Fat Pig Society Workers Co-Op, Fort Collins, Colorado, 2019
In affairs of this description … the first essential is to study the psychology of the individual.
—P. G. WODEHOUSE, Very Good, Jeeves
If we’re going to herd farmers toward forming regional cooperatives to handle the fiber side of their harvest, it’d probably be valuable to recount what makes an actual working co-op tick. To do that, we’ll report on a day in the life of the first modern organic hemp cooperative—the Fat Pig Society workers co-op—during my most recent pilgrimage to the co-op’s Fort Collins farms and greenhouses. Even though the FPS is a cannabinoid-focused co-op, the lessons are the same. And even if many of our putative fiber co-op’s members aren’t doing much more than opening their gates for the fiber truck once per season, a portion of any co-op’s members is going to have to deal with the organization’s operations. When you look at successful co-ops, you quickly realize that the more engaged co-op members are, the better.
The first modern cooperatives arose in Scotland and England in the 18th century. They emerged from the transition between serfdom and modern agriculture. That was 300 years ago. In my research, I’ve been shocked to learn how deeply co-ops are integrated into today’s economy. One hundred thirty million Americans belong to at least one co-op, and 25 percent of American electricity is generated by either municipalities or electric cooperatives.1 Worldwide, there are three million cooperatives involving 12 percent of humanity.2 I get 90 percent of the food that I don’t raise myself at the all-organic Silver City Food Co-op in New Mexico, founded 1974.
Some agriculturally focused co-ops are massive. Blue Diamond Growers, launched in 1911, had $1.67 billion in almond sales in 2016. Organic Valley, producer of eggs and dairy products, has 2,000 independent farming members and 500 employees. The point is not just that cooperatives can be hugely lucrative. It’s that the difference between these billion-dollar entities and publicly traded billion-dollar companies is that a cooperative is not owned by shareholders or hedge funds. The revenue stays with its members.
There are so many categories of co-ops. I can’t tell you exactly how many, because some co-ops are an amalgam of several different ones woven together. The Fat Pig Society is a worker co-op planning on branching out to include a producer co-op. The rules can vary widely among different types of co-ops. This, unsurprisingly, has led to lawyers who specialize just in co-op nuances, and it can get complex: One attorney suggested to a group I’ve been trying to corral into a co-op that it form “in part [as] an agricultural marketing cooperative and in part a worker cooperative … this would integrate workers into the ownership and governance of the cooperative, avoid servant laborer status for the workers, [and save] a lot of money in tax and labor law.”
That alone is a full meal of information to digest. If you and some fellow farmers are considering a fiber (or other) co-op, you’ve got your background research and legal due diligence to do.
A co-op, of course, is not the only righteous way to go—we’re mainly discussing the model here as a way for independent farmers to make something with their tons of fiber. We’ve also talked a bit about B corporations and profit-sharing LLC models. In Vermont, we started our enterprise as an LLC with a mission statement that flat-out said we intended to evolve into a cooperative model, once we realized it would take beyond planting season even to land on which type or types of co-op we wanted to be:
Our goal is to cooperatively produce healthy products (for our own families and communities, and for more than just humans) that benefit the local economy and soil (including the farming economy) by promoting a regional and sustainable industrial loop. Therein we hope to provide a regenerative planet-wide economic model that might help heal soil, mitigate climate change and make room for healthy, affluent rural communities to lead the world toward long-term peace.
Lovely, idealistic stuff. But in practice, a co-op is a business. Just a different kind of business. Like any venture, a hemp co-op likely faces years of challenges just to keep itself functioning. I don’t really care if an enterprise is called a co-op or something else. If it operates by Bill Althouse’s basic goal, I’m a fan: “It’d be nice for farmers not to get screwed for once,” he told me as the FPS was filing its formation paperwork, back in 2014.
The other essential thing to know about the modern cooperative movement is that it operates according to these seven principles, sometimes called the Rochdale Principles, for the British co-op that first applied them in 1844. Any co-op member anywhere in the world will know about these principles. At least some of them. Like the Ten Commandments, most folks will probably be able to name about five of ’em.
