“On a purely economic viewpoint, when you’re buying local food, you’re keeping money, power, energy, and autonomy within your contained system. Instead of buying a bag of potatoes from who-knows-where, where that money is then taken out of your local community and put into a larger operation’s funds who -- they don’t care about your community, they like your money and it helps them do what they wanna do, but they’re not reinvesting it. When you buy a bag of potatoes from PrairiErth, that money goes towards paying people who live here, that money goes towards furthering the farm operation so they can produce more for more community members at a more affordable price. I think the longer the co-op exists and the more people who shop here, the more affordable everything becomes because these people have more assets to become more efficient so they can lower the prices of their local goods as their efficiency increases. So it’s a win-win, I mean, you buy those potatoes and all $4 you spend on that bag goes right back into [the local community] -- none of that leaves here.
So that, just on an economic just purely numbers level, you’re already seeing a huge increase in your impact. But then when you start thinking of it in a more esoteric way, the work that was put into raising those potatoes, that’s people’s livelihood. They’re out there every day with their hands in the soil and they’re doing it out of a place of love cuz they really believe in local food, they believe in farming and producing for their community, and when you eat that potato, it doesn’t taste like a product; it tastes like food. It was grown to sustain you; it wasn’t grown to be sold. These people want to make money but that’s ultimately not why they’re doing what they’re doing -- if they only wanted to make money, they wouldn’t be farmers. They’re doing it because they value the land, they value the food, and they wanna produce for their community. And when you eat food with that mindset attached to it, I really believe that it nurtures your body better, that your body’s better able to receive from it because it’s not a product, it’s food. It changes it from a commodity to food and that’s a huge difference.”