts. And this is a video that the father took and he's got now over 300 of what he calls the best hits of the pesticide spring. This is from his balcony. So you start to see the pesticide drift. You get a sense you've got the thermal updraft. You also have the increase in technology where we've got the droplet size is really tiny. So then the pesticide drift is magnified because it can move more. So this is just literally from the top, the rooftop that they've got there of their herb business. So it gives you a little bit of a sense of what was coming up the valley. And if you could hear it, you'd hear a bird song in the background, sort of ironic. So what happened was there was this one farmer, in Gunter, and Gunter had converted to organic in 1991 and decided that that was the way of his ancestors and that he really needed to promote organic agriculture. He said that's the way we've done it now for over 5,000 years, we know that. And so he went to organic, but then in 2009, this orchard popped up on the side and this orchard popped up on the side. So he did his first cut of, hey, did the analysis, sent it in, pesticides. Second cut, pesticides. Third cut, pesticides. 250 euros out of pocket for every single sample that he had to put in. And so he went to the mayor, to Uli, or Ulrich. He's known around town as Uli, who grew up in the area. And he said, Uli, here you are, you're the new mayor in town. You're trying to create a sustainable community. It's got the first organic hotel, did you know organic hotels exist? The first organic hotel in this region in Italy. It's got the World Meisterschaft, the World Championship Pizza is there. They've got these organic businesses that are popping up all over. And so Uli had really decided that they wanted to build the sustainable community in green ecotourism. And he said, the whole dream is gonna be dead if we don't do something. And there were people like this. This is Adith, who back in the 1990s, and I just coincidentally met her and didn't realize it until three years ago. I met her while she was out in her field harvesting, saving all of these grain varieties. Nobody else was paying attention to these old heritage grains that used to be predominant here. And Adith and her husband, Robert, started saving the seeds. And then in fact, they found some, a neighbor was taking the roof off of his house and found a newspaper from 1893. And that newspaper had two heads of grain that obviously were planted in that area and they saved those. And now those seeds are going out to local farmers. They're using them in the breads and the other products that they have. So you've got people like Adith and Robert, her husband. They say they have a division of labor that keeps their marriage together. He takes care of everything underground. She takes care of everything above ground. And they have six show gardens, display gardens, where they're growing out all these different varieties. And then also, Edward and Helga are doing the same thing, teaching people how to bake bread from these ancient grains, teaching school groups, showing the farmers how to do the old style of planting and harvesting. And then you've got folks like Konrad here who is the person who first told me a lot of this story who has sort of a black market guest house in which he invites people to come in and you just, you go and you eat whatever it is he gives you that day and then you pay whatever you all decide is a fair price at the end. But pretty extraordinary. Who started the corncomber, which is a group which was dedicated to getting farmers to grow the old grains and find the markets for those. And then you have Franz the baker and Franz the baker is in his, he's 30, well now he's a little older, but he was 33 and right in here is the sourdough that was three years older than he was when we were in there doing this photograph and doing these traditional breads with the traditional grains and trying to buy organic and regional as much as he could. And then you have a Gideas who he's the person I needed to see 35 years ago who is actually starting to do organic orcharding. And organic orcharding I think is the most complicated part of organic agriculture in many ways. It's very challenging, but he's been doing it now for 30 years and he actually, he doesn't spray copper, he doesn't even use compost. And if I'd not been through his orchard and his vineyard over and over again, I'd never believe what I actually saw there. And then you've got Evelyn who she and her husband like so many in the United States have food allergies. So they've been working with her mother who grew up there and the only thing her mother bought was salt, sugar and coffee in the household growing up. So the people who are going back to these old food ways trying to deal with the allergies that they're confronting. And then you have Peter, the veterinarian who travels around a large animal vet, sees the insides of the barns, insides of the houses, he knows what's going on, he sees the landscape or she sees the landscape all the time. And he's been one of the biggest stalwarts in this whole battle. And then a really interesting person, Alexander Agatley, who was confronted with this whole situation in which he decided that he wanted to build a cheesecake. He could only, because of having this small farm, he could only have 12 cows and milk them at one time. And so what he decided to do was to start making cheese but he needed to build a cheese cave. So he went to the Italian tax authorities and he said, I'd like to print my own currency. Like, are you what? So they said, well actually as we look it's not illegal as long as you pay taxes on it. So he created his own currency with one of his cow emblems on it called the Engelhorn which is the name of this farm. And so every Engelhorn, every bill is actually worth one kilogram of cheese. So we would presale people 10 years worth of cheese. And so he raised 167,000 euros by doing this. And then it ended up impacting the local economy as well because people could actually pay other bills with the Engelhorn and then those folks would go in and buy things. So he created his own local economy which is really astounding. But then folks decided they had to do something to really start to help people be aware of what was coming with the apples. And of course Adam and Eve and the apple, they decided they would play off of that. They got into the gorilla art. They started, this is in May of 2013, this was the first time they had a big public event to let people walk or bike or drive from town to town to actually see what was being threatened by the pesticide industry. So the orchards, suddenly there were snakes, serpents, there were real serpents that some of the women were carrying around. There was an Eve to greet you as the temptress at every single village. Snakes appeared in the apple fields. And they just continued to play off of it. This is the whiskey distillery. Again, trying to bring the old grains back like here in Vermont. And so it's the first whiskey distillery in all of Italy. And so there was quite the event there that day. And then the next year they got together and they decided that what they wanted to do was actually to showcase some of the things they had. So here they're serving wine. And the abbot at the monastery decided that the monks were using pesticides. And he said, I wanna have the first organic vineyard that produces communion wine in all of Europe. So he brought in someone to do that. It's also the highest vineyard in all of the Alps. And so here they're doing a wine tasting. Here they're tasting some of the local vegetables and stews, beekeepers talking about what they're doing. And Robert and Edith bringing these beautiful manifestations of the grains that were traditionally grown in the area. And showing them as something aesthetic as well as something that was also very important to the food system. And so the big issue here, as so many of you know, and we can talk about this afterward if you like, but just this whole issue, when you've got 42 kilograms of pesticides being sprayed