Rob:  With grocery prices on the rise, an Oklahoma organization is getting back to the basics to advance what they believe is the future of food.  As our Russ Jowell shows us, it’s a new kind of grocery store, whose products come from local farmers, and whose customers come with a smile.
Russ:  Kim Barker’s job is pretty egg-citing.
Kim Barker:  I’m checking eggs in.  We check everything in, so if something comes up missing, we know to look for it.
Russ:  Kim is only one of over a hundred producers here at the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, a revolutionary statewide program that’s changing the way Oklahomans stock their pantries.
Jeff Colpitts:  It provides a direct connection between customers and producers, and they get that handshake.  They get to know who the producer is, and they have some faith in their production methods and what they’re buying is really what it’s advertised to be.
Russ:  If you’ve lived in rural America for any length of time, chances are you’re already familiar with the concept of a co-op. Patrons are considered members who join by buying a small stake in the venture, about fifty dollars per year. Then during the first week of every month, these members can order a variety of products directly from a group of over a hundred independent farmers from throughout the state. 
Bob Waldrop:  Local food producers tend to use less chemicals, less pesticides, less herbicides and grow in more natural and organic ways.
Russ:  This is Bob Waldrop, the man behind the co-op who founded it out of a desire to connect Oklahoma residents to a plethora of food produced right here in the state.
Waldrop:  A giant tomato grower will choose his varieties of tomatoes based on what can be picked green and shipped well for thousands of miles. Whereas your local grower will choose varieties based on how good they taste. And he or she will let them ripen on the vine, so you’ll get them at the full height of their taste and freshness.
Russ:  And it’s this desire for a fresher, tastier, healthier product that has contributed to the co-op’s ever growing success.
Waldrop:  We had our first order in November of 2003, and about thirty-five people ordered about $3500 worth of stuff, and here in June of 2008, our most recent order we had 644 people order about $62,000 worth of Oklahoma food products.
Russ:  Here at Kim Barker’s farm in Waynoka, getting the best taste and freshness out of his eggs means raising his chickens the way nature intended, in an egg-mobile.
Kim Barker:  We started selling eggs through the Oklahoma Food Co-op about a year ago, that’s when I built this egg-mobile.
Russ:  But don’t let your eyes fool you. Though it may look like a normal hen house, everything about it is designed to keep things as close to nature as possible.
Barker:  With the slotted floor, the manure falls on the ground and fertilizes it, so they can go ahead and eat all the bugs in the area and leave it fertilized a little bit.
Russ:  And on the third Thursday of every month, Kim joins about a hundred and twenty other independent farmers at this Oklahoma City warehouse where the fruits of their labor over the past month are sorted out and shipped across the state. Over a thousand different products will pass through here today, from the very familiar to the highly unusual.
Jeff Colpitts:  I produce grass fed beef, all natural beef. 
James Stepp:  Buffalo meat.
Jeff Colpitts:  All natural pork.
Lori Lyon:  Apple mint, which smells like minty apples, I assume.
Leah Aufill:  Peaches and squash, chard, choy.
Charlotte Hayer:  My business is the Laughing Rabbit Soap Company.
Russ:  In addition to bringing together a variety of wholesome local edibles, the co-op also brings together the faces and hands behind all those products, something that keeps members coming back month after month.
Leah Aufill:  You get to know your producers and talk to them and ask them personal questions.  And also if you have specific needs, you can ask them to grow for you.
Russ:  And after it’s all sorted and packed, orders are loaded onto trucks and delivered to about 30 different pickup sites in every corner of the state.
Matt Burch:  I’d say we’ve got about 20 coolers, refrigerated and frozen total, and another 20 totes full of dry goods, if not more.
Russ:   Matt Burch has volunteered to deliver the orders for a pick-up site in northwest Oklahoma City.  And in keeping with the co-op’s mission, even his biodiesel truck runs a little more efficiently.
Burch:  Local producers provide me with 90 some odd percent, I’d say, of my, you know, caloric intake.  I don’t have to do much grocery shopping hardly at all.  And whenever I do, a lot of times I’ll go to places that even carry a lot of the producers that we’re carrying right now.
Russ:  And at long last, after weeks of growing, sorting, hauling, and shipping, these wholesome goods finally meet their consumers, who usually happen to be the same people who produced them.
Aufill:  I think it is very beneficial to small farmers like us who are trying to break into a market.  
Consumers know where it comes from.  They can actually call a producer.
I think it’s the way to shop.  It’s 1200 miles fresher.