Our primary aim is to revive the collective consciousness consumed by the state and capital, which devaluates labor and nature, at the stage of production, to provide solidarity and to bring people together with healthy food by protecting nature.
We must know that if we leave food sovereignty to capitalism alone in this system, healthy food will be a dream. Because capitalism imposes the seed, medicine, chemical fertilizer, price that should be used on producers and makes the farmer addicted to himself. We defend traditional production against the industrial production style in food and put the producer and the consumer at the center of the system. We take the vehicle and traders out of the way, deliver them from the manufacturer to the consumer.
We advocate that consumers should know in what conditions, how and where the food consumed is produced. Unfortunately, this is not possible in industrial agriculture and industrial agriculture does not have such a problem and it will never happen. As a cooperative, we only buy the products of the producers in our region by conducting on-site inspections.
We advocate collective production against industrial production and solidarity oriented marketing against industrial marketing. Current hygiene laws and regulations on foods aim to exclude farmers from all rings of the food chain except the production link. This legal system, which is regulated according to the preferences of multinational supermarket chains, makes it impossible for farmers to process their own products, as well as other small-scale alternative enterprises such as butchers, greengrocers and groceries, threatening the existence of distribution channels, and subordinate to multinational agricultural companies and supermarkets. Today, by purchasing packaging rather than food, the consumer becomes condemned to products that are contained in beautiful packaging, but whose health is extremely endangered, and which have almost no nutritional value. Human life is measured by shelf life. Industrial agriculture does this through marketing and advertising fraud under the name of food safety and hygiene.
By defending the fair price policy against capitalist price policies, we see access to healthy, organic food as a fundamental right and remove it from the monopoly of the upper classes. We determine the purchase and sales price of our products together with our manufacturers. We never aim to create capital, we only share our income with the society by transferring it to cooperative funds.
We see labor not as an area of exploitation, but as an organizational area, we employ our women except for hard work, and we limit our employees’ weekly working hours to 39 hours for a humane life. We ensure the social security of our seasonal workers by making SSI entries. We create jobs by doing our harvest, product screening and packaging as much as possible.
While planting a plant, we argue that other creatures have the right to live in that soil.
We never pollute our soil with chemical fertilizers and medicines. We use cloth bags as packaging for pulses packaging. We make our cloth bags for our women in Pülümür and Ovacık district.
HONEY
We produce our honey in the high altitude highlands of our geography in areas away from environmental pollution. The honey of each beekeeper reflects the flower character of its nature and therefore its aroma differs. We process our wax in Tunceli Province Bee Breeders Association ourselves. In this way, we prevent contamination from wax. We not only conduct laboratory analysis audits, but also inspect our beekeepers on site twice a season.
HMF is a carcinogenic substance that occurs in honey due to heating or storage of honey in a warm place. The HMF rate is also low since we do not apply heat treatment in our honeys. This is why our honey crystallizes early (sugar). this is due to the natural structure of the honey, and when you heat it in 45 degree hot water in such a way that it does not get into the water, it recovers.
Prolin is one of the quality parameters of honey. Food codex finds honey over 300 mg / kg suitable for codec in flower honey. We increase the quality by carrying the bar higher by setting a criterion above 600 mg / kg.
C4 candies are added to honey from outside, corn syrup, etc. It is sugars. Food codex accepts up to 7% of flower honey. Our cooperative accepts this rate as “0”.
Moisture is the proportion of water in honey. This rate is high in unripe, early harvest honey. The upper limit of this rate in food codex is 20%. It is a difficult parameter to adjust as honey firms apply heat treatment to reduce the amount of moisture, as the HMF value will increase. Since our honeys do not apply heat treatment, this ratio is on average 10%.
LEGUMES
As a cooperative, we protect our land, water and nature by raising awareness of our farmers within the scope of sustainable natural farming activities, defending traditional production. Together with our farmers, we create collective cultivation and create collective production awareness, and deliver them from the producer to the consumer without intermediaries. For 2018, we planted common crops with 20 farmers in our Kızık village and planted beans on 500,000 square meters of land.
SALT
In Pülümür district, we deliver our source salt, which has been produced with the same methods for 400 years, without any treatment. It is the crystallization of the salt water that comes out to the earth by absorbing the salt it melts during the passage of underground waters through the rock salt deposits.
PEKMEZİ
Mulberry production is common in Ulukale village of Pertek and Çemişgezek district in our province. No medicine, preservatives, glucose is used at any stage of production of our mulberries produced as cookies and molasses. The most distinctive feature of Cookie Ulukale berry is that it is white, small-grained and seedless.