Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Hello, friends, and welcome back again to another episode of Conservation Stories. This is a podcast hosted by the Sand Hill Area Research association, like we like to call Sarah. And on this episode, we're going to be talking to the OG of Conservation Community Service. I don't even know. Nonprofit Everything for the Texas High Plains. And that is Daryl Birkenfield. And, Daryl, I have to tell you that, you know, you and I have not known each other very long, but I cannot tell you how many people have said, you need to meet Daryl. You need to meet and. And always.
He is such a good man. You know, you have such a stellar reputation for not just your commitment to our region, but just as a human being. And that speaks really highly of you, and I'm so thankful that you are joining us today.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Well, you're welcome.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: I want to start off by just asking you to give us a little background on. On you. I. From what I understand, you grew up in the Nazareth area, and is that correct?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: So how did you come back home and give me your story? Give us your story.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: All right. My name is Darryl Birkenfeld. I grew up in Nazareth, Texas, east of Nazareth, a little bit on a diversified family farm.
I'm from a family of 12, so there are a number of us because we had a lot of things to do. It was a section of land only, but we had a 60 to 100 cow family dairy for 36 years. So that was during my growing up. And. But all the. At least all the silage and things came from that section of land. Maybe not all the hay. My dad had trucking business, too, for hauling cattle.
Did all kinds of things because you never.
Eight brothers and four sisters. So everybody went to work for the family when they graduated high school except me.
Well, the last ones probably didn't, but anyway, the first ones, yeah, they were needed for farming or running the other operations. So I still have a number of siblings, well, six siblings here in Nazareth.
The majority of them live within 40 miles. Yeah, so.
But I wasn't really, really cut out for, you know, the mechanical part of farming. I wasn't good at it. So I was interested in other things and went to pursue those, went to college, and then I went to the seminary because I felt the calling for. For ministry. So that was great. I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to College of Santa Fe and graduated there. And then I went to Europe for four years for graduate studies. And that was great because my great grandfather is from Germany. And so it was a chance to go back and connect to people who didn't speak English. And that happened because someone in Nazareth still could read and write in German. So it made a contact and that was great. And I think while I was over there, I remember especially having a court in moral theology by this Jesuit, young Jesuit professor who was just back from California where he had studied and he was imbued with all these great ideas. And it was a class that really influenced me because I realized, okay, I should write my master's thesis on what's happening in American agriculture. And I hadn't really thought about that before and that became a big thing for me. And I wrote a paper and I really was, you know, I think that's when I found my calling. So when I came back, that's what I wanted to work on.
So I was a parish priest in the Diocese of Amarillo, but I also had this other work that was a rural life director for the diocese. But that got me into starting a conference in 1990.
We called it a Rural Urban Partnership Conference, some fancy name, but it grew into the Southern Plains Conference. And it went on every year for 23 years.
So that was a really fun experience. And I think it had an impact on me because while I was pastoring mostly in Spanish speaking parishes, I also had this feeling of we need to do something about having sustainable communities and sustainable agriculture. So I got to get associated with different people who would come to speak at these conferences.
And that all had an impact on me, I think. In 19, maybe 90, I went to a holistic resource management training in Amarillo for five days. I would drive every day from Hereford. And that was done by Alan Savory.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: So, yeah, so I was like right in the thick of this thing. And of course I tried to get my brothers to look into this and.
But they were doing their own things too, like had gotten into making compost. And at one point they were one of the largest organic cotton producers in the Texas. Organic cotton producers.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Really?
