For people who want easy access to local, organic food, Burlington Vermont is a good place to live. Within city limits there are 13 farms producing everything from salad greens and parsnips to eggs and blueberries.

This farming happens on land that’s under long-term management by The Intervale Center, a non-profit organization that I helped to establish back in 1987 as part of Gardener’s Supply’s community service . At the heart of the Center’s work is their stewardship of 350 acres of land, much of it currently in certified organic agricultural production.

Most Intervale farmers are distributing their produce at local farmers markets and through CSA memberships. But traditional CSAs, even in our hotbed of local food interest, reach less than 10% of local consumers.  To increase demand and reach more households additional innovation is needed.  Just as the first CSA in northern New England was started in the Intervale, the Intervale Center is now helping 100’s of new households connect with local food through an innovative multi-farm CSA with shares delivered to their places of employment.  This initiative, operated by The Intervale Food Hub, has been attracting a lot of attention.

 I spent the day after Thanksgiving with two of those interested parties – Mark Bittman from the New York Times, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – giving them a tour of Intervale farms and explaining the Food Hub concept.  Our Food Hub is a triple-win: more consumers get easier access to food from local farms, 24 farmers have a new and predictable sales channel, and more local economic value from food produced and purchased here is circulated in our economy rather than “leaking” out.

Bernie Sanders, Mark Bittman and Travis Marcotte (Executive Director of the Intervale Center)  Photo by Joe Speidel

As mayor of Burlington, it was Bernie Sanders who paved the way for establishing the Intervale Center. Back then, it was almost impossible to find local, organically-grown produce.  New York Times columnist, cookbook author and popular TV and video cook, Mark Bittman, has been a powerful spokesman for healthy eating and food system change. This New York Times commentary on his recent visit to Burlington, does a great job of explaining the Food Hub concept. 

I want to thank both of these distinguished guests for helping to spread the word about some of the many good things that are happening here in Vermont.
 

Our non-profit organization in Costa Rica, Restoring Our Watershed, has taken a big leap forward this year thanks to Matt Rosensteele and Ann Marie Titsworth who have come on board as Executive Director and Director of Operations, respectively. Though Matt and Ann Marie have been with us less than 6 months, they’ve made some remarkable progress.

In early October, ROW launched a new and improved website: ourwatershed.org. The new site has a good overview of our work in the Nandamojo River valley, as well as an interactive version of our monthly publication, The Green Leaflet, in both Spanish and English. Our blog has been integrated into the website to provide timely news about happenings in the region. You can also sign up for our monthly emails for updates about our various projects.

One of ROW’s key goals has been to establish a micro-lending program to stimulate local food production. In August, we gave out our first loan to help several local residents purchase beehives. The new beekeeping operation will provide a sustainable source of income for two families, with the first harvest expected this December. Honey production is an ideal first project as there’s strong local demand for the product, a good profit margin for the borrowers, and a beneficial effect on the environment.

Jaime Zuñiga Leal inspects his new hives.

 A second micro-lending initiative is in the works. If all goes well, several area residents will soon begin offering local, humanely produced eggs to area hotels and restaurants. To learn more about our micro-lending program and investing in the future of the Nandamojo, please visit the ROW website or send an email to ROW’s Executive Director, Matt Rosensteele, matt@ourwatershed.org.

It’s not milk or maple syrup. It’s not apples or honey. Vermont farmers are learning that one of the best ways to generate on-farm profit is by “growing” electricity.

In fact, energy experts suggest that by 2030, Vermont’s working landscape of forests, pastures and cropland, could be producing more than 50% of our State’s electrical energy needs. For farmers that have had to struggle with volatile milk prices and ever-rising costs for fuel, animal feed, fertilizers and labor, producing a crop that doesn’t require daily feeding, seasonal plowing or annual investments in infrastructure is almost too good to be true. At the same time, the rest of us get to help preserve Vermont’s working landscape by purchasing electricity from Vermont’s farmers at below market prices.

Vermont residents currently pay almost $100 million dollars each year to keep the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant limping along. If we use that money to instead purchase electricity from Vermont farmers who are generating power from wind, solar, biomass or methane, we could keep all of our energy expenditures circulating right within Vermont.

Want to learn more? Read my article, which will be appearing in an upcoming edition of the Vermont Natural Resources Council’s member newsletter. You may also be interested in learning about the Vermont Council on Rural Development’s Working Landscape Partnership.

In June I spoke at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies annual conference in Bellingham, WA.  BALLE is North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, with more than 80 community networks in 30 U.S. states and Canadian provinces, representing over 22,000 independent business members.

