About The Show:

"If you can put your shoulder to the wheel on something that's positive, that's tangible, that can be your lifeline, to having a good outlook toward your community and toward your life in general. ”

 - Mark Cain

Mark Cain's journey into organic farming began during his college years. His enthusiasm for biology and ecology led him to start a small farm in Illinois. Realizing he needed more training, he moved to California to apprentice under the renowned gardener, Alan Chadwick. Eventually, Mark found his way to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and discovered a property with blueberries, which became the foundation of his organic farming operation. For Mark, working outdoors and connecting with nature was a transformative experience, bringing him immense happiness and purpose.

Over the years, Mark's organic farming operation expanded, and his relationship with Ozark Natural Foods (ONF) Co-op became integral to supporting local organic agriculture. The co-op's commitment to buying locally grown produce and providing fair prices to small growers helped foster a strong community of organic farmers in the region.

Mark felt a kinship with fellow farmers and valued the collaborative atmosphere where knowledge and advice could be shared. The co-op's role in nurturing these relationships has made a lasting impact, not just on Mark's life, but on the community as a whole, reinforcing the importance of local, organic agriculture.

What You Will Learn In This Episode:

• Explore the fascinating history of organic farming and the evolution of certification standards.
• Discover the impact of collaborative approaches to addressing insect pests and crop diseases.
• Learn about the importance of locally sourced produce at Ozark Natural Foods.
• Understand the role of farmers' markets and co-ops in fostering community connections.
• Recognize the need to support small-scale farmers and sustainable agricultural practices.

All this and more on this episode of Ozark Natural Foods: The Co-Op Podcast.

Important Links and Mentions In This Episode:

• Visit Ozark Natural Foods store in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to purchase fresh organic vegetables, culinary herbs, blueberries, and specialty cut flowers from Dripping Springs Farm.
• Get involved with local organic growers in your area by joining gatherings and events to share information, tips, and experiences about organic farming.
• Consider volunteering at Dripping Springs Farm or other local organic farms to gain hands-on experience about organic gardening and contribute to sustainable agriculture.
• Follow Dripping Springs Farm on Facebook

This Episode is Sponsored By:

Ozark Natural Foods

Connect More With Ozark Natural Foods:

• Grab our Newsletter 
• Email Us at Info@ONF.Coop
• Connect With Our Facebook Page 
• Join The Facebook Group
• Connect With Our Instagram 
• Connect With Our LinkedIn Page
• Learn more about the History of Food Coops

We get by with a little help from our Co-Op Members and Friends!

Please consider rating and reviewing our podcast on Apple Podcasts or your Podcast player of choice. A little Love goes a long way. 

ONF – COOP – DRIPPING SPRINGS GARDEN

Welcome to Ozark Natural Foods, The Coop podcast featuring stories and information about the largest food Coop in Arkansas. Based in Fayetteville and serving all of Northwest Arkansas, the Coop has been around for 50-plus years, providing community and encouraging a love of food that is good for us and our planet.  Learn our history and standards of quality, meet our Coop members, employees, and vendors and understand why being locally focused is vital to our food products and economy. The Coop has leveraged cooperative economics here in Northwest Arkansas to bring the freshest and the best food to our whole community.  Listen to Ozark Natural Foods, the Coop Podcast today to learn why.

Hey, folks, and welcome back to another episode of ONF, the Coop Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Wilburn, and I'm excited to be with you today for another new episode. Today we have Mark Cain, who is one of the founders and a gardener with Dripping Springs Farm. And Mark is here with us today to talk a little bit about his experience with the Coop and more importantly, the fact that he's had almost a generation of time providing organic vegetables, culinary herbs, blueberries, and all kinds of specialty cut flowers to Ozark Natural Foods. And so, if you've walked into the produce section, you've seen his product.  If you have walked into our new location and seen the beautiful cut flowers there, you've seen his product. And so, without further ado, I want to welcome Mark Cain to the podcast. How are you doing?

Good.  Thank you, Randy.  Appreciate it. Nice to be here.

So Mark, I would love for you to give your origin story and you don't have to go back to birth, but you can just give the audience just a little bit of background and history on you and how you ended up here in Northwest Arkansas.

Mark Cain [00:2:12]

Randy Wilburn [00:06:02]

People hear organic all the time and I know a lot has changed over the years, but from your perspective, given that's all you've ever known as a producer of crops, what is the significance of organic food in your mind?

