Creating well-being in people, place, and the planet at the Knoll

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By  Jessica Buxbaum, ACORN Intern

On the Eastern edge of Middlebury College’s campus along Route 125, there’s a mound of fertile ground used as the college’s organic garden -- affectionately nicknamed the Knoll. In August, it’s lush with vegetables, herb bushes, and fruit trees; year-round, volunteers and interns work to keep the beds bountiful and productive. But the Knoll is about much more than productivity. 

Megan Brakeley, the college’s Food and Garden Educator, manages the whole operation. She sees gardening as holding worlds within it, and wants the Knoll to be a place for people to connect with the earth, their community, and themselves. Producing a lot of food in the process is just the gravy, she says. 

She became interested in farming, gardening, and environmental work in college, when ideas like carbon footprints and food miles were just starting to enter the public consciousness, and when a group of her classmates and friends at Middlebury were gearing up to found 350.org. 

Having grown up in a conservative community that was not very environmentally minded, she embraced her own not-knowing and started asking questions about the entwinement of food, farming, and global environmental issues. 

This curiosity led her to her first farming experience -- a year-long internship after graduation at a junior boarding school with a fully functioning organic farm and a robust garden education program. There, she learned how to operate farming equipment, manage pastures, grow food, slaughter animals, and, significantly, how to teach these skills to others. 

She took over as the Food and Garden Educator in 2018, the first year that the Knoll was absorbed into the college’s budget. The students that spearheaded the Knoll’s creation in 2002 never intended for the Knoll to compete with local producers, but 15 years after its first growing season in 2003, the Knoll’s operating budget had had to come entirely from its produce sales.

This financial shift in 2018 gave Megan, and everyone else involved with the Knoll, the freedom to pursue programming, partnerships, practices, and conversations that align more closely with the Knoll’s mission: to explore food as a medium to create well-being in people, place, and the planet -- not to produce food for profit. 

Last summer when student internships at the Knoll were canceled due to Covid, instead of shutting down the Knoll’s operations, the college allowed the garden to continue operating to meet emergency food needs in Addison County and paid four dining hall workers for full-time work at the Knoll. Determining what exactly the food needs in the county were was done in collaboration with HOPE, which the Knoll has a longstanding partnership with. The Knoll ended up growing mostly butternut squash, garlic, and onion, because those are staple crops for production farms that rarely get donated or gleaned for HOPE’s food shelf. 

The Knoll has also been able to develop a new relationship with Chief Don Stevens after he approached Megan about growing native crops with the goals of producing more native seeds, providing education about the Abenaki nation, and providing food for Abenaki food security programs. 

Educational partnerships with classes have always been part of the Knoll’s goals, as well. Most recently, the Knoll has started growing kernza and silphium, two perennial crops, as part of the New Perennials Project. 

Beyond creating wellness by filling stomachs and minds, Megan sees the Knoll as a place for healing and grounding. 

Because it isn’t a production farm, they have the freedom to slow down and experiment with different practices like no-till farming, and farming by hand instead of using machines for most tasks. 

In the context of a changing climate, student interns and student and community volunteers have the opportunity to create their own knowledge base about concepts that get easily complicated by theory and doomsaying. What does a drought look like and feel like in this place? What does a warm winter mean for the rest of the growing season? They can see it all for themselves.  

There’s also room for playfulness and celebrating the parts of ourselves -- our embodied humanness, our physical capabilities, our creativity, our curiosity -- that aren’t often celebrated in the classroom or elsewhere. I have given my own time volunteering at the Knoll over the past year and a half, and I can say from personal experience that this is a deeply empowering and critically important part of the Knoll’s operations. 

Throughout her life and throughout her time at the Knoll -- even as she has become an expert gardener and has spent decades thinking about food, agriculture, and global challenges -- Megan says she has tried to keep hold of a “beginner’s mind” -- a concept in buddhist philosophy about approaching all things with openness, eagerness, and curiosity. 

She is looking forward to welcoming community members back to the Knoll in the near future and to continue supporting students as they work to make the Knoll a supportive, welcoming, and fun place to explore themselves, the world, and everything in between. 

