Two More Chances to Become a Member

Food Co-op Days at The Magic Carpet this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, November 27, 28 and 29

10% of your purchase goes to the food co-op. Members or new members can sign up for a $50 gift certificate drawing to be given away on Sunday. Call 479-2433 for directions.

 

See us at the Tanana Valley Farmer’s Market Annual Bazaar on  Saturday, Dec. 5. Call 456-3276 for more information.

Dessert Auction Applause

This is an interactive post.  Please feel free to comment and add to this applause list or email cjfriar@riseup.net to add your thanks to this post.

This event has been in the works for months. Many hands worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help in the effort to raise funds to open our food co-op.

It began with a committee and a chair. Thanks first need to go to Helen McClean for her talented management of the event and constant good cheer. Cora Kelley assisted with auction logistics, Sharon Alden made sure we had many delicious desserts and Morgan Macchione got our credit card machine set up just in time.

Meanwhile, Sue Sprinkle, created breathtaking graphics for our advertisements, Barb and Tom Bradley handled all of our fundraising items, Shaun Lott helped distribute flyers and wrote thank you letters and Evan Daigneault coordinated the volunteers for the membership tables.

A new and prolific behind the seasons committee member, Christopher Friar, assisted with the Facebook page, blog advertisements and created advertisements in other social media. Rob Leach and Hans Geier lended critical support at the auction. Countless members lended a hand or created awesome desserts for us. Special thanks go to the ReJoySing Choir for providing entertainment at opening and to Jersey Jones for his auctioneering expertise.

Eating Alaska showing sponsored by the Health & Wellness Committee

The Fairbanks Coop’s Health and Wellness Committee in conjunction with the UAF Peace and Justice Coalition presents a FREE showing of the film Eating Alaska Tuesday night, November 24, at 7 p.m. at UAF’s Schaible Auditorium. Running time is 57 minutes.

We’ll have a brief introduction and open discussion afterwards. All members of the Fairbanks and surrounding community are invited (both present and future members of the Coop!), so invite your friends to a FREE showing of this excellent documentary.

Community sustainability forum

Hans Geier, FCCM board member, attended a forum at Noel Wien Library Nov. 4 on community sustainability and food security. From the blog of the UAF School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences:

Hans Geier spoke on the imminent establishment of the Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market. Geier, who is a board member of the FCCM, is also a Cooperative Extension Service agent, an instructor with SNRAS, and a farmer. The FCCM will concentrate on selling locally produced goods and food. He described one of the difficulties in getting Alaska-grown food into the hands of consumers, saying that most Alaska seafood in the state’s supermarkets has been first shipped to distributors in Seattle and then shipped back up to Alaska. The market will try to establish direct shipping from Alaska businesses, such as seafood cooperatives, farmers’ cooperatives, the two dairies (Matanuska Creamery and Northern Lights Dairy), Alaska-grown oyster producers, and so on.

Dessert Auction Extravaganza Saturday, November 21

Dessert Auction Extravaganza – November 21, 2009

Anyone wishing to have a copy of this flier to post or share please email fccm2010@gmail.com

Pass the word! This is going to be a great event!!

Website back up, phone line to be activated soon

The website is back up and on line!

To all of you who have been calling in on our message phone, thank you very much! You’ll be pleased to know that the phone for our volunteer center should be ready on Nov. 12, so you’ll be able to call in and talk to a real person (Evan Daigneault, most likely) after that.

Website issues

The word from our webmaster is that the website for the Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market is on a server that is undergoing attack; the site will be down until either the server can protect itself or we can find a new server. In the meantime, we will try to post the resources there to the blog, and upload a mirror site.

Addendum 11/4/09: This is our push month for raising $100,000 in membership equity, (a most awkward time to have website problems); so please bring your capital investment in to our volunteer center/office at 542 Fourth Avenue, Suite 100 B, in downtown Fairbanks. Call 457-1023 or e-mail info@fairbankscoop.org

Thank you!

Community sustainability meeting

Suzy Fenner of SCANFairbanks and Mike & Ritchie Musick are holding a meeting on community sustainability:

November 4th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm Wednesday evening at the Noel Library Auditorium

There will be a presentation by Ritchie and Mike Musick on The Natural Step for Communities, discussion afterwards, and a second presentation and discussion at 7:00 pm on food security and sustainable agriculture.

Contact: Suzy Fenner, SCANFairbanks
(Sustainable Community Action Network for Fairbanks — advocating for economic, environmental, and social sustainability) (907) 479-2345, polarsolar@gmail.com

Dessert Auction Updates!

Dessert Auction Extravaganza!!

November 21, 2009
Morris Thompson Cultural Center
$10  (suggested donation**)

Dessert Donation Check – in: Between 6:15 p.m. – 6:45
Program and Auction Begins: 7:30Featuring guest “Celebrity Chef’s” and
Live Music and dancing by The Denali Mountain Boys; featuring Bruce Delbridge, Kit Carson, Earl Hughes and Fred Weisse.

