Dear friends,

Thank you to you all for staying with us on this co-op journey. Last Sunday, at our last potluck of the year, we shared some exciting updates, had generative discussions, ate some delicious food, and enjoyed lovely company.

It was so fun to see all the new faces — thank you to everyone who joined us! And many thanks again to everyone at Dreaming Stone for hosting us! For those of you who weren't able to make it, we'll offer a recap here. 

* Lindy has started a full-time job with the town of Rutherfordton as the Director of the new PARC (Parks, Arts, Recreation, & Culture) Department. Congratulations, Lindy! She will remain an integral part of the co-op and will lend her time and energy when she can. We are so grateful to all that she's done to get us where we are. 

* In January, Harvest Browder will join the co-op team to run the weekly food-box program, grant-funded programs, and our burgeoning wholesale procurements. Harvest has just the right experience — having run the produce department at Trader Joe's, lead food programs at Warren Wilson College, and more — and just the right blend of creativity, leadership, and commitment to local food. She's also a partner in The Good Company (a new farm that produces turmeric, ginger, and other specialty items). We are so excited to have Harvest on the team!

* We're proud to say that in January we'll begin supplying farm-fresh food for school lunches at Lake Lure Classical Academy. 

* As we move in to 2026, we've identified three major priorities for the co-op: (1) increasing our diversity, i.e., developing and implementing strategies to reach the innermost circle of our target market (people who feel like farm-fresh food is out of reach for them); (2) co-op development, i.e., organizing members of stakeholder classes to set the terms of membership & getting us closer to fully ratified cooperative; and (3) business development, i.e., increasing revenue from wholesale & retail sales while streamlining operations. We will be recruiting folks to join working groups to take ownership of each priority in the coming year. If you are interested in joining one of them, please respond to this email and let us know. 

Wishing you all a love-filled and restful holiday season. 

Thank you to everyone that joined us for the May Co-Op Potluck and Meeting. We spent some more time this session hearing from all of you about why this project matters on individual, community, regional, and global levels; what you see as our collective purpose and potential. Matthew explained a view of our target markets, with the concentric circle model where you all are the easiest to reach on the outer circle, with larger campus wholesale members in the next realm, and those who may feel abandoned or disconnected from the local food system actually in the center. Rosco led a discussion that yielded valuable information for our website, which is currently under construction.  

Lindy explained where we are in the Food is Medicine/Rural Food Box Project. The farm rotation plan has been shared with producers, and some troubleshooting discussion took place on adapting and adjusting the rotation as needed. An important update: Blue Ridge Health has posted the Community Health Worker - Food Box Delivery Driver position and is currently seeking applicants. If you are interested in delivering the food boxes or know someone who may be interested, please share the link above - the quicker the position is filled the quicker we can start our Food is Medicine program! Blue Ridge Health has shared a hope to begin within the next two weeks. 

Keep an eye out for the opening of Community Subscriptions - we will open the Food is Medicine/Rural Food Box program to 10 Co-op community members who will receive 1 local meat, 5-7 produce items, and 1 dairy product in each weekly box, with contributions from a rotation of 4 farms each week. 

To join this program, there will be a $35 membership fee, and each weekly box will cost $50. If you would like to receive a weekly box, please sign up here. If we get more than 10 people to sign up, we will enter all names into this random selector to choose the final list.  

Thank you to everyone that joined us for the March Co-Op Potluck and Meeting. We shared concrete plans for the Food is Medicine Project for 2025, were joined by new stakeholders from each class, unveiled our logo and branding deck, introduced ourselves by sharing a drawing of our inner lights, and of course shared an incredible meal. 

A couple loose ends from the last potluck: We have recipe requests for the cornmeal almond cake and the seasoned sweet potato dishes. If you made either of these dishes, could you please share? And someone left a canvas tote bag left behind; please reach out if you are missing one. 

Food is Medicine Project

We are excited to announce a Direct Relief Grant awarded to The Community Farm Stop of Rutherford County! This grant will fund 16 weeks of the Food is Medicine Project in 2025 and the first 12 weeks in 2026. Each week, starting in June, we will:

• Collect food from participating farms;

• Package boxes that will include 1 local meat, 5-7 vegetable items, & 1 dairy product;

• Deliver the boxes to 25 members of our community, identified by Blue Ridge Health as patients whose lack of access to fresh food is of primary impact to their health.

We are awaiting notification on another grant that will support the purchase of equipment, software, packing and sanitation supplies, etc. This additional grant may also extend the 2025 program to 22 weeks.

Conference Recaps

Lindy and Dana Chouquette attended the Resourceful Communities Food Hub Conference in Greensboro conference, where they participated in hands-on training on food safety, tracking, distribution software, and more. They also made connections with people running food hubs around our state.

Matthew and Lindy attended the Cooperative Power Unleashed, hosted by Carolina Common Enterprise, hearing inspirational histories and modern stories where cooperatives are addressing problems from language interpretation services in the Triangle region, housing in the greater D.C. area, and how a cooperative bookstore’s structure positioned it to be an effective information and care hub for disaster response in the hours after Helene moved out. 

Next Potluck

We invite you all to join us for the next Co-Op Potluck and Meeting - Saturday May 31st at the same Eric Wells Picnic Shelter in Kiwanis Park, Rutherfordton, at 5 pm. 

