Vermont's 'agripreneurs' succeed in 'post-dairy' economy

Joneslan Farm sold its cows and became the biggest goat farm
in the state. (Photo by Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post)

On Vermont's US 7 in 2017, a 600-acre dairy farm, Nordic Farms, went bankrupt. The cows and farm were sold. "But the land became part of Vermont’s agricultural future. Will Raap, founder of Gardner's Supply, an organic gardening supply company, bought the property with a vision for making it a model of a 'post-dairy agricultural economy in Vermont'," report Laura Reiley and Zoeann Murphy of The Washington Post.

"Dairy once accounted for 70 percent of the state’s agricultural economy. But the number of dairy farms in Vermont decreased from more than 4,000 in 1969 to fewer than 600 in 2021, as the state’s small-scale operations lost out to sprawling ventures in California," they write. "Higher temperatures also contributed to that shift, causing cows to eat less and produce less milk."

With 600 acres to work, Raap created Earthkeep Farmcommon in 2021. "More than a dozen agricultural businesses, including Vermont’s first shrimp aquaculture outfit, share land, equipment and barn space, and together build consumer interest and brand identity with farmers markets and events," Reiley and Murphy report. "A new generation of 'agripreneurs' — often young, sometimes first-time farmers, many women or people of color — are swooping in to try something completely different."

Other newcomers to the agriculture scene include a malthouse, which is "the only malthouse in the state, providing the state’s brewers and distillers with malted grains sourced regionally," they write. Along with the Jones family who lost all their cows to daily decline but gained "1,500 goats parkouring over hay bales and each other. Joneslan Farm in Hyde Park is the biggest goat farm in the state, selling its milk to Vermont Creamery to be made into cheese."

Vermont's agriculture community is pivoting to meet climate and economic shifts. Riley and Murphy write, "The state’s agricultural researchers are looking for ways farmers can 'hedge their bets,' diversifying crops with high-value items that can also expand the growing season."

New England subsidies help make community-supported agriculture programs accessible to low-income families

A CSA share from Red Fire Farm
(Photo submitted to The Daily Yonder)

Community-supported agriculture is a win-win for rural communities: Farmers get an extra avenue of income, and families who often live in food deserts can access fresh, local produce. But CSA programs typically require an up-front payment of several hundred dollars for the season, and low-income families often don't have the money. Some New England communities have innovative variations on CSAs that preserve the benefits to farmers while making the programs more accessible, Caroline Tremblay reports for The Daily Yonder.

For example, the Northeast Organic Farming Association operates twin Farm Share Programs in New Hampshire and Vermont, which aim to lower CSA costs for low-income residents. Initially funded by a grant, the New Hampshire program is now supported mainly through an annual fundraiser to which community partners contribute a portion of that day's sales, Tremblay reports. Such fundraising covers half the cost of the CSA for each low-income family, while the families themselves and participating organic farmers contribute the 25 percent each. Farmers are able to keep the same profit level because they solicit donations from other CSA members. NOFA has an Agriculture Department grant to establish similar programs in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

Red Fire Farm, which has two locations in Western Massachusetts, has a novel way of getting fresh organic produce to low-income families: since 2017 the farm has been a certified retailer for the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. "It’s a streamlined structure to simplify the use of SNAP benefits that was launched by the Department of Transitional Assistance," Tremblay reports. Farms certified as SNAP CSA retailers don't need dedicated equipment to process payment, as they would if they were selling at a farmer's market. Instead, low-income CSA members send a form to DTA, then the monthly benefit funds are automatically sent directly to the farm each month.

Farms that sell locally doing better during pandemic than farms that depend on longer supply chains

"While farms that rely on other businesses to ferry their products to consumers have struggled, farms that sell directly to consumers have not, farmers and experts said," Marissa Plescia reports for the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. "The virus has upended supply chains: An Ohio Farm Bureau survey in April showed that about 45 percent of respondents experienced disruptions distributing their products. Dairy farmers dumped milk, and hog farmers euthanized piglets. But sellers in more local markets have, for the most part, been insulated, they said."

Many farmers are making the switch from wholesale to retail markets, according to Raghela Scavuzzo, associate director of food systems development at the Illinois Farm Bureau. "She’s also seen an increase in farms starting online stores and community supported agriculture, where consumers can become members of a farm, similar to becoming members of a grocery store, she said. There are also more partnerships between farms through vendor boxes, which combines products from several different farms into one package," Plescia reports.

