Good Food Starts Here
How Land Trusts, Co-ops, and Farmers Can Build a Sustainable Local Economy

By Craig Chevrier

Near the end of the 2004–2005 school year, some students, faculty, and staff at Champlain College started discussing whether it would be possible to convince Sodexho, the company that runs dining services at the college, to add organic and local foods to its daily menus. This would be a shift away from the standard frozen and processed ingredients that are prevalent in large food service providers' offerings.

Most folks are aware that “organic” is big business in the United States. More and more people are turning to organic and natural foods as evidence piles up that eating processed and packaged foods and foods grown with industrial pesticides, not to mention genetically modified and genetically engineered foods, might not be good for you. (As if we needed science to tell us that the orange cheeze stuff on our 7-Eleven nachos isn't so healthy, or we ought not to eat chemicals that kill bugs, not to mention how all that plastic our Ding Dongs are wrapped in isn't good for the environment.) Organic food, though it comprises just a little over 1 percent of all food sales in the U.S., is a $3.5 billion industry, according to the USDA.

In short, Americans are waking up to the fact, after three generations of Betty Crocker, Nabisco and Kraft unwholesomeness, that good food is good for you—and bad food isn't, even though it tastes good. And members of the Champlain College community are no different. Since so many of us chose to move to or stay in Vermont, where healthy living and local products are premiums, it's even more likely that Champlain College would be a place ripe for the return to natural and organically grown foodstuffs.

Getting Local

As a board member of the Hinesburg Land Trust, which is facing huge projects in the near future to try to preserve open space for “traditional use”—farming, sugaring, cross-country skiing, hiking, hunting, equestrian—I participate in one of countless community-based organizations that are thinking about these issues, even as many farmers simply give up, believing the assumption that “farming is dead” in Chittenden County, and the only way to make a living on the land is to sell it off for housing lots, clustered neighborhoods, and shopping centers. This fatalism about farming (and development, for that matter) is often corroborated by politicians, like Vermont Agriculture Secretary Steve Kerr, who tells farmers they have to be big to be profitable. But our elected officials, and the corporations that influence them (by a count of 9-to-1 vs. nonprofit lobbyists), forget that there's more to farming than milking cows.

Preserving the land is just the first step. The long-term goal is to build community nonprofits/not-for-profits that can own the land or sell it to new owner-farmers who: sell their future development rights to protect the land in perpetuity; farm the land (or pay for it to be farmed), ideally with a wide range of crops for a well-rounded and rotational produce and meat selection; sell the products, with the intent to distribute primarily to local shops, restaurants, and institutional dining services; and build peripheral businesses around the stuff.

For instance, we could grow an array of green vegetables, fruit, corn, alfalfa (to feed our herd), beef, chicken, turkey, barley, and grapes in Hinesburg on our 300-acre farm—a small farm by today's corporate farming standards, but larger than the LaPlatte Angus Farm or the Misty Knoll chicken farm, both of which provide high-quality natural meats to numerous restaurants and specialty supermarkets in northern Vermont. We could then set up spinoff not-for-profit or cooperative companies to distribute or sell these products to businesses and consumers. They could be anything from a farm stand to wholesale distributors to local food markets and restaurants, to a winery (Hinesburg was once famous in Vermont for the “Hiney Winery,” local legend has it), a brewery, or a pub/restaurant. In other words, the entire food chain could be local. Certainly, some of this food could make its way to Champlain College's dining hall. In fact, it would take some advance commitment by a responsible, forward-looking institution like Champlain College to make the concept work.

Proven Concept

“Chevrier's nuts,” you say? I'm a pipe-dreamer, an idealist, a radical. Maybe so. If not here in our great state, then where could we build a sustainable economy (not to mention a local food source for northern Vermont communities that could survive a major fuel shortage, or other catastrophic event that could debilitate shipping foods across the nation) that puts an end to our tenuous reliance on California, the Midwest and Latin America for our meat and produce? Besides, great restaurants in the area like Smokejack's, American Flatbread, the Black Sheep Bistro (in Vergennes), the Bobcat Café (in Bristol), Starry Night (in Charlotte), and numerous other Vermont eateries are already profiting from the premise that the best foods are natural, and organic and local when possible. More organic, cooperative farms would only improve the supply to these businesses to help them service and feed the demand for good food.

University of Maryland political economy professor Gar Alperovitz, in his book America Beyond Capitalism, calls the concept of community and cooperative-based ownership community development corporations (CDCs), and cites the Burlington Community Land Trust (the founder of the Intervale network of farms and farm-based businesses) as one of the pioneers of the concept. He cites other successes in rural areas like Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, and South Carolina, as well as in urban areas like Los Angeles, San Antonio, Portland, Oregon, and Memphis. According to Alperovitz, CDCs number as many as 6,000 in the U.S., an increase from “a mere handful” three decades ago. And it doesn't have to be food-based. Some successful CDCs work in textiles, electricity, biomass fuels, and other sustainable, locally produced goods and services.
Fringe benefits of CDCs, besides the provision of local, sustainable business, include cooperative residential homeownership, resulting in much lower housing costs (30 percent or less of total income per family) for residents and farmers than skyrocketing retail Vermont real estate prices would allow; far less pollution than corporate counterparts; jobs for local workers; and overall increased appeal of smaller communities, which struggle to keep young people close to home.

Just think of the possibilities. Fruit tainted with less carcinogenic pesticides. Meat and dairy products without worry of the harm of bovine growth hormone, or meat products from animals that weren't forced to eat animal feces for sustenance. Vegetables that haven't been genetically modified. Food that doesn't come wrapped in plastic that will be on earth forever.
And think how cool it would be to be a student in—or a customer of—the Champlain College Hotel and Restaurant Management Program. For the years we spend at Champlain, we'd know we were eating to live well.