Transcription of the

Keynote Address of Thomas Harttung

January 31, 2004

NOFA-NY Annual Winter Education Conference

Syracuse, NY

Dear Friends: It’s great to be here. The last time I was in Syracuse was nine months after my Danish high school graduation – driving a rental car return from Detroit to Providence, Rhode Island. We’re talking May 1980 – 24 years ago. So what mischief have I been up to in the meantime? That’s what I’m here to talk about.

I’m not really very Danish. I have to shatter that illusion from the beginning. I’m half English, kind of Norwegian, a bit German and a little Danish. I come from a totally nonagricultural background. You have to go back six or seven generations in find anything vaguely looking like farming in my blood. There’s something called the handicap theory - that you can, in fact, benefit from lack of background....

I’ve put in a secondary title to what I’m going to talk about called – Thinking Outside of the Box – mainly because it carries some of the energy that took us where we’ve gotten. It was what we were doing. We were in uncharted territory because there wasn’t time for thinking in terms of inside the box solutions or even money for inside the box solutions, so it got to be pretty outside the box most of the time. You have to watch out for that because it gets to be a habit, and then inside the box solutions become boring, and when you’ve got that situation, you need to watch out. Then you’re headed into trouble. But before I tell you about it, I’ll tell you a little bit about what happened between 1980 and today.

I took over a farm in 1984 - kind of early - due to the death of my parents. I like to call it a family farm, but really, my parents bought it only 14 years earlier and they bought it for a place for the family to be outdoors. Agriculture was really a backdrop for family.

I farmed it in an unconventional but not organic way for 10 years. In 1990, I began a family of my own. In 1995, I converted the farm to organic principles – which resulted in a positive chain reaction of creativity that we had not foreseen.

In 1995, the farm supported three families, giving full-time work for four people. Eight years later, there are 160 of us. And it’s all due to one key idea -- the idea of reconnecting urban households and farms. It’s as simple as that.

And you all know that I didn’t come up with that idea. On the other hand, I didn’t steal it from anyone either. I ran into it in the public domain, so to speak. The organic domain, of course.

Gate-crashing a World Organic Scientific Conference in Copenhagen in the summer of 1996 – I call it gate-crashing because I was still in conversion then – and you know, one feels kind of unworthy, fragile, unsexy in that phase – like a crayfish changing its shell. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to be there, but I kind of sneaked around.

But there was Michael Ableman showing slides from Fairview Gardens in California and talking about their CSA. And the same day there was a Canadian girl called Gendiene, who had gone to England and set up a box scheme. And later the same day a Canadian who ran a box scheme in Devon, England with her husband, Tim. I didn’t sleep for three days, or at least that is how it felt. It was a profound encounter.

I didn’t steal the idea. Rather, I put myself at the disposal of a great idea, and have continued to do so to this day. The jobs – all the staff – are kind of a side effect of my own personal voyage that started that day. So, being back here is also sort of to pay back my dues to the pioneers of this country that got us on this track.

Someone once said that what really moves the world is enlightened self-interest. I have to subscribe to that, I guess. I put us at the disposal of this great idea because it offered something extraordinary. I could go on being a farmer. I could be a foodie. I could be a philosopher. And, I could be a revolutionary. All in one – Wow !

So we set up a CSA the following winter of 1996. We even got a government grant: $10,000 to set it up, with the by laws and so on. And 100 families in our area signed up for the trial year, the season of 1997.

The dream then was to have 250 families share the garden on our farm. That was the dream, full stop. Seriously. We are now in our 8^th year and more than 44,000 households are now customers of this system. How? We simply let it get out of hand.

The CSA structure survived for only two years, unfortunately. It was registered as a charity/nonprofit organization – and it simply couldn’t deal with risk-taking and the fast decision making that took place in those early years. So we mortgaged the farm and founded a limited company called The Seasons. In Danish that is Aarstiderne. We set up a website designed by a Swedish chef while he was cooking for people in Vail, Colorado. So, again, you guys helped us out. It became a dot.com and not a dot dk because an architect’s partnership had taken the Danish domain called The Seasons. Today it is the most visited architectural website in the world.

But we liked the name and it has served us well, although it is the most unpronounceable name for any company on the planet. It’s worse than Haagen-Dazs – seriously. I have not met a foreign person who could pronounce it. Dutch is spoken with a potato in your mouth and Danish is spoken with a hot potato in your mouth. So that’s what we are called.