1. Voluntary and open membership.
2. Democratic member control.
3. Member economic participation. [This and number 4 are the keys that keep revenues among members.]
4. Autonomy and independence.
5. Education, training, and information.
6. Cooperation among cooperatives. [This principle explains how the FPS markets its main cannabinoid product, called Free Hemp. It’s not exactly free, but it’s free of branding, corporate investment, and marketing other than word of mouth. It’s either sold directly by the FPS, by fans of the product who buy a case or three at a time, or at other co-ops.]
7. Concern for community.
The goal of these principles, as Wendell Berry knew from his family’s formative role in Kentucky’s tobacco co-op movement, was power in numbers—for cobblers, chip makers, hemp farmers, makers of anything. Screw the middleman, rather than the farmer.
I was overdue for a Fat Pig Society field visit in March of 2019. I’d been following the co-op’s on- and off-field efforts since before its formation, and with processing done in Vermont and my return flight to New Mexico stopping in Denver, the stars aligned for my first field visit in a year. This time, I found myself hurrying nervously up the Colorado Front Range because of a troubling text I’d received from Iginia Boccalandro upon landing in the Rockies. Before leaving Vermont the previous day, I had messaged Iginia that I might be running a day or two late following the blizzard in New England. She replied, “Please get here tonight, not tomorrow. It’s Bill’s birthday. We need your energy here.”
That should have been a red flag. But it was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. Plus, how bad could things be? Still, I probably wouldn’t have harvested a crop or created a product without the selfless guidance of people like Iginia and Bill. Needless to say, I drove up to the FPS farms and greenhouses in Fort Collins, 40 miles from the Wyoming line, immediately upon landing in Denver at sunset.
Up until that text, I thought I’d be reporting on good news about the co-op. I had reason to be bullish. After four years of the usual entrepreneurial struggles, the FPS had apparently beaten the odds and gotten on its financial feet. The last time I’d seen Iginia, at an industry conference a few months earlier, I’d awkwardly offered to pay for her breakfast. I knew that for three years the co-op had been treading water, its members unpaid and busted flat. Why would season four be different? So I was more than a little shocked when she told me, “It’s cool, I got it. We’re all getting paid two grand a month plus our food and housing costs. We’ve got fifty grand in the bank.”
I considered Bill, Iginia, and the team to be integrity role models. That it was actually working out fiscally frankly blew my mind. When I had woken the FPS farmhouse with marginal Coltrane four years earlier, the co-op’s then four members were sharing the best clothing so one person could be presentable in town, at expos, and at meetings with bankers and potential members.
A few years later, Iginia told me over that conference breakfast, one white-label crude contract alone was generating $120,000 annually. Best of all, contract farmers, some of them on track to become members, were already getting paid.
The co-op, in fact, had paid farmer Will McDonough, 44, of Wimo Farms in Berthoud, Colorado, $75,000 since my last visit, plus provided him with $75,000 in clones for his next planting. McDonough, a navy sub vet and in civilian life an organic raw dairy farmer and employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs, told me, “Farming hemp has elevated my family’s income level substantially and saved our retirement. I can call it a wonderful relationship because I don’t see any end in sight.”
When he met Bill and the rest of the co-op team, McDonough said, “I was already passionate about building the small-farmer economy. And we shared organic principles: I fertilized the fields from our own cow manure. It was a good match.”
Had the Fat Pig Society cooperative achieved only this one goal, I’d still call this story a celebration. Farmers were making a good living. This was the unwavering aim of the co-op’s founders since before hemp was federally legalized. I can attest to this because I knew Bill and Iginia prior to the Fat Pig Society’s formation, back when we all lived in New Mexico in the 2010s. Iginia was a Rolfer and ran a speaker program called the Carbon Economy Series, which is how we met. We depleted a lot of the strawberries that Bill grew for his booth at the Santa Fe Farmers Market (the berry vines draped down according to a trellis style of his design), while discussing their plan to keep farmers from getting screwed for once via hemp. A few years later, their real-world organic hemp cooperative was already churning out top-shelf product and paying farmers top dollar.
