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Newsletter No. 3
| Sept. 11, 2010 |
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Greetings!
Lots of good food
news to report and a reminder to Eat Local!
Meet Hannah Mueller, our
new Farm-to-School coordinator for Addison County. Welcome Sam Lester, a veteran commercial grower from Long Island, to our local foods market.
Don't forget: the third-annual Tour de Farms takes place on Sept. 19 in Shoreham!
Jonathan Corcoran
President, ACORN Network
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Eat Local!
 September is Eat Local Month, and Addison County will be
full of activities celebrating the start of the harvest season. Saturday, Sept. 11, the
Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op hosts its Harvest Festival from noon to 4 PM. Music and plenty of local food, for free and for sale, are
major draws.
If you're closer to
Shelburne, stop by the 9th Annual Small Farms Food Fest at Shelburne Orchards Sunday, September 12 for music, hayrides, hands-on crafts, lots of taste-testing from local
producers, and more.
Food drives and a
gleaning project aim to deliver local produce to those who need it the
most. Eat Local Month is also
Hunger Action Month, and the Vermont Foodbank is organizing Pick for Your
Neighbor at U-Pick orchards, encouraging people to gather extra food for their
local foodbanks.
Participating orchards in Addison County include Champlain Orchards in Shoreham, Happy Valley Orchards in Middlebury, and Shelburne Orchards.
Yet another event coming up
fast is the third annual Tour de Farms, to benefit ACORN, Rural Vermont, and the Vermont Bicycle & Pedestrian Coalition. It takes
place on Sunday, September 19 in Shoreham. Call 802 223-7222 or visit here to pre-register by Monday, September 13 ! The Tour de Farms offers three scenic bike rides with stops and snacks
at a variety of agricultural points of interest. Participants enjoy good company with other cyclists and food
lovers from around the state, and return after the Tour to Shoreham Green for
the Shoreham Apple Fest, a wonderful celebration of the harvest with music, crafts and hearty food.
Near the end of the month, on Sept. 24, Bristol's The Inn at Baldwin Creek hosts its 14th Annual Harvest Celebration, the Feast of Our Farms 2010. This is sure to be a lavish event where local cheese makers, wine producers, brewers, and coffee roasters offer their best at the Gala Grazing Dinner.
It's difficult to imagine a better time and place to enjoy localvore cuisine than this month in Addison County. Take advantage of all there is to offer, at a festival and in your own kitchen!
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ACORN Produces Local Foods Plan for County
Did you know
that Addison County is the leading market for local foods in the State of
Vermont (on a per capita basis)?
In March 2009, a major local foods summit
was organized in Middlebury by the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op, the Addison
County Organic Growers and the ACORN Localvores to explore the barriers and
opportunities to further growth of this rapidly emerging market. ACORN and a
group of area growers subsequently formed the Addison County Local Foods
Collaborative (ACLFC) and applied for a planning grant from the Farm Viability
Program to develop a strategic plan to expand local foods in the county with
the assistance of consultant Rose Wilson.
Research for the plan began at the Farm-to-Plate meeting in December
2009 in Middlebury. ACORN helped to organize a focus group of
foodservice managers from local institutions to better understand their
needs. Through the course of the winter and spring, ACORN conducted
purchasing surveys with these institutions and field surveys with 40
Addison County producers, processors and retailers.
The 48-page plan highlights three initiatives which ACORN is
currently researching and developing to implement in the next 12 months:
Launch the ACORN Wholesale Collaborative: To jump-start the
development of a wholesale market for local produce by creating and
coordinating a low-cost, direct ordering and delivery service from
large growers to institutional and school foodservice accounts in
Addison County. Hire a part-time County Farm to School Coordinator: To coordinate
initiatives and resources in the three county school districts to
develop and support gardens and hoophouses as well as cooking and
composting programs; to explore foodservice marketing opportunities; to
organize Stone Soup II to highlight pioneers and successful initiatives
in the county; to secure funding for three district farm to school
coordinators for 2012. Develop an Addison County Local Food Index: To create a baseline
metric for the local food market to be able to measure growth. Basket
might include local food sales reported by MNFC, Middlebury Farmers
Market, Greg's, Mountain Greens, AWC, and the Addison Northeast Buying
Cooperative.
The plan's 2020 goal is to increase the share of local food
expenditures in Addison County by 10% - from 5% to 15% or from
approximately $3.5 million to $11 million.
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Gleaning Program is Picking Up
by Corinne Almquist
The Addison County Gleaning Program has grown rapidly this
year, and is continuing to salvage surplus food from local farms with great
success. We have harvested several thousand pounds of food over the course of
the summer, and are looking forward to a very busy fall.
