The Good Earth Market food cooperative in Billings, Montana, which opened its doors 23 years ago, closed in October 2017. Over the last few years, the long-loved community market had a hard time keeping up with increasing competition.

“Costco and Walmart and Albertsons and everyone has organic,” said Carol Beam, board president of the market for the last 13 years. “We knew what we needed to break even every week, and every week we were anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 short.”

It’s not just in Montana—around the country, food retail is in a state of upheaval. In addition to co-ops being squeezed out of the organic food market they once largely provided, conventional grocery stores are also facing pressure from online retailers. And though food co-ops are no longer the easiest, or even the cheapest, way to access organic and local foods, those that have succeeded for the long haul may offer signs of hope for local economies.

C.E. Pugh, the chief operating officer of National Co+op Grocers (NCG), a cooperative providing business services for 147 food co-ops in 37 states, said co-ops began seeing a change in their fates starting in 2013. “The conventional grocers got very serious for the first time about natural and organic and added lots of products,” he said. “The impacts manifested themselves almost overnight in 2013.”

NCG has seen six cooperatives close since 2012, but has also welcomed 23 new stores in that same period, some of which were newly opened co-ops, and some of which already existed but had not yet joined NCG. The Minnesota-based Food Co-op Initiative, a nonprofit focused on helping new co-ops open and thrive, supported the launch of 134 co-ops in the last 10 years. Of those, 74 percent are still in business.

While the number of food co-ops in the U.S. is growing overall, some are still struggling against an influx of available local and organic markets. As co-ops face increased competition from mainstream retailers, advocates are considering how to distinguish themselves—and how to adapt to ensure survival.

The Rise of Organic in Conventional Grocery Stores

After 40 years, the East Lansing Food Co-op (ELFCO) in East Lansing, Michigan, closed in February 2017. “I have anecdotal evidence that when the co-op was started in the 1970s, there was almost no access to organic food whatsoever,” said Yelena Kalinsky, president of the co-op board during ELFCO’s last year. “Now there are a number of ways.”

One of which was likely a Whole Foods, which opened a store in April 2016 a mere 200 yards away from ELFCO. Even besides Whole Foods, there were already other natural grocers in town, such as Fresh Thyme and Foods for Living.

“Even Kroger has an organic foods section that’s doing very well,” Kalinsky added. “The positive spin is that we achieved our mission of making organic and local food possible. But after Whole Foods and Fresh Thyme came in, our numbers went down.” In May 2016, sales were down 20 to 30 percent over the previous year, which the co-op blamed on stronger competition.

Annie Knupfer, professor emeritus of educational studies at Purdue University and author of Food Co-ops in America: Community, Consumption, and Economic Democracy, acknowledges the abundance of organic food purveyors in today’s marketplace. “I think today the question would be, why a food co-op, when there are so many other options, like farmers’ markets, CSAs, organic food stores,” she said. “Unless you have a strong commitment to the ideals of food co-ops, you have a lot of options.”

Pugh of NCG echoed this sentiment when discussing the ways conventional mega-retailers like Costco, Walmart, and Kroger encroached on the organic market. Currently, Costco is the largest retailer of organic food in the U.S., with four billion dollars in annual organic sales in 2015, while Whole Foods had $3.6 billion. And in 2017, Kroger reportedly broke $1 billion in sales of organic produce.

“This new thing with the conventional [retailers] was kind of insidious, and people didn’t quite see that,” he said. “[Co-op leaders] thought, ‘Our customers won’t go there,’ but they were already there, buying products the co-ops don’t carry, like Charmin. And so they’re there anyway, and then they see organic milk, and they think, ‘Oh that’s a good price.’”

Distinguishing Co-ops from the Competition

“Each individual co-op and each individual community has to determine its relevance today,” Pugh said. “There’s no question of what its purpose was 10 to 20 years ago, when it may have been the only source or the best source of organic products. [But] why is it relevant today?”

According to Knupfer, one thing co-ops offer is a sense of community and empowerment in decision-making. “You can’t go into a CSA or grocery store and participate,” Knupfer said. “But you can raise concerns at any business. So I think what a co-op needs to provide is a sense of community.”