Hooray, I thought. Right as I was finishing up this book, I had a textbook case study for the persistence and patience preached in its pages: a four-year, small-farm journey to liquidity. In the realest sense, the FPS members had been conducting three years of R and D. They’d learned lessons of cultivation, processing, even packaging.
Four years is a long time to stick anything out. Twenty-two percent of small enterprises fail within a year (not the more commonly reported 50 percent, but still a lot).3 My mistake, it turns out, was assuming financial stability meant organizational stability. Money might not buy happiness, but, I thought, doesn’t it solve all business problems?
I wanted this to be true, especially for a co-op: This was the model I yearned to see replicated in hemp-growing communities all over the world. Indeed, I’d been trying for several years to launch one in multiple states. I’d forgotten that the hardest part of this enterprise would be the human side; that cultivating people would prove more difficult than cultivating and marketing top-shelf hemp, forming a co-op, or becoming fiscally buoyant.
Optimism was my dominant state of mind as I drove north toward the plump porcine logo on the FPS entrance sign. Some unnamed social crisis notwithstanding, I missed my mentors and I wanted to see how, if at all, the cooperative had migrated in practice, principles, or spirit as it was apparently on the rise. When she’d apprised me of the promising financial developments at that conference breakfast, Iginia had also told me that the co-op was on the verge of expanding, almost on schedule, to its phase-two plan of adding a producer co-op to the existing worker co-op.
“We want the worker co-op to do farming efficiency, breeding, product development,” she’d told me. “Basically to be a think tank. The goal being enrichment of the producer co-op, composed of hemp farmers.”
As a result of this remarkable recent progress, I thought I’d be asking questions about marketing, tax issues, and growth plans for membership and acreage on this visit. I wanted to be bored by the mundanity of success. Instead I learned that the success of a co-op is much less about its operations than its personalities.
Loving these people like kin, news of FPS unrest, though lurking below my optimism, was jolting. In fact, it’s still a bit painful to recount the turmoil I witnessed over the next 2 days. I mention this for two reasons. First, because the FPS, six months later as this book is going to production, lives to fight another day, which means the way its members handled a core crisis provides a model for how other co-ops might address social engineering issues. Second, because I believe this co-op’s members deserve some kind of integrity and transparency award. On this most recent visit, they were aware I was researching a book chapter about the functioning of a real-world hemp co-op. They knew I was going to report what I saw.
When she and Bill decided to form a co-op, Iginia was aware that managing people would be the hardest job. In fact, it was her job, from the start. The daughter of South American engineers came in with some essential perspective: the awareness that the world’s most successful co-ops have identified the people problem and learned to address it as a top priority.
“The Mondregon Cooperatives of the Basque region [of Spain] have recognized that it is a career track position to be the social coordinator,” she told me four years ago. “This is the person who checks in with every member in her section, every day: every manager, every intern, every engineer, every custodian. These guys have twenty-eight billion dollars in assets, and still there’s a social coordinator for every eight people. So we decided to replicate that. As you know I’m that person.” Indeed, I did. Iginia was the Chief Cat Herder. But the FPS’s big problems arose four years later when Iginia realized she was also one of the cats.
Iginia met me at the camper as usual as I pulled in when the moon was high in the sky that March evening. What struck me as unusual was that, despite the relatively early hour, she took my elbow and walked me away from the farmhouse. We headed straight to the main FPS greenhouse for a private chat before I even encountered the rest of the crew. As we pulled back two greenhouse flaps, gaining 30 degrees within three steps, she said, “I knew it was going to be this way. I just didn’t realize how bad it could get, so quickly.”
“How bad what could get?” The moisture in the greenhouse air was itself a second wall through which we walked like wizards at a train station.
“The people problem,” she said, sitting us down at a picnic table surrounded by plants of all sizes.
“You mean Bill,” I said, wiping my brow.
“I mean Bill, myself, Yamie, Gavin, and all the volunteers,” she said. I noted that she had listed nearly everyone who was or ever had been a member of the co-op. But then, after a significant pause, she added. “Mostly it’s about Bill and me, having crossed a line where we’re having difficulty working together.”