Well, back in the mid-80s, when we started producing, organic was an informal term. There certainly wasn't a legal definition of it. We would have people advertising their product as organic at the farmers' market or at ONF or anywhere but there were no set parameters about what that meant. Usually, it meant people were not using any form of fertilizer, insecticides, or herbicides.  Generally, that was understood. But people would come to us at farmers' market occasionally and ask us if organic meant we were growing it in water. They had it confused with hydroponics.  And so back at that time, the organic certification situation was very scattered across the US. There were a few independent organizations that were certifying their growers as organic, but there wasn't a national standard.  The national standard didn't happen until 2002. In the mid-90s, there was a lot of planning around how that was going to happen and how to create a national law that was defined organically.  Well, in 2002, that law was put into place. There was a Board formed, the National Organic Standards OMRI which is the Organic Materials Research Institute that published a list of everything that could be used in organic production. So at that time, in 2002 when the national law came into effect, a lot of the smaller organizations that had been certifying actually went out of business because they had to meet standards with the USDA, and some of them didn't have the wherewithal to do that.  And then it became more expensive also to be certified.  So there were a lot of growers like ourselves who decided to shelve it for a year or two just to see how it played out with our public. And after a year or so, we decided that we had spent ten years training people what organic meant and we wanted to use that word.

So really, I can't believe that 2002, that's just from the date that we're recording this. That was just 21 years ago. It hasn't been that long.  In my mind, it's like all we've been ever buying is organic food but in reality, that's not the case.

Well, the organic movement in the US started in the 1930s and 40s.  It's quite an interesting evolution.  But starting with biodynamics in the 1920s and then J. I. Rodale in the 30s and 40s who was following the work of a man named Howard, an Englishman who worked in India, who was finding out that the composting techniques of the traditional farmers in India were often superior. The types of results were superior to the chemical fertilization process. So, J. I. Rodale eventually started the Rodale Institute and published Organic Farming and Gardening magazine for years and years and years, which we got for so many years and published New Farm magazine. He really popularized the idea of organic farming, so a lot of us were exposed to those materials starting in the 70s and then, of course, Mother Earth News came along with the whole back to the land movement, and everybody was all about, let's grow organically. When we first bought our farm, we had some extension agents come out and check out our blueberries, and they told us that it was not going to be possible for us to grow products organically. It was just not possible.  There were just too many insect pests. And that was conventional wisdom at the time that it wasn't possible. And of course, now we know differently because we've been doing it for this our 39th year in production, and we've never used it. Now there are things that we stay away from because they have particular insect pests that are really difficult to deal with organically, especially tree fruits which can be very difficult around here because of our humidity in the summertime.  So as growers, we find our way through this kind of complex puzzle of what grows well here and what doesn't grow as well. We don't push back when we have so many problems. It looks like it's just going to be forever a losing battle against a certain type of insect. But there are lots of cultural things we can do.  For instance, say we have a big problem with something called a harlequin bug that gets on all of the cabbage family crops in the summertime and we've heard from another grower that what they do is they just eliminate all that family of crops from their fields in the middle of the summer. They eliminate the host because it's not possible to spray them all. They're really hard to kill with organic sprays, but if you eliminate all the hosts for even just one month and they don't have any place to live, then you can start over with those crops again in the fall and you don't have that passed on.  So there are tricks that accumulate over time.  When you have an active network of organic growers as we do in this area, thankfully, we have regular gatherings where we get together and share that type of information. What are you guys doing about this problem, or what's selling well for you at the farmers' market? So we have a very active network of growers that are sharing information.

I would say it's more collaborative than a competition with your fellow growers.

If you're smart, it's collaborative.  If you're a newbie, you might feel competitive, but in the end, it doesn't pay to be competitive.  It pays to make friends with your fellow farmers.

Especially those that have been there and done that.

Unfortunately, the most important lessons are the ones that cost you a lot of money.

Absolutely.  So we talked off the air before we started this a little bit about the back to land movement and I was telling you my familiarity with that topic and subject. But I would love for you just to give our audience just a quick snippet into what the back to land movement is as far as you're concerned.

