Guiding Principles

1. Support and create the regeneration of Nature.
   Now, more than ever before, by adopting cultivation principles that are gentle to the earth and ecosystem, we need to grow a diversity of food crop varieties in our fields and orchards in order to adapt to changes, and to keep our food and ecosystem healthy, resilient, and dynamic. Explore, celebrate and consume what diversity can be found locally.
2. Honor producers and trust Indigenous knowledge.
   Farmers’ problem-solving skills in combination with embracing indigenous knowledge are key assets for coping with and adapting to climate change, assets that have not yet been sufficiently honored, understood and drawn upon by our community.
3. Individual agency for change.
   Consumers – eaters, chefs, or makers – need to vote with both their forks and their wallets in support of more diverse and regionally self-sufficient food systems, positive environmental impacts, and to lower their carbon footprint by whatever means they have available to them. Consumers also need to vote at the ballot box for more climate-friendly policies associated with resilient and healthy local ecosystems.^[1]
4. A holistic ecosystem response to scarcity of natural resources and climate change.
   Responding to climate change requires holistic and resilient ecosystem approaches impacting water, soil, and biodiversity to ensure adaptation to a changing environment. Such approaches should focus on the restoration of the dynamic connections between intensively managed agricultural lands and the natural ecosystem for the overall health of humans and the planet.
5. Cooperation and Collaboration;
   We need to empower local communities that link farmers, foragers, fishers, and ranchers with chefs, makers, consumers, and educators to be codesigners of local solutions to global change, and then creatively transmit their solutions to other communities for adoption, refinement, rejection or adaptation. Therefore, we subscribe and adhere to the Statement of Co-operative Identity as detailed and maintained by the International Co-operative Alliance.^[2]