Auction Fun by Jersey Jones and featuring local chefs and perhaps even a surprise appearance by a couple of celebrity chefs.

No host cash bar by Pikes,featuring  local wine and beer.

Coffee by Forget Me Not Espresso.

Door Prizes

Hosted by our own Board of Directors

**Dessert donations, purchases and membership fees are not tax deductible. Your support helps us with our effort to open a community-owned and controlled grocery store that will support local farmers and help build a thriving, local food system and create a just marketplace that nourishes. the community.

Essay on Sustainable Agriculture

for SARE New Voices Contest
December, 2007

I didn’t grow up on a farm.  When I was young, I never learned how to fix a screen door let alone a tractor.   I didn’t know which end of a seed to plant in the ground.  If you had told me twenty years ago that I would own the farthest north certified organic farm in the country, I would have told you that you must be crazy.

I come from a long line of Jewish tailors who never ventured too far from the city.  My connections with agriculture were like many kids growing up in suburban America – with the pictures of fields of grain on cereal boxes or occasional trips to the “country” to visit an apple orchard or to see goats and rabbits at a petting zoo.   But my parents always had a garden we always liked to eat and we liked to eat good fresh food.  This is how I came to agriculture – through gardening.  Through getting back to that connection with where your food comes from and acting on it.  I wanted that feeling of looking down a row of crops and feeling that connection with the plants and soil and the thousands of years of farmers and gardeners before me – food growers.

It took me a while to get into farming.  It didn’t come until my mid-thirties, when after many years of having a garden, I quit my day job and followed the dream of many back-to-the land folks before me. I had no idea of what I was doing, but I expanded the garden, bought a rototiller and Elliot Coleman’s “The New Organic Grower”, and started to make a go of it as a market farmer.  It certainly hasn’t been easy, especially since we live in interior Alaska square in the middle of agricultural zone 1.  There is very little historical farmland where we live.  Our farm was literally carved out of the Alaska wilderness with a chainsaw and bulldozer – hardly a soft footprint on the land.  But we justified the destruction of 10 acres of our forest with the belief that having a farm and feeding people was, in the end, a good thing for the community.  After all, wasn’t that what all farmers had originally done?  Also by farming organically, we hoped we were insuring a healthy environment for any wildlife that used the farm, for ourselves and our workers, and for those who ate our produce.  The demand for quality local produce is high, and despite our growing pains as a farm, we are still able to stay afloat with a lot of hard work, and all of our savings.  After 10 years, we have a healthy farm and an increasingly successful business.

Since I come from this new movement of market gardeners turned farmer, my models for success and role models to seek advice from have been organic farmers many with similar experience as I but with more years under their belt.  We have learned the appropriate models for ecologically sound agriculture and the goals for our farm are the same as the goals for many farms like ours across the country – to minimize off-farm inputs while maintaining high soil fertility, to produce high quality and healthy produce, and maintain a profitable business.

We think about sustainability a lot in Alaska, however most of the discussion focuses on natural fish and wildlife populations and their relation to subsistence versus commercial harvest.  There is little talk about sustainable agriculture, but there should be.  Although one’s vision of Alaska might be one of a hunter alone on the tundra, we get most of our food like the rest of America – from large supermarkets run by huge corporations.  If the average piece of food travels approximately 1500 miles from producer to consumer in the rest of the country, it travels much farther to us in Alaska.  For this reason, and many others, we should be concerned about sustainability on a local and community scale.

If our state seems extreme, it is but a microcosm of the country as a whole.  We need to look within our own communities for inputs to agriculture and other resources.  Our model for farming does follow a community approach.  Eating locally is not just a buzzword for marketing – although that is very effective – but it also should be the way we do business.  “Thinking globally and acting locally” is not only the right thing to do for the earth, it is the only economical thing to do.  With the cost of fuel rising ever higher coupled with high shipping costs, we have to think very carefully what it is we import.  Looking at ways to improve the soil, create energy, and market crops must be local in order for us to make a living and feel as though we’re living our lives for the betterment of our community.

Small-scale and locally marketed agriculture should not be just a fringe or niche economy. By showing that we can make a living while growing healthy crops by ecologically sound methods we will make ourselves assets in our local economies by encouraging both new farmers and intelligent agriculture.   It will continue to cost more for food, but we cannot keep going down the path of large scale commodity agriculture transported huge distances or we will be paying a higher and higher price for the wrong reasons.

I can now fix a screen door, sometimes fix my tractor and plant seeds right side up.  If the son of a long line of Jewish tailors can carve out a niche in small scale agriculture, then I’m optimistic that this growing movement of community-centered agriculture can keep gaining momentum.  We need to invest in community agriculture – it is at the core of sustainability.

Mike Emers
Rosie Creek Farm
Ester, Alaska