You know how it is in late August, when your vines are loaded down with ripe fruit, but you’ve got a deadline in the morning, or a pile of sweaty summer laundry, or a kid with a dentist appointment, or all three. You’re thinking, I’ve got four burners, two three-gallon pots, a couple of dozen quart jars and not a minute to spare. You feel guilty letting all that good produce go to waste, but you know it’s nothing to how you’re going to feel in January when you’re pouring off another can of pureed tomatoes trucked three thousand miles from California, thinking, I could be eating my own right now.

That’s the situation Peter Pehrson of Schoharie, NY was in last season, with more tomatoes than time. “I said to myself, there must be others in my situation. Turns out there are, and they range from home gardeners to commercial apple producers” he said.

Out of that realization comes the Schoharie Community Cannery, where local growers of any size, from backyard gardeners to commercial farms, will be able to use communal canning equipment to process their vegetables, fruits and perhaps eventually their poultry products as well.

Pehrson hopes to build a community cannery to process all natural or organic produce from local growers. The cannery would probably be built as a non-profit division of a for-profit, cooperative corporation, a business model that allows for both commercial bank loans and private investments as well as foundation and philanthropic funding. Pehrson and his co-consipirators are working out the details with the help of their upstate community, and are holding an open meeting to discuss the project  this Saturday from 9:30 to noon (see more info here). Everyone who eats is invited, and Pehrson promises to send us a rundown of the meeting for those New York State readers who won’t be able to attend on Shabbat.

Community canneries sprang up during world war two to accompany the victory garden movement. American households growing food in their backyards used shared equipment to store their home-grown veggies for the winter. Since then, many canneries have closed, for a litany of reasons we’re all pretty used to by now, including the cheap availability of canned vegetables: why pay fifty cents per can to do the work yourself when you can buy your vegetables at the supermarket for almost as little? I’m sure our readers can name plenty of good reasons, including the lower cost to the environment and the fact that your own garden produce is probably organic and tastier, but the fact remains– community canneries are no longer producing in most states.

These days, southern states, including Virginia, Georgia and Florida, have the most community canneries currently operational (according to the database currently being compiled at pickyourown.org). Ohio also has a few, but there are none in New York, California, Vermont, or any of the other places you might expect to find ample support for a venture like this one, which not only creates jobs to run three shifts of canning during the height of the season, but also creates important infrastructure for food security in local communities.

Pehrson hopes farmers will be able to find a new market through canned vegetables produced in a USDA-certified community kitchen. In this post, for example, local farmer Bob Comis in Stonybrook, NY ponders all the ways he plans to put the Schoharie Community Cannery to good use. Comis is a livestock farmer, so canned goods would allow him to turn his farm into a more closed system–with the animals fertilizing the vegetables–without the intense pressure of finding a market for fifty new pounds of zucchini every day, all summer long.

Comis dreams of growing five acres of dry beans to can and sell at his farmer’s market stand. At the food conference in December, Michael Ableman mentioned that one of the issues facing sustainable agriculture is the need to produce more sustainable staple crops, so that consumers can get their flour and protein locally too. Community canneries, which make it possible to pressure-can things like dry beans for use without soaking and hours of cooking, might assist in building this necessary infrastructure.

Given the possibility that they’ll be processing chicken in the next few years, I’m going to take a leap and figure that the Schoharie Community Cannery won’t be kosher, particularly since kashrut rules for canning vegetables  and fruits include strictures not just for meat and milk, but also for some produce, such as potatoes and cabbage. So why should Jew and the Carrot readers out in other states be interested in this little upstate startup?

Perhaps because your own community needs a cannery, maybe even a kosher one. Pehrson suggests that the model he and his colleagues are currently planning to institute will require less than $400,000 over its first three years in operation, but USDA-standard community kitchens can cost much less, depending on the cost of space and the equipment they purchase.

“In terms of community support, it’s been a positive tidal wave” said Pehrson, who also hopes that the cannery will provide jobs and a reason for young people to stay in the area. “Everyone benefits” he says, “Local jobs worked by local people is the best situation for an employer.” Switch eater for employer and food for jobs and you’ve got the local foods manifesto in a sentence.

To rsvp for Saturday’s meeting, visit the Schoharie Community Cannery web page at schohariecannery.org.