Some corn and soybean farmers, who tend to rely more on long supply chains, are not faring so well, and that's on top of the pain already felt from the trade war with China and last year's record wet weather. Krista Swanson, a corn and soybean farmer in Illinois, told Pescia that there's only one planting season for soybeans in the spring, so she wasn't able to make big changes in her farm's production to respond to the market.

Middle Eastern farming techniques and skills are the secret to success of organic vegetable farmers in New York state

A couple who run an organic vegetable farm in Norwich, New York, have become highly popular with restaurant chefs who shop at a Manhattan stand, and their success stems from an unusual business model in agriculture.

Zaid and Haifa Kurdieh in a high tunnel (NYT photo)

“If (Zaid and Haifa) Kurdiehs’ produce is uncommon, so is the way they grow it — with technology and farmers from one of the world’s oldest, most advanced agricultural nations: Egypt,” reports Priya Krishna of The New York Times.

“Each year, they enlist about 25 farmers from that country to work for six to 10 months. They use high tunnels, unheated greenhouses developed in the 1950s and still not widely used in the United States, and even adapt some varieties that are popular in the Middle East.”

The Kurdiehs bought a house in Norwich where real estate was inexpensive and started growing vegetables in the backyard in 1998. Then they bought some acreage nearby and installed high tunnels, a type of low-tech greenhouse that requires less equipment and maintenance.

Today their business, Norwich Meadows Farm, is a certified organic grower of produce, poultry and eggs with a heavy reliance on high tunnels to gain control over adverse weather at their farm. They also design and build high tunnels for other farms.

Chefs know the Kurdiehs because they produce unique varieties of vegetables that thrive with cultivation methods unique to the Middle East. Zaid Kurdieh, 55, was born in the United States but grew up in the Middle East. His father was an oil industry engineer.

As the farm expanded, the Kurdiehs wanted to leverage skills they knew existed along the Nile River. “In 2002, Mr. Kurdieh flew to Egypt, an early adopter of the high-tunnel system, and found a group of farmers to work for him. Before they arrived in Norwich, Mr. Kurdieh was cultivating 200 varieties; he now grows more than 1,300 on the 250-acre farm,” the Times reports.

New young farmers aiming to sell local produce at farmers markets; McConnell's push for hemp bill could help too

American small farms are in dire straights right now: more than 12,000 went out of business in 2017, net farm incomes have dropped 52 percent in the past five years, and bankruptcies are up 33 percent in the past two years. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway said last week at the Farm Bill markup that "two key universities informed us that two-thirds of the representative farms they use to model the economic conditions of agriculture are currently in marginal or poor financial condition," Doug McKelway and Kellieanne Jones report for Fox News.

But some farmers are finding hope in consumers' increasing desire to buy locally grown meat and produce. Thousands of young hopefuls, many who aren't from farming families, are going into farming with an emphasis in the kind of local, often organic product that people demand--coupled with modern social media savvy to market their products directly through farmer's markets or community supported agriculture programs.

"Congress is also intent on expanding opportunities for new young farmers," McKelway and Jones report. "One bill sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, The Hemp Farming Act of 2018, would remove industrial hemp, the non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana, from the Controlled Substances Act. With its soil replenishing qualities and uses in fabric, food, lotions, and anti-seizure oils, many farmers are convinced it's a potential replacement for a mostly bygone cash crop, tobacco."

New farmers are sorely needed in an industry where the average farmer is 58 years old and will retire soon. But the cost of land could deter aspiring farmers. Nearly 100 million acres of farmland is expected to change ownership over the next five years, so advocacy group The New Young Farmers Coalition say they hope Congress will do more to help young farmers afford land, McKelway and Jones report.

A list of 'best films' about 25 professions recalls a better one naming the best movies about farming

Kevin Costner played a farmer in "Field of Dreams" (1989).

The Washington Post's selection of the 10 best movies about journalism prompted the newspaper to round up some experts — just one for each profession — to declare the best movies about other professions. Since the first list didn't include any pictures with a rural angle, here are the pickers and the picks for two rural lines of work, farming and mining.

Phil Smith, director of government affairs and longtime spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America, told the Post that the best movie about coal mining is "Matewan," a 1987 film about a West Virginia coal strike almost 100 years ago that led to the greatest use of military force against American civilians.

