Vermont's Local Banquet Spring 2016

vermont’s

local banquet spring 2016 | issue thirty-six

Cover crops • Bakers & brewers • Sheep shearing

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The Robinsons' dog Trump enjoys the apple orchard in bloom, late 1800s.

4 Editor’s Note

16 The Shearer's Daughter

6 Garden Pathways

18 Building Brands in a Small Farm Food System

The Great Garden Cover Up

8 Set the Table with…

Local Oils

27 Farmers’ Kitchen Caprine Cake

10 The Huntress

29 Calendar

12 Home For Supper

30 Last Morsel

Remembering Lewis Hill

14 A Rising Collaboration

A Slow Tan

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Editor’s Note

Publisher Schreiber & Lucas, LLC

Last fall I was an intern on a Vermont sheep and fruit farm, and over the course of three weeks I used parts of my brain that I tap so rarely they might as well be located in my elbow. Normally I spend my days as a writer and editor, working with words, and like most of us I don’t tax my thinking beyond what my chosen line of work asks of me. My brain is narrow. It is used to doing one or two things well.

On the farm, though, I was forced to think spatially when I had to set up new pasture fencing in anticipation of moving the lambs. I had to think mathematically when juggling the numbers involved in making sheep’s milk yogurt (time, temperature). I had to engage in a bit of systems thinking as the farmer explained all the factors influencing the health of the apple trees. I was compelled to understand basic genetics when the ram was brought in and the breeding plan was (literally) put in motion.

Thinking in such a variety of ways brought home to me that farmers must indeed be multi-skilled. A successful farmer doesn’t just “grow plants” or “raise animals”; they must also, to some extent, be a biologist, a chemist, a carpenter, an electrician, a machinist, a chef, and an accountant. If they raise animals, they must also be a veterinarian, a geneticist, a pharmacist, and an animal behaviorist. If they sell their own products directly and have employees, they must also be a marketing expert, a salesperson, and a human resources manager. I’m sure there are plenty of other skills I’m leaving out.

Farmers may not be experts in all the fields they touch on, but they have to know the basics. Can you imagine a farmer not knowing anything about animal genetics, the chemistry behind food safety, or how an electric fence works?

Culturally in America, farming is still seen as being second to a college education, and farmers are often assumed to not be very smart. How wrong this is. Farming may actually be the profession that requires the most knowledge of the most topics and the most engagement with the most skills. This kind of wide-ranging wisdom strikes me as a greater guarantee of a satisfying and self-sufficient life than the intellectual specialization that renders so many of us incapable of such basic things as feeding ourselves or understanding the weather.

The next time you’re at a farmers’ market, wincing at the price of what is sold there, think about all the knowledge that went into the making of that product. And realize that the farmer who brought that product to life through his or her smarts was probably self-taught over many years. Isn’t it fitting that human knowledge is said to have come from an apple tree?

—Caroline Abels

Editor Caroline Abels Art Director Meg Lucas Ad Director Barbi Schreiber Proofreader Marisa Crumb Contributors Mark Cannella Nancy & John Hayden Cheryl Herrick Pamela Hunt Charlie Nardozzi Katie Spring Rachel Ware Helen Whybrow Printed with soy ink on FSC certified 50% recycled chlorine–free paper Subscriptions, $22 Subscribe online or send checks to: Vermont’s Local Banquet PO Box 69 Saxtons River, VT 05154 localbanquet.com 802-869-1236 we welcome letters to the editor info@localbanquet.com vermont’s LOCAL Banquet Mission Statement The purpose of our publication is to promote and support our local communities. By focusing on fresh, local, wholesome foods grown and made in Vermont, we preserve our environment, grow our economy, and enhance our nutrition.

Vermont’s Local Banquet (ISSN 1946–0295) is published quarterly. Subscriptions are $22 annually and are mailed in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. Please make checks payable to Vermont’s Local Banquet. Thank you.

Copyright (c) 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without written consent. Opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publishers or editors.

On the cover : Heike Meyer, owner of Bröt Bakery in Fairfax; photo by Aleksandra Mojsilović / Three Little Halves, threelittlehalves.com.

Contents page : Historic photograph from the collection at Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh.

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local banquet 5

garden pathways The Great Garden Cover Up

by Charlie Nardozzi

Charlie Nardozzi at a recent cover crops workshop Cover crops and green manures may be terms you usually associate with farming, but they’re important for even a small-scale home gardener. “Cover crops” usually refers to grains or legumes grown in fall to “cover” the soil in winter. They’re usually tilled or turned under in spring. Green manures are plants grown during the growing season and turned under in summer or fall to enrich soil.

Why Cover Crops?

Some of the reasons to grow a cover crop or green manure are obvious and some a little more obscure. Cover crops hold the soil in place, preventing erosion. (This can be particularly important if you garden on a slope—and we have plenty of those in Vermont.) Cover crops also help build soil fertility in a number of ways: • When tilled under, these crops add organic matter to soils, improving water drainage in clay soils and water retention in sandy soils.