Then she took a breath.
“That social coordinator’s job [in the Mondregon model] is to ask personal questions, like ‘What’s really going on with you?’ and ‘Who’s pissing you off?’ As well as business questions like, ‘What could be done better on your shift?’ and ‘Do you know about the big co-op board vote coming up?’ There have been studies about this: It’s an essential co-op survival tool.”
They must be doing something right over in Basque Country. The 63-year-old Mondregon Co-op group has 74,000 members working at 257 companies. They do everything from making bicycles to offering engineering training. Equally important, 70 percent of the co-op’s members vote in co-op elections. That’s 15 percent higher than voting rates in US presidential elections.
“The model has been replicated all over Latin America,” Iginia continued. “That’s where I learned about it. It’s all about the team feeling empowered.”
It seemed so sensible, so natural. I immediately started trying to work out where else the social director appears in nature. Is there a gorilla Iginia? Possibly. And cattle folks tell me that there’s a sort of auntie for the herd, making sure someone’s on lookout, and all the calves accounted for. Regardless, I had little doubt she was right about the importance of the position. I don’t speak lightly in my advice on this front these days, because I’ve felt the pain of crossed wires and mixed expectations within an entrepreneurial group. Trust is one thing, and essential, but it’s just one building block for a successful working group. Two or three people might have fairly different opinions about what amounts to a full workweek, for instance. Or the big one: How long you all might have to work before getting well paid. No one I’ve met is immune.
When things have gone well on any project of which I’ve been part, whether as entrepreneur, consultant, or researcher, it’s because every member of the team was jamming in sync. Everyone stepped up without having to be asked, knowing the others would often do the same. When the project hit bumps, it was usually because there were communication issues.
Okay, I got it: A co-op is wise to have a social director position right from launch. Non-discussed expectations, man, what an enterprise killer. But I didn’t fully grok what the new issue was for the FPS. When there’s a difficult, challenging personality, and everyone recognized that Bill can be a difficult personality, the social issues might come to a head sooner. But they always do. That’s because everyone’s difficult. It’s why I live 40 miles from the nearest town, surrounded by attack goats.
“I get all that,” I said to Iginia at the picnic table. “Why are you telling me this now?”
She sighed. “What we realized a few weeks ago is that we need to have a member who is Bill’s keeper,” Iginia said. “Someone other than me. We know each other too well for me to be his social director. Or my own.”
Now I understood: The co-op required another social director, maybe two. A member whose job is just to deal with the co-op’s chief farmer and idea man. And probably one to assist Iginia too. Social director was not her only position. She had a half dozen other roles in the young co-op, including membership and volunteer-outreach coordinator, and product formulator. She wasn’t a bad farmer, either.
Bill and Iginia have known each other for a quarter century. Imagine your social engineering task, if you’re the social director for a newly formed co-op comprising geographically scattered farmers feeding a fiber-processing facility.
“Bill is a genius,” Yamie Lucero, the newly inducted FPS member, had once told me. “He can design and execute on a large scale. It’s just not a personality that is geared to consensus thinking. Which is what a cooperative is.”
Right. Cooperation. We start learning to do it in kindergarten. It is, you could say, the core curriculum. And democracy is a core principle of all co-ops. But oh, man, the G-word. Whether one declares Bill a true genius or a sensitive artist whose PTSD bubbles forth every now and then (Iginia characterizes him as a genius, too, as do I), the situation seemed manageable to me.
“So bring on a new member,” I said. “Is that such a big deal?”
For a long moment Iginia said nothing. She just looked at me, and her eyes welled. I was floored by her next words.
“We’re discussing dissolution,” she said. I felt as though I had been punched. “The situation had gotten so bad that we brought in a co-op-focused consultant just the other day. It kind of went well, and kind of not. That’s why I rushed you up here. It’s a critical moment.”
As social director, Iginia was doing her job. Especially because she was one of the members having a critical social issue, she recognized the need for a grown-up in the room for a few days, watching and asking questions. Someone other than herself.