per hectare per 2.5 acres. And in many cases, apple growers are using 30 to 40 different pesticides in a given year. We don't know what individual pesticides do. We don't have a good enough understanding of that in many cases. We don't understand the combinative effects when those come together. And thirdly, and usually 95, 90% of a pesticide is actually the inert ingredients, that the active ingredients are mixed in. So when we've got all of those issues, then it becomes a real challenge to understand what to do and how to deal with this. And so the Europeans use the precautionary principle much better than we do. That is, who bears the burden of responsibility? Is it actually the manufacturers of these substances or is it the consumers? And the precautionary pushes the fact that the burden of responsibility should, to prove the safety, should be on the manufacturers. So when you're trying to figure out who you wanna push an agenda in the town and it deals with pesticides and parts per million, parts per billion, who better to go to than the town pharmacist who does that day in and day out and knows that it's the dose that makes the medicine. So Johannes Pertinger, who grew up here and farmed in his early days as well here became the spokesperson because he could deal with the science and actually bring that forward and bring it out to talk about pesticides. And then the pediatrician, Elizabeth Fiertler, who grew up in the middle of the valley and actually grew up surrounded by pesticides by apple orchards and never really thought about it until she got to malts where there were almost no apple orchards. And so the two of them came together, they wrote a manifesto and in that manifesto they put forward the precautionary principle and they ask that the mayor come to the protection of the townspeople because in Europe and also in Italy the mayor has the right to do whatever is necessary to protect the health of his or her community. And that's an interesting issue here in the States because there are only seven states in which the local regulators can actually supersede federal law. And right now in the Farm Bill, I think it's 9011, Farm Bill that hasn't been passed is trying to eliminate any municipality in the United States from being able to regulate pesticides on its own. So this is not insignificant. But the problem was they kept pushing this issue, they tried to push it forward, but actually it was the women who got together when this particular person, Martina, went to the hairdresser here, Beatrice, and she went one day, nobody else was in there, pesticides were sort of anathema to talk about, and she said, what do you hear about the pesticides? What should we do? And she said, well, nobody's really talking about it. And so as they were doing this, as they came together, Beatrice said, we've gotta do something, we have to work together. And the men aren't doing it, so it's time for the women to step in and do it. So they created a letter writing campaign, and here they asked publicly in writing for the mayor to take control of the community's health and do whatever was necessary. From that point, then they actually filled these pesticide Tyvek suits and around the farmer's market in the area, stuffed them with hay and put the different warnings for the different pesticides on them. They did it under the cover of darkness and people came out in the morning and there were all these pesticide straw men, if you will, who were scattered around. Then they had a banner campaign altogether one night and which they had people come together, and they decided it had to be a positive campaign, that it couldn't be negative. And so they said, instead of calling for a ban on pesticides, we have to call for a pesticide-free future. And so they hung up all of these in the middle of the night. There were over 300 of these hung up in one night, and even the Abbott allowed them to hang one in front of the monastery as well. So they had this referendum in 2014. It was the first referendum in the world. We haven't been able to find any other replications anywhere in which they voted for a pesticide-free future. And it was extraordinary because 69% of the population voted, and 75% voted in favor of a pesticide-free future, which was extraordinary. They had these, the sunflower became the emblem of everything that they were doing. And these are the ordinances that were put in place in March of 2016, I'm sorry, they were passed in 2016. They were implemented this past April. A judge in Bolsano in the local town said, we're putting those on ice until January of 2019, January 17th, he's ruling on those, and we'll see where it goes. But it'll be interesting, and I'll tell you a little more afterwards. But this is a giddiest, the orchardist. And when you do this, when you have this kind of a movement, this is part of what happens sometimes. This was not this fall, but the previous fall, someone came through and sprayed his orchard with glyphosate. So 30 years, no copper, no sulfur, no nothing, and just went through and devastated the orchard. Of course, that impacted his organic certification for the next three years. And to hear him tell it, at this point, he said, you know, this is part of the cost. Obviously, I wish it hadn't happened, but this is part of what we do sometimes when we really step up and step out. So it gives you a little bit of a sense there, some of the ramifications. But, you know, Johannes, the pharmacist has some, you can see these on the website, I'll let you check those out, has these ideas for how to actually move these community initiatives forward. And I'm just, I'm gonna, this is Kun who formed the pesticide action network for Italy in the process of all of this. And also did a study now, going to schoolyards, taking pesticide residues and over 70 different schoolyards to show the impact. That may be in the Journal of Toxicology, it's under review right now. And now, you know, malts has become a beacon throughout Europe. There's actually a pesticide-free town network throughout Europe. And there's almost this varsity competition for seeing how far you can take it. And these are the folks in malts under the high tunnels. And I was just in Brussels, we were there with the exhibit, and malts was featured with the EU. And this was the coolest thing to actually be in the EU and see this come across the EU Social and Environment Committee to actually see this come across on the banners as we were going in. That the EU is actually taking seriously this notion of pesticide-free towns and cities and finding their way forward. So it's pretty inspiring just seeing these things happen. And I think there's a long ways we can go. And Switzerland now has a referendum to go pesticide-free with a 10-year transition. See where that goes. Bandana Shiva has picked up this and is trying to create an alliance around the world of, as she's calling it, poison-free communities, which that includes the GMO piece as well. And then that vineyard where I worked and where I sprayed pesticides, this is the end of the story, but the beginning of the story. This is Nick, who was five, six, and seven while I was spraying. And I'd always say, Nick, get out of here, go away. He always wanted to help. What he has done now is he's taken out all of the Vitus vinifera vines and he's replaced them with fungal-resistant vines and he doesn't spray a single thing ever. So that's the beauty of the story, that there is a hope, there is future, a future for a pesticide-free future for all of us, but we need people like this who are the pioneers and can move it forward. So thank you very much. Questions? Sure, if you all have time. Yes, we have seven, eight minutes for questions, so. Yeah, sure. I'm gonna leave you to the mic for a second. Okay. Questions? Yes, sir? No, we didn't do that one. We did some drone work. We were being chased by the police. Oh, the question was, the drone work, that is the photography, did we do that? That was Red Bull Media. We did some drone work. We were being chased by the Carbonary, the police, you know, at various times. It's a little