• Cover crops help balance nutrients in the soil. For example, legume cover crops, such as hairy vetch and field peas, absorb atmospheric nitrogen, changing it into a form plants can use. Cover crops can also help break up clay soils. On our Addison County clay soil, we’ve noticed changes in the workability of our soil just from a few winters of cover cropping with winter rye.

• Some cover crops and green manures, such as buckwheat, can literarily choke out weeds with their lush, thick growth. Others, such as winter rye, exude chemicals from their roots that inhibit weed growth.

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• Cover crops can also attract beneficial insects to your garden. I’ll never forget seeing a community garden plot cover cropped with buckwheat one summer. When that buckwheat was in bloom is was loaded with bees, wasps, and other beneficial insects.

• Finally, you can eat your cover crops, too! Not all cover crops have to be grasses or unusual legumes. I’ve used extra fava bean seeds as a cover crop, enjoying the beans in summer and letting the taproots break up the clay soil. Red clover is our state flower and has a tasty bloom that’s great in salads. Even winter wheat shoots can be harvested when young in fall and made into wheat grass juice.

Planning for Cover Crops Growing cover crops is one of those good gardening chores that we all know we should do, but that often gets overlooked.

One of the biggest challenges for the average gardener is where to grow them. Here are three ways and places to grow cover crops in your garden.

Rotate beds. If you have enough beds or room in your garden, consider rotating a green manure planting into different beds each year. Letting a bed grow a green manure will help rejuvenate it for next year. If you plant fast-growing green manures such as buckwheat, you can even plant in spring, turn it under in late summer, and still have time for an early fall planting of kale or other greens.

Succession plant green manures. Another way to integrate green manures into your growing beds is to succession plant. Succession planting is when you plant two to three crops

in a bed in one season. For example, plant arugula in spring; after harvesting, plant bush beans in early summer; and once the bush beans finish in late summer, plant a fall kale crop. You can apply the same technique with a green manure crop: After your lettuce has stopped growing in one bed, consider planting annual rye grass or buckwheat as a summer green manure instead of planting another vegetable. Even small patches of green manures growing in part of a bed will benefit the garden.

Cover crops in fall. The most common way gardeners use cover crops is to plant them in fall after most vegetables and flowers have passed. Winter rye, winter wheat, oats, field peas, and hairy vetch are some of the most popular fall cover crops.

These cover crops fall into two categories in Vermont: cover crops that survive the winter (winter rye, hairy vetch) and have to be turned or tilled under in spring, and crops that will grow well in fall, but die in winter (oats, field peas, summer alfalfa).

This second group can be tilled or turned under in spring—or, because the tops have died, you can just lightly fluff the soil in spring and plant right into the bed. The cover crops that naturally die off in winter are particularly good choices for gardeners who are practicing no-till gardening.

photos by caroline abels

Planting the Cover Crop As with any seed crop, you need to properly prepare the seed bed before planting. Till or lightly loosen the soil, removing old plants and roots. Broadcast the cover crop or green manure seed at the recommended rate and cover with soil. On sandy sites, cover the seed with a deeper layer of soil than on clay soils. Keep well watered if Mother Nature doesn’t do it for you.

Sow most cover crops in fall, ideally 30 to 40 days before a normal hard-frost date. The earlier you can plant, the better your crop will cover the soil in fall.

Best Cover Crops for Vermont While many plants can be used as cover crops, they generally fall into two categories: grains and legumes. The grains hold the soil and produce an abundance of organic matter, while the legumes help the grains grow by fixing nitrogen. If you’re growing cover crops or green manures, look for mixes with a little of both. If you’re just looking to smother weeds or get the most organic matter possible in summer, grow all one type, such as buckwheat or annual ryegrass.

Here are some of the best cover crops and green manures to grow in Vermont. Check local garden centers or mail-order catalogs for seed.

Winter rye/winter wheat—These grains grow 4 to 5 feet tall at maturity and grow on low fertility and acidic soils. They are hardy to -30 °F, so good choices for Vermont. Winter rye can be sown as late as early November in Vermont and still germinate and grow. Turn these grains under as soon as possible in spring before they reach maturity or they will turn into a thick grass patch that will have to be mowed before being tilled.