“Much as I’d love to be the benevolent matriarchal dictator, that’s not how it works,” she said, and erupted in her massive, contagious laugh that sent the nearest plants dancing. The consultant’s conclusions, in Iginia’s words, “forced Bill to acknowledge he can be difficult, and forced me to acknowledge that we wouldn’t be here without him.”
The takeaway here is a reminder that every relationship requires constant upkeep. Heck, everyone’s always evolving as individuals. I’m only marginally the same guy who started writing this book. Even as we accept that humans can be hard to get along with, especially in a business environment, I believe farmers deserve some slack. That’s because their work is so important to us all. Sequestering sufficient carbon in increasingly healthy soils is the difference between humanity’s surviving and not. No pressure.
And it’s not as though Bill is a monster to be around 95 percent of the time. Even Iginia says, “His soul is a flower. It’s appropriate that he developed flowers and sweet fruit for years. That’s who he is, at core.”
He’s also teaching a new generation an old way to do business. Work ethic is paramount. Don’t even try to get a FPS member to go out for some live music during harvest.
“What can I do?” I asked there in the greenhouse as we wrapped our private debriefing that evening.
“Be here,” she said. “Do your thing.”
She was referring to the fact that I have a Get Out of Bill’s Wrath Free pass for some reason, and I often use it (like when I play sax at dawn). Yamie and Iginia can’t believe the things I call him on—we recently disagreed on a plant patent issue, for instance. They quietly congratulate me afterwards as though I have just gone the distance with the Champ. This visit, Iginia wanted to me to watch, and when necessary, speak up.
The next morning we sat down with the complete FPS crew (now down to three members, from five) in the same greenhouse, indeed at the same long white trichome-covered table. This is where the workdays were based at this point in the spring: here and in the ethanol-processing garage. In more ways than one, I spent most of that 2-day visit really getting at the root of things with the core FPS team. I did that by working beside them on their crop. Like any start-up, they had no time for anything but an actual day in the life of the FPS. There was no lipstick for this Fat Pig.
Alongside a rotating string of volunteers of all ages working for product (a four-ounce jar of Free Hemp with 1,000 milligrams of organic, farm-to-bottle CBD infused in coconut oil, costs $80), I and the FPS team planted keiki clones just trimmed from bushy mother plants. Bill’s technique for ensuring that the keikis took root was different from Iginia’s, but both styles worked well, and they communicated their suggestions to newbies like me respectfully.
When that task was finished after a couple of hours, we relocated more mature plants to their final, larger pots. These would be their homes until they landed in someone’s transplanting machine or were hand-planted. There’s nothing like hours-long stretches doing satisfying if repetitive work in an oxygen-rich, sauna-moist, plant-energy-dominated environment to get folks really talking. Yamie and Iginia quickly got on to the deep topics. Bill’s emotions, as always, were conveyed in code.
Grief, too, played a role in the outpouring. Since my last visit, the co-op had lost the architect of its anti-marketing strategy and my good friend John Long to cancer. A fifth early member, 28-year-old Gavin Lim, had split, needing a BFB (Break from Bill). His membership was bought out by the remaining members, though he returns to help out periodically.
When the work allowed, we really talked. Hemp clone work and ethanol processing permit fairly regular bursts of chatting, stretching, and jamming between bouts of concentration. My friends filled me in on bottom-line and social issues while we restocked flats of clones beside the transplanting tables, or while a few of us dashed off to the garage when the timer sounded to indicate it was time for the next stage in the ethanol processing cycle (stirring the flower material, for instance).
At first, I was surprised to learn that most of the FPS’s current challenges were the same ones that every plan B hemp enterprise was facing. It could fairly be described as routine turmoil. The classic, harrowing life of an entrepreneurial venture. I’d seen it before. Indeed, I was living it. They’d made it this far. If it hadn’t been for Iginia’s heads-up the previous night, I wouldn’t have been worried.