Spencer Blackwell of Elmer Farm on the joys and challenges of organic farming

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By  Jessica Buxbaum, ACORN Summer Intern

With a robust CSA and produce regularly sold at the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op, Elmer Farm has become “something of a poster child for local food” in the Middlebury area, farm co-owner Spencer Blackwell says. The farm sits on 90 acres of conserved land and grows 8 acres of certified organic vegetables just out of sight from Route 116.

Its successes since its first growing season in 2008 are no accident. Spencer, who co-owns the farm with his wife Jennifer, is a lifelong farmer who has spent decades living and working on farms. He has seen and experienced the joys of providing food for his community, as well as the challenges that farmers face in the context of changing labor markets and a changing climate. 

Spencer grew up on a defunct dairy farm in the Montpelier area. His neighbors were mostly dairy farmers who, at the time, were beginning to feel the effects of Ronald Reagan’s Herd Buyout Program, which offered to pay dairy farmers to slaughter their herds with the goal of raising milk prices on the market. One byproduct of the policy, however, was that smaller farmers had greater incentive to take the government’s buyout, paving the way for increased farm consolidation.

He loved growing up around agriculture, but he watched as farming declined around him and was replaced with housing and development projects. 

When he went to college at the University of Vermont, he remained drawn to agricultural work. He loved seeing the tangible outcomes of a day’s work -- something most people don’t get to experience in academia or a desk job. He spent his summers working on local organic farms and started working full seasons at various farms after graduation. 

Working on organic farms versus conventional farms was a given for him at that time, he said; the industry was just becoming popular and that’s where they needed more labor. Plus, it attracted likeminded people with similar philosophies about agriculture and the environment.  

A few years and a few farms later, he started working at the Intervale Center, which owns 360 acres of land in the Burlington area where farmers can rent farmland and equipment to pursue farming ventures with lower risk. There, he worked as the center’s facilities manager, pursued a grain farming venture that didn’t ultimately pan out, and met Jennifer, who became his wife and the co-owner of Elmer Farm. 

Shortly after, the Vermont Land Trust was just getting the Farmland Access Program off the ground. The program sells land to people interested in using it for farming. It makes it more affordable for young people to buy land and start farming, it gives the Vermont Land Trust the right of first refusal on any development projects on that land, and it made it possible for Spencer and Jennifer to buy what is now Elmer Farm! 

The time between their first growing season in 2008 and 2015 was “a frenetic, crazy time of building stuff, getting bigger, learning, and figuring out systems that work with our land,” Spencer said. They had to build infrastructure, get to know the soil types beneath their feet, attract buyers, and much more. 

Evidently, something they did worked. From 2008 to 2015, they doubled their produce sales every single year. They developed relationships with community members and organizations like HOPE, where they regularly donate food, and the Middlebury Co-op. 

Spencer says that the most rewarding part of his time at Elmer has been raising his family here and getting to meet all the happy, grateful people that get excited about their produce. 

But they are facing new and growing challenges, as well.


Farming is a precarious profession, always at the whim of mother nature -- but a changing climate makes things particularly challenging. 

For instance, in their first year, they had tilled and readied a field for planting before receiving 7 inches of rain over Fourth of July weekend that basically washed the field away. Spencer called this a “good lesson in vulnerability.” During last summer’s drought, their pond for irrigation went down to nearly empty and wasn’t replenished until April. 

Now that Elmer Farm is big enough for Spencer to hire a crew to help with the labor-intensive tasks on the farm, Spencer’s been able to turn his attention toward building soil health and resilience so that the farm can be better protected from extreme weather events. 

The keys to this, he says, have been minimizing tilling and experimenting with leguminous crops like beans that are able to fix nitrogen into the soil. With these practices, even in just the last couple years, they’ve been able to greatly reduce their reliance on black plastic and cut their fertilizer bill in half while keeping yields the same. 

