Day 10: Eat your (organic) vegetables

The Farm Stand at Cedar Circle Farm.

This morning we toured Cedar Circle Farm, a gorgeous organic fruit and vegetable farm that's motivated by sustainable agriculture, community health, education, well-paid laborers, and environmental values. Cedar Circle was established on this 40-acre property in 2000, and has several programs for getting farm-fresh, organic fruits and vegetables to Vermont customers. They have an education program run by our tour guide Eric Tadlock, a retail flower department, and a farm kitchen managed by Alison Baker, which supplies their cafe, farm stand, and a small amount of prepared foods and value-added products that are sold elsewhere. Their produce and value-added products are sold in four direct ways: direct sales to customers in their farm stand (where we ate lunch today), direct sales at four Vermont farmers' markets, a CSA with about 180 shares per year on average over the last 12 years, and pick-your-own strawberries and flowers. They also have two festivals every year that attract 1,500-2,000 people each: a strawberry festival in June and a pumpkin festival in October.

Beautiful greens on Cedar Circle Farm's vegetable farm.

All their produce is certified organic, which proves challenging. However, like every other organization we have met with, they make organic work because they are loyal to their values and truly believe in the benefits of organic practices. I want to take this moment to explain what I've absorbed from our conversations about organic. Despite what you may think (and what I thought before this trip), organic is not just about consumer health. It's about farmers producing food using practices that recycle resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity, without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, genetic modification, or other synthetic additives. A really important aspect is soil health, letting plots lay fallow, and keeping nutrients at balanced levels in soil. Operations Manager Luke Joanis told us that they need to scale up and accumulate more land, but not increase production. In order to keep maintain their soil and grow great crops, they need time and space to let the soil retain its nutrients.

Grace Gershuny, an organic inspector who was deeply involved with the local and organic food movement of the 1970s, spoke to us about perceptions of organic. She emphasized that people who complain about organic standards being watered down when the USDA took charge of the federal organic certification are only thinking of consumers as the end all be all. Organically grown or produced food is inherently healthier than conventional foods, but we need to understand the importance of organic in environmental and farm viability.

Strawberry stand at Cedar Circle Farm, which is open when
customers pick their own strawberries at per-pound prices.

In the afternoon we stopped by Chelsea Green Publishing, the leading publisher of books on the politics and practices of sustainable living, in areas such as organic farming, food/nutrition/cooking, gardening, permaculture, ecology, the environment, simple living, renewable energy, economics, food politics, etc. We learned a lot about the writing and publishing process, but I was impressed by how well our conversation with Co-Founder and Publisher Margo Baldwin and Communications Director Shay Totten fit into our food systems focus. Releasing books about sustainability and food is incredibly important in raising awareness of the issues I'm spending these 3 weeks learning about, and sparking conversations among people who wouldn't normally think about food systems as a critical matter.