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Yes, yes. So that was a. Interesting time. And so it was, it was really great to have that kind of outreach. A couple of summers in the early 90s, organized a sustainable ag tour and we did that in Nazareth and kind of an offshoot of the conference. So those are the things that motivated me to want to go and get a doctoral studies to, to work on my PhD. And that all worked fine because the bishop was really in favor of that. The bishop at the time. But of course, bishops change and the next one was not so. But. But that also got me thinking about, well, what what am I really being called to? And that's when I decided I needed to leave priestly ministry, active ministry, and go a different route. And that was in 2002. And when I left, I knew I could do something. I just didn't know. I didn't know what it was going to be. And right about that time, some people I knew from earlier years, they were working on a thing called. Which they called Ogallala Commons. It was an idea. It was no organization, no nothing. So they contacted me in the summer of 2002 and said, hey, we're having this, our third conference. Would you like to organize it? We'll, you know, contract with you to do that. And I said, well, sure. Well, that turned out to be really good. And that was in November in Burlington, Colorado. And at the end of it, I said to the director or the person who was with the parent organization, I said, what happens next? He said, well, that's a good question. He said, I have funding for one year, and this could be. This could go forward, and you could do it, but I only have funding for one year, so it's up to you to raise the money after that. So I said, okay, I'll do it. But I had 14 years of running parishes, so I thought I could do it. And that's how it all started. And luckily it came around. Well, and things we're doing now, I had no idea we were going to do that 22 years ago. But one of the things that was in there in the beginning was stewardship of water, stewardship of natural resources. And that was something I always felt strongly about.
But I really learned more as I went away from the place I grew up, from my sense of place. And when I came back, I always went to study or I was interested in learning because I wanted to put things into practice, whether it was holistic management, whether it was sociological models applied to agricultural ethics, I didn't want to teach. I wanted to put things into practice.
Yeah. So that's kind of always been my calling. So with Ogallala Commons, it was building an organization that's never had employees. We've always been contractors. But it's worked well, and it allowed the organization to grow through its infancy to what it's doing now. So now we do three major programs. We do internships or workforce and leadership. We also do rebuilding local food systems, and then, in addition, we do stewarding natural resources.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: I'm just so surprised that we're talking in the 90s, earlier than the 90s, and you were thinking about these things and being exposed to them. And what has that been like to Malcolm Muggeridge, I think, said, you know, for an Englishman to know England, he must leave it. And like you, when you do, you leave and you. You come back, you see things, you know, maybe in a different lot, or you see things that, you know, those of us that have lived in the same place forever, you know, we kind of. Are we over. We overlook things, or there's things that we just don't see. So has that been, you know, difficult for you to come back with these new ideas and some new. Maybe even ideology and beliefs and have seen different signs and different things, to bring those back to your own community and your own family? Has it been hard to have those things received?
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yes, but that's all part of it, I suppose.
To your first point about going away, that was something I didn't really think about, but I was happy to go away, but it was always to come back. I think Ursula Le Guin has a book called Always Coming Home. And that. That that phrase appeals to me. So, like, I loved being in New Mexico. I loved the exposure to different cultures. I loved mountains and flowing rivers. But that always made me want to. Want to come back and appreciate what we have. And I think in the early 90s, when I read Dan Flores's book Caprock Canyonlands, I thought, well, here' someone who doesn't even live here. And he's opened my eyes to the canyons and all the things that I've tried to explore and formed my sense of place. So I've always valued. I think going away is really good in that sense for people. So when I was in Europe, I was really homesick.
I loved all the things there, but I didn't want to live there. I mean, I would look out my window and see all the Audubons and think, wow, is there nothing? I can't see things here. And same with being in California two and a half years. I really, really like that. I love the atmosphere. But it was always to be able to come back and inhabit this place, the Yano Estacado, the flat. The world's flattest mountain.
Yeah. So one of the things, too, is how can we always live here? That's always been part.
How can people continue to live here? That's always been one of my motivations. I think I was in junior high, riding with my dad in the pickup, and he said, I don't know why I would ask him about this, but I think I knew already then the aquifer was being depleted. And I said, I was talking to him about it and I never forget what he said. He just said, well, if the good Lord didn't want us to use it, why would he have put it there? And that kind of is the struggle of the ideas and ideology that needs said is that we all tell ourselves things to get through life. And I think that that was a different time too.
It was a smaller footprint or impact on the aquifer in some way. So different now. And yet it's still the idea that, well, it's there for us to use. But my thing has always been how do we live from the water? How do we live from the resources so that others can live after us and all creatures, all creations. So.
And I was, you know, I think one thing about being abroad and studying different places is I was just imbued with ideas of people that I never would have come into contact with.