Well, I can give you my personal take on it, which was, here I'm somebody who was interested in biology and everything biological and ecology when the science of ecology was first being formulated.  And what I found out at university and right afterward when I started working for an organic gardening program, a community program, was that I was much happier working outside as a part of nature rather than studying it as an objective science. And so this kind of hands-on integration in the natural world became something that I was going to pursue as a lifestyle and a profession.  I wasn't going to be happy just looking at it from the outside. Also, at the same time, people were starting to hit the wall with the types of job prospects that they might have that were traditionally associated with success with good incomes, whether it be a doctor, a lawyer, or whatever white-collar worker.  We could see the stress levels that our parents had in some of their jobs, even though they were successful in a societal, normative way, there are costs. And so one thing that really brought that home for me, I was a junior year abroad program student in Paris, and I was in school. I was studying embryology and biochemistry and ecology. And slowly I became quite depressed. I wasn't like a big city guy.  I was from sort of smaller towns here in the States. And even though I love being in France, I could tell that the weight of living in a highly paced urban environment was taking its toll on me and I decided to take a semester off, and I went to work on a small dairy farm in the Alps in Germany. And within two weeks, I was so happy. I was just, like, super happy.  I had a real smile on my face. And that told me something about my particular orientation toward work. And so that led me to want to do outdoor work in the natural world, and it just all kind of fit together for me. So I think if you want to talk about the back to land movement in general, it has a lot of those same elements in it.  And we have the same thing happening now with young people. Young people are very idealistic, and they get super troubled by the state of the world's ecology, and the inability of governments to deal with those types of problems in a timely way that takes so long for the wheels of government to grind into action.  And so in order to not lose hope, especially as a young person, idealistic young person, if you can put your shoulder to the wheel on something that's positive, that's tangible, that can be your lifeline to having a good outlook toward your community and toward your life in general. And there are so many young people that are lost in our current world.  And it was the same in my generation too. And you can only spend so much time in the psychedelic land, eventually, you have to get back to work.  What I find here on our farm too is that we have young people come in and help us every summer, and for them, it's all new, but they realize that a different world is possible. They can see it in front of them. And when they start working that way their confidence grows about what's actually possible in the world.

I think that's exciting to me. And I know that, as I had told you, I heard from a number of board members about the back to land movement and the group of folks that were very instrumental in a lot of the ways that the Coop has grown over the years.  Your interactions with the Coop started 20-plus years ago or more than that?

Probably more than that. I know we were selling some things to the Coop when it was on Dixon Street. That might have been over 20 years ago.  It was always a natural relationship for us. We shop there. We're definitely part of the clientele that makes the Coop work and we have the same type of values. More recently, I'd say in the past 20 years, there was a movement on the part of some of the public, some of whom were our friends who were following us at the farmers' market, that they really wanted the Coop to start selling more locally grown product because a lot of the organic produce was coming from larger farms in California and coming through larger distributors and it's pretty easy for a produce manager to look down the list of what's available and just mark it off and get it delivered. Whereas the problems of bringing in locally grown produce and developing relationships with local producers, it's much more complex. And case in point, you can have salad mix available this week for two weeks and then you're going to be out for a little while and then you might have something else here for two weeks. It's not something that the produce manager is able to pin down on their calendar as being consistently available and that is the main problem with locally grown products.  However, once the Coop decided it was going to have this attitude that it was going to buy as much locally grown produce as possible that was available then things started to shift. And every time I would call the produce manager and say, we've got this. Yeah, bring it on in. Yeah, bring it on in.  They basically had a welcoming attitude to try to buy as much as they could.  Of course, they didn't want to have surpluses that were going to go to waste. But the attitude was there that, yes, we want to try to foster this relationship with as many local producers as possible. And that has really changed the Produce Department at ONF in the past 20 years.

And it has increasingly gotten better and better and as I look at it today, just as recently as yesterday when I was in there, I always marvel at what is available. And with the knowledge in my head that most of this produce is locally sourced, which is kind of cool, and I know all of it is good for you. And that's the key piece that I think is important. And a lot of people don't realize that you can't necessarily go into every grocery store and see something comparable like that, or at least that experience here in Northwest Arkansas.

Another important piece of this is that ONF has always tried to pay the growers a decent price for their product. And that has meant often that the in-store price after the store markup is put on it is going to be higher than you would buy conventional produce at another local grocery store. But that is the reason so many small growers are able to sell. And when I say small grower, I mean anywhere from half an acre to ten acres.

And you have 40 acres?

