Co-op Market

Grocery & Deli

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Monday - Saturday: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sunday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
526 Gaffney Road
Fairbanks, AK 99701
907.457.1023

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Paper or Plastic? Neither.

March 5, 2019 By Kristin Summerlin Leave a Comment

Co-op Market shoppers are a conscientious lot. Over the years, more and more of you have made it a habit to avoid waste by bringing your own reusable shopping bags. In fact, according to our recent Shopper Survey, 51% of you say you always bring your own bags, and 28% frequently do.

We’re proud to say we’ve never offered plastic grocery bags at the co-op, but we do go through a lot of paper bags: nearly 52,300 last year alone. Those bags, which may be used just one time, often for only a few minutes, cost the co-op more than $13,000 last year.

In some ways, paper may seem more environmentally friendly than plastic, which is made from petroleum. But paper bags come with their own (ahem) baggage.

Did you know it takes about four times as much water to make a paper bag as a plastic bag? And the fertilizers and other chemicals used in tree farming and paper manufacturing contribute to acid rain and water pollution.

Sustainability is part of our mission as a co-op. We are committed to being good stewards of planetary and fiscal resources. For this reason, we’ve decided to start charging 25¢ for paper bags starting Friday, April 5. This charge applies only to the heavy paper bags with handles, and it is the actual cost of the bags, not including freight.

Our shoppers who use SNAP will be exempt from the bag charge, as we know EBT will not pay for it.

As always, we want to offer options and alternatives.

  • We’ve just set up a shelf in the entryway with cardboard boxes, free for the taking. Use a box. Save a bag! The grocery business generates a huge amount of cardboard waste. By reusing the boxes we receive in freight, you’re helping extend the life of precious resources.
  • We always have reusable shopping totes for sale – including the green Bagitos with our raven and pea logo. Not only are those incredibly durable, but they also hold as many groceries as at least two paper bags. Best of all, they’re made from recycled plastic bottles, and Bagitos donates profit to support environmental education for school kids.
  • Alaffia Fair Trade market baskets, handmade by women in Ghana and Togo of sustainably harvested grasses, make beautiful and sturdy grocery totes.
  • Don’t forget: You can also eliminate single-use plastic bags by bringing your own clean containers for shopping in Bulk. Just ask a cashier to take the tare weight before you fill them. And you don’t have to use a plastic bag for Produce: Bring your own bag –  or don’t bag it at all. It isn’t necessary.
  • We’re exploring possible options for a free reusable bag exchange. We hope to set something up as soon as we we get the logistics worked out.

To help you with the transition away from paper bags, we’re planning to hold a BOGO sale on our reusable bags. Look for more details soon.

Can small acts save the planet?

“One bee is an annoyance, but a swarm is a game changer. Small acts in big amounts are a force to be reckoned with.”

Filed Under: Issues, Member education Tagged With: sustainability

Talk by David Fazzino and Phil Loring on Alaska food systems

December 9, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

This event, part of the Anthropology Colloquium Series, may be of interest to FCCM members:

Anchorage? Uh, Washington? Anyone? We Have a Problem! Disaster Politics and Cumulative Effects in Alaskan Food Systems
David Fazzino and Phil Loring, Department of Anthropology, UAF
Friday, Dec. 11
3:30 p.m. – Schaible Auditorium, Bunnell Building, UAF
****
Information: pplattet@alaska.edu

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues, Member education Tagged With: education, food systems, local food production, rural Alaska, sustainability

Community sustainability forum

November 18, 2009 By coopmarket 1 Comment

Hans Geier, FCCM board member, attended a forum at Noel Wien Library Nov. 4 on community sustainability and food security. From the blog of the UAF School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences:

Hans Geier spoke on the imminent establishment of the Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market. Geier, who is a board member of the FCCM, is also a Cooperative Extension Service agent, an instructor with SNRAS, and a farmer. The FCCM will concentrate on selling locally produced goods and food. He described one of the difficulties in getting Alaska-grown food into the hands of consumers, saying that most Alaska seafood in the state’s supermarkets has been first shipped to distributors in Seattle and then shipped back up to Alaska. The market will try to establish direct shipping from Alaska businesses, such as seafood cooperatives, farmers’ cooperatives, the two dairies (Matanuska Creamery and Northern Lights Dairy), Alaska-grown oyster producers, and so on.

Filed Under: Publicity Tagged With: community, local food production, news stories, sustainability

Community sustainability meeting

November 3, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

Suzy Fenner of SCANFairbanks and Mike & Ritchie Musick are holding a meeting on community sustainability:

November 4th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm Wednesday evening at the Noel Library Auditorium

There will be a presentation by Ritchie and Mike Musick on The Natural Step for Communities, discussion afterwards, and a second presentation and discussion at 7:00 pm on food security and sustainable agriculture.

