I had the honor and privilege last Friday of serving as the guest speaker for a monthly lecture series called Friday Best Management Practices (BMP) Talks and Tours—a collaborative effort between the Environmental Defenders of McHenry County and the McHenry County Department of Planning and Development.
Preparing for that talk was a valuable exercise. It brought me back to the most fundamental reasons we built our co-op—and why we continue the work today to sustain what we’ve created together.
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges—the constant “whack-a-mole” of running a business. Keeping the lights on, making sure the shelves are stocked, even something as simple as pricing a bunch of local kale correctly. In the midst of all that, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
But that bigger picture matters.
It’s the reason we show up—as owners, as staff, as volunteers, as shoppers and as members of this community.
Here, in simple terms, is what that BMP talk was all about:
The Food System We Built – and the One We Need
The modern food system is one of the most remarkable achievements in human history. It moves food from roughly 570 million farms to more than eight billion people with extraordinary scale and efficiency. It has helped make food widely available, reduced hunger in many parts of the world, and given consumers year-round access to products once considered seasonal luxuries.
But efficiency is not the same thing as resilience.
A system optimized for scale can also become concentrated, dependent, and vulnerable to disruption. We’ve seen this in recent years through droughts, floods, supply chain bottlenecks, labor shortages, disease outbreaks, and geopolitical conflict. Remember what happend to grocery shelves in 2020? When production, processing, and distribution are concentrated in relatively few places and controlled by relatively few players, shocks in one area can ripple quickly across the system.
We also see pressures on the land itself. Modern agriculture has delivered impressive yields, but often with tradeoffs: soil erosion, declining biodiversity, petroleum dependence, and heavy reliance on external inputs. Productivity matters—but productivity alone is not enough if the natural systems that support it are weakened over time.
There is another challenge that receives less attention: the economic disconnect between farmers and the food dollar. In conventional long supply chains, farmers often receive only a small share of the final retail price, while more value is added through processing, packaging, transportation, and retail. That reality can make it harder for farmers to invest in long-term soil health, diversified rotations, or practices that may pay off over time but cost more today.
So what does a more resilient food system look like?
It looks like diversity. Local farms. Regional supply chains. More crop variety on the land. Stronger connections between producers and consumers. It looks like communities having some ownership and influence over how food moves locally.
That is where food co-ops fit in.
The Food Shed is not here to replace the global food system. We are here to complement it. We help create a reliable market for local and regional producers. We keep more food dollars circulating closer to home. We shorten supply chains where possible. We give our community another layer of food security and resilience.
When you choose to shop here, own here, or invest here, you are doing more than buying groceries. You are helping build a system that values both efficiency and resilience, both abundance and stewardship, both global reach and local strength.
The future of food will require both systems working together.
Thank you for shopping with us!
Scott T. Brix
Board President