The co-op’s new bankers, for instance, visited the FPS farm on my second afternoon, meaning the ranch house had to be cleaned up. In the plant realm, just six weeks earlier, a sudden infestation of spider mites had decimated 86 of the co-op’s 90 prized mother plants, right when they needed to fill thousands of clone orders.
There was the usual debate among the co-op’s members about how to best price their core value-added product, Free Hemp. And, of course, there was the normal suspected rip-off of co-op genetics by a former collaborator: Bill’s near fisticuffs with the dude was averted by last-minute Iginia diplomacy. All par for the course so far. Tractor-maintenance issues also reared their noisy heads. Just because you’re a righteous, organic co-op doesn’t mean FLOATER goes away. It was spring. The co-op’s outdoor fields had to be prepared.
Most interesting to me was that I had arrived at a good time for learning about alcohol processing—literally the inner workings of the cold ethanol model. These were the folks who taught me how to decarb. So I figured they’d be promising candidates to demonstrate ideal models of reverse moonshining, which is how I think of ethanol extraction.
On the second morning of the visit, Bill met with a retired Colorado State University materials engineer, now an FPS neighbor, to see if they could rethink ethanol extraction. Specifically, Bill was seeking a finer mesh netting in which to contain the co-op’s hemp flower harvest within the machinery’s hopper. One that could be more easily removed and cleaned between processing runs.
“Most ethanol setups have a wide cage inside that gets immediately clogged with flower material and is hard to get at,” he explained to me while I looked, slack-jawed, at the CAD designs he and the engineer-neighbor were poring over. “I want to see if we can find the right gauge bags to hold our [hemp] flower, which we can remove and wash every processing cycle.” Just Bill revolutionizing another industry. Again, nothing new here.
It wasn’t until lunchtime that I witnessed any evidence of the current crisis, an eruption between Iginia and Bill surrounding the consultant’s conclusions. Bill thought, as many of us would, that the outlay of nonfarm expenses for a conclusion that questioned his behavior was a waste of money. Channeling her study of the Mondregon model, Iginia stood her ground, maintaining that a new cat herder had been called for. I slipped away to let them converse at high volume while I played saxophone in the greenhouse.
Later that evening, we sliced Bill’s birthday cake in the farmhouse kitchen where, even during lean times, the FPS team had fed me and countless volunteers hundreds of meals, as though the pigs were already fat. If things weren’t overly festive, they had calmed down once the sun had set. I like to think that the appearance of the alto horn during the afternoon had helped. I asked the co-op’s brain trust if the mission was as clear as it had been when they launched the co-op in August 2014.
On this there was no debate. Bill’s mantra never changes. “You know the answer to that,” he said, adding a scoop of à la mode to his slice. “We’ve achieved our goals when every organic hemp farmer in the state of Colorado is receiving 100 percent of the retail dollar from their crop after expenses.”
“That’s why we started paying farmers from first dollars in,” Iginia said. “That’s why we exist.”
That’s also remarkably close to plan A for this enterprise. Will the Fat Pig Society stay together long enough to achieve its goals? Even its members are divided on that question. As I pulled away at the end of that visit, Iginia again left me with the impression that she was near her limit; that the FPS experiment would be on the brink of ending were it not for everyone’s commitment to its mission.
“Shared clothing we could face,” she said. “Now we’ll see if we can resolve the human issues.”
Yamie, by contrast, believed the FPS was “over the hump” and ready for its planned next stages.
“I think we’re hearing one another,” he told me as we transplanted the final plants before I bugged out, a little shaken, and headed home to my family.
For his part, during our interactions, Bill spoke of nothing but plants, co-op finances, and processing engineering. That is, except for one moment, when he was giving me a maintenance lesson out by the ethanol refrigeration unit, which needed some kind of adjustment.
He said, “Man, this wasn’t supposed to eat up half my day.” And I said, “Good thing you’ve got such a strong core team here—Yamie can handle the processing run and the volunteers in the greenhouse while Iginia entertains the bankers.”
Bill set down the rag he was using to work a tight valve, looked at me over his slipping glasses, smiled slightly, and said, “Yeah we’ve been at this a long time.” That’s Bill-speak for “I love these people and don’t know what I would do without ’em.”