tricky. Okay, sure. And collect questions. You had one, right? What's been the response to Monsanto and pharmaceutical companies that produce the chemicals over there? And you know who did the sabotage? No, I mean, and this is sort of this big irony is that Monsanto bear, in this case, they haven't really shown their head, unfortunately. And this is just sort of an interesting question for you all to ponder. The cooperatives have been the ones who have been the biggest antagonist of this, this association of cooperatives. So for me, it poses just this really interesting question of when does a cooperative lose sight of its vision in many ways? Because they were so successful in all that they did. So they've been very strongly pushing back, and then I have to say some of the other funders, even the Rifeisen folks in some cases, have stepped forward and there's a lot of power in that money. The Apple Lobby is what the locals call it. So it's interesting because it's sort of contrary to what we tend to think of who's gonna come out and push against it. They don't need to, there's so much intense power coming from these other angles. So it's a great question. Hi, thank you, thank you so much. No, it's starting to expand. France is making some really incredible moves forwards and so folks are, there's the glyphosate focus, that is the roundup focus. There's also the focus on neonics, neonicotinoids and the issues with the pollinators. In Europe, they're becoming very, very aware of what's going on because they've had, there was a study that just came out this past fall looking at insect populations and the insect populations in part of Europe. This has been citizen science that's been going on that's documented for 30 years now. They've had between a 50 and a 75% drop in insect populations and then the bird populations in much of Europe have dropped by a third plus. We're seeing in the United States, we don't have the documentation to the same degree that they do there. So France is being very proactive. Italy actually, if this judge pushes, throws this out and says that they can't have this ordinance in Rome, they're more likely to uphold it and if they have to take it to the EU, they've already gotten the EU Health Commissioner to write a letter saying the mayor is within his right in this case to do this. Switzerland, I don't, when I talk to friends who live there, they're not so sure the referendum's gonna pass, but the fact that it's on the ballot and they got 160,000 signatures for it is really compelling. So make it headway. Yes. Go on. Okay. I've got a question back here and raise your hand. We have about five minutes to take as many questions as we can. I'm actually not a question. I'm just an appreciative comment. I grew up in the Hudson Valley. I'm gonna get emotional, but we lived near Apple Orchards and my mother died of cancer and she experienced many flyovers where she was in the orchard and didn't know that a plane was coming and I attribute this to her breast cancer, very tenacious breast cancer. Thank you for your work. Thank you and I'm sorry. Thanks Elizabeth. I'll say my grandfather was a plant pathologist at North Carolina State University. The part of the story I didn't tell you was I grew up working in the Peach Orchard with my grandfather who developed the pesticide spray programs for peaches, apples, strawberries throughout the Southeast and we used intense pesticides there. My grandfather died of Parkinson's. Three of his colleagues in the plant pathology department died of Parkinson's. So it hits home and I've been there in the drifts and the piss in the Peach Orchards. So thank you and if we can find ways to raise the awareness and keep the neighborliness. Shouldn't we know the title of your book so that we could order it? I sure. Where do we get it? You can order it or it's a precautionary tale. And it's also, there's an audio book version if you like as well. And I've got some copies here if you'd like one tonight as well. But thank you very much. We have time for one or two more who has a question or comment to make. I hear one over here. So as I'm hearing this, we're in the middle of a classic situation for instance in Vermont where it's all over the place. The farmers rent fields. There's glyphosate all over the place. And politically, at least I've been observing that at least our department of agriculture is very, very close with the farms. They encourage the growth of the farms. So trying to get my head around how you organize it, even in our place like Vermont, what do you do with the realities of the economics, the department of agriculture? Even, I'm thinking even our liberal senators and congressmen, I've never gotten into the issue with them but I don't know, I'm just curious as to where you go with it. No, I think that's a great question. It is a real challenge. And I think a lot of us and myself being involved in the conservation districts here in the state for about 17 years and other work with the agency of ag. You know, there's a sentiment that we wanna make sure that we support our farmers and we do wanna do that and to hit them when they're down is a really challenging thing to do. But I think the farmers don't understand the science. They haven't seen the science in many cases. And so a lot of it is, how do we distill the science, put it forward, help the farmers themselves understand? I mean, who really wants to be around these things and spring them in many ways? That's a real challenge. The medical community, just like in malts, the pharmacist and having the pharmacist and the pediatrician in town and they on that manifesto that they put forward, they got every single person with a PhD and MD or who were veterinarians. So the doctors, dentists, veterinarians, wildlife biologists, foresters, anybody that had a doctorate, all except for three, signed that manifesto and put a picture beside it and put a statement as to why they thought it was important to have a pesticide-free future. And until we get the medical community involved and the medical community, as you read what's making our children sick by Michelle Perot, who was just here in Vermont and she'll be back through. It's another Chelsea Green book. And she talks about the fact that over 50% of our children are chronically ill at this point in time when you use those different diagnoses. So, forget it if we're not paying attention to ourselves. It's our children. And the fact these pesticides actually impact not just us, they also impact our children. They also impact the genetics for two more generations. So we're talking about a three to four generation impact here just by virtue of these repeated exposures that one person may have. So we need the medical community to tackle the science, to take it on, to spend the time and it's ugly. I mean, people like me, I ran away from this because I came to Green Mountain College to teach organic agriculture. There's such joy in that and bringing that forward. I didn't wanna go back into the science and the ugly side of it. But at this point, I think the old dogs need to jump back into the fight because we know enough now and we do know enough science-wise and we do have the models to show that there are alternatives, which we didn't have those as well 20 or 30 years ago. So, but thank you for asking because it's critical and Vermont could do so much better. Okay, we're gonna take one last comment. You implied there was a biodynamic farm there and I didn't know what kind of future the biodynamic approach is having in this anti-pesticide world. Mm-hmm, yeah, in fact, several of these farmers that have featured are biodynamic and they're more interested in the biodynamic certification than organic certification and because Rudolf Steiner was sort of kindred spirit there, the biodynamic community is really much stronger there than it is in the United States. And so there are, for example, a Gideus really focuses on biodynamic practices of the orchardist. He takes it a step further and then also Alexander the cheese maker. So, and there, there are also these questions about certifications