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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Peak Oil [the Waldrop food security vision]
  • Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:21:44 -0700


From: aelewis@provide.net
------------------
Robert Waldrop, a Catholic priest, runs the Oklahoma Food
Cooperative -- http://www.oklahomafood.org -- and moderates the
ROE2 board: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2

He's got a lot of interesting things to say, and practical advice.
The fascinating thing about this, to me, is the organizing
implications and the way in which it can model a broad populist
initiative, while reflecting a fundamental rejection of
[corporate] "business-as-usual". Formations of this kind may be
important nitty-gritty mechanics of that "Right To Live Off Of The
Land" (Sam's proposal at www.geocities.com/senorefe/proposal.html)

Alan

----------------------

SNIPPETS:

"We started to meet every month, we also started a listserv to
discuss the concept -- okfoodret@yahoogroups.com -- and anybody
can join the group and read the archives, which have a complete
account of our development. At each meeting we had a potluck
lunch. That organizing committee was very diverse. We had
conservative Cherokee Baptists, a lesbian Unitarian minister, and
most points between. We had Democrats, Republicans, and
anarchists. We were (and are) extremely diverse in religious,
political, and philsophical viewpoints. Yet, we have never had
one argument about anything not related to the cooperative. We
all agreed, without really even discussing it, to leave all of
that baggage outside the door, and to cooperate together to create
this new local food system."

"We're already providing supplemental groceries to more than 200
households every month. The local food cooperative we started is
doing $8K to $10K/month, and helping jump start a bunch of small
organic/sustainable production farms and ranches. This past year
we've helped people plant hundreds of fruit and nut trees and
berry bushes. Next year we will do more. Our local food
cooperative is an interesting exercise in how people of varying
beliefs can work together for a common purpose. On our board, for
example, we have conservative Republican fundamentalist Baptists
-- and a lesbian Unitarian minister. These people would generally
not even talk with each other, much less work together on a
project. Yet, we found something that could unite us, and in the
midst of all the doom and gloom, I find a certain amount of hope
in that."

"Starting a local food cooperative transcends all of the present
ideological fissures of American society. It avoids the politics
inherent in "disaster preparedness", or "anti-terrorist food
security". I should mention that the statements of Thompson were
widely circulated in the real community food security community,
and the general opinion there was the food system had already been
poisoned by the agribizness system of producing, processing, and
distributing food."

----------------------

FULL TEXT:

clipped from: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:04:08 -0500
From: "Robert Waldrop" <rmwj@soonernet.com>
Subject: Re: What I wish for

----- Original Message -----
From: "ReadFamily" <dtzjread@comcast.net>
>The fact that we all feel too small and scared
> about this is a testament to the power of the
> train - but it can be stopped and we can do it
> together.
> I really do believe that, but at the same time I
> don't know where to begin.
> Any ideas?> We have 7 weeks.

If you're saying there is something that we could do on election
day, in terms of voting, to stop the on-rushing train which is
Peak Oil, then I can't imagine what it would be unless hmmmm
starting compost piles and preparing gardens for the following
spring. I don't mean that as a flip answer, but there is nobody
to vote for on Election Day in the United States who is going to
do anything other than speed us onward towards through the "bridge
out ahead" sign. I don't see any practical political solution to
the dilemma at this point, given the real world situation in the
United States, and the real world situation of our politics. At
least at a national level.

The only place I am investing any political effort is at the
local/city level, and that's not much right now. What I am doing,
and what I recommend to everyone, is trying to create the
beginning of a new culture within the collapsing ruins of the old.
I am staying right where I am, Oklahoma City, based on my own
analysis of the advantages of this place in the realistic
scenarios I see coming. I am always prepared to change that
assessment as time passes, but we are making our stand right here
at home. We are trying to learn how to live better with less. We
are not borrowing money, we are slowly remodeling our house to be
super insulated, we don't use air conditioning, we grow some of
our own food, and get 80% of the rest directly from Oklahoma
farmers. We teach others to do likewise. e.g. we are busy getting
fundamentalist Baptists to talk with lesbian Unitarians. This is
much more productive and positive than tilting at the windmills of
American politics. Expect nothing but disaster from Washington,
D.C. as time passes. Things will only go from bad to worse
politically. Use this time of calm before the storm to do
something similar in your own situation. Some people maybe should
move, but those questions have to be answered by indiividuals.
One thing we haven't discovered in this three year conversation is
a grand unified theory of peak oil survival. And I don't expect we
ever will.