One challenge that Spencer hasn’t yet found a solution to, however, is securing stable labor on the farm season to season. They’ve increased their wages and try to create a positive work environment by hiring folks with an interest in agriculture, but workers still typically perceive working at Elmer as a temporary gig on the way to something else. As a result, Spencer is often forced to retrain his crew every year. 

“The price of labor keeps going up -- and it’s still not enough to live on -- and the price of food is staying the same, so something seems a bit broken there,” Spencer said.

When he’s driving around in a tractor or crawling around dirt beds, he has a lot of time to think about how Elmer Farm fits into the bigger picture, he said. He noted that progress and efficiency in our society often relies on specialization; but at Elmer, they’re trying to reverse specialize -- they’re trying to diversify, and build resilience in the process. 

Diversity in agriculture, not specialization, supports healthy people and a healthy planet. Spencer mused on what this might mean for our workforce, too: “Why not have people working a three-hour shift here doing manual labor, and a three hour shift in some other job? It’s all about finding balance. We’re trying to do that here.”

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Food, Labor and Community: A Conversation with American Flatbread Head Chef Samantha Langevin

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Samantha Langevin is the head chef at American Flatbread in Middlebury, where she thinks deeply about what it means to support local food and her community.

Samantha Langevin is the head chef at American Flatbread in Middlebury, where she thinks deeply about what it means to support local food and her community.

By: Jessica Buxbaum, ACORN Summer Intern

With locations across five states and a line of frozen pizzas available at the grocery store, American Flatbread could be written off as just another pizza chain. But Samantha Langevin, head chef at Flatbread’s Middlebury location, tells an entirely different story. 

She arrived at American Flatbread through a love for food. Raised in Vermont in a single-parent household, she recalls learning to cook for herself, shop economically and eat adventurously. After studying comparative literature in college, she had planned to go to graduate school, but her priorities changed after landing an internship and then a job at Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills, California -- a 1600-acre wilderness preserve, fully-functioning organic farm, and site for experiential education.

She spent eight years at Hidden Villa, where she learned the value of working with her hands, developed a love for environmental education, and met her current partner, before moving back to Vermont. 

Now, in addition to running a kitchen and honing her skills as a chef, she thinks deeply about issues in the food system. I spoke with her about the restaurant’s position within Vermont’s food system, labor in the food industry, the value of supporting local food in Vermont, and much more. 

Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and concision. 

Explain your transition from Hidden Villa to American Flatbread. 

By the end of my time working at Hidden Villa, I was not only doing education around food, agricultural and environmental science, as well as culinary science, but was doing a lot catering on the side with produce from the farm for facility rentals like weddings and retreats. 

When I moved back to Vermont and was looking to concentrate more on food as a career, I was approaching it from wanting to be adventurous with my eating, really enjoying cooking, and this environmental education background. 

I worked in a variety of places, but when I came to Flatbread, it felt like the right fit. There’s a certain kind of ethos around food and community here that is very much in line with both my upbringing and what I had learned and experienced at Hidden Villa. 

What role do you think restaurants play in food systems, generally speaking? 

Because restaurants are preparing the food and produce, there’s a lot of influence restaurants have on how people think about and use certain foods. For example, if someone sees kohlrabi at the grocery store and they’ve never had it before, the chances of them eating it are pretty slim because it looks strange and they aren’t even sure what to do with it. But, they might order something in a restaurant with kohlrabi and think, “That’s delicious, what is that?” So there’s this place for education through exposure. 

What role do you see American Flatbread playing in Vermont’s food system, specifically? 

I came into a great situation at Flatbread in that, when I started working here, we already had a lot of great established relationships with local food producers. The owners really recognize the value of supporting local economies, so, when it comes to deciding how we’re managing food costs, there is an understanding that we are going to spend more to support local agriculture or support organic food. It’s a balance, and you can’t do that all the time, but in a place like Vermont, it’s not just about economics -- It’s also about the people in your community. 

On the other side of that, we’re lucky that Vermont is a place where that kind of intentional sourcing is a selling point. Orb Weaver is a good example of this. If Orb Weaver’s farmhouse cheese is on a flatbread, we know there are people who are going to buy it just because they love that cheese. People recognize local food and get excited about it.  