In addition to sharing a favorite dish highlighting local ingredients, we are challenging each of you to bring an acquaintance, friend, or family member who is different from you in at least 3 of these ways: gender, race, generation, economic class, political outlook, sexual preference. We need to build a coalition of community owners from all walks of life in order to have a sustainable future that addresses everyone’s needs. 

At this meeting we will drill into details on the Food is Medicine Project, like how you can support and participate through community subscriptions or become a packing assistant (grant funding supports payment for this work). We will also present a proposal for working groups to tackle each stakeholder class’s membership terms. 

We are excited to see you all, as we continue to build this thing together. 

The Votes Are In

After tallying the votes, the winning name for our co-op is Community Farm Stop of Rutherford County! Now that we have a name, we can begin plugging that into the more procedural items, like securing a website domain, creating a contact email address, social media accounts, and inserting it into draft bylaws, articles of incorporation, etc. 

Weighing Business Model Options

In prior meetings, we’ve discussed a few different operations models: a mobile market (food-truck style), a pop-up market, and a brick & mortar store. 

After discussing these options with several co-op members and going through a comparison of the costs, strengths, and weaknesses of each option, we feel confident that we should move toward a brick & mortar store. No objections to this proposal were voiced at the potluck on Sunday, but if you have any please reach out and let us know.  

The next steps here will be to sharpen the startup plan, including strategies for capital raising. 

Membership updates: Wholesale Consumers

We’ve held meetings with local restaurant owners to get feedback on initial proposals for what the Wholesale Consumers’ membership rights would look like. 

From those meetings, we learned that flexibility will be key for most restaurants — for instance, the option to pay membership fee in monthly or quarterly installments and a lower tier of what would constitute “wholesale” buying from the co-op. A lower membership fee will put this in reach for most local restaurants. 

So we are considering offering two tiers of wholesale memberships — one at a lower cost for restaurants/cottage businesses  and one at a higher cost for corporations, hospitals, schools, etc. The cost levels would correspond to the volumes of food being purchased. 

In general though, the restaurant owners are enthusiastic about the co-op and would like to figure out a way to support. Of course, much of this comes down to the details above. 

Membership updates: Farmer-Producers

We’ve had follow up visits with Encompass Farm and Seven Oaks Farm. Both have an interest in moving and simplifying at least one of their markets closer to home and the co-op would be attractive, especially with some predictability in orders and sales. (See HOP below)

We began this same conversation with Wild East and are working down a list of local farms, especially  former vendors at the Rutherford County Farmers Market that have shifted markets outside of the county. 

The largest gap in producers to recruit is in dairy and meat. We welcome recommendations, especially if  you know of those operating with organic or regenerative practices. Bonus points if you can offer an introduction. 

Membership updates: Workers

We are beginning to turn attention to developing what the membership rights would look like for co-op employees. 

Are you interested in working at the co-op? Please email us and let us know. We will start having conversations around what specific roles we will need to fill, what compensation will look like, and what the membership structure will be.

Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP) Program

The state-run HOP program directs Medicaid funding toward improving certain lifestyle factors that are related to healthy outcomes but aren’t directly related to a person’s medical condition (food, housing, recovery, etc.). In the realm of food, a medical provider can prescribe that a patient receive healthy food boxes, which are paid for by Medicaid, including funds for administration and delivery above the price of the food itself. There is currently no HOP food box provider in Rutherford County. 

Back in December, Dana Choquette at WNC Food Systems Coalitions raised the idea that the Co-Op should consider filling this need. We also had dinner with Grace Fitzgerald, who runs community engagement at the Foothills Food Hub, and she gave us lots of good information about how they run the HOP program. 

In short, we think it sounds like a great way to fulfill our mission to fix the local food system, particularly for our community members for whom local healthy food is currently unavailable. Additionally, HOP boxes would provide predictable, guaranteed sales for the Co-Op and therefore stability for our producers and the organization. 

Trip to Boone

On Tuesday, Jan. 21, Lindy, Rosco, Carrie, and Matthew joined Laura Ponder and other members of the Rutherford County Food Council for a trip up to Boone where we were given tours of the High Country Food Hub and the FARM Cafe.

High Country is a dynamic example of how farmers are able to reach consumers in a direct way outside of the farmers’ market. They provide a cool online marketplace where shoppers make their purchases; once the orders are in, farmers drop off the purchased products to High Country, where staff organize boxes for each buyer to be picked up. 

We will look more into the online marketplace that they use (Local Food Marketplace) and assess whether it can be tailored to what we’re envisioning, which is a more fluid experience, not so regimented by order days, delivery days, and pickup days. Buyers in our county have already shown that a specific shopping day (i.e., the farmers’ market) doesn’t work for them. However, this option could work to secure pre-orders for producers and help predict sales quantities. 

Local Food Marketplace also supports purchases through the HOP program and has been used to manage grant awarded credits for local food pantries to order and spend down an allotment of funds, so there is beneficial synergy there. 

While in Boone, we had lunch at FARM Cafe. There, customers pay what they can—some, all, or none of the suggested prices. Customers who want to and are able to can exchange labor for a meal. FARM Cafe has direct relationships with local farmers, but it also sources from other outlets redirecting excess foods and reducing waste in the local food system. They are also a regular seller (of stocks, frozen soups, and sauces) through High Country Food Hub. Nice mutually beneficial relationship.