 Wonderful speaker for the first talk of day three of this teamwork is Jovi Aversberg and here you go. Thank you very much. So good morning everyone. I hope everyone has at least had a bit of coffee and maybe some tea so we can start with our talk about Reiko how to reboot agriculture. So I'm actually sitting on the Swedish countryside it's surprisingly sunny this morning no one would have expected that and I was thinking we can talk a bit about agriculture and what we can do with that. So the thing is that I'm sorry we are there we should be Reiko is reels konsumption in English and it is actually a movement that started in Finland originally but that by now is kind of spread all over Scandinavia and it's a grassroot movement so it's basically founded by the people for the people and organized by the people. So think about that you want to go to the supermarket and you kind of want to buy let's say a bunch of tomatoes and normally it's quite hard to know where are the tomatoes from what has been doing done to my tomatoes how far have they been transported and Reiko just really cuts out the middle man so Reiko is your neighbor that grows the tomatoes is like hi you want to buy tomatoes from me oh yeah that would be great let's buy tomatoes. So and the one of the things with this kind of markets is I think you maybe know that from the places where you live where you have farmers markets farmers markets are quite a restricted thing because there's rules and regulations and it's not really not everyone can participate you need to actually be a professional farmer. The cool thing with Reiko is that it's people meeting and exchanging goods but the actually selling part has happened before over the internet and since it's quite hard to regulate a bunch of people that just meet up and exchange resources. So you kind of at least for Scandinavia we have found a way to be outside of those regulations while on the other side through group control being able to keep a very good and high standard both in quality but also like the ecological side of things and transportation and all of those. So this is like the general the general movement then since it's a grassroots movement there is like no bigger organization it's basically when people think oh I want to start one of those rings then they can just do that and try it and this is what I did 2019 in a small town called Herbie in the south of Sweden. So a bit about Herbie Herbie is a small town on the countryside in Sweden so we're talking like 50,000 people max let's say low income education. It's not that great conservative structures yes very much I don't think I need to say how people are mostly voting here neither. So it's not really a place where you would expect sustainable change but since in 2021 we have come to 2500 members in this ring and that is actually really cool. So how did we do that with communication and then you get all these really nice things as a sustainable catalyst where you have people actually being able to try because you don't need to be a professional farmer to be part of a RICO group so if you just grow tomatoes and you have 20 tomatoes too much you can actually put up your 20 tomatoes for sale and try is this actually something that I would like over this RICO group you can see what are the demands what do people want what do people like. So hand then apparently we are a bit running out of time already so this is just showing actually the progress of when you keep on going and you people start to talk about and you start spreading things over social media how you can get from quite small group to a quite big group with over 25 people producing the food and over 2000 people being able to buy the food. So what kind of challenges do we have? We have a problem with accessibility the thing is in Sweden these groups are organised over Facebook groups I don't think here I need to tell you why that is a problem I would really love hearing different like how could we solve that I will just say why we actually choose Facebook because we want everyone to be able to participate mainly also older people living on the countryside that basically the smartphone they have started to be okay with that but so much more that's hard so this really like it is it is very difficult to find a good balance between okay how much how far can we push things there. The same goes for payment methods in Scandinavia we have quite easy solutions for that but I know for example in Germany that that's not as easy you need to have a good location it needs to be big enough so that actually you can all meet up there corona doesn't make that an easier now you need to have even more space and you need to get actually you need to get the movement going so you need to kind of push through a few months maybe even a year until there's people that heard of it and until the talk is around but then it gets done when it once it rolls it's kind of does that fairly fairly automatic also you need to keep the transport efficient so just because it's most scale produced doesn't mean necessarily that on a cost on a transportation level it's more energy efficient so the bigger the ring gets the more people are coming you maybe need to find ways to ensure that. So yeah so what I kind of want to just a bit maybe help inspire is like think about start more of those rings try to get the idea a bit outside of Scandinavia because it's really cool and it's generally quite easy thing to do choose a communication platform think about maybe find something better than Facebook look at the local laws and regulations how can you get around that there should be a way to get around that and then find people that grow tomatoes cucumbers maybe someone that has some chickens or some milk farmer that is really tired of just being screwed for the prices of the milk. Yeah and of course the more products you have and the more producers the more people will actually come and buy their food at those small small scale markets basically so yeah that was that I realized that was very little time for a quite interesting topic but if anyone has questions I think we will take these after the talk so thank you very much. Thank you that was really interesting it's a quite radical approach to buying local actually so I'm totally in we do not have yet any questions in the pad so for the people who are already watching the stream in the morning please hop over to the questions pad you find the link in the schedule and I have a question did you have a look into solutions like mobility son or something additionally to to Facebook to organize the groups and the events. Yeah there is actually an app developed and called local food notch at the moment where we kind of have hopes that it's going to be maybe not a replacement but that it can help on the way they have been doing quite some beta tests