What do you see as the biggest weaknesses or vulnerabilities in our food systems?  

A huge percentage -- something like 60 percent -- of the produce in the U.S. comes from California. Thinking about the effects of climate change on the state of California, how reliant we are on migrant labor to pick that produce, and prices for transportation which we really feel on the East coast, that is a huge area of weakness within our food system. 

Vermont is lucky that we have a lot of support for local food, but we also have a long winter and the restaurant has had to scramble when things have happened in other parts of the country or the world. There was one winter, for example, when a case of celery hit $100, and it meant that we had to pull it from our house salad.

Another area of weakness is that we don’t often pay the true cost of food. There’s an education piece to that -- people that can afford to pay the true cost don’t think they should have to because they don’t realize what it actually costs to produce food. There’s also an equity part --  the perception is that if you use social services or you're low income then you should be pinching your pennies, and there isn't a perception that you should have access to fresh produce. 

How do you think labor in the food industry factors into how people value food?

To start with labor within food service, it is really hard to work in a restaurant regardless of what position you’re in. I think there’s a perception on the consumers’ side that it’s not a real job unless you’re a chef, in which case you should be working crazy 80-hour work weeks. We are constantly hiring; we can never keep people in even though we pay well, we have nice benefits and we treat our staff really well. I think it’s because people don’t see working in a restaurant as a viable career.

And then on the agriculture side -- oh, man. Here’s what I’ll say: we treat water, soil, seeds and manure as resources, but we don’t treat people as resources when it comes to agricultural production. That’s a very general comment, but I think the dairy industry in Vermont is a great example. There’s a lot of migrant labor that supports our dairy industry. Those are super hard jobs with crazy hours, but it’s still this unacknowledged part of how our state is an agricultural state. 

Do you see these issues in the food service industry and the agricultural industry as being related? 

I think both are affected by how we perceive jobs that are service-based. We place high value on certain professions, and we pay them and treat them accordingly. If food was more expensive, if you had to pay servers better, then we might treat workers in restaurants and in agriculture a little better, too. 

We have this perception that food should be cheap, so we don’t even think about who’s providing that food and how they should be paid. 

What will it take to change how people value food and labor in the food system?

Culturally, we have to perceive manual labor differently. Working in a field and working in a restaurant -- both of them, you could say, are products of your hands. Something like being a lawyer is a product of your mind. Both are necessary in our society, both have value, but I think we don’t always perceive something that demands physical labor as having the same worth. 

One thing many employers can do is treat employees better, whether that’s at a farm or in a restaurant. Changing individual workplaces from within is really important. 

Vermont is home to many small, sustainable local producers, but it also is home to plenty of larger, industrial farming operations, as well. In this context, what does buying local mean to you? 

If we’re going to serve something here and call it “local,” it’s usually from Vermont. If it’s from outside Vermont, it’s made primarily with Vermont ingredients or it’s from just over the Vermont border. We consider it all part of our local food system, and that includes industrial dairy. 

For example, the quantity of eggs that we use means that we buy them from a large production facility based in Vermont. We still list that as a local product because it’s still supporting local producers, local jobs, the local economy. I think that’s still of value even if it’s not the small-scale organic productions that we think of when we hear the word “local.” 

Plus, I think by supporting those local businesses and industries, we’re in a better place to work with them on changing for the better. 

Volume 4: Lester Farm and Market

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Sunset over Lesters Farm and Market

Sunset over Lesters Farm and Market

Lester Farm and Market, located just outside Middlebury in New Haven on the west side of Route 7, sits on a sloping 28-acre parcel of land overlooking the Adirondacks of New York. Pulling off the highway I left my car and proceeded down the iced-over dirt road towards the home situated just behind the quaint little farm stand that sells all manner of veggies in season. I was met by Sam and Maura at the door of their two-story home, the owners and founders of Lester Farm and Market.