BALLE’s vision is that within a generation we will see “a global system of human-scale, interconnected Local Living Economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems, meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life”.  For this year’s conference I was asked to help frame the need for a new economy and discuss my efforts over three decades to build a stronger local economy in VT. 

I began by showing an image from a conference I organized back in 1980.
The first energy crisis had just “ended” and people were starting to realize the precarious connection between our industrial food system and cheap fossil fuels. I suggested that Vermont’s response could be to produce more food for local consumption using less petroleum inputs and using more sustainable practices. This is exactly what’s happened, though it took another ten years to begin gaining traction. Burlington lead the way with Vermont’s first CSA and community-wide waste food and yard waste composting program – both now part of the Intervale Center.

Vermont’s evolving local food system and the new business opportunities it has fostered, have proven BALLE’s belief that: “local, independent businesses are among our most potent change agents, uniquely prepared to take on the challenges of the twenty-first century with an agility, sense of place, and relationship-based approach others lack.”  As Michael Pollan, author or the The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wrote a few years ago:

The total economy is the globalized world in which everything is a commodity. Everything is produced wherever it can be produced most cheaply, which is to say most destructively, of people and resources, and moved to wherever it can be sold most dearly. This is zero sum food economy. It means more cheap food for us, less for the soil, less for the workers and much less for the animals…Our food, in the vision of the globalizers and the vision of the total economy, will come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply, freeing American labor and land for higher uses. I frankly don’t know what higher use there is for labor and land than growing food…Local food economies are our best hope for checking the drift toward the total global economy. And food is where these economies begin. A revolt is underway across this country. A revolt of the small producers and consumers and some of the most important politics today…are happening at the farmer’s market.

The “total economy” that Pollan speaks of relies on a neoclassical economic principle in which the human economy is above the biosphere and nature imposes no limits on continual economic growth. Peak oil, climate change and diminishing soil and water resources reveal a different reality. Food security and food prices will continue to challenge this wrong-headed human assumption.

At BALLE, I also pointed to other factors that are supporting change in our food system. Similar impulses are at play in the energy system and waste system, and the consequences of damaged ecosystems are becoming impossible to ignore. Regaining local control is a trend that will result in a remade global economy, built on more resilient local economies.

What’s the easiest and most important (tropical) plant gardeners can grow?

I’ve spent the past several months learning about coconut palms in Costa Rica. Why? Because these are among the most amazing, adaptable, resilient, nutritious and versatile plants on our planet.

Since coconuts can survive months bobbing at sea until they finally find land and sprout, coconut palms are found thriving on tropical, subtropical and even temperate beaches all over the world. They can grow in sandy and clay soils, sea water, polluted water, or almost no water…and once established, need very little care! Distantly related to grasses, they can absorb almost every important mineral needed for superior human nutrition. The fruit of the coconut is, in fact, one of the world’s top super foods.

The list of health benefits from coconut water, meat and oil is truly amazing:

• They boost the immune system with antiviral and antimicrobial fatty acids.

• Their 90 percent raw, saturated fat (from plants, not animals!) benefits cardiovascular,endocrine, hormone and nervous systems, plus provides fast energy.

• They help manage blood sugar to control hypoglycemia and diabetes.

• They assist the body’s absorption of key vitamins, amino acids and minerals.

• They can increase metabolism and reduce excess body weight.

The coconut’s benefits go far beyond human nutrition. In Sanskrit, the word for coconut means “the tree that supplies all that is needed to live.” The buds of coconut palms can be tapped to produce a syrup, which can be dried into brown “palm” sugar—a healthy, low-glycemic, vitamin- and mineral-rich substitute for cane sugar. And the wood of the coconut palm trunk makes beautiful bowls, wood art and souvenirs.

To enjoy the meat and “pipa water” (and to make them easier to open), we harvest coconuts while they’re still green. I like the flesh of the nut young, when it’s textured like gelatin and can be eaten like custard, with a spoon.

The resulting 90 percent waste from processing the nut is good news:

• Dense, long-lasting, and slow-to-degrade coconut husks make the perfect base for compost, and a wonderful mulch when shredded with a machete. Both help maintain healthy soil tilth—difficult in the    tropics, where soil organic matter oxidizes quickly.

• Coconut fronds, which make the perfect casing to enwrap deep-rooted vetiver plants and help them get started at the beginning of the wet season, are part of our soil erosion control and rainwater absorption system in the Nandamojo River watershed.

• The outer course “husk” fibers of the mature coconut seed, called “coir,” show promise as a replacement for peat moss. We use coir here in Costa Rica as a soil amendment, aerating our heavy soil with organic matter. We’ve also developed a seed germination mix and potting soil for grow bags with coir as the main ingredient.

