We Didn't Set Out to Build a Grocery Store
Two weeks ago we closed the doors to our retail market on 8th Ave.
It was one of the hardest moments in Smokin' Oaks' story — not because of the building itself, but because of what happened inside it. Conversations. Shared meals. Producers meeting the people they were growing for. Families discovering food they could trust.
For many people Smokin' Oaks was the market.
For us the market was always something more. It was one piece of a much larger vision.
We never set out to build a grocery store. We set out to help build a different food system.
Those convictions haven't changed. And over the coming weeks we'd like to keep exploring them with you.
This is the beginning of a new series — Building a Different Food System — where each week we'll explore one idea behind the food system we're working toward. Sometimes farming. Sometimes ownership. Sometimes current events. Sometimes the people behind the food.
Our hope isn't simply to tell you what we believe. Our hope is to help you better understand the food system we all depend on — and why we believe it can be built differently.
Every Meal Begins Somewhere
Every meal begins long before it reaches our plate. It begins with land. Who owns it. Who stewards it. Who makes decisions about what happens there. Most of us never think about those questions. But they're some of the most important questions we can ask.
Who Owns the Land Your Food Grows On?
Most people assume farmers own the farms they work. Many do — about 97% of American farms are still small and medium-sized family operations.
But something has been quietly changing for decades.
The 2026 Land Report confirms what many in agriculture have been watching for years. Stan Kroenke is now the largest private landowner in the United States — controlling more than 2.7 million acres after acquiring nearly one million acres of New Mexico ranchland in late 2025. That was the largest single land purchase in America in more than a decade.
Bill Gates is the country's largest private owner of farmland specifically — holding roughly 275,000 acres across nearly twenty states, managed through a private investment firm and operated by professional farm managers who have never touched the soil themselves.
Neither example is inherently good or bad.
But they illustrate something important.
Farmland is increasingly being viewed as an investment asset. Farmland prices have increased 39% since 2020 and the trend is accelerating. New research shows 58% of small farms are at risk of sale or acquisition before 2030.
When the people who own the land are primarily optimizing for financial return the decisions made on that land naturally reflect those priorities. What gets planted. How it's managed. What farmers are paid. What practices are rewarded.
Most families eating that food never see those decisions. They simply experience their results.
It's Not Just the Land
The ownership problem doesn't stop at the property line.
When Monsanto — now owned by Bayer — introduced Roundup Ready seed in the 1990s something fundamental changed in American agriculture.
Farmers had always saved seed. It was how farming worked for thousands of years. You grow a crop. You save the best seed. You plant it next season. The seed belongs to the farmer.
Roundup Ready seed changed that. The seed is patented. You license it for one season. You cannot save it. You cannot replant it. You buy it again next year — from the same company — at whatever price they set.
Today 90% of all commercial corn seed planted in the United States contains Bayer's trait for glyphosate resistance. Four companies control 62% of global agrichemical sales and 40% of the global seed market.
The farmer doesn't own the seed going into the ground. They don't own the chemical keeping the weeds off it. They don't own the land it's growing on in many cases.
They do the work. Someone else owns the system.
That's the food system most Americans are eating from. Not because anyone chose it deliberately. Because it was built this way — one patent, one contract, one acquisition at a time.
Why This Matters
Ownership shapes every food system. It influences what gets planted, how land is stewarded, what farmers are paid, and ultimately what reaches our tables.
When ownership changes incentives change. And when incentives change food systems change. That's why we've spent so much time talking about stewardship, transparency, and community ownership. Because ownership isn't simply about who holds the deed. It's about who shapes the future.
What Stewardship Actually Means
When we talk about regenerative agriculture we're not just talking about farming practices.
We're talking about a fundamentally different relationship to land.
Land that's stewarded — not just owned — gets managed on a different timeline. You're not optimizing for this quarter's yield. You're building soil that will be more productive in ten years than it is today. You're maintaining biodiversity that makes the whole system more resilient. You're thinking about what you're handing to the next generation not just what you're extracting from this one.
That kind of stewardship is almost impossible to finance through conventional capital. Banks don't lend on ten-year soil health timelines. Private equity doesn't invest in practices that sacrifice short-term yield for long-term resilience.
The cooperative model changes that equation. When the people who own the operation are the same people who eat the food — and who want their grandchildren to eat clean food from healthy land — the timeline changes. The incentives align.
That's the whole argument for community ownership in four sentences.
The Cooperative Connection
The cooperative we're pursuing grows from that conviction.
We believe the people who depend on a food system should have the opportunity to help steward it — not simply participate in it as consumers.
It's a different way of thinking about ownership. And over the coming weeks we'll continue exploring why we believe that matters.
Next week we go deeper — who really owns America's food, and what the grocery aisle you walk through every week is actually telling you about the system behind it.
Want to go deeper on this every week? We send one email every Thursday — no fluff, just the food system conversation most people aren't having. Join the list. Subscribe →
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