I remain worried about the Fat Pig Society and its members, but overall confident in the entity’s endurance. For one thing, the core members are united on another key point beyond the core mission. And that is firm belief that the mission is best executed under the cooperative model. For us co-op idealists, the message might be to enter with our eyes open. It could be after we clear a few hurdles that things get real.
If the Fat Pig Society is an accurate model, a co-op achieves success through a combination of relentless work and good karma. The FPS bread and butter is a $10,000-per-month (and growing) crude order from a pet food CBD outfit called Suzie’s CBD Treats, whose product FPS helped formulate.
“This saved us,” Iginia told me as we ate Bill’s birthday cake, our fingers still fragrant and sticky from the day’s work even after showers.
As with other early FPS angels, Suzie’s CBD Treats’ founder Richard Squire, who had previously founded and retired from the successful Breckenridge Brewery, saw the importance of the farmer-enriching FPS mission. Most people do once they spend a half hour on the co-op’s 10-acre farm parcel just outside downtown Fort Collins.
“We helped Richard with some health issues,” Iginia said, which included a since-shed opiate prescription resulting from a back injury. “And then he came out of retirement to work with us. It was win-win. When you’re not obsessed with immediate profit, you can operate largely on belief in your mission.”
This is not the only time that karma has buoyed the FPS. Back in 2016, a jar of Free Hemp improved the quality of life of a couple’s son—the husband was a food safety consultant and the wife was a food safety lab scientist. Together they helped the FPS design its commercial kitchen operating procedure.
“That was ten thousand dollars’ worth of consulting, gratis,” Iginia said. “In Venezuela we have a saying: ‘One hand washes the other, and together they wash the face.’ It’s cooperation like that that keeps a fledgling co-op alive.”
And it all came from appreciation, not hostile takeovers. You can read the relief spreading across Iginia’s face at moments like this. This is a woman who considers bobsledders coddled wimps—not a fragile gal. But even as she worries if the co-op can transcend its current personnel crisis, she relishes the achievements on the entrepreneurial side. We both thought revenue would be the hard part for the FPS. Let’s see that taught in biz school: karma investing.
As a co-op, the FPS can’t accept investment in exchange for shares of the enterprise, but it can accept in-kind services like the commercial kitchen consultation, as well as loans and friendly real estate exchanges. The result of good work combined with this kind of angel support is that phase two of the FPS—launching the producer cooperative with the aim of including more farmer-members—is slated for mid-2020.4 I watched Iginia in her office preparing to post the required notices for the expansion, per Colorado co-op rules. This was a good sign. Moving forward with plans despite some internal issues.
“My work lately is all about increasing efficiency,” Bill had told me as we were rooting keikis. “How do we harvest and process one hundred pounds of flower in five hours? What do we charge for that?”
He’s thinking ahead. If the FPS is ready with a game plan and membership increases as a result, so does the bottom line for farmers.
To demonstrate how this is so, Bill ran the numbers for me. “The farmer can now process four thousand pounds wet, per acre, with our genetics. That’s two tons, which in drying and processing goes down to half a ton, and then again to ten percent of that for a crude of fifty pounds.”
The next bit of math mandates deciding how much of that crude goes to wholesale and white labeling, and how much into Free Hemp and the rest of the expanding FPS value-added product line. CBD crude, as of this writing, is worth about $2,500 per kilo, or $1,130 per pound. Producing those 50 pounds of crude per acre means a 2019 Fat Pig Society farmer’s crop is potentially worth, before any value-added product, $56,500 per acre. That’s assuming current wholesale prices hold, which as we’ve been screaming is a big assumption, though less so for organic product.
Not too shabby. Especially at 5 or 20 acres for farmers like the McDonoughs. The clone-selling side of the FPS business is also a reliable source of cash flow. And, Iginia told me, they’re sticking with their long-standing anti-marketing policy for Free Hemp; it’s only retailed by co-ops.
“And we still prefer to provide folks with a case, to distribute to their friends and those in need of high levels of bioavailable CBD,” Iginia told me. I refer high-CBD requests to the FPS all the time.
