The brain child of Yvette Plentai, Niagara Local Food Co-op is a virtual market for anyone wanting to eat locally produced food.

Producers will post online what crops are available crops and buyers will be able to pay farmers using PayPal and pick up their orders at distribution centres.

"My vision is every farmer and producer will become a household word," Plentai said, "I want our producers to be stars."

Plentai said she wants the agricultural industry to spill into the tourism industry, and have people come from other countries to eat our produce.

"It will instill pride into the area," she said, "We can all become ambassadors for the Niagara area."

Beth Secord of Mathias Farms Ltd. said she will benefit from the co-op because since the Can-Gro canning factory closed she has had nowhere to sell her pears.

"It's a miracle we're still here," she said of her family-operated farm in Fonthill.

Since she received a letter from a grocery store telling her she can no longer bring her pears there because of liability issues, her Bartlett pears haven't been in demand.

"They sell California Bartlett pears instead," Secord said.

Secord was one of the farmers who went to Oklahoma to see a similar food co-op is already in its fifth year of existence and operates on a state-wide scale.

"If I hadn't seen it," Secord said, she would not have believed it.

But she said the operation in Oklahoma sells $40,000 of local produce, livestock, and other home-made goods every day.

But they only operate once a month, Secord said, and the Niagara co-operative will be run twice a month.

The co-op will allow farmers to sell more of their crops through retail, instead of wholesale, and allow them to keep more of the profit. It also creates a more efficient sale because the goods are pre-ordered, so the farmers will know who much to bring to the distribution point.

However, the co-op is still in its early phases and factors such as location and funding still need to be decided.