Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

While global markets crater, a Vermont town unites around food
Tom Philpott at 12:35 PM on 09 Oct 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/8/15255/4310


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.

What we're talking about here is something I've been yammering about for 
years: serious investment in food processing and distribution infrastructure.

How did the town pull it off? Not by relying entirely on globalized credit 
markets. According to Burros, the town's ag pioneers have "lent each other 
about $300,000 in short-term loans" over in recent months.

And they've rejected the tired homilies of hyper-capitalism, opting for 
cooperation over ruthless competition. Burros:

    Cooperation takes many forms. Vermont Soy stores and cleans its beans at 
High Mowing, which also lends tractors to High Fields, a local composting 
company. Byproducts of High Mowing's operation -- pumpkins and squash that 
have been smashed to extract seeds -- are now being purchased by Pete's 
Greens and turned into soup. Along with 40,000 pounds of squash and pumpkin, 
Pete's bought 2,000 pounds of High Mowing's cucumbers this year and turned 
them into pickles.

I realize that Vermont is a unique place. Few people make fortunes there; but 
folks with money made elsewhere flock to the state. As Burros puts it:

    These entrepreneurs, mostly well educated children of baby boomers who 
have added business acumen to the idealism of the area's long established 
hippies and homesteaders, are in the right place at the right time. The 
growing local-food movement, with its concerns about energy usage, food 
safety and support for neighbors, was already strong in Vermont, a state that 
the National Organic Farmers' Association said had more certified organic 
acreage per capita than any other.

Like any community, Hardwick has assets, challenges, and needs. Sounds like 
its citizens are mobilizing in creative ways to harness its assets and treat 
its problems.

What they're doing is by no means unique -- or limited to communities with 
plenty of wealth.

Look at what Growing Power -- whose founder, Will Allen, just snagged a 
MacArhur genius grant -- is doing in low-income areas in Milwaukee and 
Chicago. Or what People's Grocery is doing in West Oakland, and Added Value 
in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one of New York City's lowest-income areas. Look also 
at what's going on in Carrboro, N.C, and Woodbury County, Iowa. The list is 
long and growing.

What these programs need to grab a foothold and start really building robust, 
job-creating economies is investment cash. Government at the federal, state, 
and local levels can either continue to neglect these efforts, or learn to 
support them, leverage them, and help them multiply.

The global financial system has plunged into deep crisis. Its architects -- 
including former Goldman Sachs chief Henry Paulson -- evidently have no idea 
how to revive it, even with full command of the public purse.

Rather than throw hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars into that 
dubious project, why not focus on diverting credit to the sort of initiatives 
happening in Hardwick?