and what really matters and is it local, is it biodynamic, is it organic, or just really knowing your neighbor is the most important piece? Okay, thank you so much, Phillip. Thank you, I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, okay. We're gonna turn to co-op reports, so Scott. Thank you, that was really, really interesting. I'm gonna give you a, we're gonna go through just a few slides and give you a bit of a snapshot and some trends. I'm gonna take Jose's spot tonight, obviously, because he couldn't be here for a slide. Member owners, this is a fact that the council reviews or we see the equity report when a member wants to get their equity back. We also see how many members are joining every month and it's a truly amazing number that we've got currently of almost 9,200 members for the county that we have 11 or 12% of the entire county is members and it's just extraordinary how it's been adopted and I think we're most of us are just blown away every month by the actual members. Just giving you the trend and it's just growing and strong with just great co-op. Product sales, a large percentage and obviously it's been a major emphasis in what's been embraced by co-op members and others, the CHOP, the 70% of co-op members, 70% of sales are from co-op members, the other 30% are from non-co-op members and that just continues to grow and certainly Kari and his team and management and the buyers are always seeking out to carry as much local products because that's what we wanna buy. Economic impact, our sales are close to 25 million but if you just, the impact that we have both in Washington County and the city of Montpelier, what's being spent and between salaries and as the trickle-down effect it's not just 25 million dollars in sales but this is what the impact that we have on our very local and dynamic numbers for what we mean to the economic impact that we have locally here in Montpelier. Retirement plan, this has been a really, really positive aspect that we have for the employees. It's what I would think is a very rich generous plan and it's really the participation has really been growing and if you contribute 3% of your salaries, the first 100% and after that it's the next 50%, 2% we contribute 50% so if you max out you're getting a contribution of 4%. We just switched over a few years ago to another mutual fund that's been really saving the employees a lot of fees. It's down to just a little under a third of a percent and the numbers have been growing really, really. When I first started I think it was less than a million dollars and total net worth for the IRAs or the Kiosk for the retirement plan is up to 3.4 million dollars so great investment in the future of each of the employees of the co-op. Investments, the co-op invests in other co-ops both in a New England fund and in our local co-ops made small investments in Brattleboro and helping out both in expertise and investments and our total right now is just under half a million dollars and that's just, we're a successful co-op but we feel that the board and management and staff feels that it's prudent to invest in other co-ops. By law committee has just been formed this year, Carl is the chair, he's stepping down but he's gonna, he may remain chair, Steve Farnham, Stephanie Kaplan, Cheryl Connor, Sue Zacus and Jed Davis and we'll probably be getting, we'll have probably two council members that will sit on the by-law committee and they're gonna work through both from the board perspective and from the community what and if we should do with our by-laws. Treasurer's Board, okay, gross sales, I think we just popped over that one. Growing, leveling out just a bit, we're kind of growing with the rate of inflation right now. Population of Washington County is not growing, we've got competition from stores that are opening or have opened up in Chittenden County but sales are still growing and aggressively marketing, you've seen with the sales and discounts and I think the staff has really been doing a great job with enticing the public and with the members certainly, it certainly behooves people to become members, there's tremendous benefits and you can see that our sales still continue to grow. Net sales, employee compensation is about 28% of the total cost of goods is the big purple piece. I think we have a number on that. Anyway, expenses, so that's where the dollars raise the go and you can see that after depreciation, the profit from the co-op, the profit and sales is well less than 1%. So it all goes back into, it's all from the cost of goods primarily and employee compensation. Patronage refund, our earnings last year were 171,000. The council decided to take half of the total patronage refund and distribute it back to the members, somewhat similar to what we distributed last year and the other half is gonna go back into capital improvements within the co-op, retained earnings and as you can see with the bottom number on that sale, the net income was just over $50,000. Hand off. My mic working? I did. So it's working, can you hear me? Great. So I'm gonna finish off the treasurer's slides since Jose can't be here. From the balance sheet, we're gonna talk, look at the liabilities to equity. So this is the ratio of all the co-op owes in terms of long-term debt, short-term, current liabilities compared to the equity, the portion of our assets that we own, okay? And you can see back in 2009 to the far left, it was about $1.90 that we owed, either our vendors or our employees or the banks or someone for every dollar that we owed and over the past 10 years, we've been bringing this ratio down and finished last year at .82, meaning that for every dollar that we own, we have about 82 cents that we owe someone. So that's strong progress and it's really a function of paying down our long-term debt and building up equity. So in the next slide, we'll show the equity a little bit more. So equity, of course, is that's the portion of our assets that we own and we have close to double that over the past 10 years, ending up last year at about 3.8 million and the sources of equity are the equity investments that individual members make, $180 over time. There's all of the retained earnings that we've accumulated over our 46 years of existence and then there's the retained patronage, where we pool a portion of the patronage refunds. And so one thing that's logical to ask is how much does the co-op need? And that's a really good question. It's something that the council and the management team have to think about and it's really based on what are our strategic initiatives? What do we want to reinvest back into the business? What do we want to hold and reserve for a rainy day? And at this point, I think that the council leadership is feeling fairly confident to the point where we're going to take a portion and accelerate some of our debt repayment over the coming year. Okay, I'm going to shift into the general's manager's report and I'm going to talk about three things, member discounts, employees, and the products we sell. And so I'm going to start with member discounts and I'm going to start it off with probably my favorite co-op joke, which is how many cooperators does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer is we don't know, they're still in a meeting trying to figure that out. And that is apt in a way because we've been talking about member discounts over the past two years. We started this effort a couple years ago, had a series of co-op conversations to figure out what to do about member discounts, if anything, after we noticed this phenomenon over the past 10 years of member, what we're allocating to member discounts has been growing at a pretty rapid rate between 15 and 40% per year, much faster than the rate of sales growth. Through those conversations, we heard a wide range of perspectives and we ended up with two primary goals that we want to use to guide us going forward. The first one is to adjust the member discount programs in order to increase access to co-op products for those least able to afford them, regardless of age. So we heard a lot of