That really, that really made me theological ideas, philosophical ideas, and that has really shaped me. So. Yeah, when I know it's difficult for people to see things or accept things that they've never been exposed to, but I've been kind of formed in that too. I tell people, well, I haven't been in the ministry for 22 years, but I still, I'm asking people to do things that they don't want to do.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Yes, I'm still, I'm still asking people.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: To get involved or to go directions or think about things that they may not want to do, you know, right off the bat. So that, that part is never, that part has never changed.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah, you got to have kind of thick skin to be, to be able to, you know, keep up that work for sure.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: And a community of people you can talk to. I mean, I can live here in Nazareth because I, I have people, friends who live around the area, around the country, maybe even around the nation of the world too. That gives that, that keeps me going because.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's really true. And I think, you know, for me, a lot of, A lot of exposure that I've had to these different ideas have come from weird, you know, connections with people that don't live, you know, where we are. And, and then, of course, I've spent this last two years on the, the current cohort with the Texas Agriculture Lifetime Leaders Program. And we've traveled all over the place, including California. And I don't know if you've kept up with the things that are happening there, but, you know, know that there's going to be a lot of small sharehold farmers that are going to go out of business this year because of the regulations, the water regulations, you know, and it's going to really, it's going to have a big impact. And I know even when we were there, they were saying, you know, they felt like they would lose about a million acres. It's, it's so hard. We've had several conversations on podcasts with people about how do we find the middle with middle is the hardest place to find and how do we find it and how do we, you know, keep that balance where, you know, we are protecting our resources but, but also we are committed to the, you know, human flourishing of the people that around us. And I don't remember being, we were in California just you thinking you're so frustrated about these policies and the things that are happening to these, you know, these aren't, these aren't, you know, huge farmers. These are people that have a 70 acre orchard or, you know, and a job in town, you know, and they're these, the ones that are growing this local, the local food that are going to be impacted by this. And you know, but then we went up to the mountains and saw the sequoias and I, you know, I just cried.
They're so magnificent. And I thought, gosh, I guess if I had lived in a place where this was in the driving distance of me, I would, you know, I can see the other side too, you know, and it's such a hard, it's such a fine balance. And I know that a lot of us have been afraid of over regulation and afraid of kind of that slippery slope of going down that road, but yet here we are and we're starting, you know, I know you probably know that we're part of the Applied Lakes Restoration initiative where we're, you know, looking to just bring some landowners into that program for restoration applies. And we're calling the campaign tomorrow's water is your legacy. Because we, you know, we really feel like there's, it's our generation, that the people that are here now, that there's not going to be any question about whether we know or not what's there. Whether we know or not, if it's going to be gone, it's, it's going to be gone or we're going to have something there that's going to be our legacy.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: The one thing, one thing I've gotten out of, you know, by studying in Europe and living there for four years, it's a lot older than here. And I think that's really something that we who live here lose sight of.
It's very. It's very young. What we brought to this land is very young, just a little over a century old. And in California, the same thing. It's, It's. There's a lot that went on before what, what is there now? And I think one thing that we, you know, it's easy to look and say, well, you know, we don't want to be like California or Colorado. Those things are hard to choose. Or what's going to be here next. I mean, that's one thing always 25 years ago. What' starts in California, spreads across the country, because that, that's so, you know, and it happens here, too. And what, what. What I like about the work of Ogallala Commons is to hold up a word that most people have never heard, and yet it's in, it's in our. It's in our DNA, and that is the commons that we are very big on our property rights and our individuality, but everything we have is from the common good and from the Commonwealth. And we might say, well, well, we don't like all the regulation, and yet we find ourselves. We find that what is common is being, is being taken, is being, is being usurped, is being extracted before any. Before the generations that come will ever have a chance to. So that's. It's a. It is a balance, like you said. But I think that's one of the perspectives I've really been thankful for and, And I'm happy to try to bring into discussion and lay before people, because you don't have to go back very far. And we were, you know, we came from those places, our forebearers, where they had to leave because the commons had been enclosed in England and in other places. And it's like, well, there's nothing left for us. We have to go someplace else. But every place is a commons, and you have to learn how to hold things in common, how to.