This of course is rather counter-cultural, we all like the idea of
thinking globally, but we often forget the second part of the
admonition, "act locally". Of the two, the "act locally" is the
more important, but it is certainly the road less travelled.

Robert Waldrop, okc

----------------------

clipped from: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2

Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 21:02:52 -0600
From: "Robert Waldrop" <rmwj@soonernet.com>
Subject: Re: Food security as common ground?

Sharon,

My suggestion is to focus on food security in the form of
developing a local food community/system.

Generally I have had very little success preaching the end being
nigh do to peak oil. I have had a similar lack of success in
talking about disaster preparations in general.

But I have had a lot of success in developing the Oklahoma Food
Cooperative and promoting permaculture and gardening.

The Oklahoma Food Cooperative as it is now is not a sustainable
food system, but it is the kernal of one, and like anything
organic, it has to start small or it won't start at all.

You may not have been around when I started the food cooperative,
so let me review for you and others how I did it.

The first thing I did was start a website, www.oklahomafood.org .
I started to collect information about farmers and ranchers that
sold direct to the public. I found a handful on the internet, I
found more when I got a list of licensed "custom butchers" from
the state department of agriculture, and started calling them. I
sent letters to county extension agents and to Mennonite and
Catholic churches (Mennonites because they were all in rural areas
and Catholic because that's what I am and most of the priests
already knew me). I looked in the classified ads of the Daily
Oklahoman every day for people advertising produce for sale.

After a few months, I had accumulated about 500 names, addresses
and phone numbers for local producers -- including farmers,
ranchers, market gardeners, and local processors (jelly makers
etc). I also was buying more food myself from local farmers,
encouraging others to do the same, and organizing a few bulk
purchases, such as the day when a farmer drove into town to my
house with his pickup bed full of grain, and about a dozen people
showed up with plastic buckets and filled 'em up and paid the man.

My original idea was to open a cooperative store. I chose
cooperative as the business model because ownership of vested in
the members, and they have a long history of a being a practical
way to organize a new grassroots business venture. My great
grandparents were founding members of the Tillman County Farmers
Cooperative, and some of them were also members of cotton gin
cooperatives.

OK, so I wanted to organize a cooperative. Now what? Well, my
research showed that most cooperatives get started by an
organizing committee, so I decided to find an organizing
committee. I scheduled 7 meetings all across the state, 2 in Okc,
the rest in various parts of the state. To find a free space
outside of OKC, I called Catholic churches and usually booked
their social hall. In OKC I used library meeting rooms. For
publicity I sent press releases to the local newspapers in the
area, and they were all published. I also sent notices to the
county extension agents, and usually the church secretaries would
volunteer info, "Oh, you need to talk to John Doe, he raises
peanuts" or cattle, or whatever. I publicized the meetings
throughout Oklahoma cyberspace, and also networked with Oklahoma
groups like the Regional Food Bank, Kerr Center for Sustainable
Agriculture, and the Noble Foundation in Ardmore. The meetings
were attended by 2 to 12 people besides me, one meeting had nobody
there. At the meetings I explained the concept, and invited those
there to elect a member to our organizing committee. And so it
came to pass that we got an 8 member organizing committee.

We started to meet every month, we also started a listserv to
discuss the concept -- okfoodret@yahoogroups.com -- and anybody
can join the group and read the archives, which have a complete
account of our development. At each meeting we had a potluck
lunch. That organizing committee was very diverse. We had
conservative Cherokee Baptists, a lesbian Unitarian minister, and
most points between. We had Democrats, Republicans, and
anarchists. We were (and are) extremely diverse in religious,
political, and philsophical viewpoints. Yet, we have never had
one argument about anything not related to the cooperative. We
all agreed, without really even discussing it, to leave all of
that baggage outside the door, and to cooperate together to create
this new local food system.

