Local growers hoping to form worker-member Lawrenceville co-op

Being a small food producer is hard.

There are physical issues, such as dealing with climate change and the changing of the seasons.

Then, there are the challenges of packaging, marketing and selling your goods, which can be expensive and inefficient.  

“In Pennsylvania, 4% of farmers are making an actual value-added product,” said Rob Breen. “It’s not really financially sustainable for small and mid-sized farms to just be in the commodity business as a producer.”

Breen, a local grower and designer, had dealt with those problems himself as a small-scale farmer and food producer in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in Pennsylvania. So he came up with an idea that would remove some of the barriers for people who want to pursue agriculture or food production at a small scale: Zeromile, a dual member and worker cooperative that provides space for producers to make, pack and sell their wares.

The co-op is intended to shorten the food supply chain by giving local growers a place to make and sell products and at the same time offering members access to healthy local foods at a reduced price, according to Breen.

“You can put a label on it, and you can stand behind a product and tell your story,” Breen said. “That’s really, really crucial if we want to continue to have community farms, urban farms, small farms.”

Breen has been renovating a building he leases in Lawrenceville that he first discovered being utilized as a vertical mushroom farm. He said he hopes to add three kitchens as well as areas for refrigeration, packaging and more, with all of the necessary utilities and equipment.

It’s clear that 38-year-old Breen has put countless hours of work into the building even amid ongoing renovations. As he easily moves through the structure that spans the width between 43rd Street and an alley in the back known as 43rd½ Street , it would be impossible to tell he’s almost completely blind. At age 12, Breen was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease that leads to gradual degeneration of the retina. He was legally blind by the time he was 25.

“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “If you were to take a movie screen and then an AK-47 and shoot out 90% of it randomly and then place static over whatever movie was behind it, that’s what the world looks like to me.”

The diagnosis initially made Breen want to be alone, he said, and to him, that meant being out in nature. But that led to his interest in permaculture, ecology and sustainability. 

Zeromile already has enough growers, makers and artisans who have signed on as members to become operational. However, funding to get the co-op running remains an issue.   

Breen was hopeful to launch the co-op after receiving a $100,000 USDA grant, but following the federal funding freeze and spending cuts in the spring, that was reduced to $25,000. Zeromile began a multi-part fundraising campaign this week with a goal of raising a little more than $100,000 for the needed infrastructure, licensing and equipment, said Amanda Pagniello, who founded the co-op with Breen.

Pagniello, a dispatcher for 412 Food Rescue who has worked in myriad positions in the food industry for a dozen years, said Zeromile is a sustainable solution to obstacles faced by small food producers as well as consumers.   

“There’s no longevity in [the idea] that it has to be high volume, it has to keep growing, it has to be this way,” Pagniello said. “That’s just not a sustainable way to do things in general, and I think that speaks to how we consume things. Yeah, we’re going to be producing consumables, but the point is to make it something that is speaking to more longevity and community building than just a basic business.”

Trevor Ring, founder of Community Cultures, which produces and educates people about fermented foods, has worked with Breen and Pagniello to establish Zeromile. He also plans to use the co-op to make and sell his products, including live-cultured sodas similar to kombucha and fermented vegetables. 

High costs and limited access to food production facilities can be a strain on small food producers, Ring said, but a dual worker-member co-op could help to solve that problem by keeping expenses down and providing a place with a direct connection to consumers.  

“As a food producer in Pittsburgh, there’s definitely a lack of infrastructure and resources for small food producers, especially with kitchen spaces,” Ring said. “Zeromile is perfect for that, and what it could accomplish would be huge for Pittsburgh and hopefully be a model that could inspire other similar projects.”

Pagniello said that Zeromile is designed to be a replicable way to bolster the local food supply chain as well as helping to address food insecurity. 

“As someone who works in food security, I’ve seen the increase in need, I’ve seen the degradation of soil in farms and the unfortunate reality that land is not just not accessible, but barriers are becoming even worse,” she said. “Our food supply chain is only going to get worse unless something changes.”