Contact: Suzy Fenner, SCANFairbanks
(Sustainable Community Action Network for Fairbanks — advocating for economic, environmental, and social sustainability) (907) 479-2345, polarsolar@gmail.com

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues Tagged With: community, sustainability

Essay on Sustainable Agriculture

October 30, 2009 By mary.christensen 3 Comments

for SARE New Voices Contest
December, 2007

I didn’t grow up on a farm.  When I was young, I never learned how to fix a screen door let alone a tractor.   I didn’t know which end of a seed to plant in the ground.  If you had told me twenty years ago that I would own the farthest north certified organic farm in the country, I would have told you that you must be crazy.

I come from a long line of Jewish tailors who never ventured too far from the city.  My connections with agriculture were like many kids growing up in suburban America – with the pictures of fields of grain on cereal boxes or occasional trips to the “country” to visit an apple orchard or to see goats and rabbits at a petting zoo.   But my parents always had a garden we always liked to eat and we liked to eat good fresh food.  This is how I came to agriculture – through gardening.  Through getting back to that connection with where your food comes from and acting on it.  I wanted that feeling of looking down a row of crops and feeling that connection with the plants and soil and the thousands of years of farmers and gardeners before me – food growers.

It took me a while to get into farming.  It didn’t come until my mid-thirties, when after many years of having a garden, I quit my day job and followed the dream of many back-to-the land folks before me. I had no idea of what I was doing, but I expanded the garden, bought a rototiller and Elliot Coleman’s “The New Organic Grower”, and started to make a go of it as a market farmer.  It certainly hasn’t been easy, especially since we live in interior Alaska square in the middle of agricultural zone 1.  There is very little historical farmland where we live.  Our farm was literally carved out of the Alaska wilderness with a chainsaw and bulldozer – hardly a soft footprint on the land.  But we justified the destruction of 10 acres of our forest with the belief that having a farm and feeding people was, in the end, a good thing for the community.  After all, wasn’t that what all farmers had originally done?  Also by farming organically, we hoped we were insuring a healthy environment for any wildlife that used the farm, for ourselves and our workers, and for those who ate our produce.  The demand for quality local produce is high, and despite our growing pains as a farm, we are still able to stay afloat with a lot of hard work, and all of our savings.  After 10 years, we have a healthy farm and an increasingly successful business.

Since I come from this new movement of market gardeners turned farmer, my models for success and role models to seek advice from have been organic farmers many with similar experience as I but with more years under their belt.  We have learned the appropriate models for ecologically sound agriculture and the goals for our farm are the same as the goals for many farms like ours across the country – to minimize off-farm inputs while maintaining high soil fertility, to produce high quality and healthy produce, and maintain a profitable business.

We think about sustainability a lot in Alaska, however most of the discussion focuses on natural fish and wildlife populations and their relation to subsistence versus commercial harvest.  There is little talk about sustainable agriculture, but there should be.  Although one’s vision of Alaska might be one of a hunter alone on the tundra, we get most of our food like the rest of America – from large supermarkets run by huge corporations.  If the average piece of food travels approximately 1500 miles from producer to consumer in the rest of the country, it travels much farther to us in Alaska.  For this reason, and many others, we should be concerned about sustainability on a local and community scale.

If our state seems extreme, it is but a microcosm of the country as a whole.  We need to look within our own communities for inputs to agriculture and other resources.  Our model for farming does follow a community approach.  Eating locally is not just a buzzword for marketing – although that is very effective – but it also should be the way we do business.  “Thinking globally and acting locally” is not only the right thing to do for the earth, it is the only economical thing to do.  With the cost of fuel rising ever higher coupled with high shipping costs, we have to think very carefully what it is we import.  Looking at ways to improve the soil, create energy, and market crops must be local in order for us to make a living and feel as though we’re living our lives for the betterment of our community.

Small-scale and locally marketed agriculture should not be just a fringe or niche economy. By showing that we can make a living while growing healthy crops by ecologically sound methods we will make ourselves assets in our local economies by encouraging both new farmers and intelligent agriculture.   It will continue to cost more for food, but we cannot keep going down the path of large scale commodity agriculture transported huge distances or we will be paying a higher and higher price for the wrong reasons.

I can now fix a screen door, sometimes fix my tractor and plant seeds right side up.  If the son of a long line of Jewish tailors can carve out a niche in small scale agriculture, then I’m optimistic that this growing movement of community-centered agriculture can keep gaining momentum.  We need to invest in community agriculture – it is at the core of sustainability.

Mike Emers
Rosie Creek Farm
Ester, Alaska

Filed Under: Issues, Member education Tagged With: community, education, local food production, news stories, sustainability

Sustainable Community Movements

October 19, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

Richard Seifert, an energy and housing specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service, will be giving a talk on sustainable community movements (“Connecting University Research to Communities”), Wednesday, Oct. 21, from 6:30 to 8 pm at Noel Wien Library (1215 Cowles in Fairbanks). This talk is part of the Community Energy Forum, sponsored by the Alaska Center for Energy & Power, the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, and the Extension Service.

Seifert will discuss community gardens, home weatherization, renewable energy, education, and local organizations that are working to build sustainable communities.

Seifert is a member of the Alaska Energy Network. See also his website, Sustain Alaska.

Filed Under: Events, Member education Tagged With: community, education, planning, sustainability

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