Sow 2 to 3 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Hairy vetch—This cold-tolerant legume survives to -15 °F, so it usually makes it through a Vermont winter. It’s best paired with winter rye for that reason. It grows in poor soil, but accu-

Buckwheat in flower mulates phosphorous from the soil so is a good choice in soils naturally high in that nutrient. Sow 1 to 2 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Oats—This grain is only hardy to 10 °F and doesn’t produce as much organic matter as wheat or rye. But it does tolerate wet soils. Because it dies off in winter it’s a good choice for no till gardeners. Sow 2 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Field peas—Peas love growing in cool weather and are a good choice for a fall crop paired with oats. They not only fix nitrogen for plants but use the oat stalks to grow on. They are annuals. Sow 2 to 4 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Annual ryegrass—This annual form of perennial ryegrass looks like a lawn when growing. It’s fast growing and hardy to -20 °F so it may survive the winter. However, it will flower and die in spring so you won’t have to till it under to kill it. It’s particularly good at absorbing and holding nitrogen in the soil so it’s a good cover crop to grow following a legume. Sow 1/2 to 2 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Buckwheat—This is the best crop to grow as a green manure in summer, to add organic matter and to smother weeds in your garden. It’s fast growing, going from seed to a 3- to 4- foot tall plant in flower in roughly 40 days. You can sow two to three crops per summer. Cut down the stalks at flowering and use them as mulch around plants or till them under to directly add organic matter. Wait one to two weeks and sow another crop. Sow 3 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Last, it should be said that cover crops will not only provide all the benefits I mention above; they can also save you money over time. Instead of annually buying yards of compost or bags of fertilizer, you can let cover crops and green manures provide your plants with some of the vital nutrients they need.

Charlie Nardozzi is a nationally known garden radio and TV host, speaker, and consultant. He hosts the Vermont Garden Journal on VPR, In the Garden on WCAX-TV, and runs garden tours, including his upcoming Gardens and Castles of England & Wales Tour from July 8–18, 2016. Contact Charlie via his website, GardeningwithCharlie.com, for more information.

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local banquet 7

Set the Table with…

Local Oils

by Cheryl Herrick Netaka White remembers going to some of the first local food challenges in Vermont—potluck meals to which attendees would bring food that was entirely grown or raised within Vermont, or a 50-mile radius.

“There would be all this great stuff,” he recalls, “but there was no oil. I thought, "Isn’t it interesting that we all want locally grown food on our tables, but we sure love that [imported] olive oil?’” Since those early potlucks a dozen years ago, a handful of Vermont farms have begun bottling their own culinary oil. But Netaka’s thoughts led him to wonder what he could do to get a local, monounsaturated, Vermont-produced oil onto the dining tables of Vermonters.

Netaka is now the operations manager of Full Sun Company, a Middlebury-based business that is offering culinary, Vermont-made sunflower and canola oils produced partially from Vermont-grown seed. Together, he and business partner David McManus are trying to provide a market for Vermont-grown sunflowers and canola seed by selling a great-tasting product to chefs and consumers.

The two met while working on alternative and on-farm energy projects, but they describe themselves as “foodies at heart.” David had spent years working in New Jersey with the specialty meat company Applegate as it was scaling up to meet demand for natural, ethically raised meats. “My appreciation for good food came from going out to the farms and seeing how the animal was fed, and how they’re taken care of before they go to slaughter,” David recalls. “And that’s what we’re doing here [at Full Sun] but with plants, so we can provide the best possible raw ingredients for the best possible result.”

Both David and Netaka describe the delight they’ve experienced when introducing others to their cold-pressed, organic oils. They note that consumers, accustomed to commodity oils, have often come to think of sunflower and canola oils as bland, flavorless, and devoid of nutrients. Full Sun is working to change that assessment by offering a bright, fresh flavor in their products. “The sunflower oil tastes nutty, like sunflower seeds,” Netaka says. “And the canola is earthy and buttery, with hints of a mustard sort of spice.”

The cold-press process is key to the flavor. At Full Sun’s facility in Middlebury (the only operation in Vermont that is solely processing food-grade oil from seed grown by other farms), oil is always kept at 125 °F or below, and then goes through a series of filtration steps to remove sediment. The result is what Netaka calls “a bright, clear oil. We retain the flavor

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of the seeds, the color, the health benefits. And we’re not abusing the fatty acids.”

Full Sun oils are currently found across Vermont in highend eateries, schools, hospitals, and restaurants of all sorts. One chef reports putting the sunflower oil on his bagel in the morning instead of cream cheese or butter. “Now how often do you hear about someone doing that with oil?” Netaka asks.

While flavor is important, Full Sun’s owners are aware that flavor reflects the quality of the seed and its cultivation—and they are hopeful about what that seed means in terms of the larger agricultural landscape in Vermont. Full Sun oilseed is partially sourced from Vermont, but also sourced from a few other states and Canada.

Netaka notes that farmers have been growing sunflower and canola in Vermont for 10 years or so but there hasn’t been a commercial demand for the seeds from any local processors beyond the farms themselves. Full Sun is now “telling growers that we’re here, and we’re inviting growers to learn along with us.”

John Williamson of State Line Oils in North Bennington is one grower who is looking at growing sunflowers for Full Sun. He’s been producing on-farm biofuel , but with the price of diesel so low, he says the numbers just don’t make sense for farmers. “We calculate that the cost of a gallon of biofuel on the farm costs about $3.50 to produce,” he says. “With the price of diesel under $2 a gallon, it just doesn’t add up.”