For Sam, the Farm was a project that he came to later in life and brought him back to his roots. Growing up on a farm on eastern Long Island, cultivating the land has always been a part of Sam’s life. Even when he worked construction, he made sure to grow a portion of his own veggies. After marrying his partner Maura, an architecture student and publisher from New Jersey, Sam and Maura searched in vain in Maine and New Hampshire for a parcel of land to farm. They finally settled the land they are on now in New Haven after a Thanksgiving visit to Maura’s brother in Salisbury. 

Sam’s farming philosophy displays a unique and wholesome way of working the land. Instead of viewing the land as a commodity that can be used strictly for financial gain, he understands the land to be a conduit through which he, and Maura, can connect to their community. “We really try to do as much as we can with the community” Sam points out. For years now, Sam and Maura have created a corn maze that school children and seniors in the community can explore, they give away hundreds of pumpkins for the community to carve, and give free tours of their farmland. Recently, they have also been a part of ACORN’s Farmacy program, allowing low-income families access to nutritious, locally-sourced foods. 

Sam and Maura’s choice to use their farm to deepen community ties and bring people together is a noble aim. This choice also allows them to explore more sustainable planting practices rather than pushing the land to maximize profits. Sam’s crop beds rotate on two-year cycles. The first year the beds are used to grow produce while the second year they are rested and used for the corn maze. The corn is not harvested but allowed to decay and fortify the nutrition of the soil. 

Sam also experiments with using oats and barley as cover crops in-between planting beds while growing vegetables. This form of permaculture was new to me. In most practices of permaculture, all crops are harvested, but by using cover crops in-between beds as green manure as well as a traditional cover crop, Sam fortifies the microbial levels of the soil to a greater extent. While Lester Farm and Market is not a certified organic farm, Sam was adamant to explain the organic growing practices they do use.  

Sam’s planting practices not only strengthen soil nutrition, they also draw down carbon from the air through photosynthesis. Sequestering carbon in the soil is a key way that the planet regulates the carbon cycle. Healthy soils and plant roots have the incredible capacity to fix long-lived carbon in the soil and keep it out of the atmosphere. The sprawling prairies of wild grasses, goldenrod, and coneflowers across America used to act as huge sponges, keeping the climate stable by soaking up and storing carbon. 

These carbon sinks, however, were dramatically disturbed and diminished by intensive European agricultural practices that prioritized extensive clearing and heavy tillage, and the planting of single cash crops After World War II, petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers were also commonly used on ever larger-scale industrial farms across the United States. As their soils were eroded and depleted of nutrients, farmers relied more and more on synthetic chemicals to produce a good harvest. 

By destroying all plants and weeds but their one crop, farmers were inhibiting the earth’s ability to maintain biodiversity and healthy microbiome. It’s a little bit like trying to run a marathon without training, then eating a candy bar when you find you have no energy left. In this same vein, industrial farms destroy the soil’s biological capacity to stay healthy; then when they find their soil is degraded and their plants are weak, they boost it with a short term stimulant.

Sam and Maura

Sam and Maura

Sam’s experimentation with different cover crops as green fertilizer, as well as pest deterrents, shows a return to allowing the earth to regulate its own needs. This form of cultivation exhibits a deeper relationship with the land. It shows a new kind of stewardship, one where the agriculturist works in tandem with the earth’s intelligence to produce all kinds of food. Through these land management practices and their desire to feed the community, Sam and Maura are building a bridge between the earth and their customers. This is a vital relationship that has been lost in our consumption-based economy, but one that is important to rediscover if we are to combat the issues of climate change, healthcare and food insecurity. 

Like the other farmers I have spoken to over the past few months, COVID has presented obstacles for Sam and Maura. The decline of tourism to Vermont has been the most significant change. In years past ,tourist have made up a large portion of farm sales. But this drop in non-local residents at the Farm  was contrasted by a surge of locals who showed up to support local businesses. Sam and Maura hope to continue this trend of local connection in the future. Their commitment to the land and our community is an inspiring choice they’ve made. One that I hope we all can embody in the future.



Welcome to the app!