"The story is about miners who decided to organize . . . the real life and death struggle it took to make improvements in their lives," Smith writes. "My favorite scene is a meeting scene. James Earl Jones stands up with that voice, and makes an argument about how they should be working together and working toward the same goal. Sometimes the most thrilling part of a movie can still just be a speech."

To choose the best movie about farming, someone at the Post picked Breanna Holbert, a student at California State University, Chico, and president of the National FFA Organization, formerly known as Future Farmers of America. She selected "Charlotte's Web," a 1973 film full of talking animals and starring a spider who saves a pig from slaughter.

"My brother is 8. He loves this movie and I do, too," Holbert writes. "There are a lot of small players in the agricultural industry, small farmers, who get overlooked — but then they end up pushing the big players to move forward, to try and experience new things. Those small players are the Charlottes. We need Charlottes."

Farm and Dairy, an agricultural paper in eastern Ohio, picked the best films about farming four years ago. They included "Charlotte's Web," and "Places in the Heart" a 1984 film starring Sally Field, but higher on the list came "Grapes of Wrath" (1940), from John Steinbeck's novel about Oklahoma farmers becoming migrant workers in California; "Babe" (1995), also about a pig, one that herds sheep; and "Field of Dreams" (1989), starring Kevin Costner as an Iowa farmer who "builds a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield," Will Flannigan wrote. "The ghosts of legendary baseball players then come to the field every night to play."

Also on the Farm and Dairy list is a 2005 documentary, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John," about John Peterson, a Northern Illinois farmer who operates Angelic Organics. the largest community-supported agriculture business in the U.S. "Peterson is an outcast in his community who turns his family’s farm around by taking his family traditions and combining them with art and free expression," Flannigan wrote.

Given money to buy shares in community-supported agriculture, people got healthier

Photo: Charles Bertram, Lexington Herald-Leader

A pilot program in Kentucky that gave employees money to spend on fresh, local produce boosted their health and local agriculture, Janet Patton reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Tim Woods, a University of Kentucky agriculture marketing professor, introduced the idea to the UK Health and Wellness program last year, backing it up with data from research he did in 2015 that found people who eat local, fresh produce are healthier.

Woods's study, published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, found that the 95 people who got shares in community supported agriculture, which provides participants with a weekly allotment of seasonally available produce, eggs and meat, reported a long list of positive lifestyle changes. Those included eating out less often, increasing their daily consumption of fruits and vegetables, and a decrease in prescription costs and doctor visits.

"Most importantly, their monthly expenditure at the pharmacy dropped from an average of $33.84 to $17.23, almost a 50 percent decrease," Patton writes. Also, the average number of doctor visits during the six-month program dropped to two from almost seven and a half.

Woods's work prompted UK Health and Wellness decided to create its own voucher pilot with 200 CSA shares. Soon after, Appalachian Regional Healthcare in Hazard and Hospice of the Bluegrass joined in. “We are a self-insured plan so the cost of keeping someone off medication is certainly paying for the cost of her food box," hospice CEO Liz Fowler told Patton.

And it's good for farmers Patton reports: "This year’s program resulted in about $100,000 in new sales for local farms, Canon said."

Farmers bring affordable food to city 'food deserts'

Kentucky farmer Andre Barbour provides cole crops and chickens to people who live in Louisville's "food deserts," which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as "with a substantial share of low-income residents who . . . have low levels of access to a grocery store or healthy, affordable food retail outlet." People from these areas pay $12 to $50 every month to New Roots Inc., a program designed to help them get the food they need, reports Jere Downs of The Courier-Journal.

Barbour delivers food about once a week to schools and churches in Louisville, 70 miles north of his farm near Canmer. He is not only providing healthy, affordable food for people who need it but also saving the family farm. Marry and James Cross, who joined the program last year, say people in their area have nearby fast-food and liquor stores, but not grocery stores. "I am into the whole sustainable community thing. I want to eat healthy," said Marry Cross, who pays $25 every other week for between 13 and 14 pounds of food. "I like the idea that you meet the people who grow the food."

According to The Louisville Health Equity Report, Western Louisville has only one full-service grocery store for every 25,000 citizens. "Scarcity of supermarkets directly impacts health," the report said. "The neighborhood in which one lives can serve as a predictor of life expectancy."

After struggling to find reliable customers for his products, Barbour began working with New Roots last fall. The program's founder and executive director, Karyn Moskowitz, said "We are putting our eggs in the basket with him and his consortium because we believe in small farms and minority farmers in particular. We want to grow with them."