John is well positioned to make the switch from fuel oil to oil for human consumption. He’s been growing oilseed for almost 10 years, and he made the initial investment in a food-grade oil mill, learning what needs to be done in order to produce a quality product. “You have to treat the whole crop differently, starting in the field,” he says. “You have to treat the combine with food-grade oil, have the seed conditioned [i.e., dried] differently, and you can’t have any contaminants. The seed cleaner has to be set up differently, then into food-grade containers. It’s a much cleaner product.”

photo and recipes courtesy of full sun company

John is one of a small group of Vermont farmers who have made an investment in oilseed production over the last decade. Ten years isn’t a long time for establishing a new crop in a region, though, and the two that Full Sun (and Vermont’s oilseed growers) are focusing on have their own demands and quirks.

University of Vermont Extension agronomist Heather Darby (who’s also a farmer) is familiar with some of the challenges and opportunities that sunflowers and canola (a leafy plant in the mustard family) present. Sunflowers can only be grown in a particular field every 4 to 6 years. They require a long growing season, and then a long time to dry after reaching maturity before being harvested, which leaves them susceptible to the birds that love to eat them. Likewise, canola has promise here in Vermont, but faces pressure from weeds and mold.

But, as Heather says, “Growing canola and sunflower can add another level of diversification for Vermont farms, and that helps farmers.” Sunflowers can help build soil health and quality too, she says. “Sunflowers are great at improving compaction.

The year after you grow them, the soil is so much easier to work with. They’ve got these deeptap roots that pump nutrients up, plus they are extremely drought tolerant, and conserve water and suppress weeds.”

At Full Sun, two “co-products” are made alongside the bottled culinary oil. The meal (comprised of the hull and what remains of the seed) provides organic livestock feed. And all “off-spec” oil (that which doesn’t meet strict standards for color, purity, or flavor) is separated and ends up in the hands of a Vermont biodiesel maker.

Although Full Sun is seeking additional growers with the acreage to significantly increase the proportion of Vermontgrown oils in their finished product, Netaka and David readily acknowledge that they do not want to put Vermont farmers at risk by encouraging overinvestment in canola and sunflower.

“We think it’s realistic for us to increase the proportion of Vermont oils significantly, and we think it’s a logical crop for grain growers to work into their rotation here,” David says.

But, Netaka adds, “Our goal isn’t to become a solely Vermont-sourced product. It’s not realistic for us, but it’s probably also not great for farmers to devote too much acreage solely to oilseed production. Rough years for corn are also rough years for sunflower and canola.”

Both business partners and Heather Darby agree that oilseed production has a place in the Vermont landscape: it can potentially help farmers use crop rotation to supplement income and to offer consumers more locally produced options.

“In future years, we hope to be able to have been part of more grain production, more open-pollinated non-GMO corn, more bean production in Vermont,” Netaka says. “And that product from Minnesota? It costs an arm and a leg to get it here, and we’d rather pay Vermont farmers a fair price instead of the cost of getting it here with a trucking company.”

Cheryl Herrick lives in Burlington with her two sons. She works for UVM Extension’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

Tahini Garlic Salad Dressing 3 cloves of garlic (minced) ½ cup Full Sun® canola oil (or another Vermont brand) ½ cup Full Sun® sunflower oil (or another Vermont brand) ¼ cup olive oil 1 tablespoon sesame tahini apple cider vinegar & lemon juice to taste (about ½ cup total) 1 teaspoon tamari 1 teaspoon maple syrup Mix garlic, vinegar, tahini, tamari, and maple syrup, then gradually add oils while whisking (or blending).

Dijon Vinaigrette 1 tablespoon dijon mustard 2 cloves of garlic (minced) ½ clove shallot (minced) ½ cup Full Sun® sunflower oil (or another Vermont brand) ½ cup Full Sun® canola oil (or another Vermont brand) apple cider vinegar to taste (about 1/2 cup total) ½ teaspoon maple syrup pinch of salt Mix mustard, garlic, shallot, vinegar, maple syrup and salt, then gradually add oils while whisking (or blending).

Ginger Sesame Salad Dressing 2 cloves of garlic (minced) 2 tablespoon fresh ginger (minced) ½ cup Full Sun® canola oil (or another Vermont brand) ½ cup Full Sun® sunflower oil (or another Vermont brand) 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil apple cider vinegar to taste (about 1/2 cup total) 2 tablespoon tamari 2 teaspoon maple syrup Mix garlic, ginger, vinegar, tamari, and maple syrup, then gradually add oils while whisking (or blending).