Co-ops do this in a number of ways, including hosting community events, organizing local producer fairs, meet-your-farmer events, and other community-building activities. Some co-ops, including the Missoula Food Co-op, which closed at the end of 2017, and the highly successful Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, have tried to build community and lower prices through a worker-owner model. For most of its existence, the Missoula Food Co-op required all members to work in some capacity for at least three hours a month, and only members were supposed to shop at the store.

However, this was a controversial policy. The time commitment was a limiting factor for some people who might have otherwise joined and supported the co-op. Kim Gilchrist, a board member at the Missoula Food Co-op, thinks that the worker-member policy hurt the organization in a number of ways. Adding the work requirement on to the store’s out-of-the-way location may have sent potential members to more easily accessible retailers, and she says the co-op didn’t do enough outreach in its neighborhood to be economically sustainable.

Gilchrist also believes the worker-owner model might have hurt the co-op through inferior customer service. Worker-owners, not being employees, did not go through a long training, and didn’t have to worry about being fired. When the store opened to non-members, it was still staffed by unpaid, part-time member-owners. The customer service, or lack thereof, became a problem.

“We heard feedback sometimes you walk in and there’s not a cashier, or they’re not super friendly,” Gilchrist said. “Sometimes there’s music playing, sometimes there’s not. If you’re a stranger coming into the store, you want a friendly face, you want some help.”

Adapting to Compete in the Changing Market

While some co-ops are struggling, others are succeeding in a changing market with different adaptations. “The market has gotten tougher, but the difference has been that our member co-ops have been adapting,” NCG’s Pugh said. “As the competition got tighter, management at the individual co-ops just buckled down to find ways to get better.”

Some co-ops, like the Harvest Co-op in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Food Front Cooperative Grocery in Portland, Oregon have begun offering online sales. Others, like the Seward Community Co-op in Minneapolis, Minnesota, are focusing on ensuring diversity in the food co-op landscape.

Meanwhile, as Whole Foods adapts to its recent acquisition by Amazon, its role as a local foods purveyor has come into question. As it operations are centralized, co-ops may be able to reclaim their role as the best place to buy local food products and support local producers.

Allan Reetz of the Co-op Food Stores, multi-million dollar businesses with two locations in New Hampshire and one in Vermont, stressed the importance of keeping one eye on the local food system while also watching the broader market. “Cooperatives are a way to build security in your local food system and involve the community at a grassroots level,” Reetz said. “But that does not guarantee anything. You still have to compete in the marketplace you find yourselves in.”

The Co-op Food Stores, which date back to 1936, have expanded beyond a regular food co-op to include things such as delicatessens, a sushi bar, and even an auto service center. It sells co-op staples like tofu and raw milk, but also offers a range of conventional food products like Frosted Flakes in order to be a one-stop shopping location.

Despite growing competition, the Co-op Food Stores are thriving. “It’s not to say we’re doing something extra special others have ignored,” Reetz said. “Grocery retail is a tough business. Co-ops have really established a market that now the big chains have moved into over the years, so there’s a lot of attention paid to the turf that we crafted.”

Across the country in Medford, Oregon, the much smaller Medford Food Co-op, which opened in 2011, is also doing well in this difficult atmosphere. Halle Riddlebarger, the store’s marketing manager, credits the co-op’s success to its relative youth, which she says makes the store nimble and better able to respond to people’s requests.

“We’re not set in our ways from having done something one way for 20 years,” Riddlebarger said. Recently, based on member requests for more prepared food, the co-op opened a café and deli. “Co-ops have to be able to respond to what people want and not take a decade to do so.”

In some rural areas, becoming a cooperative can offer a lifeline for struggling grocery stores. The North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives runs the Rural Grocery Initiative under the direction of Lori Capouch. Because so many small, rural grocery stores in the state are struggling, the initiative has helped some become cooperatives, giving these stores the support of the local community. These cooperatives are generally conventional grocery stores, selling all the regular staples instead of focusing specifically on local or organic food.

“I think that that cooperative, community-owned business model is going to become more and more important in these small communities that are at a distance from a full-service grocery store,” Capouch said. “That’s going to be the way to keep fresh foods available for people living and working in small towns.”

Indeed, perhaps the biggest challenge food co-ops face is not the competition from Whole Foods or Costco, but finding the balance between their original ideals and the ability to adapt to what consumers want and need now.