Barbour said, "All we are doing is keeping the middleman out and keeping the money. . . . As long as I can feed people on this side of Louisville, I am good to go." University of Kentucky agricultural economics professor Will Snell said the Barbours are wise to use a niche strategy. "That sounds phenomenal," he said. "The local food movement is a niche market that is providing some opportunities for small farms. Anymore in farming, you've got to find a small niche or get big." (Read more)

Rural Canadian food co-op, close to N.D., opens a year-round store with local farmers' goods

Our friends north of the border have developed an interesting version of a rural food cooperative. Rural Roots, which opened Oct. 26 in Boissevain, less than an hour from North Dakota, is Manitoba's "first grocery store that features only locally-grown produce and product," Bill Redekop reports for the Winnipeg Free Press. The co-op "is an extension of the farmers market concept -- but indoors and open year-round." The store, which is about the size of a master bedroom, is run by volunteers. It opened without any government support, using sponsors to buy all the necessary equipment. (Rural Roots Facebook photo)

"The goal is to promote local production and 'to make food personal and transparent,' board member Casey Guenther said, Redekop writes. "So, if you're looking for a steak for supper, you can go to Rural Roots' freezer and buy 'local beef from Vicky Neufeld,' as it says on one side of the freezer. If you want fresh bread, you might pick out the flax loaf 'baked by Christine Fehr.' There are photos and bios of all its small-scale farmer-suppliers." Other items include hot sauce, rice, cheese, oils, milk and dairy products, flour, lamb, and fruits and vegetables. (Read more)

'Wendell Berry's mission, in word and deed, is the defense of the earth,' Bill Moyers says in new show

Farmer-author-poet-philosopher Wendell Berry is the focus of the latest Moyers & Co. program on public television stations, starting tomorrow. Bill Moyers interviewed Berry before an audience (a rare event for Berry) during a sustainabilty conference this spring at St. Catharine College in Kentucky, where Berry and his daughter Mary have started an ecological agrarianism program to address issues of land use, agriculture and food, which Berry has been writing about for decades.

"He is one of, if not the great, writer in American letters right now," writer Bill McKibben tells Moyers. "He understood what was happening on this planet a long time before anybody else. He's, you might say, a prophet of responsibility."

Berry talks about his recent forays into environmental activism, including a sleep-in at the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop-removal coal mining. "We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not," he tells Moyers. "The only question we have a right to ask is, 'What's the right thing to do?'" Check local TV listings for stations and broadcast times. Berry's fellow Kentuckians can see the show Sunday at 11 a.m. on KET and 6 p.m. on KET2.

Healthy Foods, Local Farms Conference Oct. 13

The 13th annual Healthy Foods, Local Farms Conference in Louisville will feature such speakers as author-farmer-poet-philosopher Wendell Berry, Goldman Prize winner Lynn Henning, Environmental Protection Agency water administrator Nancy Stoner, and Dennis Dimick, National Geographic's executive editor for environment.

The conference will be held from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 13 at Kentucky Country Day School in eastern Louisville. The registration fee is $40 and includes meals with locally and sustainably grown food. Scholarships are available. For information email or call Aloma Dew at 270-685-2034. A pre-conference Harvest Party on Friday evening, Oct. 12, at the Bashford Manor B & B, is $45. For information email or call  Joan Lindop at 502-836-3853.

As large farms replace mid-sized and smaller ones, rural communities suffer loss of local spending

"It’s not difficult to see the dominant trendline in agriculture when nearly every view of the landscape provides evidence," writes Heidi Marttila-Losure in the summer issue of Dakotafire, a regional reporting project of small news outlets in the eastern Dakotas.

"The tractors and planting rigs that were out in the fields this spring were double the size they were a generation ago; a farmer can cover hundreds of acres in a day," she writes. "Simply put, there are bigger farms, and fewer farmers.The percentage of the workforce employed in agriculture in the United States declined from 22 percent to 2 percent from 1930 to 2002, and since then it’s fallen still further, to something less than 1 percent." (Photo by Martilla-Losure)

And there's a problem with that, she notes, and it's something, sadly, people get around to talking about only after they've discussed big-farm economics. It's this thing about rural communities getting more economic and social benefit from mid-sized farms than from large ones.