How do we generate so that there is.
So there's life and not.
And not death.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's so. I don't, you know, we're such a.
To even survive in this area. You know, it's a gritty determination, you know, that sticks it out and that court, the coordinating strength, you know, and the coordinating weakness. Like, we're also, you know, stubborn and unchanging. And, you know, how we, you know, I think we. We walk a fine line where we want to. We want to bring people into the conversations. And I think that's, you Know, the thing that has been really been important to us in the podcast is to like, we can have different opinions and we can find a place to, you know, meet and, and makes the work into your point. Common, common ground, you know, we can find that and we should be looking for it. We should be looking for ways, you know, to do that. And it is interesting to me, you know, that we are such a, you know, I would think that most of the people in our culture would say, you know, that we believe, you know, in the golden rule. But, you know, how do we, how, how is that playing out in reality, in the choices that we're making, you know, that we, you know, are doing to others what we want them to do to us? You know, like we were, we were gifted and we were, you know, left. There was water left for us, you know, and now how do we do to, you know, the next generation what was done for us? You know, and I hate to even say, but I mean, I've heard, you know, people say we might as well use it now because somebody else is going to use it if we don't.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And that to me is an admonition of death winds instead of life. I mean, once you really dig down to it. So that's what I like about Playa's artillery is that they're so under, undervalued, underrated, and yet they're the lungs of the, of the Yano of the southern high plains. I mean they, they're less than 2% of the landscape, the total landscape, and yet they're the keystone. And instead of, instead of taking, they give.
But we, we, they don't fit our paradigm of what's valuable, what's profitable. So they get driven over, farmed through, and yet, so then we lose that opportunity or that, that gift of how the aquifer does, can be recharged. Well, we say, well, it doesn't matter, it's not fast enough. It doesn't fit our paradigm of what we need. So they're not that valuable. And it's, and we don't take a long term view either, which is, oh, well, okay, it doesn't do it in 10 years. No, it's, it's, it's 100 year. It's 100 year game. But, but it does, you don't have to wait 100 years for the effects. The effects start, start immediately.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Yes. And I know that's one of the things that we saw when we were in Kansas the week before your water conference in Amarillo. There was one In Kansas, we were there. And that was one of the things that, you know, shocked us about. You know, of course they have different, they have different laws there. And so they've done, you know, some required reduction in agricultural irrigation, 20, 25% in some areas. And in those areas of water levels, the water tables come up 35%, which has meant for them that some infrastructure in particular. There was, there was infrastructure there. These folks were talking about we were going to leave. You know, we started monitoring the wells to see like, if this, if this doesn't help, then we're not going to, we're not going to invest, we're going to go rebuild somewhere else. And they're staying because it did work, you know, but also there's been a real collective, you know, effort to help farmers on the, you know, with their bottom line, to make certain that, you know, because if you don't have, you don't have ag, you don't need water there, you don't have anybody living in rural Kansas, you know, so you gotta have, you gotta find a way to maintain both of those things, you know, So I just love that, love that. Well, so tell us some about, tell some about your internship and what you're doing there and then the local food also, because that's something we've had several conversations on podcast here about people that are really interested in that in the Lubbock area. And I love to see we, we talk a lot about how it seems like Amarillo is way ahead of us on thinking through some of these things and valuing some of these, the efforts to maybe keep things rolling a little bit better. So tell us what you guys have been doing on first on internships and then we'll talk about food.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Okay. Well, the whole thing with internships wasn't something I knew anything about, I mean, formally, but we were doing work with youth in entrepreneurship, doing like one day programs to engage youth and to give them a message that they hadn't heard, which was, if you want, you can come back to this place and we'd like you to come back and here's some ways you could, which was a very different message than or than they had been hearing. And so from that, a young girl then who had gotten involved as a sophomore up in Rawlins County, Kansas, the northwest corner, she said to us when she was graduating high school, can I intern for Ogallala Commons? And I was like, yes, but what is that?
We figured something out, put something together for her and for another graduating senior from Harvard. And those were our first two interns in 2007, and it went okay. And they, they were paid internships, they got a stipend. We were not an employer. It was a work experience situation. So they went off to college. But the impact on our board was like, this was an aha moment. It was like, wow.
