Tour of Hardwick, Craftsbury, Montplier in Vermont

The day began with a nice breakfast and we left at 10 am to Hardwick. The economy of the region has not been doing well in recent years. The Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE) has been trying to revive some of the farm related business around the region. Their Program Director Elena Gustavson and a Masters student working on her thesis Heather Davis explained to us the situation in Vermont. The amount of crop land growing organic would be about 15 per cent but it is only about two per cent in the whole country. Similalry, the population associated with Community Suported Agriculture (CSA) would be about three-to-four per cent but it is only one per cent in the country. The figures are low, but they are much better than the country as a whole. On food insecurity for the state, we were told that it has increased from 10 per cent of the population in 2007 to 12.1 per cent in 2009. On the other hand, this is a healthy state and the life expectancy of the state is among the highest. The harsh weather conditions have also developed a camaraderie where people are ready to help each other.

An activity that CAE has been involved is the setting up of the Vermont Food Venture Center. It has come up as an incubator kitchen to facilitate farmers with small business. The center has been built on a federal grant but the day-to-day management expenses have to be borne from the operations. It is likely to commence work soon and the farmers can get their produce to help them come up with finished products for bakery, cutting and processing vegetables and also producing sauces and jams. The farmers will have to pay about 48 dollars per hour to take advantage of this facility. This will help small farmers package and sell their produce and also perhaps help them reduce their costs in the value addition activity.

We then went to Bonnieview farm where there are about 200 sheep from which they produces cheese and  they are helped by an intern, Joe, from an agricultural college who is also learning through this on-the job training. He plans to further study and someday be a farmer on his own. The prolonged winter this year was harsh on the lambs and they lost a few. They have a Llama, an animal that saves the sheep from predators. There are plans of expanding the business by getting more lamb and also some cows.

Our next stop was Pete's Green, a village farm at Craftsbury, Vermont. They are part of a CSA, but suffered losses due to fire in their storage yards in January 2011. They were underinsured because of astronomical insurance costs and received about 250,000 dollars as compensation whereas their total losses was three-to-four times more. Their clients raised funds of about 100,000 to 150,000 dollars. It is this response from the community that has made the proprietor think that in five-to-seven years time they will repay the money to a fund to be managed through the help of CAE that will help similar farmers in distress. Now they are trying to revive their work and they will start CSA again from end June of 2011. They are able to supply through out the year by storing some foods that cannot be produced in winter and also by producing some vegetables under greenhouses during winter.

Our last visit, also at Craftsbury, was Sterling College  where they have a course on sustainable agriculture. They provide hands-on training to students and unlike other agricultural colleges most of the training uses minimum of machines and tools. About 25 students join per year for a four year program. The tuition fees and also lodging and board costs would be around 16,000 dollars. The college also produces 25 per cent of its food requirements - they are not able to increase it more because this could affect the academic content of the program. They also had a greenhouse but this does not use any heat machine during winter. The plants do not grow but are put in a dormant stage. This reminided me of the Scandinavian story of how a man had hid his father in the basement against the kings's dictum of killing all old age people. But, a very harsh food shortage during one winter led him to take advise from his father to plough the lands along side the road where grains would have been burried but the seeds would have been dormant and ploughing in the spring following winter would germinate these seeds. It is this act that saved the land from hunger and the king from realizing his folly. Getting back, the larger concerns of sustainable agriculture is to reduce costs so that more and more farmers take it up while remaining small.

On our way back we stopped and Montplier the capital of Vermont. Their capitol has a statue of Ceres the Roman godess of agriculture indicating the relevance of agriculture in Vermont's economy. One of the major agricultural products of Vermont is Maple syrup. This is produced by boiling the sap of the maple tree that is collected in a six-week period after winter and before spring, which at times is refered to a fifth season the muddy season. Vermont borders Canada and is about 90 miles from Montreal, the capital of Quebec in Canada.

In the evening we went to the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce monthly meeting. Met an wall street analyst who was pissed up that half the Americans need to be given subsidy because they are hungry or old or vulnerable and thought that if this happens then the economy cannot revive. Then on a high he started talking about his horse and how for the last half mile he gets down and walks along with him. I told him that that is perhaps the solution to the financial mess - we need to walk together. He agreed that the greed was indeed a problem if you whip the horse and wound it to take you faster and faster then it will trip and you will ultimately fall. Another financial analyst said that he is now producing onions and tomatoes as a hobby - perhaps he will have time to empathize on the farmers. Another group I met was The Chill Foundation that is helping the undeserved youth - most importantly they teach them patience, persistence, responsibility, courage, respect, and pride. Important lessons here!

Eli was considerate enough to drop me back and on the way showed me the floods along the banks of Lake Champlain, which also borders New York state on the other side. It is time I call it a day. Tomorrow we start early, move around in Vermont and in the evening drive down to Boston.

Local and slow versus industrial and fast food

The day began with an interaction with local foods connenction, Laura Daud. She tries to bring together the farmers through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) to low-income people. Most of the low income people are either single-women parents or children or old. In terms of communities they are either Hispanic or Latin Americans or Immigrants (there are a number of them from Sudan). In the usual marketing channel a farmer gets 20 cents of the dollar paid by the consumer, but through the local foods the farmer gets about 90 to 100 per cent of the dollar paid by the consumer. The poor are used to less healthy food and effort is required to make them appreciate local foods with a vegetable and fruit diet. It is difficult to take them out of the habit of fast food which also is easily accessible.