Our summer gleaning
coordinator, Jessie Ebersole, built solid partnerships with many different
organizations in need of fresh produce, such as the Community Lunch Program and
the Middlebury Parent Child
Center. Healthy, local
food that is donated to the food shelf now gets distributed immediately through
many different avenues.
We will need many volunteers this fall for a wide
variety of tasks: harvesting, processing, gleaning farmer's markets, and
delivering fresh produce to various locations in the county. If you might be
able to help with any of these tasks, or would like to learn more, please
contact the gleaners at gleanaddison@gmail.com.
And be sure to check out our blog on the ACORN website!
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Marie Audet of Blue Spruce Farm presents to the Dairy Farming Forum  | Reimagining Dairy Farming in Addison County:
Around 70 dairy farmers, legislators, and community members came
together this past Wednesday to discuss how dairy farming can become
more socially, economically and environmentally sustainable in the
county. The Middlebury event, co-sponsored by the Addison Regional Planning
Commission, the Addison County Economic Development Corporation and
ACORN, featured a stellar panel: Roger Allbee, VT
Secretary of Agriculture, Marie Audet of Blue Spruce Farms, Cheryl
DeVos of Kimball Brook Farms in Ferrisburgh, Mark Young from the First
National Bank of Orwell, and Ethan Swift and Neil Kamen from the VT
Agency of Natural Resources (ANR).
Click to read the rest of the article.
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Sam and Maura Lester by their farm stand  | Local Profile: Lester Farms
by Susan Smiley
Lester Farm, on Rt. 7 and Dog Team
Road in New Haven, is growing vegetables on clay. Some of the clay is stoney
and somewhat loamy, and the rest is heavy clay. Two years into production and vegetables are thriving on Sam
and Maura Lester's 28 acres.
Sam Lester grew up on eastern Long
Island, in a family that farmed potatoes in that region's light soils. He cut
his teeth as a young farmer bringing back into production a field of heavy clay
subsoil that had been stripped of its top soil. He and his partner worked hard to rebuild the soil's organic
matter, discovering along the way that sunflowers, plowed down in the fall,
were very effective in adding organic matter to the soil.
Click to read the rest of the article.
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Navigating the Transition: Blogging on the ACORN site
by Ron Slabaugh
I have been writing a column for the Addison Independent
newspaper for some time. It appears in their special section, "The Village
Green," which they originally planned to do monthly but it has devolved into
'occasional.' The column began its life as "The Localization Show" but changed
to "Navigating the Transition" after I heard Richard Heinberg give a talk in
Montpelier with that title.
I originally thought I would put all the back columns on
the ACORN Network website to get more use out of them but never got around to
it. At the last ACORN Network Board meeting I committed to a monthly blog
submission to our website and I will make them available to the Addison
Independent whenever they publish the Village Green. I've chosen the first
Friday of the month by 9:00 a.m. to be my deadline. I may use some of my older
columns that address important topics but update them for any perspective
changes or additions since their original publication in the 'Addie Indie.'
I would welcome any feedback and I'm sure the site can be
set up to comment on any installment. To read Navigating the Transition, go to
acornvt.org and you'll find a link in the box on the right on our home page.
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Greetings from ACORN's New Coordinator
by Hannah Mueller
 Having moved up to Vermont just two weeks ago from New
Jersey, the things that strike me most are the beauty of the mountains, the
lack of billboards, and the energy that's creating a culture of local foods
here. I feel as though I've come
to the right place at the right time. As Jonathan says, Addison County is the epicenter of the local foods
movement in the country. I've
jumped into the movement because I believe "thinking local" translates into
healthier bodies and communities, especially when kids get involved.
This month ACORN welcomed me as an AmeriCorps*State member
and its first part-time coordinator.
I will split my time between ACORN and the Willowell Foundation, a
non-profit based on 230 acres of farmland and forest in Monkton.
Along with Kathy Alexander, Food Service Coordinator at Mt.
Abe High School in Bristol, I'll be working to expand and improve the Farm to
School network in local school districts.
One of my major goals is to market school lunch to students and parents
in order to increase school cafeterias' ability to buy local foods.
Besides providing administrative support to ACORN and taking
over as the webmaster, I'll organize the second annual Stone Soup summit in
April 2011 and prepare grant applications to enable ACORN to hire three
district Farm to School coordinators in 2012.
I'm excited about setting down roots with ACORN and
Farm-to-School and helping them grow!
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Thank you for your interest in the Acorn Network. If you have specific questions about the Network, please e-mail us at info@acornvt.org or call us at 802-382-0401.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Corcoran, President
ACORN Network | |
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