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local banquet 9

The Huntress

by Katie Spring

In 2013, Murphy Robinson asked to buy a live lamb from our farm. It would, she explained, be used in her first Huntress Intensive, a weekend workshop for women on how to hunt, and it would be taken from live to butchered in order to teach how to properly field dress an animal. When we accepted her invitation to stay during the slaughter, the intense presence and care of Murphy and her students struck me as something from another time.

A group of women encircled the ram lamb, while one held its haunches and another put pressure on its shoulders, preparing for the kill. Another held a bowl at the ready to catch the blood that would drain from the neck. Before the knife was pulled across its throat, the lamb sniffed at a bowl of rose water, an offering from one of the women to help it stay calm.

Murphy began a chant that the entire group took up: The earth the air the fire the water, return, return, return, return. As the chant rose, the woman with the knife parted the fleece along the lamb’s neck and pulled decisively.

This is how I came to know Murphy. Over the next two years, she would hold three more Huntress Intensives through her Mountainsong Expeditions, along with shorter workshops on complementary skills such as hide tanning, winter tracking, and archery. Each year, the demand for these courses continues to rise, and the Huntress Intensive has sold out for three years in a row.

“It was not my intention at all to become a hunting instructor,” Murphy tells me as we sip tea beneath a mounted six-point buck skull in her tiny house, which she moved to our farm in Worcester after we met her. When she started Moun-

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tainsong Expeditions, her intention was “to start a business for adults with many women’s options that would be based around wilderness trips and the transformative power of community and wilderness.” Those backpacking and canoeing trips didn’t sell well, though, so when she finally gave in to a friend who continually asked her to teach a hunting class, Murphy was shocked when it sold out.

Marketed as the “Huntress Intensive: Taking Aim at the Sacred Hunt,” the weekend workshop goes through the nuts and bolts of safety and hunting practices, offers a discussion on the “ancient huntress archetype” and a shamanic ceremony to connect with the deer spirit, and culminates in the slaughter and butchering of a lamb or goat.

“It became clear to me that this was a really strong need,” Murphy recalls, “that there needed to be a place where women could feel comfortable just exploring hunting in a feminist environment and a spiritual environment where ethics was emphasized and the spiritual-emotional impact for what hunting means for us personally was given a space.” Most of her students are first-time hunters, and many once maintained vegetarian or vegan diets. This isn’t surprising at all to Murphy, who herself was a vegetarian for 27 years.

Raised in a Hindu-based meditation community in Iowa, Murphy grew up surrounded by vegetarians who, not surprisingly, didn’t own guns. The seeds of her hunting journey, which took years to germinate, were planted in her early 20s when she was working at an international wolf center in Minnesota.

There, she taught visitors about predator ecology and began to appreciate the role of the predator herself.

photos courtesy of Mountainsong Expeditions

Dhyana Miller of Full Moon Girls attends a hunting intensive led by Murphy Robinson

“When we extricated the wolves and cougars [in North America], we removed predators and unbalanced the ecosystem,” she explains. “Deer populations actually become unhealthy and overpopulated and will begin to starve and have disease if we don’t have a peak predator. Right now, the peak predator is mostly humans.”

Her time at the wolf center gave Murphy a more holistic view of ecology, and from there she moved on to work on a trail crew in the high Sierras, where she made her peace with the possibility of being the hunted one in cougar country.

The idea of becoming a hunter finally began to sprout as she thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and crossed paths with many deer. After being a backpacking guide for eight years, Murphy was hungry for a new way to connect with the forest. “To my great surprise, hunting started entering my mind,” she says. “It was appealing as a way to sort of get me out of my human perspective and get me into the woods in a different way, a more meditative way. It would force me to see the woods through a deer’s perspective.”

At the time, Murphy was also learning about Nordic hunting goddess myths and discovered strong archetypes of women hunters. These stories of strong and wild women hunters had her wondering, “Is there something in the hunting itself, and not just the stories of hunting, that could teach me something?”

Murphy found a hunting teacher in a fellow Appalachian Trail hiker named Chase, and in 2010 traveled to his North Carolina farm. “In seven days I went from never having shot a gun in my life to having shot a six-point buck,” Murphy tells me, pointing to the skull hanging above us. Although she hasn’t always had as much luck, she’s hunted every year since.

In the five years since her first hunt, Murphy has answered that initial question of Is there something in the hunting itself?

She says that while backpacking and canoeing may be easier ways to become comfortable in the wilderness, “Hunting offers an intimacy with the land because you’re going off the trails. There’s so much mindfulness and attention to detail that comes in, especially when you’re tracking deer….You learn to read this whole language of the signs the deer leave.” Perhaps most important, “It’s a way of becoming native to place. Woods that you’ve hunted you’re going to know better than woods you’ve just hiked through.”

Murphy’s own dietary background and knowledge of ecology offers vegetarian and vegans a way to understand hunting.

