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largely organic agrarian economy with added value food stuffs: you come into the town of Hardwick, Vermont, from the east, you’ll come in on Route 15, weaving through a series of curves that begin as gentle sweeps and get progressively sharper. Route 15 becomes Main Street, and Main Street lasts for about a quarter mile before it hits the town’s only traffic light, which consists of a single, flashing orb at the junctions of Routes 14 and 15. If you turn right, continuing on 15, you’ll immediately pass the Amatuer Boxing Club (it’s for sale), a garage, a gun shop, a pizza place, and a lumberyard, in that order. A bit farther out, there’s a bank and a tractor-repair business. A Ford dealership. A gas station. If you go straight through the light onto 14 South, you’ll pass two auto-parts stores, a school, a cemetery, and a series of residences, many of which are in disrepair. In either direction, you’ll be through Hardwick in two minutes or less, pushing on the accelerator as the speed limit rises again to 50 and the road unfurls across the lush Vermont countryside, helping you forget about the forgettable small town you just left behind. In this way, Hardwick is not unlike scores of other small, hard-bitten towns scattered throughout the American landscape, still clinging to the vapors of whatever industry brought the population together in the first place. In Hardwick, it was granite (Hardwick granite is built into the Pennsylvania State Capitol and Chicago’s City Hall). But the granite industry in Hardwick slowed decades ago, and the town of 3,000 languished. The village developed a reputation as little more than a gallery of rogues; the local drinking establishment, Benny’s, was known throughout northeastern Vermont for its cheap beer and frequent skirmishes. The town earned the nickname “Little Chicago.”
Hardwick softened over the years, as its affordable real estate and pastoral beauty (within town limits, there are 37 miles of paved road and 51-miles of dirt) lured a small clutch of white collar workers willing to brave the 30-mile commute to the state capital of Montpelier. But the economy still suffered: In 2003, the per capita income was a mere $14,287, twenty-five percent below the state average; and last year, Hardwick’s unemployment rate was nearly 30 percent higher than the state average.
But something’s happening in Hardwick, and it’s happening because of food. It could have started with the Buffalo Mountain Food Co-op and Cafe, a small, earthy joint on Main Street that’s been active since 1975. The co-op serves the multitudes of left-leaning back-to-the-landers scattered through the surrounding hills and provides a market—a modest market, but a market—for the local farmers eking out a living from the land. Or maybe it started before that, with Hardwick’s topographical good fortune to be located in a region of ample, fertile farmland and a culture of working the soil. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, the only rational response to a global food system on the brink of crisis and a town desperately needing something on which to hang its future. While the beginning might be hard to identify, the present is not. That’s because, during the past two years, Hardwick has developed a local food infrastructure that is unlike anything to be found in North America. It is at once an amalgamation of a stunning number of food-based businesses in the region (Vermont Soy, Jasper Hill Farm, Pete’s Greens, Patchwork Farm & Bakery, Apple Cheek Farm, Claire’s Restaurant and Bar, and Bonnieview Farm to name only a few) and the keen business savvy of the (mostly) youthful entrepreneurs who spend their days tending livestock, fields of lettuce, and racks of cloth-bound Cheddar. In the evenings, they convene to quaff beers and brainstorm the next step forward for this little settlement, which just might become one of the most important food towns in the United States.
Tom Stearns has a carnival huckster’s energy and a self-confidence that never seems to bleed into arrogance. He is of medium height, with wavy, dirty-blond hair and a long, angular face. He wears thin-rimmed glasses and has a habit of scrunching his nose, which flares his nostrils and makes him look momentarily unhinged. He laughs loudly and often. Thirteen years ago, when Stearns was 19, he started High Mowing Organic Seeds, an organic vegetable, flower, and herb seed company that’s now located in Wolcott, one town west of Hardwick. Today, the business has 30 employees and does between $1.5 and $2 million in annual sales. Because of his energy, charm, and drive, Stearns has become the de facto mouthpiece for Hardwick’s rapidly evolving food scene and the president of the recently formed, nonprofit Center for an Agricultural Based Economy, whose mission is to nurture and promote a sustainable local agricultural economy. I first met with him at a potluck dinner party at Heartbeet Lifesharing, a residential community for special-needs adults, who participate in all aspects of farm operations on the sloping 150 acres of field and forest. There was drumming and a bonfire and small children running across the sunlit lawn clutching rabbits to their chests. A herd of cows grazed on a pasture below the house. Stearns’s vision is to provide the world with a model food system that serves the local population while enriching its producers in ways that range from the cold, hard tangibility of cash to the less precise metrics of social improvement and regional pride. Stearns is not a dogmatic locavore; he believes it is economically and environmentally justifiable to ship products that are financially dense (a pound of liquid milk wholesales for about $0.20; a pound of Jasper Hill’s Bayley Hazen Blue cheese wholesales for $9.75). He sees Hardwick as an antidote to a global food system that’s teetering beneath the weight of energy prices and the capriciousness of nature. “Who’s the biggest user of energy? Agriculture! Who’s the biggest user of land? Agriculture! Who’s the biggest user of water? Agriculture! Who’s the biggest polluter? Agriculture!” He stabbed a finger in the air for emphasis. “All we have are models of broken plans to look at.” He sipped his beer and turned to face me squarely. “In five years, we will have people from all over the planet visiting Hardwick to see what a healthy food system looks like.”
<snip>
http://www.gourmet.com/travel/2008/10/hardwick-revival
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While global markets crater, a Vermont town unites around food 2
* Tom Philpott
Posted 1:35 PM on 9 Oct 2008
by Tom Philpott
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The effort to revive global credit markets has devolved into farce. Every day, U.S. authorities announce some earth-shaking new measure -- a $700 billion bailout, the Fed's extraordinary move into the commercial-paper business, a coordinated global set of rate cuts -- and every day, investors continue acting as tweaky as meth heads when the dope has run out.