So, what is Aarstiderne? A box scheme/CSA? A farm-based fresh produce business? An organic food company? A food culture educator? A complex adaptive system/energy field? An orchestrator of food-driven ecosystems? A self-organizing hot house experiment? What I like to think is that it is a way of managing the planet, but the answer would depend on whom you ask. Experimenting on how to do things is a key part of our work. I’m going to describe it for you and break it down for you. The answer depends on whom you ask.

If you look at it from above, it looks like a patchwork of small fields. It’s a farm on the coast of the inland waters, the archipelago of Denmark. As you can see, my conventional neighbors grow winter rape (canola) and I don’t. We are in a high priority nature conservation area because of the farm’s coastal boundary of 4.5 miles. A key part of our work is to try to make it work and still preserve the landscape and the species there, including the dormouse that I showed you at the beginning of the slides. Unfortunately, the dormouse hasn’t been seen on our farm, but the priority is that one day I hope to give a presentation where we can have a picture of one that is lived with us.

When you look at it from the side, the land has a beautiful landscape quality and our work goal is not only preserving it as it is now, but also returning some of this landscape to its former glory.

You can also look at it from the bottom up (slide of a large tree, taken from the base, looking straight up into a pattern of limbs and leaves). I m not going to talk a lot about trees, but my university background is in forestry and I have a deep affection for trees. We do use them as our key educators because if you look at forests and forests’ ability to self-organize, it quite extraordinary to see how forests are a complex social organism. I like to use forests because we are humbled by forests. If you walk into a cabbage patch or a wheat field, you feel like the master of things and a senior species there. If you walk into a forest, you are humbled. Trees are bigger than you, they have been there longer and they have incredible capabilities of organization. You feel humble. So it is an incredible and healthy exercise to walk in a forest.

On a good day, it looks like this. This is a garden dedicated to a farm shop on the farm. It’s also a venue for customers to see what they will get in their boxes. If you look in the back by the oaks, you can see the field scale cabbage patch because we grow at the field scale, too.

We recreate the close links between the work of the organic farmers and the work in all the kitchens, transforming the bounties of the land into the feasts of honest, nutritious, seasonal and inspired food. You will notice it has lots of food and kitchen and spiritual angles. Sort of a credo, sort of a battle cry, what we are there for.

At Aarstiderne, when we were growing, we articulated these as our basic principles. It took us through the breathtaking growth from 2000 to now. It helped us maintain a basic civility. There are many stories behind these and I can’t tell you all the stories, but I’ll speak to some of them. They are: empathy, quality, creativity, conversation, growth, transparency and ecology are all household words.

Our growth has been very quick. In 1999, we were serving 2000 households. In 2003, we had 44,000 customers.

Our growth in numbers of households and in dollars:

Households U.S. Dollars

1999 2000

2000 10000 $6 million

2001 20000 $13 million

2002 30000 $23 million

2003 40000 $25 million

Customers are paying more that these prices for their food because food is taxed at 25%. These numbers are for the company, so add 25% to what they spend or $31 million in spending with them. We typically have larger public sectors in Europe and we do nice things with them.

If you ask me what is going on, the project is about being a change agent reintegrating us with the natural world. It feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

We believe in hospitality. This garden shows people what is going into the boxes throughout the seasons. We believe in bringing people onto the farm. We also believe in taking children onto the farm for 3 days to a week as part of a project to give them an idea of what we are doing.

We are still absolutely crazy about self-organization and permaculture and natural, undisturbed ecosystems. This where you get the smart ideas and the solutions to things that seem to be insurmountable problems. Look into the way the natural world on the farm organizes itself and carries the stress and the discrepancies, its quite extraordinary. So we are into undisturbed systems, although there is disturbance all around us.

We made a decision to go on the internet because the phone was killing us in those early years. So we made a defensive move onto the internet because we couldn’t handle all the calls. We set up a website. Going onto the internet meant we could work in the day and answer email at night. In those days, it wasn’t a forward thinking move, it was to handle the calls. If they make a decision to join a CSA, it’s a life decision and people want to talk about it. It’s like an organic help line.

What was then a liability is now an asset. Two or three years later, conversations with our customers are what give us huge amounts of valuable information. You can’t do this with surveys. Personal attraction of a conversation you learn something and go somewhere. We have a Conversations Department to talk with whoever needs to talk to them, rather than a customer service department. Their job is to engage in as many conversations as they can. We have made the art of conversation a top priority for our work.