We have 40 acres, but only two full acres are in intensive production. You can produce a huge amount of product on even just two acres with intensive methods. Now, we have all different kinds of producers for the Produce Department at ONF.  We have tree fruit people.  We have meat people. So we have people on different scales. But the people that are producing vegetables for the Coop are generally on fairly small scales. But by paying a decent price for that product, it allows those people to stay in business.  If you try to go to another outlet, a regular grocery store, and sell it, first of all, it's not possible. They don't want to deal with you because you're not in their production stream.  They don't have the call for locally grown as the ONF customers demand. But then the price that you would get would be so low that you would have to expand your production by ten times in order to make any money doing it.  And so there goes the lifestyle.  It's all connected. So it's important for the ONF customers to understand how that picture works.

And I know you mentioned something else that I really wasn't aware of, but it was also kind of the history of the farmers' market here in Fayetteville, which is unique. There's a little farmers' market in Springdale.  There's one in Rogers, and there's definitely one in Bentonville. But the Fayetteville farmers' market is unique. And I know that there is some connection and relationship with the Coop from that perspective.  I'd love for you just to kind of talk about the farmers' market a little bit and why the next time whoever is listening to this, the next time they visit the farmers' market may look at it differently.

Well, our farmers' market has become a jewel and has become what we consider to be the heart of the Fayetteville Community in many ways. But it wasn't always that way. We had Marcella Thompson this past weekend tell us the history of this at our annual farmers' market member meeting. The farmers market was started in 1973 and Marcella and her late husband Glenn were forward-thinking enough that in their initial founding of the articles of incorporation and they're going to the City Council and getting a special city ordinance to reserve the places on the square for the vendors to come in Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays. And then our system of commissions, which is the percentage that the farmers pay to the market organization for being there, and also the way we pick spots, kind of democratic way.  We pick spots on the square for our farms based on a point system by how much commission we pay. It's a very interesting kind of unique system. One of the wonderful things they realized at the time is that you can't have a farmer's market and have a lot of reselling of products that are not grown by the vendor because it destroys the price structure. If you have any type of product dumping, large farms that want to dump two or three truckloads of watermelons, and they'll just sell them at any cost just to get rid of them. And then you have the small half or acre vegetable farmer who's growing specifically the further farmers market, and you have somebody come in and dump three truckloads of watermelons on the market at a time when everybody else has the watermelons.  It just doesn't work. And so from the beginning, that was not allowed. I fell in love with the market in 1981 when I came up here with a load of watermelons from Mississippi to sell to our cooperative warehouse. And I looked at it and it was in this beautiful downtown square and the city had spent a lot of money landscaping around the square. So they even hired a violinist to come and play for the gardens when the gardens were first put in.  And so there were musicians there and it's just a great community vibe. I kind of fell in love with it. And when I moved up to the Ozarks, I wanted to be within an hour of Fayetteville and Eureka Springs so that we could market here. And that's how we started looking for a property because we knew that we were going to grow in this market.

And that makes a lot of sense. So you found a place and it's within an hour's drive of here. [MC - It's 50 miles east of here].  But the way you described it it's like a utopia for you in terms of, that might be a little hyperbole, but there is a dramatic difference between where you are there and even when you come here and I think you likened it to the urban to the rural. I'd love for you just to expand upon that just a little bit for some of our listeners, because I think a lot of people listening to this podcast sometimes we forget that we are surrounded by a lot of natural landscapes all around Arkansas, period, but specifically Northwest Arkansas that lend themselves to the kind of lifestyle that you have and the kind of business that you're able to operate within an hour's drive of here.

