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.

• What if we had to get serious about climate change? All that moving food around sends huge clouds of carbon into the atmosphere; if you had to pay the cost of its environmental toll, distant food would be unaffordable—and many of the areas where it's now grown might be hot enough to destabilize harvests.

• What if something disrupted our food supply? When Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services, quit his post in 2004, he said, “For the life of me I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do.”

• What if the decline in Vermont farms began to imperil our communities, sending money out of state and country, and replacing families with longstanding ties to place and neighbor with summer homes and ski chalets. I don't mean to be alarmist, this could probably never happen, but…

• What if people noticed that food from the supermarket tastes like crap? And that it was making them fat and sick?

Even if all those what-ifs suddenly came true, it's not immediately obvious that we'd be able to become food self-sufficient. After all, we live in a northern climate where the growing season can end pretty abruptly in mid-September. There are twice as many Vermonters as there were a hundred years ago when we were, more or less, feeding ourselves—and there are infinitely fewer farmers. (The state has been losing farms month after month, year after year, since the 1950s—81 more dairy farms kicked the milk bucket last year, dropping the state's total to 1200 or so. You do the math.) And we've grown accustomed to a far more diverse diet, one that changes little from season to season.

On the other hand, a look at the numbers is not entirely discouraging. A caution—there aren't that many numbers available, and they're sometimes contradictory. But a 1997 study found Vermont the closest to food self-sufficiency of any of the New England states. And a 2000 study by Dough Hoffer of the Livable Wage Campaign showed Vermonters were importing $1.8 billion in food, while exporting $1.2 billion. True, two-thirds of those exports were in the form of milk, which the state of course produces far out of proportion to its own needs, but it demonstrates that there is real reason still to think of Vermont as an agricultural state.

Even slight increases in local buying would have big effects. Hoffer reports: “If Vermont substituted local products for only 10 percent of the food we import, it would result in $376 million in new economic output, including $69 million in personal earnings from 3,616 jobs.” In other words, shift just one dime per dollar from Philip Morris and Kraft to Trudy the egg lady and you've managed to create jobs on an IBM scale—not as well paid, but perhaps more stable. That's why the governor has radio ads urging Vermonters to look for groceries that come from close to home.

We'll know more about the numbers in a year or so. UVM graduate student Dave Timmons is trying to answer some of these questions with harder figures. “The Ag Department is urging Vermonters to get 10 percent of their food locally,” he says, “but nobody knows how much we're doing now, so it's a little hard to assess effectiveness.” In the absence of precise numbers, however, some anecdotal evidence:

Consider the Intervale. Though too many Burlingtonians take it for granted, there's really nothing quite like it on the planet. I spent a late summer day there this year, and as always it was a revelation. On a couple of hundred acres on the wrong side of the tracks near what used to be a dump, a dozen farmers and perhaps fifty farmhands have created a kind of Eden. “This place produces 500,000 pounds of food on about 110 acres,” says Kit Perkins, head of the foundation that oversees the operation. Depending on how you count, that might be 6 or 7 percent of the city's fresh food. That's not a pilot project or a test kitchen; that's real production. The Intervale Community Farm may be the largest community supported agriculture farm in northern New England; the composting operation which helps underwrite the whole project is the state's largest; there's even a black-bean farmer producing enough on an acre for all the burritos at Pennycluse café.

It's not as if this is out of the mainstream. See that guy with the ponytail out there in that meticulously weeded field? That's David Zuckerman, chair of the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, not to mention proprietor, with his wife Rachel Nevitt, of the 15-acre Full Moon Farm. How quickly could Vermont feed itself if it had to? “I think we could feed ourselves by the end of that full growing season,” he says. “Many of us could grow more storage crops for winter eating. Land that's now being used for corn and hay can be converted. And now that we've got High Mowing Seeds company, we've got a lot of seed, more than the state could use.”

But, luckily, we don't need to become self-sufficient overnight. There's room for incremental growth, taking advantage of the burgeoning number of skilled growers around the state. Zuckerman, for instance, apprenticed alongside Will and Judy Stevens, whose Golden Russet Farm in Addison County is one of the state's showpieces. In the Northeast Kingdom, Jack and Anne Lazor at Butterworks Farm have seen sales grow 10 percent or better, year after year after year; now they're offering cornmeal and beans across the state. Ben Gleason in Bridport has been growing wheat for a quarter century, which is now in demand at bakeries like Red Hen and breweries like Otter Creek. Champlain Orchards, started by Bill Suhr with help from the Intervale Foundation, has become a year-round source of local cider for the state. And on and on and on—old farmers and new, passing on information, a kind of alternative agricultural network that coexists beside the dominant dairy industry with its ever larger farms trying to compete in a global market selling commodity crops. (And of course there's an incredible knowledge base in those dairy farmers old and new, the people with the real living skills that need to get passed on, and who need the support to find new agricultural paths that don't lead down the dairy dead end.) What marks most of this alternative production is the attempt to avoid becoming mere commodity, the attempt to add some value—whether through organic growing practices, or winter delivery, or clever marketing—that will allow them to survive.

