Moscow Food Co-op Producer Profile

by Patrick Vaughn, from the December 2004 newsletter

What better producer to profile in our newsletter’s anniversary issue than MaryJane Butters, one of the earliest local organic producers in the state of Idaho who also has a long and close association with the Moscow Food Co-op?

Though familiar to many Co-op members over the years, MaryJane is increasingly gaining regional and national recognition. Her organic backpacking and instant food business is blossoming into a multi-faceted effort to advocate for small farmers and community-based agriculture, to extol the skills and values associated with rural self-reliance, and to highlight the challenges and successes of rural women. These initiatives have culminated in fast-growing circulation for her “MaryJanesFarm” magazine and in a recent major book deal.

Co-op shoppers can find MaryJane’s organic prepared foods in bulk bins and in smaller packages. Also, the Co-op includes “MaryJanesFarm” in the magazine rack.

Her humble roots and hard work over the years, her struggling for and finally achieving success, parallels in many ways the maturing of our Co-op. MaryJane says, “I wanted to live in Moscow because of the Co-op.” She served as a Co-op volunteer, first coordinating the newsletter advertising and then as the night janitor. “I lived through several iterations of the Co-op ‘busting its britches.’ Finally, frustrated with no place to park and kids still in car seats, I prodded the manager by saying, 'if you don’t move I’m going to open a natural food store myself.'” The Co-op did move, and MaryJane became an employee of the Co-op, hired as a carpenter to remodel the old KFC on Third Street for the new store. She recalls working together with Jack Carpenter in sub-freezing winter weather before the walls were sealed.

A single mother with two young children in the 80’s, MaryJane started the Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute as an activist response to Chernobyl and Hanford. She had a vision for integrating agricultural issues with her environmental passion, so, after four years of hard work, MaryJane left PCEI in order to stay home with her kids and tackle sustainable farming directly. She began by selling produce at the Farmers’ Market and to the Co-op.

Two decades later, her small farm-based business has grown and MaryJane has gained an experienced perspective on rural life, forged from her values of caring for people and the environment. She retains her passion for educating and supporting local producers, like the ones we profile in this column. There are daunting challenges in making a living on a farm, and demeaning perceptions of what a rural person is. MaryJane says she told herself, “No matter what, I’m going to farm, stay on my acreage, and become a forum for advocating for farmers.”

Even with her recent success, MaryJane still faces the negative stereotypes of what a farmer can and can’t do. “There’s no political correctness, no rules for what you can say about a rural person,” she says. “There are five boxes you can put a farmer into. It’s unacceptable to be different and not fit into one of those boxes. It’s even worse for women. There are about two boxes for rural women. As a woman you can’t go into a bank and get an ag loan.”

Farmers have always been considered ‘lower class.’ As MaryJane puts it, “We have de-valued our food and the skills necessary to grow it and in the process we have de-valued farmers. Now corporations own the food supply. I branded myself as a business strategy to illuminate who I am, to put a face to food, so that I can voice this major problem. I don’t know if I can fix it in my lifetime but I can talk about it.”

MaryJane is excited about the local organic farms that are starting up around Moscow. She is hopeful, and worried, about their future. “What is it they need to succeed, to be here fifteen years from now?” she asks.

I asked MaryJane what it’s like for her to be authoring a book. “I love it,” she says. “Nobody told me I couldn’t so it never occurred to me I didn’t know how. But I had no training whatsoever. I never ever dreamed author, yet I was an author already, publishing my magazine, really a mail-order catalog that got out-of-hand.”

“My eye kicked in on photography, my muse kicked in for stories, and my passion for farming fueled the whole thing. Food grown with passion on a human scale is more nurturing. I think my magazine and my book will nurture people in that same way.”

Pat Vaughan is on the front end of finding what box will fit him in his desire to farm.

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