This morning I got up and went out early, around 6:30 because I wanted to burn off some big pile of bamboo stalks that we've been harvesting. And we're down in a little valley that's completely forested all around us.  We're surrounded by forested hills and down at the very bottom, right below our house is this beautiful clear stream that runs into the Kings River. It's called Dry Fort Creek. And on a misty morning like this morning, there'll be this mist rising off the water and slowly moving downhill through the valley. And with this beautiful kind of spring-like weather we're having the last couple of days, it's sort of intoxicating, really, for somebody like me to be able to wake up and be there and then have my life as a gardener.  And I get to stay home all the time except when I come to town to sell or buy supplies. And my fantasy at the time and now my reality was that it was somehow possible to farm on that small scale using organic methods and to make a living. It might not be a rich man's living but it would be a satisfying life. And it has turned out to be that. It has turned out to be all of that and more.  And I feel like when you're farming like that out in the boondocks in the rural areas, there are not a lot of people to talk to, to share that experience, because very few of us have that opportunity. I think something like 1% of the US. population is involved in agriculture. It's very.  I was in Senegal a month ago and 70% of the population is still involved in village agriculture and we just don't have that. Our agriculture and rural social landscape is very fragmented. So I feel like the seed is there for little operations like ours. We have a certain cultural renewal potential that we're sharing with our urban customers who are here in town.  I think I was telling you just a little bit earlier, it was probably 20 years ago when I would see painters come to market and they would set up their easels on the corner and they would be painting our market display with all the flowers and the vegetables and stuff. And I started to realize what a symbolic meaning that had for people who live in town to be able to touch that beauty and that piece of the countryside. That's part of the reason they were coming to the square. It wasn't just to listen to music and it wasn't just to visit with their friends.  It's because they were in touch with some very important energy that was coming from the countryside and it allowed them to be a part of it.  And we do the same thing when we come to town. Most of us that are doing the type of work I'm doing right now, we're college-educated people. In my father's time, living out and farming like that was associated with poverty and ignorance.  And now we have satellite internet. We're in touch with everyone all the time with our cell phones.  It's just not the same. And we have university libraries at the touch of our fingertips. And we have a situation where so much of the population lives in urban areas that they've created concentrated wealth that we can draw on when we come to town and sell our products.  So we live in a very different era than my dad did.  So this constant interaction between the farmers bringing their product to town and the people coming to market like this is a very healthy thing for our society.

I think so. And to me, the Coop is kind of like a microcosm of that because you have this centerpiece in the community, not unlike the farmers' market, but this is open almost twenty-four seven. I mean, it is open all the time and it creates an outlet, right? Because it's not like the farmers' market runs year round and so the Coop is there year round and it's able to provide that outlet for all of the things that you're able to grow with your hands and bring to market. What are some of your favorites, the things that you bring to market through the Coop that tend to be tried and true year in and year out?

Well, we started the Flower Department at ONF, and so, I got to talking to Pauline Teasen years and years ago when it was over in Evelyn Hills, and we had one vendor selling some flowers there on Friday evenings at the Entrance Way.  But I thought, well, let's see if we can start some type of permanent sales here. And Pauline said, okay, well, let's build this display up near the register and we can fill it up. So for the first at least three years, we would bring in bouquets on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and then we would replace…..  It was all on commission. We would replace everything that didn't sell with fresh bouquets,  And that went fine.  When the store moved into the new location the sales really expanded. And part of was it a location where people from the college were coming over and buying stuff, and it was just more centrally located. And I really like bringing in those flowers because I'm proud of the way they look and I'm proud of how they hold up. And we get such great feedback, and we get people, like, stopping us as we're pulling the cart into the stores, like, oh, my, you just brought all these in. And then the people in the Homestead Department are like, well, people are asking about your flowers.  When are they going to start? That's super fun. And then for our produce, we do a lot of bag mixes of spinach and salad mix and things like that.  [RW - Which I'm a big fan of.  My wife and I are huge on that].  I love that. We like doing that because I love salad. But even one of the checkers once said she saw me checking out and she knew that we were supplying the salad over there in the Produce Department. She said, do you guys talk to the nature spirits? And I said, what do you mean? I guess I do, but mostly I'm just saying, excuse me, or I'm sorry. She said because your grains are just magic. That type of feedback is what farmers live for.

I love that.  Your greens are magic. We've kind of gone all over the place with this conversation about your history and about your experience here in Northwest Arkansas and what that's meant for you personally as well as professionally. What would you tell the uninitiated that are just brand new to the Coop about the importance of the Coop, but then also just the importance of being able to support the local industry, the local agriculture industry that's here in Northwest Arkansas?

Well, if we're going to have an alternative agriculture, meaning an alternative to large-scale conventional production which uses lots of chemicals and generally comes from way far away.  If you're going to try to foster a local network of farms that supply food to local people and for that to be lively, it has to have the support of consumers who care where they spend their dollars.  And that's really the crux of the issue for all of us that buy food, especially that every time we spend money on food, we're making a choice of what we vote for.  And everybody has lines that they draw, well, I'm not paying that for organic butter. I can't pay that for those peaches from Colorado. That's fine. But to just make the choice so that it's not always low prices.  We have to all do that as concerned consumers because we are the ones who are creating the agriculture of tomorrow through our choices of how we want the landscape to be treated.  Buying something that's organically grown or naturally grown is not something that you just do for yourself. It's something that you do for the environment because it implies a certain way of taking care of the environment.  And the local rural community, whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, is taking care of the natural world just outside the city limits. So it's in everybody's interest that we promote these types of eco-friendly practices as much as we possibly can.