perspectives about how discounts should be used. And one thing that almost everybody agreed on is that discounts are beneficial when they're applied to folks who are in need, low-income folks, and that was more or less universal. We heard from a lot of folks who felt like the senior discount's important age-based discounts has a role in the co-op. We've heard from other people who felt like the age-based doesn't make a lot of sense, and that's somewhat difficult attention to resolve, maybe impossible to fully resolve, but we do know that we wanna try to allocate some additional resources to the need-based discounts. The goal number two is pretty common-sensical, I think, is manage the member discount program so they're sustainable and don't jeopardize the co-op's financial health long-term. So how are we gonna move forward on these things? We've made some decisions on next steps, and basically it's a pretty cautious approach. Number one, we're gonna expand our co-op cares discount program. Co-op cares is the low-income discount for members who currently are eligible for WIC or Three Squares Vermont, are eligible for a 10% discount at the co-op. We're gonna try to expand that program by broadening the criteria. We've looked at some different things like home heating assistance would be another marker of need, and we're also interested in partnering with some of the local organizations that focus on food insecurity like another way. It was one of our Hunger Mountain Cooperative Community Fund recipients in helping to identify who are folks in their communities that could be part of our community and benefit from a discount. Number two, in terms of next steps, is to invite member owners who are now receiving the senior discount to consider giving it up voluntarily. This would be voluntary. There's no pressure to do this, but we heard from enough people that were interested in doing this as an option to free up resources for the need-based discounts. So we have been starting to distribute information about how you might do that. If you're signed up for the E-News, there's information there. We also have a handout. But basically the idea is let us know if you'd like to relinquish it. You can sign back up for it at any point, and then we're just gonna see what the impact of these two steps are in assess as we go along. There's a lot of moving parts to the discount question including how is the overall business doing? But we feel that these are reasonable next steps, and again, we're taking the cautious incremental approach. Okay, gonna shift into talking about co-op employees. This was a topic at last year's annual meeting, and I know from talking to people that it's a very important value for the co-op. People want to know that the co-op is a responsible employer. So just a few statistics, at the end of last year, we had 166 employees. Just about 80% of them are member owners of the co-op. Approximately 100 full-time, which we define as 32 hours per week or more. The average tenure of those full-timers is nine years. We have a very low rate of employee turnover, especially as a retailer. All the employees are earning at least the Vermont livable wage, which I believe is $13.03 per hour right now. And then we have an excellent benefit program. Next slide, please. We did have an employee survey done, employee satisfaction survey. And for the first time in many years, we hired an outside firm to conduct the survey to get the benefit of their expertise. We learned, and are still learning from that survey, we just got the results. There's some key themes that they identified as opportunities to improve. And so I'll just go through those really quickly. Build trust between management employees. It's been an issue in some places. Improve the spirit of cooperation amongst the co-op employees. Communicate proactively. Manage change initiatives more holistically, which means would include communication about changes and involving people in change planning, and then increase professional development opportunities. None of these were surprised to us. Some of these things we've been working on, initiatives to improve, but there are some things that we will definitely, as we digest this information over the coming month, really sort of prioritize, including the internal communication piece, getting the 166 people the right information at the right time is always a challenge, but I know that we can do better. Professional development opportunities, there's a lot we can do in this area, in part because we have such a sort of experienced workforce. And then building the trust between management employees. A lot of that is, I think one of the important sets of relationships there is between the management team and the leadership of the union. And so we're certainly gonna continue to work on those relationships. Next slide, please. And sort of a baseline from the survey to the question or the statement, overall I am very satisfied working at Hunger Month and Co-op. We have about two thirds of employees who are saying, or the respondents anyway, who agreed with that statement that they're very satisfied. So that's good, it's not where we wanna be. We want it to be much closer to 100%. And I personally am committed to making the Co-op an even better place to work so we can get that number up. So last topic is the products we sell. Of course, that's sort of at the heart of what we do. And last year just to give you a sense of where that stands relative to our different values, about 40% of our sales come from local products or Vermont-made products. 34% are certified organic. 45% of the products we sell are fresh. So dairy, meat and fish, cheese, deli, those sorts of things. And that's been something that's been growing quite rapidly in recent times. About 9% come from the bulk department and that's something that's actually been decreasing over time. And then we're also starting to measure what are products that are made by other cooperatives we sell and it's about 5%. So it's a good amount. And then I wanted to finish up by talking about our product standards. All of our products meet certain standards. I really wanted to talk about this because it kind of got to me healthy living. The store up in South Burlington was able to get a lot of attention from local media by claiming that they were the first store to institute these new rigid standards and that was a surprise to many of the local co-ops because we've actually had these standards in place for quite some time. And basically our products are free from artificial anything. Hormones and antibiotics, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, serrated ingredients, bromated and bleached ingredients. These are to us, this is just common sense. This is what our members expect. They expect us to filter out things like this that really don't have a place in a healthy diet and so we're happy to do that. So I think we're gonna pause there and open it up for questions and comments. And we have a couple of mics that'll be circulating around. And so if you have a question for me or for anyone on the council. Yeah, I wanna say, yeah, thanks for the, all the good statistics. Just a couple of guidelines for this session, this part of the meeting. There's a lot of people and there's people also viewing. So the one guideline is to be brief and concise with your comment or question. Keep it under 30 seconds. I have a harmonica in my pocket. So if you hear the harmonica play, you'll know to wrap it up. We'll get around to as many people as possible. And if you would also say your name before your comment or question, we'll direct it to the council members or staff leaders, but we also have a note taker so we can get your name as well. So that would be really helpful. You have one? Great. As an owner member, I'd like to challenge the co-op to get that percentage of people who agree that they're satisfied working here up from a D plus, maybe to 70% next year. Think about 80% or even 90%. I'd like the co-op to be one of the most progressive co-ops in the country. The people working there do a great job. I look at