Rick Thomas explains how to pull out logs with a team of workhorses. Driving the team is second-year Sterling student Lee Sienkiewycz of Starksboro. Photos by Bethany M. Dunbar
CRAFTSBURY COMMON — Locally produced foods can help not only farmers and consumers, but the area’s economy as well.
“Vermont has this country’s healthiest food system,” said Tom Stearns of High Mowing Organic Seed Farm in Wolcott at the Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College on Tuesday.
“This particular region is a hotbed,” he added, meaning the towns around Hardwick.
“Sterling has been here for decades pumping out graduates that start businesses,” he said.
And agriculture-related businesses such as Cabot cheese, Jasper Hill, Sterling College and High Mowing Farm are some of the largest employers in the immediate area, he pointed out.
About 50 people gathered for the second annual Rural Heritage Institute on Tuesday to discuss the subjects of food and farming; how to repair
Jennifer Wright, at right, leads a tour through the Jasper Hill cheese caves in Greensboro.
education and distribution systems in this country to make fresh, healthy, local food available to schools, hospitals, grocery stores, restaurants, and consumers; and how to make consumers aware of the difference.
An afternoon workshop shifted to outdoors under a tree. Participants discussed how to connect farmers — who often don’t have time for marketing — to local consumers or schools, for example.
Severine von Tscharner Fleming said sometimes it takes a crazy mom or two to get things to happen.
Mary Hussman of St. Lawrence University said she comes from a county in New York that is terribly poor, and she believes that most people think only about cost when buying their food. Cheap food is expected and available, but it is not local or healthy, she said.
“You pay more attention to where you get your dry cleaning done,” she said.
But even in Brooklyn, New York, consumers can become aware of their food and grow it locally. One of the guest speakers on Tuesday was Annie Hauck-Lawson of Brooklyn College, who is the co-editor of Gastropolis: Food and New York City. She described growing up with parents who grew gardens and raised turkeys and pigs in a postage-stamp sized backyard. They ate dandelion greens and radishes and mushrooms gathered from where they could find them. She decided to raise honey and tried to bring a box of honeybees home on a train. She remembers a small explosion one day from some attempted dandelion wine.
In the same morning workshop, participants heard from Christopher Carden of South Florida, who has been interviewing young farmers in Maine about why they are doing what they are doing. Many of them left urban or suburban lives behind — lives where parents urged them to go to college and become doctors and lawyers — but they were seeking something different. He talked about finding a sense of place.
“I’m not saying you have to come out to the woods to find place,” he said. But he has seen a high level of something stirring in a generation of people who have been moved around a lot, and whose lives seem somewhat fractured by movement.
The entrance of the cheese caves at Jasper Hill is quite impressive.
“Call it wanderlust. Call it cold feet,” he said, but there is something that some of these young farmers are seeking and Mr. Carden interviewed a number of them who found it.
“You need to work at it,” he said. “It doesn’t just happen.”
Someone in the workshop asked if this movement is a generational thing — one generation moves off the farm in order to seek an urban life, and the next one wants to get back to the land.
Mr. Carden disagreed, saying that the “Back to the Land” movement of the ’60s seemed to be people rejecting something, whereas this new movement seems more to be people seeking something.
Dave Rogers of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) said the current trend is “tremendously exciting,” and he likes to believe NOFA has been gearing up for it for many years.
“I like to say that NOFA has been planting the seeds and cultivating the soil for local foods for 30 years,” he said.
The opportunity presents a challenge, he pointed out. He spelled it out as such: How can we ensure that buying local sustains agriculture and the local economy?
Mr. Stearns asked participants to think about the localvore movement and how that should be defined. He said Heinz ketchup is starting to
Cheese wheels, each weighing 35 pounds, are stacked to the high ceilings in one of seven chambers inside the cheese caves at Jasper Hill.
promote the idea that all of its tomatoes are grown within 100 miles of its ketchup plant and trying to say that means the ketchup is local.
The word organic does not mean what it used to mean, some said, as huge corporations get their vegetables certified organic and ship them across the country to market.
Mr. Stearns said the perfect size farm of the future might be large enough to make money but small enough to maintain environmental and other ethical standards. But medium-sized farms are the ones going out of business these days.
Though the challenges seem somewhat daunting at times, there was good news at Tuesday’s session as well. A tour of the cheese caves at Jasper Hill showed a thriving business that is helping new small cheesemakers get started and helping Cabot to produce a cloth-bound cheddar that seems to bring consumers back to the old flavors they might have known as children. One giant section of the caves is filled to the high ceilings, mostly with 35-pound wheels of Cabot cheddar.
Participants had the option of visiting High Mowing Farm’s organic seed company that afternoon instead. Tuesday was the first day of the three-day institute. Wednesday’s sessions included one on policy, economy and agriculture, with speakers on the future of the maple industry and local development pressure and land-use decisions. Thursday more sessions were planned, including one about connecting local farmers and restaurants.
Participants had opportunities to see demonstrations of scything, dyeing wool, and working with draft horses and oxen.
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