“If you do not eat meat, I think that you will appreciate that the ecosystem needs to be kept in balance,” Murphy says. Hunting keeps the deer population under control, which leads to fewer deer-car collisions and contributes to healthier deer herds. For students who are transitioning away from vegetarianism as she did, Murphy says, “I believe that eating meat that you are deeply connected to through the process of its death brings a huge amount of meaning and spiritual nourishment to your life.” Beyond that, she says, “I think we should hunt so that we will know how fully integrated we are in our environment and in nature, and we will experience those vivid moments of deep aliveness and deep connection [when we’re] making choices

that truly matter in the moment in the woods. I think that when we experience that, we come into a deeper sense of ethics and responsibility within ourselves and all parts of our lives.”

While the Huntress Intensive, rooted in spirituality and myth, has a decidedly different feel than state-run hunting programs, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has been very supportive of Murphy, reaching out to help her become a hunter safety instructor. Historic information compiled by Vermont Fish & Wildlife shows that hunting license sales peaked in 1974 with 114,985 resident licenses sold. That number began to steadily decrease in the 1980s, and in 2014, there were just 61,285 resident hunting licenses sold.

The department has a vested interest in increasing the number of hunters in Vermont, as much of its funding for wildland conservation comes from hunting license sales. Information compiled in a Northern Woodlands article by Northeast Kingdom author Tovar Cerulli (who wrote “The Mindful Carni-

Murphy Robinson vore,” a 2012 memoir on being a vegan-turned-hunter) shows that in 2013, 32 percent of the department’s $19 million budget came from hunting and angling licenses, while only 10 percent came from the General Fund.

But when state-run hunter education classes are free (and required to pass in order to obtain a hunting license), why are people signing up for the Huntress Intensive, which runs at $225? One reason is the woman-centered approach. Marie Frohlich, a participant in the 2013 intensive, says, “I was particularly motivated by Murphy’s intensive because it was more spiritually based and for women, which made it less intimidating.”

A health coach and self-described foodie, Marie was coming to the hunt for the first time at the age of 64, and had already Continued on page 23 S p r i n g

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HOME FOR SUPPER:

Remembering Lewis Hill

by Nancy and John Hayden

Ask a longtime Vermont fruit grower or gardener about Lewis Hill and they’ll probably tell you how he inspired and nurtured their love of growing fruit. Maybe he introduced them to uncommon fruits such as black currants and elderberry. Stop by the home of a Greensboro resident and maybe they’d show you the plants or daylily cultivars they bought from one of Lewis Hill’s nurseries. Maybe they’d also show you a marriage certificate signed by Justice of the Peace, Lewis Hill; he liked to joke that he married more than a hundred women. Talk with a member of the Caspian Lake 4-H group that Lewis led from 1947 into the 1970s and they might recount how Lewis influenced their sense of place and love for Vermont forests.

Lewis Hill passed away in 2008, but he was the kind of man people remember—for his good work, his love of nature and community, and his humorous stories. Born in 1924 and the youngest of 11 children, Lewis grew up on Hillcrest Farm in Greensboro. Although his childhood was full of cold winters, a one room-schoolhouse, and hard work, it planted the seeds for his independent streak and love of storytelling. Lewis wrote about growing up in his two memoirs, Fetched Up Yankee and Yankee Summer. Both are filled with Vermont rural history and Lewis’s good humor.

Like many gardeners, we first came to know Lewis Hill through his books. In our case, it was his books about growing

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fruit, pruning, and cold-climate gardening. These are just a few of the 14 gardening books that he collaborated on or co-wrote with his wife and partner of 39 years, Nancy Davis Hill, the good woman behind the good man. Many of these books, such as Pruning Made Easy and The Flower Gardener’s Bible, are still in print, a testament to their insightful information and readability. Many continue to fill the shelves of prestigious universities, from the University of California to the University of Vermont.

Lewis’s book The Fruit Growers Bible (formerly Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden) has recently been updated by Leonard Perry of the University of Vermont extension service. Leonard was a longstanding associate of Lewis’s and a friend of the Hills. We recently met with Leonard and reminisced about Lewis and his many contributions to horticulture, in Vermont and beyond.

Lewis was one of the founding members and early officers of Green Works: Vermont Nursery and Landscaping Association (originally called the Vermont Plantsmen Association). This organization grew from 30 or so in 1964 to hundreds of members today. This active association hosts conferences and horticultural shows, compiles a member directory, and offers Vermont horticultural certification.

Over the years, the Hills owned and operated several nurseries including Hillcrest, Vermont Daylilies, and Berryhill.

photos courtesy of Nancy Hill

Through plant breeding and selection, Lewis developed two elderberry and two black currant cultivars, along with nine registered daylilies. Lewis and Nancy received the Vermont Nursery and Landscaping Association’s Horticultural Achievement Award in 1992 for their years of work in the nursery and horticulture areas.

