Worker-Owner Co-Op Permaculture Design

We came on board to this project when it was still in its imagination phase. This design was for a community cooperative that wanted a working farm, a maker-space interface with the community, a commercial kitchen, a store, and more.

It originally started as an urban project and very quickly shifted to a suburban project. We ended up finding a 60 acre blueberry farm about 15 miles outside of Portland.

We had row crops, greenhouses, orchards, bio-dynamic rotational grazing, commercial kitchen, and store. The design for that has been really an amazing design to see it come to life over the years. It’s been a great success.

Click below to hear the back-story from Jenny Pell or scroll down to read about this design.

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

When we were in Seattle, we were asked to come on board to a project that was still in its imagination phase. It was to be for a community that had a working farm, a maker-space interface with the community, a commercial kitchen, and a store.

It originally started as an urban project and very quickly shifted to a suburban project. We ended up finding a 60 acre blueberry farm about 15 miles outside of Portland. The community where this farm is, is not the same culture as in Portland, Oregon.

Portland’s very progressive, it’s very liberal and there are a lot of permaculture people but in the more rural suburbs of Portland the people are very conservative. They vote differently and they eat differently so it’s a very different marketing proposition than it might have been to people in Portland.

We decided to do the project. The governance of the project would be a worker-owned cooperative. This can be challenging in a culture that has a hierarchy where there’s the boss and employees and generally, there’s an antagonistic type of relationship there.

Farm wages aren’t very high and here we are offering a model where you’re actually an owner with a stake in the company. We chose dynamic governance as the decision making matrix.

There was a lot to do, we researched other co-ops to try to understand what worked and what didn’t. We ended up consulting with many really wonderful people. We consulted with fair-trade groups that had been around for 30 years. We consulted with farms from Vermont that had been doing co-ops for years and years. We pulled together our team and started designing.

We had row crops, greenhouses, orchards, bio-dynamic rotational grazing, commercial kitchen, and store. The design for that has been really an amazing design to see it come to life over the years. It’s been a great success.