So we have dozens of people and any young people in any county, and older people too, who are looking for work experience. And what if they could get that work experience in our communities? And what if they could earn a stipend? And then most important, for the mission of Ogallala Commons, what if they could learn about ways they could come back if they want to?
So that was really the change and changed the whole thing. After the next year we had five interns. The third year we had 16. The fourth year we had 32. And it's now we have 60 to 70 interns every year. So this is going to be our 18th year. And so what it has done is again, first of all, helped a lot of, at this point, 800 different internships for people to young people, and again, some older adults to find out that they could create a pathway, a career pathway that would lead back to their communities. And one step in that was an internship, a structured internship. So we don't determine who, what they do for the internship. That's up to the intern and to the partners, the community partners who accept them. But we have the structure, so a way for applications to be made, a way for. We have an orientation retreat. We have electronic digital process. They can build some products, write some blogs, put up some information, get stipends based on the hours they turn in and so on.
So that's what we have built. And it's been something we could use in Texas, Panhandle, South Plains, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Nebraska. So I think it's helped, really helped a lot of small communities, especially there's been some from Texas Tech and West Texas A and M and so on. But a lot of communities who would never have interns have now had a chance to do that. So our biggest example on this would be Switzer county, county seat of Tulia. They have done it for 15 years consecutively. They've never missed a year. They started with one intern in 2009, and now all these years later, they have had 70 internships in that county through our program. And they've done it in high school, They've been college age. There's been a few older adults, and it's been great. They have to raise about $12,000 or so to create these internships for four or five, we get a little support from Capital Farm Credit, but the county commissioners, it's a line item in the budget. It's the only.
But the hospital, any number of businesses, some of the feed yards. So it's been really great. If you're in high school and you do an internship through our program and in Swisher county, you're probably going to go to the pharmacy one week, you'll go to chamber of commerce one week you'll work on the Swisher county picnic because, and, but at the end of it, you'll come out with 100 or 200 hours of experience and you'll say, wow, there's a lot more going on in my community than I thought. And I, and I grew and I grew up here. That's what they'll say. Because you just don't, you just don't know. I mean, you, you can be born in all of our towns and grow up and go to school and graduate and never really know what's, what's going on economically, social capital, economically, and so on. So an internship allows a person to get to know what's going on, to, to be involved in it in the way they haven't been and then to start to build their network, to get to know leaders in the community or other people who mentor them. And then that's so important because they're career trajectory will be influenced by that because we've had a number of them. At the end, they'll say, okay, that was something. And we'll say, well, maybe you should do it. Maybe you could do another one. Oh, okay. And then their circle of professional network, it just grows and their, their vision for what they could do in their life expands as well. So today in Swisher county, there's, there's 12, at least 12, maybe 14 people who are back living in Swisher county after these internships. And a skeptic would say, well, you know, they were going to come back anyway.
Could be, yes, for some. But we'd like to think, and we have reason to believe that they are more attuned to what needs to be done to make the community vibrant and that they're better connected.
So one's a farmer, one's a banker, one's a real estate investor. So it's just a really interesting mix of people. And I think the county commissioners get this and the county judge does. So that helps them keep an item.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: This is one example. I mean, we've had different and then here's another little outcome of it. After all these years, 22 years for myself, and I'm no longer the executive director. That ended after 20 years. I'm deputy director now. But everybody on OC staff, and we have. We have seven.
The five of those are. They were interns at one time.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Wow. I don't. I just. I mean, my mind is just blown because I'm thinking about, you know, the. The ag leadership program that I'm in right now is really so much about that. It's about, like, grooming people in the ag community, Texans in the ag community, to step into leadership roles, you know, like, really to see, you know, expose them to every area and see in this. That's exactly. So I really connect with what you're saying. And why not? Only, yes, some of those people may have come back anyway, but they have come back way better prepared and way better aware.