Todd Hardie of Thornhill Farm in Greensboro calls Lewis “the gentle giant of Vermont horticulture.” Todd credits Lewis with introducing him to elderberries and educating him about their health benefits. Todd founded Honey Gardens in the 1980s, a business that sold a popular elderberry-honey syrup.

He recently planted hundreds of elderberry plants including the two Lewis Hill cultivars (Coomer and Berryhill). Elderberries and black currants were two of Lewis’s favorite fruits, but he was awfully fond of apples, too. In The Fruit Grower’s Bible he wrote, “We grow many different kinds of fruits, and I love them all, but every time a nursery catalog arrives, I automatically turn to the apple section first, to be tempted by the best new selections.” He grew the old-fashioned heirloom varieties as well as newer varieties. One of his favorites was Duchess of Oldenburg, which is especially good for pies and sauces. That’s one of our favorites too.

Besides meeting Lewis through his books, we also met him in the 1990s. We’d been riding bikes in the Greensboro area on our anniversary when we happened upon Hillcrest Farm.

Although we were a little nervous about just stopping in, both Nancy and Lewis greeted us like neighbors. We talked about some of the challenges of growing cherry and plum trees in Vermont. Lewis shared his knowledge readily. Although he took some correspondence classes to expand his understanding of plants and horticulture, most of his learning came from hands-on work and experimentation at his nursery and farm.

He wasn’t afraid to try new things, whether it was recycling metal roofing as mulch or developing propagation techniques for softwood cuttings.

One cold sunny day this past January, we met Nancy Hill at the Greensboro Historical Society, a society she and Lewis helped start. The Hill family were some of the first settlers in the area, a fact that sparked Lewis’s interest in local and family history. Lewis had collected and saved farm and household items from his grandparents and great-grandparents, including his grandfather Aaron’s account book, cheese presses, and a spinning wheel. Nancy used to keep the old wooden washboard with its hand-gouged grooves on the wall in their kitchen. She said it served as a reminder to be thankful for modern conveniences. After Lewis’s death, Nancy and other historical society members developed the Hill Exhibit for permanent display of these items.

After we viewed the exhibit, Nancy invited us back to her home for tea. She has moved away from the Hillcrest homestead she shared with Lewis, passing it on to Lewis’s great-nephew. He and his wife recently started up Hillcrest Nursery again, carrying on the Lewis Hill tradition by selling edible plants, daylilies, and more. Lewis had previously granted the Hillcrest homestead’s conservation rights to the Greensboro Land Trust.

We noticed the U.S. Peace Corps license plate holder as we followed Nancy’s car up the hill. Being former Peace Corps volunteers ourselves, we asked her about it. She’d served in Thailand in the late 1960s, having postponed her marriage to Lewis until she came home, much to the disappointment of many family members. Although Nancy liked to travel and continued to do so after she and Lewis married, she mentioned that Lewis wasn’t much for traveling. He always said he liked to be “home for supper.”

Over raspberry scones, Nancy shared the Caspian Lake 4-H scrapbook that held old newspaper clippings and black-andwhite photographs from the late 1940s to the 1970s. She served the tea as we watched the woodpecker at the feeder through the picture window and told us that Lewis would mainly want to be remembered for the work he did with the 4-H kids. The 4-H club he led for more than 25 years focused on conservation, forestry, horticulture, and community service with 150 boys involved over the years. In 1974, Lewis was one of four 4-H leaders recognized nationally for his service. It was something of which he was quite proud.

Clive Gray, one of Lewis’s old friends, came in toward the end of our visit. Clive had just come from a Long Pond Conservancy meeting. Long Pond near Greensboro is an undeveloped area of northern hardwood forest surrounding a pristine pond.

It also includes a 30-acre white cedar swamp. “The Long Pond Natural Area is a real tribute to Lewis,” Clive remarked to us.

Lewis and Nancy were instrumental in getting zoning at Long Pond back in the early 1970s. Later, they and other community members started the Friends of Long Pond and helped get 800 acres of surrounding shore land and woods protected through The Nature Conservancy.

Lewis Hill was a true Vermont entrepreneur, starting his first nursery business, Hillcrest Nursery, in 1940. He also had his own printing press and ran a printing business in the late 1950s.

He printed notecards and stationery and sold those locally and by mail order. He learned to fly and develop his own film.

He had a busy Christmas wreath business. For a short time, he even had a transportation business in which he drove summer visitors back and forth from their camps on Caspian Lake to New York City or New Jersey. In the 1990s, when Lewis was in his 70s, he and Nancy toured the back roads of the Northeast Kingdom on their motorcycles, aptly calling themselves “Hill’s Angels.”

As we remember Lewis and the many contributions he made to gardening, horticulture, the nursery industry, local history, and Vermont conservation, we are inspired by the way he interwove his many interests into doing great things for the people and places of Vermont. We are also reminded that living life well isn’t about making a lot of money or trying to garner attention. Lewis would probably be embarrassed by this article.

