Day 2: Catamount Educational Farm and Vern Grubinger

Today's tour of the UVM Catamount Educational Farm opened our eyes to a careful blend of farming for market and farming to educate the next generation of our country's farmers. Their farmer training program on a small 10-acre plot provides young people with a skills-based, experiential education in sustainable agriculture. Not only do they produce fruits and vegetables for market, but they also have time to receive additional instruction on farming practices and learn about food systems from a holistic view.

Our tour provided us with a holistic view as well, as Susie Walsh Daloz, Farmer Training Program Director, spoke to us about their role in all aspects of food systems, including relationships with customers like Sodexo, what cover crops work well in Vermont's climate in the summer, the experimentation their students do on the hand-scale garden, and where some of their students come from.

UVM Catamount Educational Farm field.

The tour made me wonder how common educational farms are, and if there's widespread interest around the country in participating in farmer training programs. This related well to our conversation with Paul Costello at VCRD yesterday about training young people to farm, while also attracting them to rural Vermont and giving them reason to stay here. It also relates well to our conversations about aging populations in farming, which coincides with the declining number of US farms in recent years. In 2007, US farmers averaged 57.1 years, which is up from 48.7 years in 1945, the first year the US Census on Agriculture collected data on farmers' age (Zulauf 2013).

UVM Catamount Educational Farm field.

Vern Grubinger's lecture was an excellent summary of food systems from a truly systemic perspective. He touched on a variety of aspects, such as geographical scales, market levels and pressures, the oligopoly of food corporations, consolidation and commodities, and non-monetized values, among others. Most significantly, he compared food systems to a multi-dimensional house because you see very different things from different angles. Yet, he stressed the importance of being aware of what exists in other perspectives and how your actions have implications in unseen areas. In this systems view, we must ask: what are the connections and boundaries that matter?


Zulauf, Carl. "Putting the Age of U.S. Farmers in Perspective." The Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics. October 23, 2013. http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2013/10/putting-age-us-farmers-perspective.html