The question “Can Vermont feed itself?” is at first glance sort of like the question “Could you teach a cow to stand on its head?”

Maybe, but what's the point?

Vermont, after all, has supermarkets throughout the state and Sysco trucks plying its highways. We're tightly linked into the global food machine, and very few of us are starving. We're part of the modern world.
But let me suggest a few possible reasons to take the question seriously anyway—questions that might be grouped under the topic “What if the modern world stops working so well?”

• What if fuel got really expensive, or worse, really scarce? The modern global agricultural system basically grows food in oil; bringing one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California takes 97 calories of fossil energy, and one bunch of grapes from Chile is the same as leaving a light bulb burning all weekend. The average bit of food we eat has traveled at least 1,500 miles—and the average bite of supermarket organic produce has come even further.

A Bright Future for Farming: Vermont Can Lead the Way
By Vern Grubinger

The commerce of food, and therefore farming, is dominated by oligopolies. At every level—from sales of agricultural inputs, to purchasing of raw commodities, to processing of food into branded products, to retailing of food to consumers—a handful of enormous corporations control a majority of the transactions.

For example, major suppliers of chemicals and seeds for farmers are Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta. Purchases of raw products produced from farmers are dominated by Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra, Smithfield, and Tyson/IBP. Food manufacturing giants that create most of the branded products on store shelves are Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestlé, Pepsico, Philip Morris, and Unilever. And finally, a huge share of these products are sold to consumers at stores owned by Ahold (Stop and Shop, Giant, Tops), Albertsons (Hannafords, Shaws, Star Market), Carrefour, Kroger, Wal-Mart, and a few others.

Eating in Place

By Kate Williams

My kids eat dirt. Occasionally they do this directly: hands hunt for worms in the dirt, hands feed crackers to mouth, hands don't stop at the sink in between. More frequently, their dirt consumption is in the form of our garden peas, bush beans, greens (yes, my kids like kale), tomatoes, and, come winter, the dry beans that we shelled on our mudroom floor one grey autumn afternoon and the pesto that they helped concoct in the blender. Recently, we bought a split half of dirt—I mean beef—from a friend across the Green Mountains that form our back yard.

Eating Locally Year-Round

By Pete Johnson

Imagine a Vermont where every village feeds itself. The local dairy farms produce milk, cheese, yogurt, and butter and none of it travels more than a few miles before it is eaten. A wide variety of meat animals graze hillsides, lawns, and lands too poor for cultivation, turning fields that are mowed or bush hogged into an important resource that produces quality protein. Instead of supplementing the animals' foraging diet with grain imported from the Midwest, we grow our own grains and other nutritious and easy-to-store crops such as turnips and beets to feed them through the winter. Some grain is sent to the local mill to be ground and baked by the village baker.

Fresh Voices from the Vermont Fresh Network
By Lee Ann Cox and Kevin Foley

Something is seriously wrong with a country that has more people in jail than farming the land. And in light of the resulting calamitous slow-motion corrosion of civil life and open landscape in the United States, anything that helps keep small-scale farmers in business and land open and productive starts to look downright revolutionary.

As the U.S.'s first organization to foster direct marketing between farmers and chefs on a local level, the ten-year-old Vermont Fresh Network is literally and figuratively revolutionary. The group's 300-plus members are a mélange of farmers, food producers, and chefs; they produce everything from venison to rabbits to radicchio; they cook at earthy diners and tony inns. The group's defining insight is that going local can create niches in a corporate, consolidated international food market that flattens both prices and diversity.

Community Supported Agriculture
By Elizabeth Wood

In a globalized food system where even the supermarket food labeled organic may come from halfway around the globe, some people are rediscovering the value of eating local food. One way of connecting with local farms is the system I use at my farm called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

The CSA concept, which arrived in the U.S. from Europe and Japan in the 1980s, has caught on fast here. Already, there are more than 1,200 CSA farms in the U.S., according to Sharing the Harvest, a book about CSAs by Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En. There are dozens of CSAs in Vermont.

Freedom, Self-reliance, and Dependence on Our Neighbors

By Erik Wilkins-McKee

I am a flatlander and a newcomer to Vermont. When my wife and I decided to leave Michigan, we considered where we might live. After ruling out the urban areas near our parents, we narrowed in on Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. For a variety of reasons, Vermont was the obvious choice, and jobs soon followed to allow it. We have been here six years, and have come to appreciate the rural and small-town character of our adopted home.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that human freedom is not curtailed by dependence on others, as long as the scope of our dependence on single individuals is sufficiently narrow. In other words, the more widespread our allegiances and interactions, the greater the likelihood that our interdependence allows sufficient freedom and agency to all. The more we expand our trade networks, the more we embrace products from abroad, the less dependent we are on the rich man down the street. Smith was building on the arguments of David Hume, but he put more emphasis on the improved standard of living that comes with such interdependence than did Hume. It was a simple argument, but one that goes a long way toward understanding the global economy and modern American communities. It also might be a key to understanding how to build alternatives, and the challenges that Vermont would face as an independent republic.

"Food Sovereignty:" Re-Inventing Our Relationship To The Vermont Landscape

By Linda Setchell

“The year that will really worry me is the year our milk production takes a real dive.”

- Steve Kerr, Vermont's Secretary of Agriculture on the loss of 6% of Vermont's dairy farms in 2004

“Our vision is for a Vermont local food system which is self-reliant and based on reverence for the earth. It builds living soils, which nurture animals and people with wholesome, natural products, supporting healthy, thriving farms and communities. These communities in turn work to encourage and support current and future farmers, continuing our Vermont heritage. This abundant and generous way of life celebrates our diversity and interdependence.”

Editorial: Homestead Security - Can Vermont Feed Itself?

By Rob Williams

We put together this Homestead Security issue to explore answers to a single question: “Can Vermont feed itself?” To be sure, Vermonters know how to eat. As the days grow shorter and we stack our wood for the winter, we also honor the harvest. October is a month to celebrate the many edible gifts grown on our land—corn, pumpkins, tomatoes, squash, vegetables and meats of varied shapes, textures, tastes, and hues.