Aaron Bradley

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Partial Transcript: my family’s farmed for generations. I’ve farmed on family land, I was the fifth generation there, and it’s a lifestyle that’s drawn me to it. Its hard work, but there’s not much can compete with the lifestyle that farming offers.

Partial Transcript: it’s a lot more labor-intensive to follow sustainable practices. We don’t use any synthetics, any chemicals any fertilizers. What that takes is to enter farming in today’s world you either have to work with very low-cost infrastructure and put a lot more labor into it or you have to enter a contract with a bigger organization, which takes a lot more money and structure.

Essentially you replace infrastructure and probably the use of pharmaceuticals and antibiotics with a lot more labor intensive operation and lower cost infrastructure. Really it’s just a tradeoff and our beliefs, our land, our animals and our family but also our food systems.

Partial Transcript: we are so disconnected with our food. People have no idea where it comes from, how it’s raised, how it’s produced, literally what’s in a grocery store are.

We shop the inner aisles, buy the boxed, processed stuff and when we get out things like a whole chicken, or a prime cut of meat, anything but a pork chop or bacon on a pig, a boneless breast on a chicken – people aren’t familiar without and they don’t understand what it is. The highly processed foods are causing some very legitimate concerns with our health system. If you look back, it’s not rocket science to see that our overall health is diminishing while we started the consumption of highly processed foods and then changed the way we produced even whole foods in the past few decades.

For us, we really feel the connection with the food, how it's raised, knowing where it comes from, what they’re fed, what it's fertilized with, any of those things, whether it’s a carrot, or a pork chop or anything in between. Having that connection with your food, offers a sense of appreciation, but it also helps better understand that our food system is a very complex thing and as you start to explore it more and more, it becomes realized how disconnected we really are. Really, it takes its own course once you dig into it.

Partial Transcript: farming and the labeling for what’s actually a form of food a lot of times is really blurry. So you hear “sustainably grown”, “good agricultural practices” whatever it may be. One of the terms you see is “grass farm.” And farmers will tell you that what they’re really do it managing the land, pasture-land ecosystems. And they’re using their animals to do that. Those farmers are acknowledging that. Whether they acknowledge that or not, as a farmer, you’re having a tremendous impact on land. And it’s not with property lines. What we do with our land is going to affect our community and it's going to affect our state, our country. It’s going to go beyond the property boundaries of a farm.

Whether we intentionally realize it or not, we’re having a tremendous impact. For us, we try to manage the land and use those animals so they doing a lot of the labor for us. An example is the land behind me. This is an old-growth pasture, a lot of saplings. A lot of things we really wouldn’t want in a grass-fed beef operation. So we have the option to go in and use petroleum, machines, and things like that. Cut all those things out. We essentially cleared enough out to the fence line and we put these pigs in. The nature of a pig, what a pig does is eat, sleep, and destroy. So we try to allow them to do that, but we want to do that to our advantage and the advantage of our land.

So as they do that, it’s up to the farmer to be able to manage that. Leave them in an area to cause a good amount of disturbance but you don’t want it to be destruction either. A good rule of thumb, or a good way to look at it is, if more farmers would look at their land as if they’re borrowing it from their kids, as opposed to their kids are going to inherit it from them, I think it would make us look at how we care for that land differently.

Partial Transcript: I was a customer of the coop for quite awhile, I was one of the guys who had no clue where any of my food came from. I didn’t care about food sources, I didn’t care about what was in my food, I cared what was cheap and what was convenient. I worked with a guy doing construction and he said “I’m going to get breakfast there one day and it was really, really good. And I said, ‘This is really good, I want more of that.’ Everything I got there was absolutely delicious.

I started becoming more educated about our food system and I realized not only is this really good food, but it's much healthier food. We’re still associated with a lot of people who take the cheap and convenient route. Even those people will tell you, even if you have to pay a little more or go out of your way to get there, you can feel comfortable doing it, if the things sold there are really good and really healthy for you. These are the people who are fast food shoppers, I don’t want to label anyone, but definitely not the ones who are seeking things out like we probably should be.