the shelves, they're clean, they're fronted, they're produce worthy of a magazine cover. People are working hard. And I would like them to be satisfied with the work. Bruce Sargent. It is working now. Thank you, Bruce. Any comments back? No, I totally agree. Okay. My name is Sandal Kate, and just a quick question. I'm guessing that Cabot Creamery is a cooperative. What are some of the other cooperatives that we buy from? Produce Farms. So some other examples would be Organic Valley, Equal Exchange, La Rio Hanna is a big player now. They're a cooperative in Argentina that sell us wine and olive oil. So it's not just domestic co-ops, but there's actually, we have a list of about 35 or 40 different co-ops that we're purchasing from. Thanks, Sandal. Other questions? Comments? Okay. Hi, my name is Rachel Grossman, and I just have a quick question that might be loaded. Has the co-op ever considered screening for political reasons? Companies that may not do business in socially responsible ways, or businesses that invest in fossil fuels and things like that? No, I guess you can't say that specifically. We don't tend to use business practices as part of the evaluation criteria for selecting products. We used to promote fair trade as a core value. What we've seen over time is that fair trade has lost a lot of its oomph in the marketplace. I think it's not what it used to be, and that was actually one of the impetuses for replacing or for starting to measure and promote cooperative made as a way to sort of replace that fair trade ethic. I do want to mention two things. One is Scott was talking about the employee retirement plan and we do have socially screened, environmentally screened options within there. That rings a bell of what you're saying. And the other thing I was gonna say is that a group of members recently approached the council about asking if we would stop doing any business with Israeli companies, products that are made Israel, because of human rights abuses in Palestine. So that's actually been a topic over the last six months or so that council has been evaluating, do we want to adopt the policy? Not about Israel per se, but about how do we think about human rights in the context of the products we sell? Okay, Eric's gonna also respond from the council and then I have a question over there. I was just, actually I'm just gonna reiterate what Chend, over the past year we've been working on a ethics policy. Surprisingly we've never had an ethics policy and we have an ethics working group and we're working forward to try and create a human rights and trade policy to kind of guide our vision on our buying. I mean, one should mention that there are things that we don't sell at the co-op. I mean, I think there are over 71 chemicals that we don't sell at the co-op because we don't agree with them. So we do take certain ethical decisions and we're trying to codify that a little bit and we've been working over the past year and I think we're making some progress on that. Thanks, Eric. We have a question there, thanks, Mary. Yeah, just to follow up on the investments. I don't know who the co-op banks with but I hope that it's not TD, who's a major funder of Dakota Pipeline, et cetera. And I appreciate that you're trying to be socially conscious. Thanks, so we actually do have a savings account with TD Bank. Council has a policy that all of our cash holdings have to be secured, except for a one primary operating account. So we have cash spread out amongst all the local banks currently. But actually, as of this month, you might have seen it in the papers. We're taking $100,000 out of our TD account and putting it into Vermont Community Loan Fund which is a much better use of the monies. Okay, I see a question there and I'll make sure I look at the rest of the room too. Please say your name for the note-taker. My name is Sam Silphamon and I'm a member of a local group called Citizens Against Plastic Pollution. And I just wanted to highlight this issue for the co-op. We recognize that the co-op did make a clear effort to eliminate the single use bags at the registered counter. But we also wanted to raise the question of eliminating those plastic bags for fruits and vegetables. And we also wanted to mention that the city council is going to be very proactive around the issue of banning plastic bags. So we are hopeful that the co-op will extend their leadership in this area because obviously we need cities and towns to model the fact that this is a possibility. So we do want to encourage people to support the issue of eliminating all plastic bags. And one other thing at the election next Tuesday, there will be an item to change the charter and Article Four will give the lead to giving the council the authority to eliminate or ban plastic bags in the town of Montpelier. So Article Four. Okay. Hi, I'm Fred Collins. My question is, if we as senior members voluntarily give up our discount, will those funds be directly transferred to the other account for low income or needy people? Yeah, unfortunately, we don't have a way to segregate. We can't say exactly how much that, the value of your individual decision. That was what I was wondering, yeah. That's it, that would be an accounting trick, I guess. All right. Robert, is that a question from? Yes. We have a question from one of our live stream viewers online. Oops, sorry. Lawrence would like to know, how good are the discounts for the disabled? We have a couple of different discounts that might apply there. I mentioned co-op care, that's the low income discount. It's a 10% discount on almost all purchases. We also have a category called work optional, which I think goes back to the era where members were required to work at the co-op, and nowadays we have a much smaller subset of members who can work, but we've held on to this work optional where people are disabled and not able to work, they're eligible for the 6% discount. Thanks to one of our Orca viewers for that question. All right, we have a question here. Hi, Elizabeth Parker. I just wanted to say that I'm so impressed with how co-op carers has come along and all the different choices that we're making in order to make sure that the discounts go to those who most need them. That being said, I'm piggybacking on the article for plastic comment that was made. One of my observations at another co-op on the very southern, southern east part of the stage, shall we say, is that when you come in the door, the first thing you see is the bulk section, and you see how to bring your own bag and to buy bulk. And I think that we might, I appreciate also what's been done in the produce section, the reduction of other items, shall we just say, to be polite, say that that's much larger. When we come into the co-op, we don't see bulk first, and I'm distressed that bulk is steadily diminishing. And I think as we are voting yes, hopefully, on article four to eliminate plastic bags, we think about all of the ready-made products that we buy that have packaging that potentially have plastic in them, and that we really think maybe we can return a little bit to bulk, and maybe we can learn to buy, and also if the co-op would do something to promote reusable bags now. So those are my comments, and thank you very much. I think we're making tremendous progress, and I look forward to more going forward. Thank you. I think you wanna respond to that? Okay, I'm gonna have Carl respond, and then I have a bit of a cue. I've got a question here, and one from Juliana, I see. Oh, yeah. If a person chooses to give up a senior discount, what effect does that have on lower-income people? Going back to the process that you outlined, Kari, where seniors would be invited to give up their discount if they want to, and the co-op cares discount to low-income people would be expanded, and then after a period of time, the effect of that would be evaluated. Presumably, the idea is we know that our discounts have been increasing at an unsustainable rate, and so presumably, if the co-op cares discount is expanded, more people will be taking advantage of that, and if enough seniors give