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Hello Friends,

Welcome to the Eat Local VT app! Whether you are a Vermonter or are just passing through, we hope this will help you connect with local agriculture and support small businesses.

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This app is the culmination of ten months of work and nearly 10,000 lines of code. A full-time summer internship for some and a fun extracurricular project for all, this is the result of lots of love and hard work. We are a group of students from Middlebury College who, like most students at Midd, want to make a difference in the world. Last spring, when ACORN reached out to a few Middlebury organizations searching for students to help them move their local food and farm guide online, the two of us responded to different calls. Surprisingly, the two of us were friends and didn't realize we had volunteered to work on the same project. It was very exciting! We quickly reached out to more friends and built a small but mighty team of students. We come from a wide range of backgrounds, studying everything from Computer Science to Portuguese. 

Stuck at home all summer and unable to gather during our fall semester, we happily worked across time zones and continents, communicating over Slack and Zoom. Our weekly meetings with Lindsey from ACORN and impromptu coding sessions kept us connected to our community. "Hello friends" greeted us every morning with our next assignment from our lead developer, and it was a constant reminder that we were not alone. 

The acorn app team on a weekly zoom call

The acorn app team on a weekly zoom call

Not only did we develop professional skills and help fellow Vermonters through our work on this app, but we were also introduced to a fantastic local food community that we may never have known otherwise. We are very excited for a time when we can go out, explore these farms, and meet the farmers. This experience also inspired us to share. We have begun to build a club that creates apps for the community hoping that other students can develop their professional skills, make lasting friendships, and have an impact on Addison County.

We hope that our app helps you discover a new favorite farm, explore Vermont's food culture, and have fun. If you are enjoying our app, please share it with your family and friends (those who don't live in Vermont can still support our local community by purchasing products online – just use the filter!) and leave us a review in the App Store. And if you want to give us feedback, please reach out to info@acornvt.org. We love receiving messages, especially when they begin with "hello friends."

Love,

Aska, Zack, Ben, Manuel, Rachel, Jake, Jason, Sam, Max


Volume 3: Re-Prioritizing Local Foods

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Choosing what food to buy in the grocery store can be an arduous prospect. There are so many items competing for your attention the moment you walk through the door. Making healthy choices that fit into your food budget can be downright impossible. As a person who operates on a tight food budget, I find it extremely hard to make local foods a priority in my grocery shopping as they tend to be more expensive. Imported and processed foods are often cheaper, faster, and more convenient. It is no wonder so many of us choose the genetically-modified peach from Florida rather than a local squash or an apple from the farm around the corner when a pound of Florida peaches cost $2.99 and local squash or apples can be upwards of $5.00 per pound. 


Besides being cheaper, non-local foods tend to be more convenient. The produce in chain grocery stores is mostly, if not entirely, from somewhere far away. Finding local foods in your area takes more time and commitment than simply driving to Hannaford or Shaw’s. 


The onset of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in produce, grains and processed foods has allowed for foods to be shipped throughout the globe and still have a reasonable shelf life. The tomato on the shelf at Hannaford was most likely shipped from Florida, Arizona, California or Mexico where the majority of tomatoes are grown. These tomatoes would not be able to stay “fresh” for so long if they were not picked slightly unripe for market and treated with chemicals to give the appearance of having been freshly harvested. This allows foods not in season to become commonly available across the country allowing us to purchase anything we want in the dead of winter.


At a quick glance, choosing non-local foods appears to be the more economical choice. They are cheaper, more convenient, and are available all the months of the year. But what are the long-term impacts of buying food products from far away? 

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Local produce may be more expensive up front but farms’ diversified cropping and soil-building practices help mitigate the long-term impacts of climate change and deteriorating human health. Industrial-scale farms that produce most of the food in this country practice extreme forms of monoculture. Monocultural production specializes in planting a single cash crop in a large area year after year to maximize production and operating efficiencies. These operations use vast amounts of subsidized water and fossil fuels for tilling, fertilizers and pesticides. 

