Are We All Becoming Vermonters?
The other day a couple of friends asked me where the term “crunchy-granola” had originated.
“I think you’re the first person I heard it from,” my roommate told me. It made me smile. My Vermont roots were showing through! I’ve lived most of my life in Connecticut, but ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I identify far more strongly with Vermonters than I do with Connecticut residents.
With family in the Lake Champlain area, I’ve spent almost every holiday and parts of summers in Vermont. In the winter, we ski and go for long snowy walks. Our summers are filled with bike rides, paddle boards, and boating expeditions. The area is full of mountains, lakes, and forests, and the people who live there take full advantage of the state’s natural playground. Hearing the phrase “Vermonter” conjures up a specific mental image — or rather a few. It’s the burly bearded guy wearing a flannel and sipping a local craft beer at a brewery, the young barista with dreadlocks and multicolored tattoos who serves you your coffee at the local coffee shop, or the farmers market attendees decked out in Patagonia from head to toe.
Sure, these are all stereotypes, but behind every stereotype, there lies a certain truth — and there’s no denying the state pride that comes being a Vermonter. Vermont is home to Bernie Sanders, Ben & Jerry’s, and to Bo Muller-Moore, the creator of the famous “Eat more kale” shirts you may have seen people walking around in. It’s true that the state is known for its ski slopes, mountains, and gorgeous foliage, but it’s also true that the state has long been celebrated for food. Vermont produces the majority of the U.S. maple syrup production, supplies 40% of the maple syrup consumed in the country, is home to numerous massive cheese companies like Jasper Hill and Cabot, and has a ratio of one dairy cow for every 3.8 people. The state has also been at the forefront of the farm-to-table movement, with a whopping 7,000 farms and over 50 active farmer’s markets.
Most recently, someone shared an article with me on the progress Vermont farmers have been making with CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) baskets, which have become a growing trend on a national scale. The typical structure of a CSA is its customers pay a fee in advance for a share of the farm’s yield in the upcoming season. One of Vermont’s CSA-offering farms, Full Moon Farm, is updating its format in order to offer its consumers a more flexible range of foods.
Traditionally, customers would stop by the farm each week to pick up a basket of assorted produce — typically farmer-selected generic baskets of whatever was being harvested that week. Full Moon, however, now offers a card payment system in which customers can go to any one of five sites each week and select the food they want. Customers pay for a certain value of the farm share, and can use it when they want to select what they want, with no restrictions. This allows families to go on vacations without missing out on their CSA basket and to choose the types of foods they desire.
As the CSA market expands and becomes more competitive, farms are being forced to find new ways to market themselves to the consumer. Some are offering specialized baskets full of herbal remedies or meal-kit style ingredients, and others are looking into increased flexibility of payment plans, food selection, and pickup location.
One has to wonder if the increased catering to the consumer is going to start eating up more and more of the farmer’s profit, which has already been in steady decline as transportation and processing procedures grow in complexity and more and more people choose to eat out. This is where I see two important millennial trends coming into play as potential solutions: technology and the more intimate, transparent business-customer relationship. Farmers will help themselves significantly just by knowing their customers, so they can anticipate which produce and how much to bring every week, but this is also an opportunity for some form of technology to come into play to track consumer’s orders and give the farms a source of concrete data to use to their advantage. The agriculture industry in the U.S. has often been weighed down by its sluggish resistance to change and its tendancy to rely on government subsidies that are little more than a temporary change, two phenonemons the industry often has little control over.
As the trend towards locally sourced food continues to grow in popularity, I would certainly hope that coinciding trends such as wider access to technology and a more honest company-consumer relationship will work together to benefit both local farms and its local consumers.
Sources:
- https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/farmers-expand-csas-with-new-monetary-options/Content?oid=14355231
- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vermont-food-the-best_us_57a08c6ce4b08a8e8b5f453c
- Timothy Woods, Ma hew Ernst, and Debra Tropp. Community Supported Agriculture — New Models for Changing Markets. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marke ng Service, April 2017. Web.