up their discount, then that will be enough to offset the increase there, and we will be able to keep that expansion of the co-op cares, is that correct? That's the idea, yeah? Thank you. Great. And also that it's a work in progress. So I'll go to a question here, there, and then there. I would like to, can you hear me? I would like to first congratulate Hunger Mountain for supporting MOCO, which is in Morrisville, it's a new co-op, and it was really, your support and your contributions was significant because just two weeks ago, we had our annual meeting, I'm a member there and I'm a member here, and we're actually functioning financially at a very stable level, and it's just wonderful, so I just want to first add that support to Hunger Mountain. My second comment relates to where you said you, about 65% of the people responding felt really good about Hunger Mountain. So my question is related to the fact that I've spent over 50 years working with families and individuals and being a dean and being at different levels in my work, is that I'm curious as to whether you've ever had an opportunity to find out, or to find a way to get in touch with the people either who didn't respond or who were not feeling happy to find out why they're not happy, because we know the reality of the human condition is that over 60% of marriages are not happy. So it's really a question of what are the reasons why, because all that you do here is really quite spectacular, it's quite special, just looking at all the information, be it there is the reality of the human condition and people and different reasons, so I would encourage if there was some way you could do that with how busy you all are to find out how we could raise that up to 670, 80, 80, 90%. Yeah, that's the goal. It was actually built into the survey process this year that the consultant that we hired to do the survey followed up with a series of focus groups so that they could go deeper into what the themes that they heard and ask more questions about what does this mean and how does it relate and what are your thoughts about it. So that's really where that list of themes came out and that's I think the current thinking about what is driving some of this dissatisfaction. I'm just on a different topic, one that we talked about a minute ago and that is the items that we throw away like plastic bags and things we don't really need to have and I'm thinking of also the small water cups that I see in the cafe, the Dixie cups that I just see being thrown away or being thrown on the floor and I really don't understand why we still have those. Your response to that. We've had reusable plastic cups on and off over the years in the cafe. I think I don't know what happens to them. It's like silverware, they just disappeared. I thought we had them. All right, that's a working on it category. Okay, here's another. Peter Johnke, more of a question if research had been done this is around plastic bag issue just I was a little surprised at the co-op. The plastic bags for bulk items had been replaced by certified compostable bags but my concern is I do a lot of volunteer work for Solid Waste Management District and my understanding is those may not and I'm not definitive on this but those may not actually be compostable if you take your compost to one of their facilities if you have your own compost in your backyard or whatever that may be fine but I'm just concerned that we may be trying to eliminate one problem but creating another. Correct. Okay, so yeah, let me address that. So in the past two weeks, we brought a new, we're debuting a new bag type in the bulk department specifically. It's called a bio bag. It's made out of a type of plastic but it's not a petroleum based plastic, it's corn and it apparently decomposes to carbon and water. So it is appropriate for composting in a facility, an industrial composting facility which we don't have access to in central Vermont. So we will be posting signage to let everybody know about this new bag but it cannot be put into the streams that will end up in either Vermont compost or Grove compost here locally. So it can't be dropped off at any of the local compost drop off spot. However, there is a benefit in that to the extent that they break down in the, well I guess I would say the main benefit is they're not petroleum based but where they do break down and I guess I would say we're all encouraged to try it out on our home compost pile and see how it works. I've got Cassandra from the Solid Waste District doing that but when it does break down, it'll break down into something that's not micro plastics. And so on this theme, so there may be, may wanna have a conversation in the future about it. I'm gonna keep with my cue but then I see your question. You're next. Thank you. My name is Lisa Rochelle. I've been a member for 13 years and a staff member for four. I spoke last year about the staff survey. I don't know if you remember, there was several failing grades that happened with the staff. I wanna make it clear that my intention is not to bad wrap the co-op in any way. I care very deeply about the co-op which is why I'm speaking up and I care even more about the staff. Sometimes the versions that you get from upper management are very shiny Apple. That's what I call the shiny Apple, right? I encourage any member to request the $6,000 professional staff survey and read for yourself how you feel about the staff satisfaction. There's even more failing grades this year in the professional survey than there was last year. The three main themes are broken trust between management and staff. This is a really big issue. Lack of communication and issues around safety. When I attended the October 1st council meeting and I apologize that I am actually going to tell you, I'm gonna talk longer than 30 seconds. Okay, and I will say you could have another 30, but. You could say that, but you can't stop me from speaking out. Anyone who would like to hear what I would like to say in three minutes or less, please come to the wellness department and I'd be happy to share it with you on my break time and I'll tell you when my break time is. On October 1st, I attended a council meeting for the full report. Enduring that meeting, the paid consultant and the council president made a terribly inappropriate joke. This is the leadership of our cooperative. Two upper management members participated in that meeting and never spoke a word. I'm not afraid to speak up. That is the third meeting that I attended in a year where women were disrespected. I am telling you because even though 80% of the staff are members, our voices are not heard. So I'm asking any of you that would like to listen to that council tape and are concerned about the lack of leadership that we have in our council president and I will say in the upper management, I'm not talking about management, I'm talking about upper management. It's a problem and there's been a lack of action for a long time and it needs to change. Changing the co-op happens as slowly as tapping and maple tree in January and it needs to change and I'm here to speak up and ask you for support in changing that. We have had reports of bullying from management. Our staff has reported it directly to the council and there was no investigation. And today I had to sit and have another meeting and I certainly hope that some action is gonna be made. The policy, the draft policy that was created is deeply disappointing. I'm asking for your support in speaking out, listen to the council tape. I'm going to request the council on Monday to choose a different president, one that can have stronger leadership. And can you say your name so people can find you or talk to them? My name is Lisa Rochelle. Thank you. I've been a member for 13 years. I've been a staff member for four. I'm not sure how much longer I'm gonna be able to tolerate it. I think we are losing our, I know that Carrie has repeated many times that we have a very low turnover. I don't believe it. In my own department alone, we've lost a half of the staff in the four years that I've been there. We