A revolution you can eat

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For more than a decade now, nef has been developing the idea that local food production can underpin thriving local economies.

It is an idea that builds on our concept of using money flows more effectively. You don’t always need extra money to revive your local economy – it can be a matter of using the existing money better so that it doesn’t flow out again at the first exchange. 

Building a diverse network of food businesses can help here.

It has been taken up successfully by many of the Transition Towns. There are places in the UK like Ludlow and Todmorden which have run with the idea of local food, and are enriching their local economies by doing so.

But the pioneering work in Vermont, one of the most conservative but also most innovative states in the USA, can teach us all something –and it has been summed up in a fascinating article in the New York Times.

The article, ‘Making local food real’ by Mark Bittman, looks at the Intervale, a 350-plus-acre flood plain not far from downtown Burlington, which is the centre of the new economic revival in Vermont.

A quarter of a century ago, part of it was planted with corn and the rest was a sort of dump. But Will Raap, the founder of Gardener’s Supply – also now the chair of nef’s American partners, the New Economics Institute, recognised its potential for the local economy.

He teamed up with local mayor Bernie Sanders, now Vermont’s senator, and began using the Intervale for incubating small food businesses and farms.  

The New York Times article explains: “A $7,000 loan from the city helped create a central composting facility (it’s now a profitable business), but the big plan was to provide a home for new farmers, on plots ranging from one to 40 acres. This goal was quickly realized, beautifully, and the results form the core of a regional system that’s providing local food in significant and ever-increasing amounts.”

There are now a number of community supported agriculture projects there, where local people buy a share in the harvest of a farm, guaranteeing the farmers’ crops in return for vegetables after it is grown.

There is now the first group CSA, the Intervae Food Hub, where 24 farms joined together so that subscribers get a better range of vegetables.

There is also the Burlington Farmers Market two days a week and the community owned City Market, which has been desperate to find better supplies of local vegetables, aware that there was increasing demand.

“We are in the middle of a food revolution,” Senator Sanders told the New York Times reporter.  That is true and it is beginning to happen all over the place, and this is just the beginning.

I’m not aware that there is anywhere in the UK which is making that revolution happen quite on the scale of Burlington, but it is only a matter of time.