“Let’s Start a Co-op”

A Principled Approach to Community,
Food, and Economy in New Mexico

By Shahid Mustafa

La Montañita Distribution Center truck making deliveries. Photo courtesy of La Montañita Co-op.​

“Let’s start a co-op, you know about co-ops.” These were the words of Samantha Yarrington to her friend, and at that time her midwife as she anticipated the birth of her child, Heather Rische. Thus began the Prickly Pear Food Co-op in Truth or Consequences, inspired by the 2020 closing of the community’s closest co-op, Mountain View Market Co-op in Las Cruces. Having worked at Mountain View Market for fifteen years, Rische recalls, “We literally sat down and cried when Mountain View Market closed. It was a community center. It was familiar and homey, and we were trying to make the world a better place. As the outreach coordinator, I was empowered to go out into the community with the intention of enriching the community . . . all that good stuff. It wasn’t just a grocery store, it was an educational hub.”

This is typical of the way member-owners and staff members think of their co-ops. Rische says she and Yarrington got in touch with the Food Co-op Initiative (FCI), which provides information, training, and technical assistance, as well as seed capital, and engages research to maintain and improve the development path for new food co-ops. Rische and Yarrington attended an online conference presented by FCI that was heavily focused on racial and food justice, the takeaway being “You’re not doing food justice unless you are doing it for everyone,” according to Rische.

The two began the work of starting a co-op by finding people in and around the Truth or Consequences community who would be supportive of the idea. Rische says they started with an online survey that got a few hundred responses from people saying they would support a co-op. They also started setting up a table at the Sierra County Farmers Market, where they asked people if they wanted to support a food co-op, ultimately gaining more support and recruiting volunteer workers. Next, they established a relationship with The Bountiful Alliance, a nonprofit that acts as an umbrella for community organizations serving the residents of Sierra County. Working with The Bountiful Alliance allows the young co-op to take donations as a fiscal partner. They are currently looking for grants and donations to support their effort.

After more than a year of work, Prickly Pear Food Co-op was incorporated in New Mexico in 2022. They currently operate similarly to a buying club, aggregating items that are available and purchasing them at a significant discount. They offer their members inventory options of bulk grains, packaged goods, and fresh produce from the Cooperative Distribution Center operated by La Montañita Co-op in Albuquerque, United Natural Foods Inc. in Denver, and Veritable Vegetable of San Francisco. Distribution takes place in the basement of a church every two weeks. Their first distributions were pretty small, but they now have seventy-four members who have paid an annual twenty-dollar fee. When asked why she has become so passionate about the business model, Rische responds, “I think the main appeal at the most basic level is that your community owns it, and it’s democratically run.”

I know what she means. Rische and I worked together at Mountain View Market when I was the general manager of that co-op, from 2006 through 2015. As she was the member outreach coordinator, we worked as a team on outreach and community building. Being connected to co-ops in the way that I have been has given me an opportunity to expand my perspective on community and the empowerment that can be harnessed through the efforts of the collective consciousness. I believe the cooperative model, as an economic and social development mechanism, is uniquely equipped to remedy conditions that may otherwise not be addressed by conventional business models.

A cooperative is defined as a user-owned business from which benefits are derived and distributed equitably on the basis of use or as a business owned and controlled by the people who use its services. The seven cooperative principles include open and voluntary membership; democratic member control; members’ economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training, and information; cooperation among cooperatives; and concern for community.

Prickly Pear Food Co-op in Truth or Consequences. Photo courtesy of Prickly Pear Food Co-op.

Cooperatives exist in just about every sector of business, and many don’t necessarily promote themselves as such. Credit unions are cooperatives, as are retailers’ cooperatives that support individually owned stores, such as REI and Ace Hardware. (True Value operated as a cooperative for its first seventy years.) Agricultural co-ops have thrived for decades throughout the world as a vehicle to aggregate resources for supplies, marketing, distribution, and capital. Housing cooperatives are also an alternative to privately owned apartment spaces, allowing members to own shares in apartment buildings; this reduces rental costs as the maintenance expense is collectively shared, usually based on the size of the unit. The first cooperative business registered in the United States was the Philadelphia Contributionship, a mutual fire insurance company founded in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin and some fellow firefighters. In 1969, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer sought to economically empower Black Mississippians through the Freedom Farm Cooperative, a grassroots agricultural co-op that consisted of thirty individual family farms, sharecroppers, and another fifteen hundred community members. Probably the most familiar of all cooperatives are the consumer co-ops in the food sector. Food co-ops have thrived in the United States since the early twentieth century, but what is generally recognized today is the model that was bolstered by financial support provided by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal between 1933 and 1939. The goal was to encourage grassroots economic development by supporting rural and agricultural communities as well as cooperative utility, housing, and retail enterprises.