Large farms, Martilla-Losure writes, buy in massive quantities, usually going to larger outfitters in larger communities or to direct suppliers for better prices. Some, in fact, are bound by contracts with corporations to buy from a certain much larger supplier, so there's not even an option for shopping local.  Small and mid-sized farms, on the other hand, stay home to buy. Research bears that out. Farms with a gross income of $100,000 made nearly 95 percent of their expenditures locally, according to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Production's "Community and Social Impacts of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations" report. Farms with gross incomes higher than $900,000 spent less than 20 percent locally. (Read more)

Farmers use more direct access to consumers to build relationships and explain their practices

Farmers are having direct contact with their consumers more and more as a result of farmers' markets, the local food movement and community-supported agriculture, in which consumers agree to buy farmers' produce. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers' markets have increased by 9.6 percent, to about 8,000 markets, since last year. More direct conversations are happening between farmers and consumers, and this can strengthening the relationship between them.

At the farmer's market in Lafayette, Ind., beginning farmer Neil Moseley, right, is able to educate shoppers about his organic farm practices and address concerns they might have about "big agriculture," which his brother practices, reports Sarah Gonzalez of Agri-Pulse. He can also tell shoppers about pesticide and herbicide use, and evolving conservation practices that maintain soil quality, protect sensitive land and preserve water quality. "The best part of what I do is getting that interaction with people," Moseley said.

Direct interaction with customers is a vital part of public relations for Moseley's farm, Gonzalez reports. He's also utilizing social media to interact, reaching more than 2,200 Facebook users. "We didn't realize we'd have to do these things when we started," he told Gonzalez. "There's so much to the marketing side of this it's baffling."

Gonzalez's article is a good example that could be replicated almost anywhere in the U.S. Agri-Pulse is a subscription-only newsletter, but offers a free, four-week trial here.

State fairs' money, ownership issues raise concern that agricultural tradition might be at risk

In mid-May, Virginia's state fairgrounds were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The right to run the fair was sold to a for-profit firm, a trend becoming more popular as financially squeezed fairs look for ways to keep a tradition alive -- and agricultural interests worry about their future role. (Bob Brown photo)

Maggie Clark, staff writer for Stateline, the daily news service for the Pew Center for the States, reports that while the majority of state fairs are still government-operated, as "state budgets have shrunk, so have the fortunes of the historically revered state fair. The fairs have lost much of their government subsidy, while still having to cope with a significant amount of state regulation. But the fair’s new ownership has not come without controversy."

The Virginia fair's new owners are Tennessee-based Universal Fairs, which owns five other state fairs and festivals. Clark writes that Universal "isn’t very much interested in the animal exhibits, crop displays and crafts projects that have marked the fair since its inception. In transitioning to a for-profit model, the Virginia agricultural community is concerned that the new owners will abandon the scholarship offerings for youth in agriculture education programs like 4-H and Future Farmers of America. The already-promised scholarships will be given out this year; beyond that, nothing is guaranteed. The youth livestock competitions have been relocated from the state fair to the Rockingham County Fair in Harrisonburg, in north-central Virginia."

A similar situation has occurred in Georgia, where a two-fair system has been created. There, the Georgia State Fair also sold out to Universal Fairs but youth livestock competitions and arts and culture shows are run at the Georgia National Fair in Perry. Some think the latter fair is what matters. Jim Tucker, president and CEO of the International Association of Fairs and Expositions, told Clark that "wherever the agricultural community meets to identify the best livestock genetics or swap tips about how to make the best jams will be the home of the true state fair."

Local-food movement is growing, but what's local?

More than half of consumers say it's more important to buy local than organic, according to data from research firm Mintel. However, the government can't track "local food" sales because there's no official definition of what makes food local, and consumers don't always know what they're buying because food at grocery stores labeled "local," is not necessarily grown within 100 miles, a common benchmark.

Strict "locavores," a term commonly used to describe those who buy local food, only buy food raised within 50 to 250 miles of their home, The Associated Press reports. Locavores often use the 100-mile standard but may extend it to the boundaries of their state. (AP photo by Toby Talbot: Woman harvests produce from a Vermont community farm.)

A new locavore index, which counted the number of farmers' markets and farms engaging in community-supported agriculture, in which farmers contract with consumers, found that Vermont is the top locavore state. Iowa, Montana, Maine and Hawaii complete the top five. "The bottom of the list raises questions," AP reports. Florida produces most of the country's citrus, strawberries and tomatoes, but was in the bottom five. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman Aaron Lavallee said local food in New England has fewer miles to travel than food in large states, such as Texas or Montana. (Read more)