It empowers the people there. It’s not just complaints or sales. They become deeply involved in the development and creativity of the company and they have very valuable information. They are the interface of the company and their work is key to personalizing something that with exclusive use of the internet could become very impersonal and it can take you somewhere. Combining a website with a great, active conversation department has worked well.

Transparency is one of the seven household words. It keeps us on track. There are no secrets to this business. We openly tell everybody about what we do. Customers have our financial data in the public domain.

We are working on a long-term project to set a new standard for transparency in food. You cannot have close links between people if you are not transparent. You cannot have close links that are not transparent.

The conventional system is so blatantly nontransparent in how it works. So there is an edge there. It is plain common sense to work with trust. It’s good for everything. We think of it as good for organic principles and criteria, organizational ethos, customer loyalty, supplier loyalty,

coworker loyalty and recruitment.

We see no real reason not to develop this idea to its full potential. It’s a vantage point, somewhere you can work from. It’s unique, vacant, unexplored, fertile and conquerable territory. It’s a vantage point you can claim, you can defend it and it’s very difficult for the conventional world to reach it.

So we thought we could just do it. But, transparency, like charity, starts at home. There are things we need to look at and agree upon within the internal culture of our company. When we launched this idea 18 months ago as a high priority, I thought we would be there in a short time, but it has taken a lot longer to prepare ourselves for what I call the Organic Full Monty. Even in organizations that have as much fun as us, there is all sorts of stuff to work through.

There is all sorts of stuff we need to work through. You cannot communicate transparency if you don’t live transparently. It’s either or. Halfway doesn’t work. So, instead of launching in 2003, we are going to launch full-fledged in 2004. We are bracing ourselves for this, but looking forward to it.

So now to get back to practical things. We move 25,000 boxes of food every week to our 44,000 family customers. Very often they are on a two-week delivery schedule. Many started with one weekly delivery and high ambitions of how this would change their life, but they hit a wall. They found that urban life is unpredictable and stressful. Sometimes they can work through the box in three days and sometimes they find that nothing happens because you are not home, you are too tired or whatever.

If we continue this rigid schedule of delivery, then it means that when our customers run out, they buy food from the enemy. And when our box arrives, their fridge is full of leftover food from the enemy. I am joking here. The grocery stores are lovely people, but they are part of an economic system that is not what we want to do. We are working on this.

Our customers get not just vegetables, but also they get a lot of fruit, cheese, meat, fish, bread.

Many are on a fortnight delivery for everything except milk. We haven’t been able to come up with a model that would break even on milk. In Denmark the market share of organic milk is 32%. In the cities, the share is 50%. So basically organic milk is a large commodity in the conventional supermarkets and they use it to bring in customers. It’s like six-packs; it’s always on offer to bring people into the stores. Organic milk is not expensive in Denmark and you can get it everywhere. So people are not willing to pay us the premium to bring it to their doorsteps. Yet. We are working on it because it would be great to have an organic milk offering in the system.

Everything else we deliver to the doorstep. It started as a drop-off concept. We found out that if you move your box drop-off location farther and farther away from the farm, the sense of ethics of people decreased and people took advantage of it. If there were 15 boxes at a drop-off spot, people graded their own box when they came and the last few boxes got a bad deal.

That happened, along with a number of other things, so we had to move the drop off system to the door, and have been doing so for 4 years. From a very difficult beginning, it is now one of the biggest strengths of our system. We put boxes outside each apartment door in an apartment building (we have the outside door key) or on the landing, but in an apartment building, people don’t take anything from other people’s boxes. We can deliver at all times of the day. We don’t take a receipt, it is a prepaid system.

At some point, people find out about you and you need to get awards. I was a reluctant receiver of this award, the first time the European Union set up an environmental award for working in the food sector. It’s the Royal Green Food Award in 2002. The logo is a bar code that goes from black to green to transparent. By mistake, they created something we will probably use in some context. It was a very generous award and 60% of our net profit that year came from that award, so we were grateful.

So. How do you get it right? What was it that happened, what drove us and are there lessons to be learned? I’ll take a go at this next.

From day one, we needed to find people who would bring creative energy to the table.

We worked with a wonderful chef. . If he hadn’t been there to tell us, the farmers that it was not about what we wanted to grow and put in the box but about stuff that people would like to eat at the other end, I wouldn’t be here giving this lecture to you. He brought the chef’s perspective and the culinary perspective to our work. If it becomes too farmer driven people are not going to suffer some of the stuff you want to grow. I know it’s probably not politically correct to say this, but in the real world, you need to have this in mind.