Why should this matter to anyone who doesn't have a pile invested in the stock market? Because we're in what's known as a credit crunch. When banks stop lending for a long period, economic activity slows to a crawl, and the economy craters. The jobs that evaporate could include your own.
But are there not other forms of credit, other visions for how economies could function? Hasn't the Wall Street model of finance -- wherein multimillionaire b-school wizards "innovate" such wondrous "risk-spreading" instruments as mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps -- gone, well, bankrupt?
The front and business sections of Wednesday's New York Times brought plenty of alarming financial news. For an unexpected bit of financial cheer, dig back to -- of all places -- the Dining In/Dining Out section. There, you'll find a great piece by Marian Burros on the small, once-depressed Vermont town of Hardwick, where people are working together to build a thriving economy around food.
Like many towns in rural America, Hardwick -- once a granite-mining center -- had fallen on hard times.
Usually in such cases, food cultures wither. Restaurants and diners shutter, farms consolidate in search of larger, far-away markets, and food expenditures become a sieve draining any remaining wealth out of the community and into the pockets of distant shareholders in fast-food chains and retailers like Wal-Mart.
Something different is now happening in Hardwick. Here's Burros:
Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food.
The activity Burros describes is dizzying:
In January, Andrew Meyer's company, Vermont Soy, was selling tofu from locally grown beans to five customers; today he has 350. Jasper Hill Farm has built a $3.2-million aging cave to finish not only its own cheeses but also those from other cheesemakers. Pete Johnson, owner of Pete's Greens, is working with 30 local farmers to market their goods in an evolving community supported agriculture program.
The area is also home to High Mowing Seeds, a leading national purveyor of organic fruit and vegetable seeds -- which, according to Burros, is intimately tied into the Hardwick scene.
All of these entities work closely together to share resources and create synergies. One way they do so is through the non-profit Center for an Agricultural Economy, one of whose projects is to roll out an "eco-industrial park" for agriculture-based businesses.
According to Burros, the Center also "recently bought a 15-acre property to start a center for agricultural education," and run a a year-round farmers market and a community garden (complete with greenhouse and a "paid gardening specialist").
There's even a community-owned restaurant called Claire's, described thusly by Burros:
Fifty investors who put in $1,000 each will have the money repaid through discounted meals at the restaurant over four years."Local ingredients, open to the world," is the motto on restaurant's floor-to-ceiling windows. "There's Charlie who made the bread tonight," Kristina Michelsen, one of four partners, said in a running commentary one night, identifying farmers and producers at various tables. "That's Pete from Pete's Greens. You're eating his tomatoes."
The payoff of all this activity has been considerable -- and not just culinary. A town official told Burros that local-food enterprises have already created somewhere between 75 and 100 jobs to the area -- a substantial number in a town with a population of 3,000.
<snip>
http://www.grist.org/article/a-new-vision-of-credit-crunch
And we just got the funding to do this:
ri Aug 28 2009
During a Friday morning visit to Vermont Soy, a business that graduated from the Vermont Food Venture Center, Sen. Patrick Leahy announced he had secured a $350,000 federal grant to help construct, equip and operate a new Vermont Food Venture Center in Hardwick’s industrial park. Leahy said the new kitchen incubator was needed to expand the food-based and agricultural-based economy of rural Vermont.
The Vermont Food Venture Center, founded in Fairfax, Vt. in 1996 by the Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont (EDCNV), is a kitchen incubator that offers affordable rental food production and packaging space to entrepreneurs interested in starting their own food-based business. The center also offers technical assistance to clients in the areas of food production, development, packaging and marketing. According to EDCNV Executive Director Connie Stanley Little, since 1996, 83 businesses, many of them micro businesses operated by Vermonters, have emerged from the center.
Stanley Little said that the new Vermont Food Venture Center, dubbed Vermont Food Venture Center2, will offer entrepreneurs nearly 14,000 square feet of multipurpose kitchen space. She explained that the move to Hardwick was made possible thanks to two Hardwick-area businesses which have already reserved space in the new facility. Vermont Soy plans to make and package soy-based tofu in the facility and Jasper Hill Farms intends to expand cheese making operations in the center. The new center will be equipped not only with specialty food production capabilities, but also feature a dairy production cell and a meat processing cell, Stanley Little said.
“This project will put people to work for decades to come developing new small businesses, enhancing Hardwick’s agriculture-based and food-based economy and giving entrepreneurial Vermonters new opportunities.” said Leahy, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Agriculture Committee. “Hardwick has become a national model for the future of agriculture. It has become a test bed where new agricultural technologies come to grow, where young and vibrant farmers are starting new farms instead of closing old ones and where food is more than a meal – but a way of life, a career and a science.”
“The creation of new food-based businesses through the Vermont Food Venture Center will help build strong local agricultural economies throughout the state,” said Andrew Meyer, co-owner of Vermont Soy. “Vermont Soy is an example of how the Food Venture Center has helped provide eager entrepreneurs the tools and support to develop a successful food business.”
“The Vermont Food Venture Center represents the spirit of Vermont, and it is appropriate that it is moving to Hardwick,” said Todd Hardie, owner of Honey Gardens Apiaries – a one-time client of the Vermont Food Venture Center. “By collaboration and working together, the Venture Center brings people and natural raw materials together to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
During the visit to Vermont Soy, Leahy also announced that the Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont in conjunction with Northern Enterprises has submitted a $1.5 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant application to the Economic Development Administration to complete the $3 million project. Leahy said he had brought this application to the attention of EDA leadership, and a decision is expected by the end of September. |
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