Most of my efforts involving coconuts have focused on maximizing uses for coir. For years, I’ve been interested in it as a locally sourced replacement for peat moss: as a gardening input to germinate seeds, as a transplanting mix and as a soil amendment. Like peat moss, which consists of sphagnum species growing in temperate and northern wetlands, coir has a unique sponge-like capacity to hold water and release it slowly to benefit the surrounding soil as it dries out—though coir has slightly different water absorption and release characteristics.  Our garden-testing includes understanding these characteristics.

Locally available and effective alternatives to using peat moss as a horticultural input and natural soil additive do exist. Coconut coir is one of the most promising; plus, because coir is a waste by-product of coconut food processing, it is clearly sustainable. Here in Costa Rica, I’m testing new container and raised bed uses for coir, for Gardener’s Supply. The results will become a new generation of “innovative coir gardening solutions.”

We’ll plant these sprouted coconuts in a few months, at the start of Costa Rica’s wet season here in Guanacaste, interspersed with organic pineapple plants. Part of our watershed restoration work here includes finding new land-based industries that provide jobs for the local economy and make farming and land use more restorative. How many acres of coconuts and pineapples will we grow in the degraded valley floor of the Nandamojo River watershed? If you are in our area of Guanacaste, stop in at www.tierrapacifica.com and we’ll discuss it over a piña colada!

“Pacas” placed on contour lines take root fast, helping to slow and absorb rainwater during the rainy season, controlling soil loss and recharging the ground water

We can get coir in large bulk bags that we use dry in planting beds, or hydrated and mixed with other ingredients for soil mixes in grow bags.

I’ve been terminated three times in my professional career.

Once was from my first professional job, which was federally funded, as an urban planning and community development consultant. I worked in rural California cities to help farming communities resist unwanted development of prime farmland. The grant that funded my job was not renewed—I guess Congress determined the goal was a lost cause (and history proved us right)—and I left California after 26 years.

My second firing was more surprising and painful. I departed California for Europe, to work with E.F. Schumacher’s Intermediate Technology Development Group. I learned about alternative communities (Findhorn in Scotland) and new economic and business development models (Mondragon Cooperative in Spain). After just 18 months exploring, working and studying—during which I met and married my wife, Lynette, in Scotland—we returned to the United States.

My luck improved when I found the ideal job in New England, working for a growing “socially responsible” business during the height of the first energy and food inflation crisis. My employer, Garden Way, a mid-size business with 1,500 employees, sold organic gardening, wood burning, solar energy and home food preservation products and books. It was well-positioned in the market and doing important work. Plus, it was founded and run by a visionary leader who hosted E.F. Schumacher at the company headquarters to discuss the ideas in his best-selling book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Matter. Garden Way’s leadership was committed to “not-for-profit-only business” and employee ownership as a path to share success and maintain internal control. Four years after I moved to Vermont and started at Garden Way, a small contingent of greedy, valueless shareholders grabbed control and fired the founder, as well as all the managers who aligned with him. That included me.

That was the early 1980s—in the middle of the recession—and jobs were scarce in Vermont. So I created my own: I started Gardener’s Supply and followed a course of providing tools and information to help people grow their own food, and eventually flowers, at home using organic practices. The Reagan years boosted the economy and the real estate market, home gardening thrived, and the business expanded to more than 250 employees.

Yet, after 25 successful years, I found it was time to fire myself: Gardener’s Supply needed more consistent and “attentive” management. My passion had always been demonstrating how local economies and business networks serving basic needs (like food, energy and housing) were the best path to proving we could have an economy that valued people, communities and the environment as much as profits and shareholder return. That passion was taking me in many worthwhile and distracting directions.

While Gardener’s Supply grew, I funneled a large portion of our financial success (some years all of it!) into enterprises that served this passion. In 1987, we started Intervale Compost Products, which grew into the largest recycler of organic solid waste in Vermont. That spawned Intervale Community Farm, the first CSA membership in Vermont (now there are hundreds of CSAs in Vermont and thousands nationally), two years later. These two enterprises led to the non-profit Intervale Center, the largest training center and incubator of community organic farming enterprises in the U.S., and numerous other initiatives that continue to evolve.

As Gardener’s Supply’s majority owner, I was committed to keeping the business in Vermont and not selling out to a larger business (for example, Home Depot made offers). My “termination” would be on my terms. It took several years to sell the company to our Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP), and we finally celebrated the deal in December 2009.

Now that I’m in retirement, I haven’t terminated my passion for local businesses, sustainability and a new economy. In fact, I’m developing ‘southern’ versions of Gardener’s Supply, Intervale Center and other ideas in the developing economy of Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where I wait out Vermont’s harsh winters. It’s a great job…and no one can fire me!