You know, you. You have not just created jobs for people to come back to, you know, for them to be aware of those jobs, but you've. You've actually created the leaders is what you've done for those. That community. That's amazing.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really kind of one of our little taglines. So we're working on our mission statement right now with the board, but it's been developing leaders for that help human and natural communities thrive. That's kind of one of our little taglines. So, yeah, that's. That's been the part that's been really fulfilling for me, and I didn't really know that was going to happen in 2003 when I started. But that's what's one of the things that's grown up along the way is the internship program and this whole effort at workforce and leadership. So that's one area. And then. Did you want to know?
[00:31:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So one more question about. One more question about the internship. So let's just say that, you know, someone from one of our, you know, smaller towns is thinking, this is something I want to start. How can we do this? What. Where would they. Would they just go to your website?
[00:31:44] Speaker B: Yes.
Right. And contact. Does just contact the organization through. Where it says contact. They could contact me. I would love to connect with them.
So, yes, that's one way. We're always looking for new partners, I guess, kind of. Our. One of our latest outreaches is in the Permian Basin to Martin county, and that's. That started with.
We did a local food summit there, and I got introduced to somebody at Martin County Convent, which is a 1884 Plaza. It's a really beautiful historic asset in Stanton, Texas. And I said, okay, yeah, that sounds good. We should try this. So they did one intern and now we're about to go to the schools next year, both the schools in the county and do what we call a Commonwealth Academy, which is a three hour program where we take students through understanding of those 12 key assets that every community has. And then we go out and look at a couple of businesses in town and then we talk about next steps. So, you know, that's how it wouldn't have worked as well in Midland, but it works really good in Martin County.
[00:32:51] Speaker A: That's great. Yes.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Real communities. Yes.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: That's just, I mean, I just, you know, I grew up in, in Brownfield, one of those, you know, rural communities we're talking about. And, and you know, I just, every time I go there, I just, my heart aches for, you know, what's left. And, and how do we, how do we help, you know, rebuild?
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Exactly. And that, that's really what started Ogala Commons is a small group of people coming together and saying if we don't work collectively together on these things, we're just going to continue to go down. And it won't be something that can be solved quickly. It will take 20 to 40 years.
And so that's kind of the long term approach. But one of the things that impressed me early on was you've got to have engagement.
Because everybody looks around, says, oh, it's terrible what's happening to our community, but we don't know what to do about it and we don't feel like it's something we should do. And the one, the one way that youth are impacted is that's a community responsibility. It's our responsibility to engage our youth if we want them to come back. Because mostly what they've heard is there is no future for you here. You need to go elsewhere.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: So we've spent the last 18 years building, we call it, we used to call it youth engagement, but it still is that. But there's a whole suite of activities of outreaches to do that brings about internships and then these other pieces as well. So something that's happening now is there is some state funding, you know, that schools can get through Texas Education Agency for funding internships like Floyd Data has done it ISD and a couple Colorado City Hamlin. So suddenly OC is working in those places because then they get this funding. It's like, oh, okay, hey, what do we do about this internships can you help us? So now we're starting to connect with school districts who, who get that funding and need help creating, yeah, 10 to 15 internships.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: So. Okay, so, yeah, let's shift now and talk some about the food, the local food, because you mentioned that's kind of how you got into Martin county. And I kind of think I know who you're talking about down there.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: Flying Y Farms.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: Flying Wife Farms. That's it. Such a great family. Such a great family.
[00:35:18] Speaker B: Yeah, indeed. So that's what we've discovered. Everywhere is just a little background, I think. Ogallala Commons had our first effort at this in 2005. So I wasn't like two years into it and we went to Lindsborg, Kansas and it was a thing on local food. I hadn't really thought a lot about it. I just grew up like a lot of people did, with my mother, growing all these things in the garden. So we ate a lot of things that were canned or fresh once.
So that was like, okay, that's really what every community had in a way. You might have had 50% or even more of the food coming from within 10 miles of the community, certainly before World War II and then a good ways after. Then of course, things changed. So what changed along the way was our health.