If instead of merely surviving, such enterprises were to sprout dozens of new allies—if the state was really interested in approaching food self-sufficiency—then there are all kinds of steps it might take. Imagine what would happen if, in addition to going on the radio and urging Vermonters to buy more local food, the governor urged the legislature to pass an institutional buying law. Say the state prisons and state colleges were forced to buy 10 percent more of their food locally, and that the percentage had to rise a little every year above that. The demand would begin to create supply.

And say the state invested modest amounts in building the kind of processing facilities that would allow more of the region's September surplus to make it through the winter. Nothing elaborate, but community kitchens, small freezing plants, help for new slaughterhouses…the list of possibilities is long. Maybe the building code should require root cellars in new construction.

If Vermont was really interested in its long-term future, it would probably be investing more state money in buying the development rights to farms. That way, the land would be affordable enough for young people to take up agriculture. Already the state's land trusts have shown a real ability to make such projects happen.

One fascinating possibility is the expansion of local currencies. The city of Burlington, for instance, is currently considering backing Burlington Bread—accepting the scrip for tax and utility payments. That would be enough to get lots of the money in circulation, which would in turn increase the number of residents wanting to buy local produce (Hannafords isn't going to accept Burlington Bread, after all), which would in turn increase the amount of acreage under cultivation, which would…
For the moment, however, Vermonters need not wait for government to act. (A wait that could take a while. The state's commissioner of agriculture remarked not long ago that he wasn't too worried about the decline in the number of dairy farms because the total volume of milk produced hadn't dropped. This is the industrial food viewpoint at its best—in his ideal world, one giant cow would spray enough milk for the whole planet from a volcano-sized teat.) This is one of those reforms that it really is possible to spur through consumer action. All you have to do is be willing to spend a little more for food.

And in fact, the little more isn't necessarily measured in money. I spent last winter conducting an experiment—to see if I could get myself through the winter eating food only from the Champlain Valley. I was worried at first; I mean, the winter is long. But in fact there were enough farmers remaining to feed me like a king. (A root-vegetable-dependent king, true, but a king nonetheless). Monument Farm milk, of course, but I also found a guy growing fifty kinds of potatoes near Rutland, and folks raising not just beef but bison and deer. Fish from Lake Champlain (though not much, thanks to the mercury floating in from the Midwest), and crisp apples from the storage lockers in Shoreham. Great restaurant meals from the Farmer's Diner to the Blueberry Hill Inn. And lots of wheat beer from Otter Creek, brewed from the fields of Bridport. It didn't actually cost me any more than shopping at the supermarket, mostly because I was buying ingredients instead of processed food. It took more time to collect it however—time that you could consider either a cost or a benefit, considering that I got to meet all sorts of neighbors, to know my country in a different way.
I began by asking, “Can Vermont feed itself?” I think I know the answer. A couple of years ago, on assignment from Harpers magazine, I went to Cuba to look at their agricultural system. Twenty years ago they were as fully enmeshed in the world industrial food system as Vermont—probably more so. They shipped sugar cane off to Eastern Europe just like we ship milk; the boats came back full of grain. They even had the world's single most productive dairy cow, named White Udder, who survived on East German grain extracts. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and Cuba was left to fend for itself. Not only were there no boats full of grain arriving in Havana (and no customers for overpriced Cuban sugar), there were also no fertilizers or pesticides, thanks to the U.S.-led boycott. Agriculture collapsed; the average Cuban lost twenty pounds, as food intake dropped from 3000 calories a day to below 2000.

But food is not optional. Cubans figured out how to do what they needed to do: build a huge series of small more-or-less organic farms—many, like the Intervale, on abandoned urban land. Far more Cubans went to work as farmers. Many of the university experts started devoting themselves to low-tech de facto organic solutions. They didn't work miracles—the country is still short of milk and meat—but within a couple of years caloric intake was back where it had been. They'd become perhaps the most self-sufficient nation on earth, not by choice but by necessity.

We face no such crisis. We have the luxury of time, to move slowly and deliberately towards a food system that makes more sense for the planet and for our communities. We don't need to go all the way; after my winter experiment I'm glad to be back eating the occasional banana. But we do have far more ability to take care of ourselves than we might imagine. •