Although founded nearly a century later, the Mimbres Agricultural Cooperative (MAC) was formed with precisely these goals. Addressing food scarcity and population decrease are issues central to the goals of MAC, formed as an agricultural cooperative of local Mimbres Valley food producers and consumers. The average age in the valley is sixty-five. According to board member Valerie McCaffrey, “We are on the frontier, we don’t have a huge population in Mimbres, and we’ve lost more after the COVID-19 epidemic. The nearest grocery store is thirty to forty-five minutes away. With all that’s happening, we want to cooperate and build community again. We think the co-op structure where the members own and operate the enterprise is very important.” Modeling the principles of education and concern for community, their goal is to educate the local community on what was going on in the region’s agriculture historically, and demonstrate the best practices in agriculture in response to climate change. “We want to have a place where the people of our community can still get together,” she says.

Left: Paula McAllister and Myra Vandy at pickup day at Prickly Pear Food Co-op. Right: Heather Rische bagging carrots at the Prickly Pear Food Co-op. Photos courtesy of Prickly Pear Food Co-op.

La Montañita Co-op opened its first store in Albuquerque in 1976, during a period that is often referred to as the “new wave” era of co-ops, between 1969 and 1979. Many co-ops started within that period began with the intention of addressing socioeconomic and environmental concerns as well as providing an opportunity for less processed, chemical-free foods. La Montañita began by serving three hundred families, and now serves more than sixteen thousand families through its four locations in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Gallup.

La Montañita also operates a Distribution Center (DC), which supports a regional foodshed including more than forty independent producers throughout the state. The La Montañita DC began operations in 2008, to help fill the gap between supplier and retailer for our local agricultural sector. The DC is the largest food hub in New Mexico. Central to its mission is providing access and distribution to wholesale markets for farmers and vendors, and supporting the local economy. Demonstrating the sixth co-op principle of cooperation among cooperatives, the DC works with cooperative producers such as Organic Valley, a farmer-owned dairy cooperative headquartered in La Farge, Wisconsin, and Sweet Grass Cooperative, a collaboration of family-owned cattle ranches located in Colorado and New Mexico.

The DC receives and distributes hundreds of products from approximately thirty different vendors, ranging from produce and livestock to pecans and flour, from all over the state. It services around two hundred restaurants, commercial kitchens, grocers, and other retailers in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Gallup, Silver City, and Las Cruces. Among its retail partners are independent markets and other co-ops located throughout the state, such as the Silver City Food Co-op and, now, Prickly Pear in Truth or Consequences. In a video of a conversation explaining the spirit behind La Montañita’s DC venture, founding manager Michelle Franklin states, “Co-ops have this way of acting from the heart of the community, and I think the heart of the community is to support all of those around us. As a community, we come together, and this is what we do best. This is the value we want to make sure is present in our food that we’re eating. We want to be part of the success of other cooperative businesses and local producers.”

La Montañita Co-op in Nob Hill. Photo courtesy of La Montañita.​

La Montañita’s location in Santa Fe was previously owned by an independent natural foods retailer who wanted to retire, and the Gallup location was a struggling food co-op that was taken in by La Montañita and continues to provide local and organic food to an underserved rural community. The Navajo Nation has some of the highest rates of food insecurity within the borders of the continental United States. Communities designated “food insecure” are also disproportionately impacted by related health issues such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. The relocation and displacement of Indigenous peoples has led to poverty, addiction, lower rates of literacy, and the transition away from traditional farming practices to dependence on processed and nutritionally insufficient foods.

ToohBAA, formerly the Shiprock Traditional Farmers Cooperative, formed in 2020 with the stated purpose “to be able to provide produce to Indigenous communities and the Four Corners region.” They also seek to provide organic, healthy produce to their communities at reasonable cost. According to Gloria Ann Begay of the Diné Food Sovereignty Alliance, the co-op formed partly to work together in handling some of the logistical challenges of getting produce to market, such as cold storage and packaging.

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La Montañita Distribution Center. Photos by Stephanie Cameron.

In her book Collective Courage, political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard shares a 1933 quote from civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois: “We can by consumers and producers co-operation . . . establish a progressively self-supporting economy that will weld the majority of our people into an impregnable, economic phalanx.” This statement embodies what I believe to be the spirit that motivates communities to invest their time, energy, and resources in the cooperative economic model. In my experience working in the cooperative retail sector, I have always been impressed with the sense of ownership and purpose that members reflect. The long and arduous task of starting a food co-op is often forgotten over the years as the enterprise evolves into what appears to be a more conventional retail operation where membership is not required to shop. That initial work is what creates what I would describe as the “funk” or “soul” that stays present regardless of aesthetics, expansion, or modernization. Envisioning self-empowerment and embracing collective responsibility, the cooperative movement in New Mexico continues to grow and demonstrate to us all the capacity to effect change in our communities and food systems by utilizing the will, determination, and collective strength of the people.