The highly processed food that majority of people are getting access to, it hasn't been good for us. So if we're going to have thriving communities, we don't just need work opportunities, we need nutrient. We need fresh, nutrient dense food. And if you look at all the communities where you say this is, this doesn't look good, things are closing, things are going down. There's a nutritional aspect too. There's a chronic, there's a, there's, there are health indicators. And a lot of them, those health indicators are, are trending downward or trending in a negative direction because of our diet. And it's odd because we live in a land where we're very cognizant of we're feeding the world or that we're, you know, we're producing all this food, but that's not the food that's getting onto our plates in a lot of cases. And so we're, we're going to the store and, and paying the premium for highly processed food that is, that is causing obesity and causing all kinds of other health, health impacts. So going to Lindsborg, they were talking about, wow, okay. We have this moment model in Oklahoma, we call it the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. And all this food comes from these small farms. And it comes into Oklahoma City and Tulsa and every third Thursday of the month. And 90% of the money from that goes back to the producers. It's like, wow. And they've been going on, like, two years already, so that was really inspiring. So we thought, okay, we could do one of these.
Kind of connected to Denver because you need. You need buyers. Right. So we helped. It took us a while, but in 2008, we started the High Plains Food Cooperative, and it's still going. And it's northeast Colorado, northwest Kansas, southwest Oklahoma. I'm sorry, southwest Nebraska.
Small farmers, some meat, vegetables, eggs. And it's kind of similar to that Oklahoma model.
Once every month, all that food was coming in and being divided up into boxes to, you know, to subscribers and to consumer members. And that was working really well and putting some money into people's pockets. Yes. But it was building what we call a regional food shed. And again, when everything is globalized or everything has to come from one place in our country and it has to travel 1500 miles, well, that is what we. That's the dominant model. And that's not going to go away in my lifetime. Totally. But if we can build up our regional and local food sheds as well, that is going to be better. That's going to be good for our communities. That's going to give some options for other kinds of production that people can get into that only have 2 acres and 5 acres. So when you said things are looking like it's really going good in Amarillo, well, Lubbock has the same thing. They have a really good farmers market, especially now out at Woolforth, and it provides opportunities. But what we saw and what we're seeing and what Ogallala Commons is now working on primarily, is first we went out and we do these local food summits to identify who is it producing food that sells directly to the public, to anybody who wants to buy. So just raising up their profiles has been the work of the last five years. So we'll continue doing that. But the next thing we're working on now that's really important is being that aggregator, that middle component. So, like, okay, you want schools to have especially small rural schools to have fresh produce and local regional needs. Somebody's got to be the aggregator. Somebody's got to create the food hub. That's what we're doing now. And it's slow work, but it's being helped. In other states that have different policies than Texas, like Colorado, they have a way now it's state law that every school district gets A certain amount of money, and it's not a small amount. Now, it's pretty good to buy local food, but guess what? The local food is 300 miles in a radius. So if you're in southeast Colorado, well, guess what's within 300 miles, the good part of the Texas Panhandle.
So basically with that, we're able to start building a food hub in Raton, New Mexico, that can service southeast Colorado and northeast New Mexico, because New Mexico also has some states policies that are, you know, that are favorable to this. So. But we're able to connect some people in north Panhandle to that.
We're going 10 acres of this or that kind of thing. So that is really important. And we have, we have something that we we should hear by the end of the month. If that gets funded by an Amarillo, then we can begin to build that kind of food hub in the Panhandle. And hopefully then, you know, just. But that's, that's what's got to happen to a place that can aggregate and hold and do some forward contracts and say to the school, no, you're not going to be able to get this from Cisco Truck, but here's another way you can get it. And you're, you're small enough. And this is, this is price competitive. And this is, and this is really good. And then doing the same thing with senior program, senior meal programs.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Oh, goodness. Oh, my goodness.
[00:41:40] Speaker B: Yeah, because they'll, they'll all say, well, you know, I'd like, I'd love to buy some local stuff, but I don't. Where'd I go? So that's where, you know, we can say, well, look, Plainview, Texas, you got, you got Frontier Market now. So this kind of thing. So that's, that's the work that, that mostly that we're doing now in rebuilding local food systems.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: And I think, you know, that people, people just became much more aware during COVID about.