We got involved with the farm, built a relationship with Chris, the butcher, and he’s awesome and he gave us the opportunity and it's blossomed from there, it's been a great thing.

Partial Transcript: one of the most important things in a food system is reciprocation, not only knowing where it's sold but the relationship between those people. To me, it’s really awesome when we process broilers, the folks from the butchery come down and they see that. They’re so anxious to do farm tours, they’re so anxious to get out and not just tell people what a farmer tells them but to go to that farm, see how things are being produced, see what the animals are being fed, what the produced as being fertilized with, the practices that are taking place there and be able to tell them first hand, hey, we’ve gone out there, we’ve know what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying but we know what’s taking place there. And I feel like the effort that’s being put forth there by the coop, there’s a lot of places that probably want to do that but just don’t have the time to do it. The coop makes sure they have that time, and I feel like those extra efforts are going to help change our food system. I love seeing that take place.

Partial Transcript: the feedback that they give us, the convenience, they’re honestly some of the greatest people to work with, when we first started delivering, my father-in-law ran a trucking business. The very first time we delivered with him, he said they really have their stuff together. That’s a relationship you want to keep. And we don’t have hiccups. That’s one of the good things. We have hiccups but as far as the relationship, things are smooth. Things go really well. I feel like the folks whether it’s a restaurant or a retail outlet, or whatever it might be, people who seek out a product like ours they understand it's not a tractor-trailer delivering food. To say they understand that, the coop exceeds that relationship, they’re just great people, awesome to work with.

Partial Transcript: the customer of the coop, in any section that you go into, whether you’re trying to buy dairy products or meat products or you’re asking about a smoothie, anything in the health dept, you can really tell that people are really professional. I’ve been there after a delivery and you hear folks being educated about the different cuts of meat, where it comes from, and the sourcing of them, being able to overhear the conversation with the butcher or anyone having a conversation with the customers who have questions, its really comforting to know that they have that professionalism, and that education and they can provide that.

We feel like one of the biggest hurdles we have in our food system at this point is the education. Folks don’t realize why they should pay more for a product, why they should seek out a certain product why a product may be questionable, or why our food system might need some changes and just being able to provide that, the coop being able to provide that to their customer base goes a long way.

Partial Transcript: the co-op offers locally sourced food, they are open ears. A lot of hoops to get into other stores. They offer an outlet for local farms and for local producers to sell products directly to the consumer. They are very understanding of production systems and they’re flexible with folks as they grow. They are able to offer something that other outlets may not be able to offer.

Partial Transcript: they are quality over quantity. They have ethics and they have integrity and they won’t sacrifice that over a dollar amount or anything else. This is the product that we want and we’re not going to settle unless he meets the same standards just b/c it has a cheaper price tag on it.

Partial Transcript: there’s a lot of integrity, there’s a lot of quality, there’s a lot of genuine care. It’s something totally different.

Partial Transcript: we’re going to buy our food, that’s locally sourced, and we’re not going to go across the country b/c its cheaper. We’re going to see the benefit in that in everybody’s health, economy, the health of our community. If people would see that that train would be rolling all the way. It would be full steam ahead.

Partial Transcript: HCC is probably the best thing that’s happened to our business. We’re still growing a lot as a farm, we’re able to do what we can, b/c of the coop, w/o that relationship there’s no way we could be doing what we’re doing. We still have a lot of growing, a lot of things ahead of us, but they’ve been a huge part of our operation and we’re so grateful for that.

Partial Transcript: if we could take people for the next five years and say, all I’m going to change is purchase local food raised sustainably, it will become our highest priority. If we could see the benefits that that could have on our overall health, and the health of our economy, five years would lead to fifty years b/c people would be so psyched about it.