Could Vermont Feed Itself

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Could Vermont feed itself?

"It doesn't make sense for all of us to be farmers," Johnson said of theburgeoning popular interest in self-sufficiency. His vision, rather, is for some specialization and cooperative use. He could supply all of Craftsbury's sauerkraut needs, while his town could share storage facilitiesand a slaughterhouse with several others. When it comes to local foodproduction, he said, "if any place can do it on the village by village level,Vermont can."

Burlington Free PressBy Tim JohnsonFree Press Staff Writer June 11, 2007Yet another dietary mantra is gaining traction across Vermont -- "eat local" -- asmore and more people are expanding their vegetable gardens, buying directlyfrom farmers, and trying to relearn food preservation techniques that mostVermonters have long since forgotten.All of which raises obvious questions:-- Could Vermont really feed itself?-- In a state where the ground is frozen four months a year, how realistic is it totry to "eat local" once the summer growing season is over?-- What about all those staples -- wheat and other grains, for example -- that arebarely grown in Vermont at all?The answers are nuanced and speculative, depending on who's talking, but noless surprising for that.One recent boost to the national "eat local" movement, whose proponents havedubbed themselves "localvores," comes in a book by novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family. "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" details their experiences after they resolved to "eat local" for a year. They did this in Virginia,however, where the climate is less intimidating. Comparable "eat local"challenges posed by enthusiasts in Vermont tend to be for just a few weeks at atime, and seldom in February.The meaning of "local" might vary with the consumer's motivation for eating thatway.

"Eating locally appeals to many people for different reasons," said RobinMcDermott, a co-organizer of Mad River Localvores. Her reasons are partlygustatory (local produce tastes better) and economic (she wants to support localfarmers).The state's Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets has been beating theeconomic drum since 2003 with its "Buy Local: The 10 percent Difference"campaign. ("If Vermonters shifted just 10 percent of their food purchases tolocally grown food products, that would add more than $100 million to Vermont'seconomy," states the Agency's Web site.)For some, the motivation is partly political, partly environmental. Much of theproduce sold in Vermont's supermarkets has traveled 1,500 miles or more indiesel-burning, greenhouse-gas-belching tractor-trailer trucks.The mainstream food economy is heavily dependent on petroleum -- used inconventional fertilizer and pesticides as well as for cultivation and transportation-- which the world has in limited supply. It stands to reason that sooner or later,the world will run out of major new oil reserves to exploit; oil production will"peak" and start dropping. People in Vermont and across the country whosubscribe to the "peak oil" notion are betting on "sooner," and they've startedgiving serious thought to reorganizing their lives in the face of a huge, impendingspike in the price of gasoline and fuel oil.Nobody can say for sure when the "peak" will occur -- by some accounts, it couldbe many decades away -- but growing numbers of people in Vermont are gettingready for it anyway, and "eating local," to the extent that it lessens fossil fuel use,is part of the new lifestyle they envision.Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at theUniversity of Vermont, is among those who see "peak oil" as "a reality," althoughhe admits to the usual uncertainty about when the peak will come. Meanwhile, oilinfuses the nation's food system."Corn," Costanza remarked, "is made from oil." If the price of oil skyrockets,conceivably, Iowa corn growers might lose their competitive advantage over Vermont corn growers."If the fuel cost tripled," said Pete Johnson, who runs a Craftsbury vegetablefarm, "all of a sudden, there would be no price differential between the greens Igrow and what a local restaurant buys from California. It would be a whole newparadigm."

The old granary

The new paradigm has elements of the old. Two hundred years ago, Vermontwas largely self-sufficient in food. Rural people depended heavily on local cropsand livestock and on techniques for stretching their food supplies through thewinter.No one today is pushing a wholesale return to the pioneer lifestyle. The point of looking back, rather, is to rediscover Vermont's capacity to produce foods that, for as long as anyone can remember, have been shipped in from other places.Consider what Ethan Allen said in a November 1787 letter about his new spread:"I have lately arrived at my new farm of 14 hundred acres in which there arethree hundred and fifty acres of choice river intervale, rich upland meadowinterspersed with the finest of wheat land and pasture land."Wheat land in Vermont produced 536,000 bushels in 1850, the state's peakproduction year. Other field crops and their peak years include potatoes, 8.8million bushels (1840); rye, 231,000 bushels (1840) dried peas and beans,104,649 bushels (1850); oats, 3.7 million bushels (1880); barley, 420,761bushels (1890); and corn, 2.3 million bushels (1900). Beef cattle peaked in 1840at 384,341 head.The numbers come from "Land, Bread, and History: A Research Report on thePotential for Food Self-Sufficiency in Vermont," an extensive study done in themid-1970s by George C. Burrill and James R. Nolfi.The study, which reviewed Vermont's agricultural history and then exploredwhether the state could sustain itself in modern times, was prompted in large partby the energy crisis, or oil embargo of 1973 -- the same stimulus that is sparkingpopular interest in food self-sufficiency today.What spelled the 19th-century demise of food self-sufficiency in Vermont, Burrilland Nolfi concluded, were the market economy and the new transportationnetworks that fed it -- first the canals and then the railroads. The result was "ashift from self-sufficient farms to commercial market-oriented production.""Europe, Boston, and New York served as major markets for Vermont products,"they wrote. "Western agricultural lands opened up and transportationimprovements brought cheap Western products into competition with Vermontproducts."Today, according to state statistics, dairy products make up 80 percent of Vermont's agricultural production, and 85 percent of those products are exported.How much food does Vermont consume in a year, and how much of that isimported? The state has no readily available statistics on that, but there's nodoubt that most food eaten here comes from elsewhere. A 2006 master's thesis

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