As Suzie’s CBD Treats’ Squire can attest, lives have been improved by the FPS harvest already. That’s not a bad epitaph for a person or enterprise: IMPROVED LIVES. For the long-term, though, none of this matters unless the core social issues are resolved. I’m hoping the FPS members’ grit, combined with the support of angels and cheerleaders, can see the co-op through these hard times. I’m far from the only one who recognizes the stakes are too high for the enterprise to quit on the cusp of success. The FPS is a role model for the farmer-first renaissance. And boy, when it comes to both production and especially marketing, the members sure are following Dolly’s advice to do things “different.”
Different for now. I can’t wait for the Fat Pig Society model to become mainstream. When it does, when a group of farmers and processors is willing to think beyond current quarter profits and into long-term prosperity, I bet it will compete with and even outperform the old Big Ag model. Maybe we really can have Main Streets again.
SO YOU WANT TO BE A HEMP FARMER
Before you leap into the hemp party, there’s one more reality to keep in mind. The effort to establish independent regenerative hemp farming as the industry standard overlaps fortuitously with market demand across the consumer landscape for non-mass-produced, non-ultra-pasteurized, non-chemically soaked products. That means millions of customers are looking for a reason to buy a craft product. More and more shoppers are becoming label readers. They’re on to the junk options.
The very word hemp carries with it, in the words of our favorite researchers Ernest Small and David Marcus, “products associated with environmentally friendly, sustainable production.”5 In other words, hemp is already a healthy brand. This is priceless free marketing for regenerative entrepreneurs. You want your brand to enter the arena with a positive reputation. You don’t want to work uphill to fix a problem. As you would if you were hawking, say, asbestos. Here we see justification for what otherwise might seem the hopelessly idealistic attempt to take a crack at solving humanity’s biggest problems while making a living. Once you realize that hemp is not just your product but a lifestyle brand, you’ll be off and running in the biomaterials renaissance.
Whatever your story, tell it right on your bottle or accompanying literature. “I cultivate hemp because …” Hopefully, your early-adopting base will digest the story behind their purchase rather than focus solely on the price tag. This enterprise backstory is what Michael Pollan calls “Supermarket Pastoral.” You know, the way you think the chickens who laid your free-range eggs are getting massages and profit sharing.
Your Supermarket Pastoral might be a strange cannabinoid ratio you stumbled upon in the feral ditch weed that has grown in your Nebraska yard for generations. It might be infusing your product with your grandmother’s favorite essential oil. Maybe it’s the low number of carbon miles6 embedded in your product, or the large number of farming families your enterprise supports in style.
Better still, brand the fact that you are the farmer. A key part of the game plan involves educating buyers about how important regenerative farming is to everyone’s well-being in this new abnormal of climate chaos. Educating customers is key, because our entry prices might have to be a bit higher than bottles of McCBD. Economists call this the first-to-market principle. I call it the non-poison surcharge. The hope is that it goes away when regenerative becomes the norm.
My own Supermarket Pastoral messaging approach is including the phrase “harvested without petroleum”7 on the product label. Plus, I do this messaging on plant-based labels backed with the aforementioned nontoxic stickum. And I’m paying for ’em, let me tell you—nearly 50 cents per label at this stage of the game. Worth it, though, for Earth and marketing reasons. It’s generally a clever move to get creative with (and then shout about) the beneficial practices embedded in your very modus operandi. In fact, the best part about regenerative practices (after saving humanity, I mean) is that they feed your bottom line.
If your Supermarket Pastoral elevator pitch is genuine and you execute it effectively enough to make a sale, you’re likely to make it again. Once they experience how awesome your cereal, tincture, hair conditioner, or dog treat is, your now-loyal customers will see that actually they are not paying more. They are paying for something different. And better. Suddenly they find they’re not even mere customers. With their purchase, they’re investing in the species’ future. With their awareness that, as Wild Bill says, farming is going to save us, they’ve become an active part of the regenerative economic pipeline. They are building their own communities.