Early on we decided we couldn't afford to open a store. The price
seemed to run upwards of $300,000 and the operating overhead was
high. Our research showed that most grocery cooperatives got
started as buying clubs. So we began to brainstorm what a local
food buying club would look like, and voila, the Oklahoma Food
Cooperative, and in December we had 114 orders totalling $11,000
in food.

We were self financed. it costs $50 to join the cooperative, and
this buys you a legal share of the enterprise, we are legally
incorporated under the Oklahoma statutes governing cooperatives.
We did get one grant early on, for $15,000, but we got it when we
thought we would open a store, which we didn't do, so we were only
able to use about $1500 of it, and it caused our only serious
disagreement during the organizing campaign. It did cause us to
make one mistake, imho, which was we charged $50 for a membership
rather than $75 because we thought we would have all of the
$15.,000 to work with. oops. My advice to new groups getting
started is to self finance from the beginning, apply for no
grants, there is no such thing as free money, it always has
strings attached, and it always costs you money, resources, and
time. Donations are fine, grants have strings. The Sierra Club
gave us $300 very early, we used that for postage to mail to all
the people I had at the Oklahoma Food website, it was very useful.

So my suggestion is to look at what we did and then adapt for your
situation. We went statewide, you might want to stick with your
region, say a several county area. This month, our order opened
today. THe producers products and prices are at our website
shopping page: http://shop.oklahomafood.org .The order is open for
a week and closes next Thursday. Members order via our shopping
cart system, and then two weeks from today, one week after the
order closes, all the producers show up at my church and
cooperative volunteers sort everything into customer orders, the
customers pick up their orders at one of several pickup sites in
OKC, Norman, Tulsa, and Muskogee-Tahlequah area.

The cooperative does not buy wholesale and then sell retail. each
producer member is his own brand. if i want to order ground beef,
i order directly from one of the 4 producers selling ground
beef,.producers set their own prices. the cooperative adds a coop
and transportation charge to customer invoices. that has been a
flat fee to date, in february that will be a percent (probably 7
percent).

And yes, if anybody does something similar elsewhere, we will be
happy to give them our online shopping software, the "Local Food
Cooperative Management System".

So that's the not so short story. If you want more local
agriculture, the best way to do it is to create a cash market for
local agriculture. Some of that already exists in farmers markets,
but most of the members of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative don't go
to farmers markets. In my case, on Saturday mornings -- typical
farmers market time in OKC -- I am usually delivering food to the
poor, so the cooperative works better for me.

Starting a local food cooperative transcends all of the present
ideological fissures of American society. It avoids the politics
inherent in "disaster preparedness", or "anti-terrorist food
security". I should mention that the statements of Thompson were
widely circulated in the real community food security community,
and the general opinion there was the food system had already been
poisoned by the agribizness system of producing, processing, and
distributing food.

Robert Waldrop, President, Oklahoma Food
Cooperative, OKC
www.oklahomafood.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "sharondownonthefarm" <astyk@brandeis.edu>
> My husband and I have made a start on personal
> preparations. We've put a lot of effort into alerting our family
> and friends about peak oil. And we're contributing, at least in a
> small way, to local food pruduction with our CSA. But both of us
> have been thinking that we'd like to find a way to reach more
> people on the subject of peak oil, and maybe make larger changes,
> but haven't been sure what our next step was. We admire what
> Robert is doing, but our faith-based institution is outside our
> immediate community, and we'd like to do something more local.
> We've considered one of us running for office, doing more writing,
> etc.. but nothing has entirely fit what we've got to offer (and
> accomodated what we don't).
>
> But one of the things that we keep coming back to is that
> community preparations for peak oil and local food security issues
> overlap considerably. If we could (on any level, local, county,
> state or national) get excited about:

_____________________________________________________________________






  • [Livingontheland] Peak Oil [the Waldrop food security vision], Tradingpost, 01/19/2005

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