a road to plenty
steps towards regenerative food webs
If you want to play with plenty today, you can download a prerelease here!
Our aim at darksoil is to grow deeper richer soil, humus-in-the-ground-literal soil and the space-between-us social soil. Focusing our efforts on food webs does both. So we’re making a small, simple, local food system app called plenty.
How did we get here?
Everyone has an interest in getting fed well. Our relationships to food are a fundamental part of our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our homes. Food is how we live, who we are, and what we do.
In a very real way, the choices we collectively make with food either contribute to tearing the already ravaged ecologies of our planet apart, or, to helping them heal.
So how do we do that? How do we move towards having our patterns of eating heal the biosphere? How do we make it easy for many, many more people to choose “heal”?
I (Viktor) have been working with these questions for about a decade now. Approaching them from different angles. Co-founding a platform for direct sales between farmers and consumers, leading a research project on food coops in Sweden, starting and running a microgreens business, becoming a mushroom farmer, and of course, darkening the soil in my garden at home.
I still don’t have sufficient answers, but some good new experiments to run.
Food + collectives
I want to share about the experiments I am most excited about and what we’re doing and how we’re using darksoil to support them.
I spent a year researching the different forms and structures of food cooperatives in Sweden with a project called Foodshift. The research included food hubs, buyers clubs, and food coops. We looked at how they work and what they need.
The research became the basis of a handbook we made for starting food coops. There are a lot of variations to these models that correspond to the different economic, temporal and spatial needs of groups. Some of the important leverage points for food systems we saw in these models were:
Food coops can reduce the need for middle-men in the supply chain to get people a lower price for their food than retail, while getting a higher price for farmers than wholesale.
Food coops can reduce the administrative burden of farmers tending to marketing and selling their goods and support farmers in spending more time tending their land and their harvests.
Food coops provide farmers with a time and money saving wholesale process while getting them close to retail prices by handling the customer demands and through bulk order processing
Food coops work because people want to spend time meeting their own and each other’s needs together doing things that are important. Doing this work is deeply meaningful and can be joyful and connective.
With all of this knowledge we, in my home village of Röstånga, decided to start purchasing food together. To do this, we do what most experiments do, we made a really good spreadsheet. With our spreadsheet and a couple shelves in my coworking space to receive/retrieve the food, we registered a cooperative and got going.
Spreadsheets work for us right now, but over time the needs of the system create some strain on the group, and required people to fill roles like:
adding, updating, and maintaining constantly shifting producer and product information
manually tracking, processing, and paying invoices
playing bill collector (which not many in a community wants to do)
handling memberships and member information
consistently coordinating time sensitive communications
Our group is made up of people that want to use their time to make sure they get the food they want and support farmers they like while being in community.
People are happy to put energy into the group, but some of the activities are less fun than others and it is usually a subset of people that are willing and comfortable taking on things like admin, bookkeeping and emailing. The gap between aspirational activities and administrative ones is why a lot of coops fail.
If we can simplify, reduce and where possible, eliminate the work that needs to be done to keep things working well and smoothly, then people’s energy can flow into more generative things. We recently asked our members what they would like to spend their time on for the group and it was things like collectively making fermentations, jams, musts, building an earthen cellar, holding family events, etc.
First implementation
The first iteration of plenty is made to fit precisely into the process that is already in place in the buyers club we have going in my home village, we want to make sure we really start where the group is currently at and then we iterate the software together from that place.
The current process is basically:
Every month, someone needs to put together a spreadsheet with the suppliers and get everyone responsible to update the products we buy
Everyone enters the quantities they want (making sure not to mess with other peoples columns) for each of the products
When we decide that an order is closed, different people take collected orders to the producers and order the products
Each producer has a person that is receiving the products, checking the quantities and notifying the group that everything is there and sorting the products for the members.
The same person is also receiving the invoices from the producers and sending them to the person handling payment and bookkeeping
Someone keeps communicating for payments to be made until everyone has paid
This is all currently done with lots of manual handling on both the communications side as well as the spreadsheet and admin tasks. These are the things that the first version of plenty will be built to handle.
Our process is similar enough to most of the food coops we are in contact with here in Sweden for them to be able to use it straight away or require slight adaptation for it to fit for them.
A larger vision
It is our view at darksoil that food coops are one of the most viable organizations to:
get farmers* paid well for their food
require less admin hours from farmers
enable buyers* to get the food they want
enable buyers to get the food they want for less money
*who care about health, soil, ecological impact, local food systems
In our research and interactions with lots of farmers and groups in Sweden, it is clear that most food coops want better tooling.
We see plenty as a simple tool to support the beginnings of cooperative regional networks of producers and food coops.
Another beautiful possibility that comes with this software, especially by delivering it inside other group coherence containers like the Weave, is in making it easy for a church congregation, school, sports association or library to facilitate collective purchasing of food.
There are many more beautiful possibilities, but, we’re going to stop ourselves from listing them out and ask that you please do so in the comments, because they’re way more fun to play with in conversation.
Dive deeper
If you want more, we discussed this and many more adjacent subjects on the Doomer Optimism podcast:
Find out more about us at darksoil.studio and if you want to support the plenty project you can do so here.
Written and edited by Viktor Zaunders and Eric Bear