are losing our talent. People are leaving. People are frustrated. And staff should not be bullied or intimidated. Thank you. Thanks, Lisa. I have a cue, but I wondered if you wanted to, if you wanted to respond. I'll just say that we are 166 on staff and there's a wide range of opinions. Something like two thirds are very satisfied. There's obviously people that are dissatisfied. All of those perspectives are valid and I am really committed to the co-op being a better and better place to work. I think it is a good place to work, but I think it can be better. And in that spirit, I invite criticism so it can make us better. Okay, thank you. I would just like to ask on this organic farmlands, how can they have septic tanks spreading all over it? Can that be organic when it's septic? And I know that happens. I've seen it. And so haven't other people. How can that be good? That's not organic. There's metals and everything else, Ann. So, that's an important issue. That's a little bit beyond my expertise. I would say that NOFA and the other organic certifiers, that's really in their domain. Okay, we have time for one or two more comments. Oh, thank you for reminding me. Marie DeCoco, and I just wanted to talk about the bio bags. I've been using them for years because I have a kid who refuses to really empty a compost bucket if there's stuff left in it. And I can tell you in my home compost pile, which I don't really maintain very well, I just dump stuff in, they rot. And my understanding is that the local folks can't take them because they both have chickens. And the chickens peck through the compost and they don't want the chickens, I guess, pecking on, even though it's a plastic that breaks down, they don't want them pecking in. Yeah, I believe that, and I think the other issue is that at least Vermont compost is producing certified organic products. Right. And the bio bag is not yet certified. I mean, I've had bags that fell apart in the bucket if I didn't take them out soon enough. Okay, I think we have time for one more comment or question, I see one back there and Rob is running back with a mic for you. Hi, my name is Amy, I'm from another way. And I'm a co-op member and I have been for the past eight years. And one of the things that I've been constantly requesting is for other products that go along with our co-op views and guidelines that are on the cheaper end for those who are low income. And I wanted to say thank you to the co-op because I noticed over the past year we're bringing in some of those items. I think it's field fresh or something field fresh or something like that. Field day. So I wanted to say thank you because I do at my work tell other people, hey, go to the co-op, they have the co-op cares, and they also have products there that are on the lower scale that you can afford. So I wanted to say thank you. Thank you. Great. And I just wanna thank everybody for the compliments and the questions and the hard things that people had to share that was useful and thoughtful. All right. What's next here? We're gonna do thank yous. We're getting into the home stretch here. So I'm just gonna read through some thank yous. First of all, I wanna thank Kim Bent, Kathleen Keenan and Lost Nation for hosting us tonight. The linens were donated by Foley, so thank you to them. Photography was provided by a member owner, Paul Richardson of Richardson Photography. Childcare was taken care of by member owner, Stephanie Picard, member owner, Nori Towns, Rain Towns and Alex Smith, thank you so much. I wanna thank all of the co-op staff and our member owners who helped set up tonight and will clean up afterwards and then getting us ready for Saturday's Food and Wellness Fair. Special thanks to the Community Relations and Member Services team, Stephanie Kanonen, Rob Barosi, Barosi, sorry. Robin Joy, Jess Knapp and Mary Trafton. We're gonna thank everyone who donated raffle prizes and samples, which there are many. There's a couple slides here. Dinner, of course, provided by the Prepared Foods team including Chef Doug Bard. Our drinks were provided by Cast Iron Skillet. I wanna thank Matt Levin and the Hunger Mountain Cooperative Community Fund Committee. Special thanks to our guest speaker, Phillip Ackerman-Leist. And then I wanna acknowledge our outgoing council members. First of all, Carl Etnire. Carl's been on the council for the past three years and always has a thoughtful response. Every question and challenge. Jose Aguayo is not here tonight but he jumped right in in his first year to serve as treasurer and we're very thankful. And then Lydia Bustler. Is Lydia here? Lydia is the staff rep on the council and is the first person I believe to serve as both the staff rep and council president at another point in her career. And of course I wanna thank everyone here for coming to our annual meeting and I wanna remind you that the deadline for ordering turkeys and pies is Monday, November 12th. And last reminder is that Saturday is our food and wellness fair in this room from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. We're gonna have a whole bunch of vendors and non-profits and local health practitioners all free of charge so come on down. Now we're gonna do raffles, we're ready. How about now? No? Yeah? Fantastic. Oh, there it goes. Awesome. All right. This is the community relations team effort raffle. Jess and Robin and myself are gonna give away some prizes. Let's see. A gift certificate for a one hour intuitive reading with Tara Carpenter is won by Armand Altman. Are you here? Are you gonna, should we deliver or should we make them? I'll deliver. Robin will deliver. Okay. Singing Spindle Spinnery has donated for a raffle prize, a seed gift pack, won by Jeremy Weiss. Oh, there you go. Do you wanna be the, all right, that's fair. All right. Sarah Richardson's book from sidelines to start lines. Let's see. One by Nora. Nora, there you go. What is it? Zablo. Nora's here. Excellent. Okay. A gift certificate for a 60 minute massage with Joanne Dwyer was won by Witt Dahl. There you go. Fantastic. All right, let's see. What is it? I just have to open this up. This is a gift certificate for Artisan's Hand, Gallery of Contemporary Vermont Crafts, won by Robin, help me out. Is this one something? Oh. Or Joan. Joan standard. Joan standard. Yes, there you go. Congratulations to everyone who's winning. All right. A gift certificate for Flying Mammoth Landscape Design for a Landscape Design Consultation, Catherine Simpson. Very cool. Congratulations. All right. There's two of these prizes. A just add coffee gift pack. Linda Kelly and Rachel Grossman. We're both, we're both of those folks here. Is Linda here? Linda's here. Okay, awesome. Very cool. All right. A gift bag from Grandie Oates. Bill Cecil. Right over there. Bill Cecil, there you go. Jobeo. Next. Jobeo Foods, Organic Pantry in a Basket. The parent, maybe? There you go. Thank you, Jess. All right. All right. The B's and T's assortment. Is it Ernie Engelhardt? There you go. Congratulations. All right. We have a gift bag of Foodie Fun, Shiloh Weiss. I'm going fast. All right. Love your skin. Love your body gift bag. All right. Help me out here. Is it? That is Liza. Liza. There you go. Liza's here. Fantastic. Okay. The Portable Outdoor Fire Pit. Bob Gross. There he is. That is at the co-op. So come by and pick it up anytime. Just checking with customer service and they'll know how to get it to you. All right. Here's a grab bag of yummy items for Robert. Is it Troster? Trester? Robert? There we go. All right. Last one. That was fast. Vermont Coffee Company Prize Bag. Schneider's the last name. First name starts with an R. Rama. Rama Schneider? There you go. Congratulations to everyone who won. And thank you for entering your Apple. And thank you for being here. Thank you very much. Before you leave, real, real, real quick, for two seconds. I'd just like to welcome potentially two new council members, Eva Schechtman and Peter Tirmel. And I need a motion to adjourn. Paul, motion adjourned and a second. And a second right here. You get the names. Okay. Thank you for coming, everyone.