and I hope I hope I hope that maybe by then next year we can start to implement it the problem is that local food notch works a bit more like an online store so you would need to have people putting up their products on both sides and that is kind of something that we would like to avoid I think it depends then also a bit of where is your market located if you're actually close to one of the big cities with a younger yeah younger crowd that you want to attract I think there it's a lot easier on the more rural areas countryside maybe we and we have talked about if we should just also have it actually on paper that we put up a paper somewhere and people can just write up their orders we'll see okay so this is this also is answers my next question for the the people or your audience that you you're trying to reach or the people to to engage you have more older people or more younger people or is it completely mixed it's quite mixed but I would say it depends quite much on the location if yours like in Herbie on the countryside it's a lot of older people and there for me that is actually also the kind of group I want to attract because the younger have kind of learned about like ecological food and being a bit more aware but the older generation still just goes to the supermarket and buys their bacon that's produced in Denmark without really thinking about it and that is one of the nice things of RECO that you actually you build a connection with the person producing your food and that can really change your approach on food completely so so so it depends quite a lot on the location if we have if we talk about for example Stockholm there the age is a lot younger I think there may be an average we're around 30 to 40 and I would say in my in my ring it's the average is more 50 to 60 so we had we do I got questions in the pad maybe that one is quite fitting what about analog communications like posters flyers probably newspapers and so on we have we have done quite some analog communication it's a bit of a challenge since the people organizing it are not our often producers or customers as well so there's not really a budget for actually marketing but we could we we got a hold on quite some some nice prints that we were able to print small scale wise and then it's about this getting this ball to roll after a while we actually have the local newspapers were like oh I've heard that you're standing there sometimes giving out food so what is that can we come and that was that I mean if you actually get that kind of audience that is really amazing before we had that and we've kind of no budget existing through analog communication what I did is basically I took my bike and then I just drove around to a lot of small farms and was like hi have you here heard about this thing it's called raco and do you want to sell your products and talk to everyone that did not want to hear about it but that helped a lot another question got is how do people set their prices is there a guidance for that there is no guidance but since you have a group of producers and everyone can see each other's prices it's quite self-regulating actually we encourage as the administrators normally have an eye on that so we kind of encourage people to take good prices like even if you just have 20 eggs to sell you can't go it's really not good if you go with your prices below the person that actually is making a living out of that so there's a lot of self-regulation about that and trying to keep to keep things kind of level and equal but so far that has been working out quite well and with producers and raco rings often they are not only producing for one ring but for few in an area of let's say 50 200 kilometers in Sweden at least so then they actually also talk to each other and to the other rings and if someone then realizes oh but this person sells their eggs way too cheap they actually will kind of be someone asking them hey could you think about the pricing of your eggs it's really a problem for us so for that has been working out really good and on the other side if you cut out the middleman you're able to provide a lot better prices for like for the quality that you get okay um how do you deal with mis-harvest versus promises it's not as much of a problem because if we compare it for example to the german oh what is it called um where you where you're part of a farmer of a farm basically you you buy a share of a farm um Zoli Darosha Landwirtschaft I think you call it um there you kind of promise what you're going to deliver with raco you just put up each week you kind of have a look what can I sell this week and then you just sell that so if there's mis-harvest too bad for the customer but then that year there's not going to be that many tomatoes um and that means that also if you actually get too much of something you can just put it off I put it up and be like okay I have a lot of shit ton of tomatoes here you go so for most people it actually has turned out that raco ring is a very good buffer some of them that are a bit further on the journey of being full-time farmers for example they have some restaurants that they have contracts with but after the things they have sold to the restaurant are gone they're still like oh god so much so much resources what should I do with that and then they sell that on raco hmm I think we have time for one more question um have you thought about linking it to food waste avoidance as in getting shops and supermarkets to donate leftover food to give away or redistribute distribute I have I have thought about that especially since food sharing is sadly in Sweden not at all very common but the thing with donating food gets you in a legally different spot and that is something that we haven't really figured out a good way to work around it would need to be very under the radar because we are not allowed to sell food at the spot where we meeting because then we would be a farmers market unlike an official farmers market and then we would need to follow the regulations for official farmers marketing so if I'm giving away food that's that is very very on the edge um so so far we sadly haven't really figured out a good way to integrate food waste in a bigger area I'm hoping that through awareness we're actually getting somewhere that the better relationship people get with their food and with the producers the more they actually will value food and the less first food waste they will produce hopefully okay um there's another question for the price in the path but I think it is already answered so for the people who ask it just watch in the uh real life um uh yeah we're unfortunately out of time it was really interesting uh thank you very much Julia I hope we'll have another talk about the topic um at one of the next cow's events thank you very much thank you very much have a good day