Generally under CSA the farmer gets the food baskets to a common place from where people pick up their baskets. However, under local foods some farmers who deliver at home are tied up with old and physically disbaled households who will have difficulty in traveling.

Another problem about the poor is difficulty in accessing health care. Poor people can access some free medicare, but that will not help them for chronic diseases. Another thing is that when they seek care they will have no bargaining power. The insured always hve their insurance companies who negotiate and reduce the medical bill much after the acture care has happened but this recourse is not their for the poor who pay out-of-pocket.

The next stop was at the slow food restaurant Devotay. Food for international participants was waived by the owners Chef Kurt and Kim Friese. The tip on behalf of the participants was paid by Laura from local foods. The concept of this type of dining is to enjoy food in the company of people at a leisurely pace as against the fast, cheap and easy. After lunch Chef Kurt spoke us at length about the movement's start in Rome, Italy in 1986.

This movement is also antithetical to the industrial agriculture, which is being referred to as conventional but that is not the correct thing as it is anything but conventional. Its emergence is not even 50 years old and has failed. In the new method of cultivation, overall production has increased, but it has less nutrients and with more sodium and nutrients and vulnerable to more attack from insects, diseseases and fungus. The emphasis on producing big has now put us in a situation where a billion people suffer from hunger and a large number who are overfed with unhealthy food. In the United States it started in the 1970s under Nixon with the thinking that a farmer has to 'get big or get out'.

Another watershed in the United States agriculture is 10 Deccember 2001 when a Supreme Court judge (who earlier was an attorney for an agri-business seed producing company) passed a ruling in favour of utility patent (as against the plant patent). In the new scheme of things if the gened owned by a company is found in any other plant either because of pollination or whatever process the farmer has to pay the company.

The alternative to this is food that is associated with pleasure, awareness and responsibility. More importantly food should be good, clean and fair that is the producer of food should get a fair price. This is very essential not only in the United States and in other countries. In India, more that 50 per cent of the population are depenedent on agriculture. They are either farmers with an average holding of 2.5 acres (1 hectare) or agricultural labourers. These producers of food are also net buyers. Their status as net buyers is used to keep prices low, but the latter hurts them more.

One also needs to know that the recent prices increases of food are more to do with the middlemen and less with the benefits to the farmer. A sadder part from India is that in the last 15 years more than 250,000 farmers have committed suicides. More of this in Agrarian Crisis in India. To get back to Chef Kurt, I will end by saying that his co-authored book Chasing Chilies: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail is about the changing climate and the need for resilience.

The last meeting was with Mr Richard of Kirkwood community education centre and Mr Bard Buchanan, a distributor of Pioneer seeds who also provides extension on soil health managment with the use of global positioning system. The information here told us the advantages of being big - the corn-soyabean cycle. The need for foodgrade quality production when it is for human consumption and with less stringent requirements when it is for animal feed. We were told that more than 90 per cent of corn is now genetically modied and it would be probably about 80 per cent for soyabean. The contaminaton for non genetically modified is more for corn as there is cross pollination but for soyabean this is not there as it is based on self pollination. The advantages of genetic modified in reducing some pests/diseases was told, but its implication on other new diseases was not very clear.

Climate change is another important question. Mr Richard pointed out that the data with us may not tell us anything conclusively but then if we wait for data we would have lost out on time. Even with the danger of dubbed non-scientific it is better to be cautious than regret.

It has been a tiring one and it is time I call it a day. Tomorrow we move to Burlington, Vermont.

Risk Management by USDA, Arcadia's Biosciences and Full Circle Farms

The Risk Management Agency at the regional  office of USDA mentioned how for commodities that are indexed at the Chicago market the prices depend on that, but for commodities that are not traded there and local to California such as strawberries, almonds and the like then they use locally collected informtion to arrive at some price. In almost all insturances, the federal government gives a subsidy and the agency managing it collects the remaining premium and fee but in case of payout their liability is only 30-60 per cent depending on the crop and the loss. Premiums are paid for nature induced losses interpreted in a broad way. For instance, following the recent Tsunami in Japan and the nuclear disaster some food items were obsorved to be contaminated (which exactly is not nature related),  but as the outcome was in a sense induced by nature they agreed to pay the insurance amount. On the  possibility of farmer and insurance company colluding, they agreed that it can happen and even identified a case where the individuals involved were asked to repay the money - unfortunately, the farmer and his wife ended their lives.

Meeting with Aracadia biosciences revealed that they work largely with bringing technology related, particularly genetically engineered ones, to find solutions to some presing problems of agriculture - salinity, pesticides, and need for increasing yield among others. They indicated about New Rice for Africa (NERICA), also see its wikipedia page here. On the genetical interventions, many questions do still remain - cost of the technology, disregard for alternatie technologies that can be  costly, and of course health implicatio which can only be known 30/40 years down the line if some research is done. For instance, they tried to address nitrogen fixation by genetic modification and cared less for nitrogen fixation by azola or other cost-efffective measures that are locally feasible. Similarly vitamin A fortification leading to Golden rice can be  supplemented by making the populations available milk, egg, carrots or spinach among others.

In contrast to the above, we also visited Full Circle Farms at Davis. A group of four people have rented the place for 600 dollars and provide vegetables, fruits, nuts or eggs under a commuity supported agriculture scheme to 20 families by charging 20 dollars for a week. The labour put in these farms is much more to the conventional farms that are largely mechanized, but one could relate with similar practices in India. One/two more days at Sacramento, California.