Could Vermont feed itself?

"It doesn't make sense for all of us to be farmers," Johnson said of the
burgeoning 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 facilities
and a slaughterhouse with several others. When it comes to local food
production, he said, "if any place can do it on the village by village level,
Vermont can."

Burlington Free Press

By Tim Johnson
Free Press Staff Writer

June 11, 2007

Yet another dietary mantra is gaining traction across Vermont -- "eat local" -- as
more and more people are expanding their vegetable gardens, buying directly
from farmers, and trying to relearn food preservation techniques that most
Vermonters 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 to
try to "eat local" once the summer growing season is over?

-- What about all those staples -- wheat and other grains, for example -- that are
barely grown in Vermont at all?

The answers are nuanced and speculative, depending on who's talking, but no
less surprising for that.

One recent boost to the national "eat local" movement, whose proponents have
dubbed 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 a
time, and seldom in February.

The meaning of "local" might vary with the consumer's motivation for eating that
way.
"Eating locally appeals to many people for different reasons," said Robin
McDermott, a co-organizer of Mad River Localvores. Her reasons are partly
gustatory (local produce tastes better) and economic (she wants to support local
farmers).

The state's Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets has been beating the
economic drum since 2003 with its "Buy Local: The 10 percent Difference"
campaign. ("If Vermonters shifted just 10 percent of their food purchases to
locally grown food products, that would add more than $100 million to Vermont's
economy," states the Agency's Web site.)

For some, the motivation is partly political, partly environmental. Much of the
produce sold in Vermont's supermarkets has traveled 1,500 miles or more in
diesel-burning, greenhouse-gas-belching tractor-trailer trucks.

The mainstream food economy is heavily dependent on petroleum -- used in

conventional 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 who
subscribe to the "peak oil" notion are betting on "sooner," and they've started
giving serious thought to reorganizing their lives in the face of a huge, impending
spike in the price of gasoline and fuel oil.

Nobody can say for sure when the "peak" will occur -- by some accounts, it could
be many decades away -- but growing numbers of people in Vermont are getting
ready 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 the
University of Vermont, is among those who see "peak oil" as "a reality," although
he admits to the usual uncertainty about when the peak will come. Meanwhile, oil
infuses 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 vegetable
farm, "all of a sudden, there would be no price differential between the greens I
grow and what a local restaurant buys from California. It would be a whole new
paradigm."

The old granary

The new paradigm has elements of the old. Two hundred years ago, Vermont
was largely self-sufficient in food. Rural people depended heavily on local crops
and livestock and on techniques for stretching their food supplies through the
winter.

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 are
three hundred and fifty acres of choice river intervale, rich upland meadow
interspersed with the finest of wheat land and pasture land."

Wheat land in Vermont produced 536,000 bushels in 1850, the state's peak
production year. Other field crops and their peak years include potatoes, 8.8
million bushels (1840); rye, 231,000 bushels (1840) dried peas and beans,
104,649 bushels (1850); oats, 3.7 million bushels (1880); barley, 420,761
bushels (1890); and corn, 2.3 million bushels (1900). Beef cattle peaked in 1840
at 384,341 head.

The numbers come from "Land, Bread, and History: A Research Report on the
Potential for Food Self-Sufficiency in Vermont," an extensive study done in the
mid-1970s by George C. Burrill and James R. Nolfi.

The study, which reviewed Vermont's agricultural history and then explored
whether the state could sustain itself in modern times, was prompted in large part
by the energy crisis, or oil embargo of 1973 -- the same stimulus that is sparking
popular interest in food self-sufficiency today.

What spelled the 19th-century demise of food self-sufficiency in Vermont, Burrill

and Nolfi concluded, were the market economy and the new transportation
networks that fed it -- first the canals and then the railroads. The result was "a
shift 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 transportation
improvements brought cheap Western products into competition with Vermont
products."

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 is
imported? The state has no readily available statistics on that, but there's no
doubt that most food eaten here comes from elsewhere. A 2006 master's thesis
by then-UVM-student David Timmons estimated that direct sales to consumers
by Vermont farmers accounted for about 1.2 percent of the state's food
expenditures -- still a higher percentage than in any other state.

Hypothetically, what if some sort of national emergency forced American

communities to become more self-sufficient in food? How much land would be
necessary to meet the food needs of the average household?

A study was done around 1990 that tried to answer that question -- in the
Netherlands. Researchers compiled a list of 100 foods and calculated the
amount of land required to produce those foods for the average household (2.4
people) for a year. For a household that consumed the full spectrum of meat,
eggs, dairy, grains and vegetables, less than an acre -- .86 acres -- was
necessary. Vegetarian households would require still less.

In their study of Vermont, Burrill and Nolfi calculated the total state consumption
of various food products and concluded that about 478,000 acres of farmland
would be necessary to meet the average dietary needs of the 1974 population of
470,000. Today, with a population of about 620,000, the state has about 1.25
million acres of farmland, of which 567,000 acres are used as crop land. Those
figures don't include non-commercial, private gardens.

"Could Vermont feed itself?" asked David Zuckerman a farmer and chairman of
the House Agriculture Committee. "Yes, but we would have to adjust what we
grow and adjust our eating habits."

What's more, he said, plenty of infrastructure would have to be added: large-

scale root cellars and coolers for winter storage, mills to grind the grain.

Quite apart from dairying, could food crops bring an agricultural renaissance?

"You don't often hear about them," Zuckerman said, "but there's a community of
excited farmers out there, 30-year-old folks who are getting into agriculture,
willing to take risks and be creative."

What about avocados?

Johnson raises 200 kinds of vegetables on a 190-acre spread in Craftsbury. He

sells much of his produce to regular customers who buy shares in an
arrangement called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) that's common
around the state.

He relies on a root cellar and a freezer to supply his customers over the winter.
Beets, carrots, potatoes and cabbage, for example, can spend the winter in a
space slightly above freezing (the root cellar). "These storage crops are
extremely low on the input side," he said. "They're simple, and they grow easily in
this climate."

Frozen strawberries and tomatoes add variety to his winter offerings.

"It doesn't make sense for all of us to be farmers," Johnson said of the
burgeoning 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 facilities and a slaughterhouse with
several others. When it comes to local food production, he said, "if any place can
do it on the village by village level, Vermont can."

When McDermott and her husband plunged into the localvore movement two
years ago, they didn't even have a garden.

"The farmers' market, to us, is like the grocery store," she said recently. They buy
food through CSAs, too -- as much fresh stuff as they can eat now and put up for
later. She makes fruit jams. She freezes meats, tomatoes, parboiled greens. She
has a makeshift root cellar in the garage for root crops, which they're growing in
the garden this year.

"We never go to the grocery store," she said, laughing, but then amended that
comment. "We go for kitty litter and toilet paper. ... olive oil."

Not everything can be grown in Vermont, after all.

"There are about 10 things we won't give up," she said. "Coffee, chocolate, flour,
sugar ... I try to use maple syrup for sugar. ... I'm trying to grow lemons. ...
Avocados are a treat for me, but I could live without them."

"Peaches," she said. "You can grow peaches in Vermont -- a lot of people don't
know that because for years the market has been dominated by peaches from
the south."
_________________________________
Contact Tim Johnson at 660-1808 or [email protected].