Q&A: Home grown

Q. What is a food system and why does it matter?

Ellen: A food system encompasses all the steps in the process of growing, raising, catching, and producing food and how it gets to our plates. When supply chains were disrupted during the pandemic in 2020, many people experienced empty grocery store shelves and started to learn about the supply chains for meat, eggs, and produce. That led to a greater awareness of what it takes to move food from its original location, whether that’s a factory or a processing plant or the land, to where we eat it.

How do we ensure that what the average Vermonter would want to see on their plate every day is available? This is what we asked ourselves when we started working on a regional partnership around food: If where our food comes from suddenly mattered, could New England offer a reliable, safe, and abundant food supply? For instance, the vast majority of food that is imported into the United States comes through the port of Los Angeles. If there are supply chain disruptions — literally, trucks and trains not moving — we’re at the end of the line.

Q. What role does a changing climate play in food systems?

Ellen: Everywhere on the globe, there is increased risk to food production because of extreme weather events such as droughts, excessive water, or excessive heat. Here in Vermont, we are learning how vulnerable we are to climate impacts, for example with the 2023 and 2024 floods and the 2023 late frost issues. There’s more unpredictability in our weather patterns.

Q. How robust is Vermont’s food supply system?

Ellen: If we look at local food consumption, i.e., food produced and consumed in Vermont, we were at 5% in 2011. By implementing the state’s first 10-year plan to strengthen our food system, known as Vermont Farm to Plate, we reached 10% in 2020 — a doubling of local food consumption! We’re midway through the second 10-year plan and our goal is to hit 25% by 2030.

We grow, raise, and produce a wide range of products in Vermont. Many people know about our dairy and maple industries, but we also raise livestock for meat (e.g., cattle, sheep, hogs), grow vegetables, apples, and some grains, and produce value-added items (e.g., cheese, yogurt, ice cream, bread, beer), and shelf-stable specialty foods (e.g., hot sauces, fermented vegetables).

So, in terms of the food the average Vermonter would want to see on their plate, we have a strong base but it’s not sufficient. We could be producing a lot more of what we and the New England region eat if we set that as the goal, had more land in production, and did more to support the next generation of farmers and food producers.

Q. How does Vermont fit into the New England region, in terms of food?

Ellen: Vermont is very much both geographically and culturally connected to the other five New England states. And food doesn’t stay within state boundaries. A lot of Vermont’s products are sold regionally; some of our biggest trading partners are other New England states. It makes sense to accelerate the regionalization of our food system that is naturally occurring. Also, much of New England’s food actually comes from Quebec and the new tariff regime is adding additional threats to our food supply. That’s another reason to think about a regional food supply that matches food needs.

If we produce more of what we actually eat in the region and keep it in the region, we would be more food secure, more resilient to supply chain disruptions. In fact, Vermont is part of a regional initiative called New England Feeding New England where we have set a goal of achieving 30% regional food consumption from regionally produced food by 2030!

If we want to become more resilient to what will be coming at us increasingly and more intensely with climate change, again it makes sense to think regionally. In any given year, somebody is going to get hit with more water than they can manage and they will lose their crops. For both food security and peace of mind, it helps to know that we don’t have to do it all just in Vermont — we have friends and neighbors and farmer connections in Maine and Massachusetts, for example. It gives us a sense of being in this together, with a larger group of people.

Q. What is the role of land?

Ellen: If you’re a new or beginning farmer and you look at the cost of land, it’s already very expensive here in Vermont but it’s even worse in Massachusetts and other southern states of the region. Maine and Vermont have lower per acre farmland costs and more available land that could be cultivated. So it stands to reason that we’re more likely to be the production centers.

A lot of Vermont’s producers are in fact selling their products to southern New England. Because of income differentials between northern and southern New England, many in southern New England can afford to pay higher prices, so it’s a way to support the economic viability of farmers and producers in the northern states.

Q. How can conservation support these efforts?

Ellen: Our land base in Vermont is finite. Of course, we need land for housing, town centers and communities, farming, recreation, wild lands, biodiversity, and functioning forests. The question of our time is how do we balance all of these different, competing land uses? But overall, given climate change and the risk to food supply nationwide, I think we need more land in food production in Vermont. Which means we should be conserving even more farmland so that it’s available for long-term production.

And we need farmers on that land. One path is traditional farm families keeping their land in production through a transfer of ownership from one generation to the next. Farmers often sell conservation easements to VLT because then they don’t have to sell the land to pay for their retirement and, in many cases, they hope someone in their family will take over.

The other is with people who are new and beginning farmers who don’t come from farm families, or immigrants who come from a place where they were farming but they moved here and don’t have land. Conservation can help matchmake between those who have farmland and want someone to take it over, and those who are looking for farmland.

A third way conservation can help is by strategically conserving farm parcels that are adjacent, contiguous, or within striking distance of other farms that are active and have been conserved. We need to keep farmland intact in large parcels — just like with forest fragmentation — because it’s harder for farms to stay financially viable when farmland is in a patchwork and farmers have to figure out how to get their tractor 10 miles down the road.

From empty grocery store shelves during the pandemic to failed crops because of recent floods, we are becoming more aware of where our food is grown, who makes that happen, and how it reaches us. Conservation can strengthen the region’s ability to feed itself by protecting farmland and keeping it intact, and by getting farmers on to land.

Photo of Ellen Kahler by Erica Houskeeper Communications