“I think some of us have been a little idealistic, and we need to learn more about how businesses work, because a food co-op is a business,” Purdue’s Knupfer said. “How do you make food co-ops a small business that’s also a community? People need to think outside the box.”

Top photo courtesy of The Seward Coop.

When I met Ron Rosmann last winter, he’d just had a small windfall. The Harlan, Iowa farmer was in the process of building a new hoop house for his farrow-to-finish pork operation and he’d come into some high-quality farrowing equipment—the parts needed to keep sows and their piglets warm and safe during the first weeks of their life—for a bargain. But the circumstances were bittersweet.

Rosmann’s friend and a fellow hog farmer in the area was selling off the equipment because he had gotten out of hog production. “It’s sad because he has a quarter of a million dollars worth of facilities,” Rosmann said. “He used to raise [hogs] conventionally and now there’s no money in it unless you’re huge.” The farmer in question was nearing retirement age and he had no family members willing to take over the operation, so he’d decided to shut it down completely. This was just the latest in a series of family farmers Rosmann has seen close up shop over the last few decades. “It’s just typical of what farming is like out here in the Midwest,” he told me.

Rosmann is in a different position. He and his wife Maria raise certified organic pork and beef under their own private label and for Organic Prairie, as well as corn, soy, and a range of other grains and hay in a diverse rotation on 700 acres. And as they look toward retirement—Ron Rosmann is about to turn 68—their sons, David and Daniel, are working to succeed them. In fact, their family was just chosen as Organic Farmers of the Year by the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES).

Take their commitment to biodiversity. The farm is divided into around 40 different fields, and in order to maintain soil health and reduce pressure from pests, they grow corn, soy, hay, oats, popcorn, turnips, and other crops in a constantly changing rotation. Some of those crops leave the farm, but much of it gets fed to the pigs and cows they raise. “We don’t buy anything!” said Rosmann.

It can be a challenge to keep this ever-changing rotation straight, he adds. But that’s key to his approach. “You have to be willing to change your mind all the time,” said Rosmann. “You can’t be set in your ways. But that’s what I love about this kind of farming. You have to be responsive to the indicators and the information out there.”

For instance, the farm survived the farm crisis of the 1980s—a time when many families in the area lost their operations due to mounting debt—by expanding on a modest scale, and taking out a bank loan to put in a farrowing nursery. Then they were early in the transition to organic and secured a coveted contract with one of the only companies paying a consistent premium for organic meat on a national scale.

Surrounded by miles and miles of conventional corn and soy, just 50 miles east of Omaha, Rosmann Family Farms also serves as a beacon for those looking for local food in the area. Maria runs a small on-farm store where she stocks everything from their farm’s meat and eggs to locally made gifts and holistic body products. Meanwhile, their son Daniel and his wife Ellen run a farm-to-table delivery service and a restaurant called Milk and Honey that sources many of its ingredients directly from the farm.

And aside from running his own business, and preparing to pass it on to his sons, Rosmann has also been an avid spokesman on the issues affecting small- and medium-scale farmers like himself.

After earning a degree in biology from Iowa State, Rosmann returned to his family farm for a trial year in 1973. But his parents gave him more autonomy than most, and he realized he decided to dig in and make it his own. “I was chastised by some people who said, ‘why did you come back, if you’re a college graduate?’ You’re supposed to leave the farm, leave rural areas to improve your life.” But Rosmann felt just the opposite; he stayed, in part, he said, because “you could make a difference in a small community” by sticking around.

Rosmann’s father was an early adopter when it came to using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but after his father passed away, Rosmann says he began experimenting with alternative methods, and by 1983 he decided to reverse course.

One of the major revelations came when he went to a field day at the farm of fellow Iowan Dick Thompson, who had eschewed conventional pesticides and fertilizers in the late ‘60s.

“He had a cleaner farm than we did and he wasn’t using any pesticides. I said, ‘I can do what he’s doing,’” Rosmann recalled. He was also intrigued by Thompson’s use of on-farm research using replicable, randomized strips. “These were environmentally friendly practices that didn’t hurt your pocketbook—in fact they helped. The goal was to get the same yields using less pesticides and fertilizers and then have proof that it would work, and learn from other farmers who were experimenting as well.”

