A small co-op, on a small main street, in a small town that grows food.

Origin

How the co-op came together

In the winter of 2013, four electricians who worked separately within a 30-mile radius — one in Hardwick, one in Greensboro, one in Cabot, one in St. Johnsbury — found themselves at the same kitchen table. Their old shops had closed or retired out. Their customers were calling them at home. Each of them was, in practice, the only person in their town who would still climb into a milkhouse attic at 6 a.m. in February to find out why the bulk-tank chiller had quit.

The proposition that came out of that table was simple: pool the trucks, pool the inventory, pool the dispatch, and own it together. The Center for an Agricultural Economy¹ had been quietly building the model in town with food producers; we asked if it would work for tradespeople. It does, with two qualifications: you have to mean it about equal shares, and you have to mean it about the dispatch rotation. Marya took the first three years' worth of after-hours calls. Desmond took the next three. Anouk has had it since 2020. Skye has 2026. We rotate every March.

The cooperative is incorporated under Vermont's 11A V.S.A. as a worker-owned LLC. Our governance is one-share-one-vote. Annual surplus, when there is one, is distributed by hours worked rather than shares held. We're members of the Cooperative Development Institute and the CDI worker-cooperative legal cohort.

What we believe about the work

We believe a service call is a relationship that probably starts in February and lasts a decade. Most of our customers we've worked for at least three times — a service drop, then a barn rewire, then a sugarhouse, and at some point a son's or daughter's first house. So we sign every job to a level a stranger could pick it up in twenty years and figure out what we did. The field log is part of that. So is the labeling on every panel we touch.

We believe code is the floor, not the ceiling. NFPA 70 is the floor. The agricultural-buildings provisions of Article 547 are the floor. OSHA 1910.269 for our PPE is the floor. We exceed each in places. The clearest place is bonding: the code requires you to bond a milking parlor's equipotential plane to the building grounding electrode system; we go further, and re-bond every twelve months, because a bad bond will kill a cow long before it sets off a panel fault.

We believe in transparent pricing. The hourly rate, the service-call minimum, the truck-roll fee, and the apprentice-time discount all live on the rates page. We will quote the job before we start it. We will revise the quote, in writing, before we exceed it.

What we don't do

We don't do new commercial construction over 5,000 square feet. We don't do high-voltage primary work past the meter base — that's the utility's. We don't do solar PV on grid-tied roofs unless there's also a battery in the project. We don't take work outside Caledonia, Lamoille, Orleans, or Washington counties without an unusually good reason; we'd rather refer you to a member of the Vermont Electrical Contractors Association in your county.

The reading shelf

What's on the shelf above the dispatch desk, in the order we reach for it:

• NFPA 70 (NEC), 2023 edition — the working copy is dog-eared at 547, 250, and 240. nfpa.org
• UGLY's Electrical References, 2023 edition. The pocket book lives in the truck. uglys.net
• Tom Henry's Reverse Reference for the NEC. The desktop copy is for arguing with inspectors. code-electrical.com
• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. The book is here because of the way it tracks the work to the months. OUP
• Richard Brown, The Last of the Hill Farms. The photo book of the Northeast Kingdom that drew Marya here in 2008. Smithsonian
• USDA NRCS Vermont Field Office Tech Notes — agricultural electrical guidance. nrcs.usda.gov

This site

This site is set in Manrope for display, Roboto Slab for body, and JetBrains Mono for job codes and field-note margins. All three are variable fonts; we use the variation axes for weight and width inline. Photography is documentary, mostly from the practice's own files; placeholders are seeded from Lorem Picsum in this published version. The site is hand-coded HTML and CSS — no framework, no JavaScript bundler — and ships from Cloudflare Workers Static Assets.

We chose to write a long site, not a short one, because most of what farmers and homeowners ask us isn't on a contractor's website. So we put it on ours. If you want to read every page in order, the path is: Jobs → Field Log → Almanac → Crew → Rates → Safety → Glossary → Visit.