[00:42:06] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:42:07] Speaker A: And I think it is really important for us to be thinking about. We don't really connect agriculture here, I think, so much to our food system because we're, we're, we don't grow a lot of food things that people, you know, we grow watermelons and pumpkins and things and, But a lot of people don't even know we're doing that. You know, peppers and, you know, but mostly we're growing cotton and, you know, corn, wheat, sorghum, that kind of thing. But I think that it's hard for people to understand that how, how for this to, how for this to happen and the importance of it. But Covid brought it kind of to lot, you know, that we, we. We really do. And when I think about now, you know, that really, that fruit, the fruit and vegetable basket of the United States which is there, that central valley of California. And, and we're going to be losing. We're going to be losing that, you know, that. And it's just going to be more and more that way, you know, and, and we've got to be thinking about what do we want to do? Do we want. Do we really want to keep bringing in, you know, food from, you know, all these different countries? Is that what we want? And, because then we are susceptible to, I mean, not to be a weird conspiracy theorist, but like I, when I think about what I know about microbes now and like the ability for us to just get, be, you know, sick, become sick from, you know, all of the chicken that leaves the United States goes to China and gets processed and comes back, you know, it just blows my mind. It blows my mind, you know.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: Well, and the same thing, the same thing in this country when 80% of our. Of our beef comes through like 10 plants. So, you know, the way you grew up and the way I grew up, we had a locker plant in every county. And all of us with those kind, with families of six to 10 people, we got by because we could take our bees in and get them processed and bring that back, and we've lost most of those. So one of the neat things that Ogallala Commons has witnessed, and it's not something we got to accompany, but it's grace that one of our interns, you know, he, he and his father have opened up panhandle processing, a small slaughter plant in between Canyon and Amarillo. And that is, that's just unheard of, but, you know, come out of COVID and they were brave people because I said this, this will never get through all the regulations. Well, they did. And, and so when we do this food summit In Pampa on May 14, you know, every time we do these things, we find new small producers we didn't know about in towns like LA Floors or, you know, somebody's got a high tunnel now and they're, they've got, they've got green. So it's just now it's. We've got people producing.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: It's just how do we, how do we build aggregation and way for them to make a good library a living?
[00:45:00] Speaker A: And that's interesting because I recently read an article and I think it was in, I can't remember now, but it was woman from Los Angeles who decided to farm. So she had maybe a 10 acre farm there. And the title of it was I quit farming for my mental health. And it was so interesting because the things that she was listing, I'm like that, that is the everyday life of every farmer. That's the every, that's, that's their life every day, you know. And so I do, I worry about, you know, people that, you know, have a romantic idea of what it's like and you know, how do we come alongside them when maybe they're not prepared, you know, for losing their crop, every bit of it, in one year or five years in a row, you know, because there's got to be a way, you know, we have, we've built in, the government has built in the safety nets, you know, to keep farmers on their land. But they are, they become smaller and smaller all the time, you know, and so what happens is it pushes more and more smaller producers out and you just have larger producers, you know, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's, it is just, it's a different, it's a different model than what you're talking about. And I'm, I'm kind of of the mind that we need both things. You know, we need, we need global food supply chains for people who need to get, you know, food from the breedlove dehydration plant. You know, I don't want to cut people off from the food that they have that they are getting from us, you know, in an effort to say, well, we want more local food. I think you can do both and I think we need, we need to have both.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Yes. So we're working that we can have local and regional food because that's the part that is really going to help our communities thrive.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so too. I do. Well, Darrell, thank you so much for. This has just been such a great, very enlightening conversation for me and thank you for giving your life to this effort and I appreciate it. I hope that you, I hope that you feel and know that you're appreciated and I hope our listeners have enjoyed getting to know you. Tell me once again, give me the name of your website so that people can go and check out what you're doing.
[00:47:29] Speaker B: Yeah, it's www. Ogallala. Like the aquifer. Ogallala Commons all together, no spaces.org okay.
[00:47:40] Speaker A: Fan folks will have that in the show notes and you can also go to sarah-conservation.com and see some information on playas that we have there that will also be linked to Texans or Playa's work for Texans and some other great information on playas. And that will be all for this podcast and we are hoping to see you again next time. Hope you'll join us for another Conservation stores.