Three years later, in 1986, Rosmann joined Thompson as a founding board member of Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), a nonprofit organization that has remained dedicated to these goals ever since, and has grown from around 50 farmers to more than 3,000.

Farmers like Rosmann and Thompson relied on tools like the late-spring soil test, which allows them to measure the amount of nitrate in the top layer of soil when their corn plants were young, so they could accurately gauge the amount of nitrogen they would need to add to the soil before harvest time. “It helped us place that nitrogen very precisely. We were cutting our nitrogen 50-75 percent and sometimes we found that we didn’t need to add nitrogen at all.”

The idea was to help farmers maintain autonomy in the face of massive farm consolidation and changes to the industry. Rosmann says that while there was a lot of interest in the late-spring soil test at the time, the tool’s popularity soon waned as the seed and chemical companies began to get a tighter hold on commodity agriculture.

“Biotech and Roundup came along. Farms were getting bigger, prices were low for commodities. The attrition of farmers kept going at a steady pace,” said Rosmann. Soon, he adds, “most farmers weren’t even willing to cultivate [as an alternative to using herbicide to control weeds] or test their nitrogen. They became paranoid, and said, ‘we’ve got to get this done in the fall.’ That’s the norm now. They put the nitrogen on in the fall, and 40-50 percent ends up in the groundwater because of leaching and warm weather.”

In Iowa, over the last few decades, this shift has had a nearly disastrous affect. Thirty years later, the ongoing nitrogen and phosphorous pollution has resulted in a high-profile lawsuit and a recent decision by state lawmakers to spend $282 million over the next 12 years on cleanup and prevention. Since then, PFI has played an important role in helping farmers diversify their farms, transition to organic in some cases, and just work in harmony with the natural world more generally.

Although PFI has remained an apolitical organization in an effort to reach farmers from both organic and conventional farms, Rosmann himself has always believed it was important to engage with policy. He and Maria have lobbied congress with organizations like the Pew Charitable Trust and Center for Rural Affairs on issues like farm consolidation and the overuse of antibiotics on farms. He also served as a board member and president of the Organic Farming Research Foundation for a number of years.

And he remains committed to on-farm research. For instance, Rosmann uses a lesser-known approach called ridge-tilling, which reduces the disturbance of the soil and helps retain organic matter—and he has produced data to support its efficacy. “I’ve done research trials comparing conventional disk-tilling and ridge-tilling. Every year, we get 5-7 percent more weeds in the area we disk till. So it’s a good tool for organic farmers,” said Rosmann, who adds that it’s hard to find the equipment because the practice has gone out of vogue in recent years.

He also prides himself on fixing his own farm equipment and acquiring much of the farm’s machinery used, an approach that is increasingly rare in the age of $250,000 tractors that can only be repaired by the companies that make them.

In all these ways, Rosmann stands out as a modern version of Jefferson’s educated yeoman farmer, “an enlightened citizen, trained in many fields,” motivated by the opportunity to be a steward the resources of land and community.

It’s a noble life, but also a lonely one, and Rosmann doesn’t always see eye to eye with many of the farmers in his community. So he relies on the PFI network as a way to stay connected to the handful of other “elder statesmen” farmers around Iowa and beyond.

“There are very few of us left with native knowledge passed down from our fathers,” said Rosmann. “But that’s the beauty of having Daniel and David here.” With his sons, he adds, the desire to stay curious and continue working at a human scale is a given.

Near the end of my visit to his farm—after I’d perused the hand-stitched tea towels in Maria’s shop, heard about the details of farrowing piglets, and toured the barn Rosmann’s father had built—we ducked into small stand of white pine trees he had planted in 1993 as a windbreak and wildlife refuge. The trees attract deer, a pest, but they also provide a rare home for pheasants, the occasional quail, and several other types of upland birds.

After a windy climb up a small hill, we stepped between the branches and the sound of the wind came to a stop. In that hushed environment, it was easy to imagine a time when many of Iowa’s diverse farms were dotted with trees. “We have more pheasants on our farm than any other in the county,” said Rosmann, lowering his voice so as not to scare off the visitors. And I pictured him and his family members stepping in among the trees every now and then when the day-to-day work of swimming against the agriculture tide becomes too much.

Then we turned and waded back through the February mud so Rosmann could take me to see his cows.

Top 2 photos by Twilight Greenaway.

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