You need to have someone to back you. Our bank suffered us for a few years and then said, no, this is too scary. We had the good fortune to find a Dutch Ethical Bank, Triodos Bank. They have been extraordinary partners with us. They were very instrumental in bringing us through difficult patches over the last 3 or 4 years. I know there are beginning to be structures like this in the U.S. There are people who can help you out.

You need to strike a balance between the dream side and the today side of things.

I call it the law of oxygen equilibrium. Money is like oxygen.

Oxygen is the destroyer of the universe and the creator of the universe.

We only need 2% more oxygen in the atmosphere and the entire thing will self-incinerate. 23% oxygen and we are gone. If you take it down to 19%, photosynthesis will go down by 30 or 40 %. It’s a very delicate balance.

The role of money in work like this is the same thing. Money is the destroyer of things and the creator of things and you need to strike a balance, not to be a total fundamentalist and not to rid yourself of principles in the process. Don’t be a Taleban, don’t be a Jesuit either. Find some sort of a delicate balance in-between.

You need to get the ball rolling. We all agree that farm days and visits are wonderful and they do wonderful things. But they are also a limitation. You are inviting people into your world and it’s your thing. If you really want to move people and make change in people’s lives, you have to go where they are. You have to take it to the streets and meet people where they live as well. You make food for them. We cook for them in the streets and tell them that the food came from this and such farm. If you want to learn more about this, Aarstiderne is a way to hook up to this kind of food quality. We set up 4 or 5-day street restaurants and have done so systematically every year. You can generate huge energy from it if you are there for that long and then are gone. You get to meet your customers on a personal level. You get to engage in conversations.

It is our eighth principle in our house is that the c word does not exist.

We have ethnologically cleansed ourselves of the word, “consumer”. It is a fundamentally derogatory phrase about other people. We are not consumers. Our customers are fellow citizens. This is a word created by economists to put us into segments. Abolish the word consumer. We can establish a relationship with the citizen within each of us.

It’s a totally different relationship than betting on only the consumer side of people.

We call these events Food for Thought and usually partner with an NGO, and that allows us to get us into attractive parts of towns and it’s an extraordinary way of connecting with our customers.

This is what this project is about. We spend serious amounts of serious time with our customers where they live, in their environment, not on the farm.

This approach is in a contemporary tone, not earthy or old-fashioned. You have to watch out for that. People lead their lives in a very fast way and you don’t want them to think their food was grown in the last century. Contemporary and non-condescending. You need to connect with another energy than that you are so right and they are so wrong.

Eat great food with them; create an experience that transcends the notion of raw materials. It works! Beauty is very often the daughter of simplicity. Oscar Wilde said in a very quizzical way: “Only shallow people do not judge by appearances.” If you want to create a relationship with your customers, get the food preparation part of it right, so that it looks good and has that energy that shows that you care for it.

We use a contemporary feel for moving organic food. You need to make it contemporary and non-condescending. Our Danish food secretary once said that a defining characteristic of Aarstiderne was the absence of the pointed finger. There is no pointed finger. We don’t put organic logos everywhere on our work. No pointed fingers. For some people its obvious that its organic and for others its not. We need to create a different energy than just the label or word.

So what’s the message?

What’s my story to you about this project that got out of hand? The root of the matter?

Truly good food can only come from sustainable agriculture. It has a spiritual aspect that you can visit also. This is a conscience thing. If you speak to people in an intelligent way about issues of conscience, on a one-to-one basis, you can connect with them. They want to do this, but they want to feel that they are doing it, not doing it because of someone else.

If we follow our consciences we obey the laws of nature.

If they think that you are so right and they are so wrong, it won’t work.

We are making organic food manifest-making it real, digestible.

If you want to make a real lasting connection with people who live in cities, then you need to fully embrace the idea of the potential of organic agriculture. It’s the biggest idea on the planet. You take the idea, you take it to town and you dress appropriately.

Its bigger than the railroads, bigger than electric technology. Its bigger than sex, after all we do it three times a day. It’s the biggest thing in the world. It’s scary, but we have a tendency to forget this. You embrace the idea, you take it to town and you dress appropriately. You bring it to a contemporary mindset. You can create an energy field. You can be between the Jesuit and the Talaban and still feel OK about it as a person in the 21^st century.

Always dress appropriately, but be creative about it. In this slide of a poster, vegetables surround a beautiful, naked woman. It was a movie promotional and Aarstiderne supplied the vegetables. The movie flopped, but everyone is still talking about the poster.