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.

Imagine 95 percent of a village's food produced locally, with only a few items such as citrus and olive oil imported, compared to the current reality where special culinary treats are produced locally and the bulk of daily consumption comes from elsewhere. This may not just be a bucolic dream of a few rural idealists but a possibility that we need to prepare for—whether we want to or not.

The vast majority of the food eaten in this state is trucked in from far away. We have come to accept this as the norm, and forget that the system of immense agriculture and transportation that allows this is only a few decades old and is considered by many to be unsustainable. If it is not sustainable it will end some day. We live in uncertain times. Climate change, terrorism, and especially the end of cheap oil threaten to disrupt or end the systems that deliver our food. If the flow of food-filled tractor trailers ever stops, how long before Vermonter's starve?

I own Pete's Greens, a four-season vegetable farm located in Craftsbury, Vermont. At my farm we have long had an emphasis on season extension, attempting to grow and market as many crops as possible for as long a season as possible in our challenging Zone 3 climate. We have great success producing baby greens and other leafy vegetables in our minimally heated greenhouses from early March through December, but that leaves two and a half months of reliance on imported vegetables. Recently we have begun growing a wide assortment of crops outdoors, storing them in our root cellar, and selling them all winter and even into the next spring and summer. Using the simple and inexpensive technology of the root cellar, it is possible to provide many crops 365 days a year.

A quick scan through a seed catalog generates this by-no-means-complete list of crops that can be stored in a root cellar or other similar storage facility for two to twelve months: dried beans, four colors of beets, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, Chinese cabbage, five colors of carrots, three colors of cauliflower and Romanesca cauliflower, celeriac, Belgian endive, radicchio, bulb fennel, garlic, kohlrabi, leeks, onions, parsnips, an array of colors and types of potatoes, pumpkins, storage radishes, daikon radish, scorzonera, salsify, shallots, rutabaga, winter squash, turnips, and Jerusalem artichokes. Add in a few good freezing crops like spinach, berries, melon, and whole tomatoes and it is possible to feast on vegetables throughout the Vermont winter.

In order to feed ourselves in this way we need a lot more winter vegetable farms and the facilities to store the produce. And we need to educate consumers about the joys of eating the vegetables listed above, none of which top the list of sexiest vegetables. While celeriac and brussels sprouts may not have the mass appeal of strawberries, they are great winter food and much better fuel for the body and soul in February than tasteless and nutritionally weak imported strawberries. We grow a baby white salad turnip that is great eating both raw and cooked. When we began growing it several years ago nobody would buy it because of the name turnip. Now it is one of our most popular offerings and the single most missed item when we don't have it at farmer's markets.

In some cases we already have the facilities and farms but are not taking advantage of them. For example, last December my local co-op had three types of New Zealand apples but no Vermont apples. (Is there anything more spectacularly wasteful than shipping a fruit that is mostly water halfway around the world?) But then in the middle of June the same co-op had very good Vermont Paula Reds. All you hear about the Vermont apple industry is doom and gloom, and yet we could and should be eating Vermont apples for ten or even twelve months of the year.
So what will it take to get there? Obviously the most effective incentive for local food is market forces that make it comparable in cost to imported food. While this is likely to happen over the next years and decades, I believe that we need to start building the infrastructure to feed our state now. We need meat-processing facilities, small dairy plants, freezers, root cellars, smokehouses, commercial kitchens, and many more farms that diversify into every possible niche. We need to remove restrictions that make it difficult for small meat and milk producers to sell to their neighbors (for example, it is illegal to raise free-range chickens, slaughter them on the farm, and sell them at a farmer's market), and we need to push both our state and federal governments to spend money that encourages local food consumption. The Vermont “Buy Local” campaign is a good example of this, but its budget was cut this year.

The federal government's response to hurricane Katrina indicates that we may not be able to depend on it if there is an event that stops the flow of food to Vermont, and in many cases it has laws and subsidies that favor corporate food over local food. We need to organize as communities and perhaps openly defy some of the laws that make it hard to sell locally. Vermont has the land, skills, and independent spirit to build a local food system that will make our citizens healthier, happier, and more secure.