The purpose of soil (which we now know to be able to sequester vast amounts of carbon if properly managed) in industrial hydroponic agriculture is to hold the plant up to receive liquid nutrition and protection, Decades of heavy tillage with tractors, toxic pollution and exposed cropland have degraded our soils.  

In the US, nearly 175 million acres of subsidized corn and soybeans were planted in 2020 to supply the food processing industry and feedlots. This type of agricultural production accelerated erosion of topsoil, depletion of aquifers and contamination of our watersheds by water-soluble nutrients and toxic chemicals like glyphosate. Not surprisingly, the incidence of chronic diseases exploded in the early nineties. By 2005, 54% of Americans were diagnosed with one type of auto-immune disorder or another. Today, 46% of American children suffer from a chronic disease. 

Medical journals in the early 2000s began reporting that every chronic disease starts with inflammation of the gut and disruption of the gut microbiome. 70% of our immune system is located on the other side of that gut lining. Around the same time, soil scientists were beginning to explore the complexity of the soil microbiome and discovering its critical role in producing the key nutrients needed to sustain human health.  The good news is that agronomists and pioneering producers across the nation are beginning the shift to reducing tillage and chemical inputs, diversifying and rotating crops, and planting cover crops - all in the effort to start rebuilding soil health. 


Is the price we pay for cheap industrial food what it really costs? No. To start with, Federal subsidies for the petroleum industry, for irrigated water, for different commodity crops, for loans and insurances discount operating costs to maximize production and keep food prices low, push out inefficient producers and support increased spending on consumer goods. Then there are all the externalities – real but invisible costs that are not paid at the check-out counter but that have been pushed out into the future for society to pay. These externalities include the costs of poor nutrition, out-of- control healthcare spending, climate change, economically-gutted rural communities, contamination of our soil, water and air, and the loss of biodiversity and wildlife.

The consequences of extreme monocultures can be seen throughout history. In the 1930s, horrific dust storms eroded the prairie soils of Middle America. The Irish Potato famine in the middle of the 1800s was caused by a late-blight disease that destroyed consecutive potato harvests. This disease was able to spread quickly because the Irish farmers, at the urging of their British overlords, abandoned their subsistence crops and only grew a single species of potato throughout the Island. 


Small local diversified farms that use regenerative practices do not pose this risk as they cultivate many crops on small acreage. This type of agriculture is known as permaculture and is practiced by many indigenous peoples around the world. Like organic agriculture, permaculture increases soil health as the different plants exchange different nutrients with the earth in a small space. New Leaf Organics and Fire Fly Fields farms both also practice forms of oligulture. Oligulture allows crop beds to rest and regenerate after the growing season. More and more farmers are now planting cover crops to help regenerate the soil microbiome. Others allow farm animals to graze in the resting beds, allowing for the animals’ manure to revitalize the soil.

Here in Vermont crop and dairy farms are quickly joining the campaign to rebuild soils and combat climate change. With a combination of old and new regenerative practices, farms across the state are drawing down the carbon in the atmosphere and storing it in the ground, where it can provide crops with a broad spectrum of nutrients. Dairy farms, such as Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, are taking further steps to mitigate their impact on the environment by capturing the methane from cow manure and turning it into a fuel source. These farms have committed to become carbon neutral by 2050. In fact, according to the 2017 US Census of Agriculture, between 2012 and 2017, Vermont farmers increased the acreage of no-till land by 173% and cover crops by 101% making the state a national leader in adopting soil conservation practices.


The evidence is rapidly building that locally-sourced foods are healthier than industrial hydroponic foods. Local organic farms do not use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides but rely on biodiversity and healthy soils to manage their farm ecosystems. Their food is tasty, nutrient-dense and super-fresh. Numerous studies show that the inclusion of local and whole foods in one's diet can prevent and even reverse chronic illness.

Reprioritizing locally-sourced foods grown in healthy soils is a huge step towards the path of healing our society and planet. Programs like ACORN’s Farmacy , Farm-to-School and Farm-to-Table restaurants are vital steps in re-connecting our community with local farms feeding us healthy life-giving foods. Get to know your farmers!