Saturday afternoon, I spent two hours chatting with Peter Pehrson at his home just a couple of miles from my own. I could have sat happily chatting with him for a few hours more, but I had to leave to do my evening chores. We were talking about an exciting venture that he is putting together, the Schoharie Co-op Cannery. That is, a real genuine community-scale commercial cannery that will be available to can (in metal cans or glass jars) the produce  of individual gardeners with a few tomato plants, the hardcore gardener with a half acre garden who puts up nearly all of the family’s winter food, and the produce of  farmers, from small market farmers all the way up to large scale commercial farmers.

Toward the end of our conversation, I told Peter the truth about how I feel about his project. I told him that for the past four years I have wracked my brain thinking about local-regional farm and food systems, trying to come up with ways to re-invigorate them, to shore them up, to make them viable, to make them desirable to people in the early 21st Century and beyond, and of all of the ideas that I have come across and come up with myself over those years, the Schoharie Co-op Cannery is the single most exciting.

The Schoharie Co-op Cannery is “sustainability” made real in the form of a working community-scale factory. It encourages the de-commercialization of food through gardening (during the height of the Victory Garden era, as much as 40% of produce consumed in the country was grown in home gardens). It encourages the localization of production, distribution, and consumption. It stabilizes local produce for consumption outside of the growing season. It generates substantial value-added marketing outlets for local and regional farmers desperately in need of them. It encourages the utilization of a larger percentage of farm crops, a substantial percentage of which are currently left to rot in the field because they are not the right shape, or are a hair too big or too small, or have one blemish too many or too dark.

I would like to use my own farm as an example of the power of the Schoharie Co-op Cannery to promote local agriculture.

For the past few years, I have been trying to figure out how to add vegetables and small soft fruits (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, etc.) to the farm. I want to do so because I want to make full use of the fertilizer value of the livestock manure, especially winter bedding packs, produced on the farm. However, there are two barriers to vegetable and fruit production on a farm such as my own, with a single farm operator. They take a lot of labor, and they require near daily marketing outlets because fresh vegetables and fruit are so highly perishable. I had not been able to find a way around these two barriers until I met Peter and he described his vision of the Schoharie Co-op Cannery to me.

Rather than growing vegetables and fruit for the fresh market, I can grow them to be canned. I do not need to sort them. I do not need to wash them. I do not need to store them. I just pick them into boxes, baskets, buckets, bags, or bins, and unload them at the cannery. A day or two later, I pick up shelf-stable canned goods that I can then market on the farm, at my weekly farmers market, or via local-regional third-party retail outlets under my own label, or, I can market them through the Schoharie Co-op Cannery, which will have a retail store and will do its own marketing and distribution under its own label.

Also, I have a fascination with dry beans and have a dream of growing them commercially, on a small scale, about five acres. My plan was to market them dry in one pound bags. The reality is, however, in the early 21st Century people who use dry beans do not buy dry beans dry, they buy them canned. Small-scale dry bean canning, however, is not an option. There are no local, or even regional, dry bean canneries, and if there are or were, they would be industrial scale and would not want to deal with a farmer with five acres of beans, and even if they were willing to do so, they would not can the beans for the farmer, they would buy the beans from the farmer at industrial-scale commodity prices, which a farmer can only accept if he or she raises hundreds or even thousands of acres of beans. These dreams beans, therefore, are just that, a dream, or, they were.

Enter the Schoharie Co-op Cannery. The dream becomes a reality.

The Schoharie Co-op Cannery makes it possible for me to market my five acres of dry beans in a form that is culturally familiar and at value-added prices that go into my pocket, and out of my pocket into the pockets of my community members, and out of their pockets into the pockets of other community members, and out of their pockets into other community pockets, and out of those pockets back into my pocket, and on and on.

The dream becomes a reality because the Schoharie Co-op Cannery answers the single most important question of local-regional farm and food systems, infrastructure. The Schoharie Co-op Cannery is not a capricious marketing gimmick, it is not a bit of foodie culture fluff, it is not a scramble to capitalize on a socio-economically exclusive fad, it is a foundation stone, set firm upon the ground, exactly the type of foundation stone on which durable local-regional farm and food systems are built.

For more details about the cannery go to http://www.schohariecannery.org. Peter says, “we’re in the business start-up stage so there are many balls in the air at present. Developments will be posted on the website. Note also that our community & outreach/listening meeting Feb. 21 from 9:30 am – 12 Noon in Cobleskill. Visit the website for the meeting details.”