You put that very well. And certainly, I agree with you.  And I think for a lot of people, it's just the things that they can't see right, that are just below the surface if you will. And I don't have the privilege of being behind you or your shadow as you do what you do on a daily basis, but clearly, we are able to see the fruits of it every time we walk into the Coop or every time we come to the farmers' market.  So I think it's important for people to recognize what that means to our ecosystem as a whole and how we need to take advantage of it and support it, especially any of the local providers and producers that are making an effort to bring healthy, wholesome food to our tables on a regular basis. So I want to say thank you personally, and I appreciate the lesson that you've shared on this particular episode. Not just about Dripping Springs, but more importantly, about this whole system that we're in here, this ecosystem that is in northwest Arkansas, and how the Coop plays a role in that.  How the farmers market plays a role in that and how there are a lot of people that were part of what we're calling the back to land movement that has been the backbone of what we're able to experience from healthy choices that we have in our grocery stores, especially what's offered at the Coop. So thank you very much.  I appreciate that. [MC -You're welcome].  So listen, Mark, when you and Michael aren't out there tending to the soil, what do you guys do for fun?

Play the accordion.

So I guess you're in a place where you don't have to worry about upsetting your neighbors with that.  [MC - Oh, no, they'd start dancing]. I love that. I love that.  Playing the accordion. Well, that's cool. Well, Mark, if anyone wants to learn more about Dripping Springs Garden, where would you like them to go?

They can go to our website, drippingspringsgarden.com, or we have a Facebook page, Dripping Springs Garden.  I'm not super active on Instagram.  I need to put a younger person in charge of that but you can see some cool pictures and get an idea of what's going on out there. And we do have some public tours periodically during the summer.

I was going to ask you about that. I think I may have to grab my family and convince you to let us come visit you guys at some point in time and check out the farm. I think that would sound like a lot of fun.

I would recommend that to anybody who is super interested in good food and local growing.  Whenever they have an opportunity to go out to a farm, they'll never be the same afterward when they actually see where the cherry tomatoes are growing and how they're harvested. It'll make quite an impression.

I would imagine.  I'm definitely going to take you up on that. And certainly, again, I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule and sitting down with us today on Ozark Natural Foods, the Coop Podcast. This is certainly an important program to not just create awareness of the Coop, but it's also an important program to create awareness of all of the people that play a role in even allowing the Coop to exist first and foremost. So I personally want to thank you both to you, Mark, and Michael, for all the work that you guys do at Dripping Springs. And we certainly look forward to sitting down with you at some point in time in the future to further the conversation.

Well, thanks for having us.  ONF is a very big part of our income picture, and we are super happy that it's here and are happy that there's an interest in organic production like ours.

Absolutely, and I think it bears repeating to anybody listening to this. If you are going to the Coop and spending your hard-earned dollars there, just know that on the other side of that are people like Mark and Michael from Dripping Springs Garden and so many of the other providers to the Coop that their livelihood is dependent upon your support of the Coop and so, we certainly want to encourage you to keep doing that. And as you walk into that Coop and you see those beautiful flowers, know that somebody lovingly cut those flowers and prepared them in such a way.  Because I got to tell you, those bouquets are absolutely amazing. And there's something about flowers, fresh cut flowers that just set things apart. And so I certainly appreciate you guys bringing a little bit of color to our regular day whenever we are able to walk into that Coop. So thanks again.


Well, folks, there you have it, another episode of the Ozark Natural Foods Coop podcast. We hope you enjoyed it, we hope you got something out of this. Learned a little bit more about organic farming, a little bit about the back to land movement, and certainly a little bit about Dripping Springs Garden and what it takes to work a farm locally here in Northwest Arkansas, and the simple fact that we only see the end result but there's so much more that is a part of it.  And so we really appreciate Mark taking time out today to share a little bit of that story. We will be back with another new episode of the Ozark Natural Foods Coop Podcast soon. I'm your host, Randy Wilburn, and we'll see you later.

Thanks for tuning in to the Ozark Natural Foods, the Coop Podcast.  Whether you are new to the area and looking for a healthy grocery store or you've been here for ages but didn't know the whole story about Ozark Natural Foods the Coop, this podcast is one of the best places to start. For more information about the Coop, please visit our website at onf.coop to learn more. That's onf.coop@ozarknaturalfoods, the Coop, we mean it when we say keeping it local since 1971.