He followed his passions and did good work not to be a hero, but maybe that’s why he was.

Nancy and John Hayden own and operate The Farm Between (thefarmbetween.com), an organic fruit nursery and fruit farm in Jeffersonville. They specialize in uncommon fruits such as black currants and elderberries.

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local banquet 13

A RISING COLLABORATION

—The Beer and Bread Connection—

by Pamela Hunt Freshly baked bread coming out of the oven at Elmore Mountain Bread (above); Spent grains await their addition to the mix at Bröt Bakery (right).

Once upon a time, in cobblestoned villages across Europe, brewers and bakers depended on each other, trading beer and spent grains for loaves of bread made with those grains. But on our side of the Atlantic, this relationship has largely been lacking.

“This country never really had the tradition of small-town breweries,” says Heike Meyer, owner of Bröt Bakery in Fairfax. “In Europe, some breweries have been around hundreds of years, and they’re still in the same village. And bakeries are abundant, too.”

Now, some of Vermont’s bread and beer makers want to bring this collaborative tradition to the Green Mountain State.

It was a Tuesday morning when I visited Bröt, and Heike was turning the dough for her sprouted bread. A sweet, beery aroma filled her toasty kitchen, where three large plastic tubs were arranged on a long table. As I settled in, she donned a pair of bright blue rubber gloves and dove into the seed-studded mass in one of the containers.

“The turning process allows the dough to get aerated,” she explained as she folded the dough over onto itself. “It also allows the beer to get soaked up by the sprouted grain”—in this case, spelt and einkorn. “And because of the long resting time, you end up with flavors that you otherwise wouldn’t have in a beer bread that’s made in just two hours.”

After working the dough for a few minutes, she let it rest and moved on to the next tub.

Although the fermentation had been going on for six hours already, the dough wasn’t anywhere near ready to form into loaves. The turning process would continue every half-hour for the rest of the day, dictated by a twittering alarm set on Heike’s smartphone.

Heike learned the baking craft in her native Germany, working for Weichardt, the oldest biodynamic bakery in Berlin. After a spell in New York, she and her husband, Jens, decided to move to Vermont, where they could become more self-sufficient, grow more of their own food, and become part of a smaller community. She began baking bread mostly for herself and their neighbors; now she sells her product at City Market in Burlington, the Fairfax farmers’ market, and the Hudack Farmstore in Swanton, as well as through her bread CSA.

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photo courtesy of Elmore Mountain Bread

Bröt Bakery

But it was getting to know Paul Sayler, brewmaster at Zero Gravity in Burlington, that opened up a new avenue for Heike—and for the Zero Gravity brewery. When Heike broached the idea of making sprouted bread with beer, Paul and head brewer Destiny Saxon were immediately on board.

“Heike likes to try different beers,” Destiny told me, “from pale ales to weizenbocks.”

“We do like Zero Gravity,” Heike says. “Many American beers—they’re very hoppy. Zero Gravity is more moderate, more in the German tradition.” She picks up a growler each week in exchange for a loaf of bread for the brewers. She even shared one of her recipes with the pizzeria’s kitchen so they could make those stalwarts of the biergarten: soft baked pretzels. “It really feels like the classic relationship from the small town,” Heike says, “when the brewer and the baker worked hand in hand.”

photo by pamela hunt

Elmore Mountain Bread On the other side of the Green Mountains, husband and wife Andrew Heyn and Blair Marvin were beginning their day-anda-half-long baking process when I visited their shop, Elmore Mountain Bread. Andrew was adding flour to a massive, 50-year-old German diving-arm mixer. “It most closely replicates hand kneading,” Blair said. “It’s a workhorse!”

Since they launched their business in 2004, Andrew and Blair have produced multiple styles of bread, from spelt ciabatta to a loaf featuring grains grown down the road in Berlin to tasty maple cinnamon raisin loaves. The one I was interested in was their Brewer’s Bread, featuring beer from Morrisville’s Lost Nation Brewing. The bakers’ relationship with these brewers goes back to when Andrew worked at Rock Art Brewery, where Allen Van Anda was the head brewer before going on to co-found Lost Nation.

Their beer/bread collaboration was prompted by yet another big name in the Vermont culinary world: Joey Nagy of the Mad Taco and Mule Bar. When Joey was tapped to create the menu for the Lost Nation taproom, he called on friends Andrew and Blair to supply the bread. This partnership fit right in with the pair’s mission: to supply their local community.

“First and foremost is Morrisville—it’s our market target and our town,” Blair said.

They initially used spent grains in their dough, but now that they mill all of their own flour, they use toasted organic grains/barley. But they definitely still use beer. Over the loud whir of the food-grade paint sprayer Andrew was using to coat the fermenting buckets with olive oil, Blair explained, “All of our breads are long-fermented and use fresh-milled flour, so we’re trying to bring out the nuttiness and sweetness of the grain. A beer with a lot of hops isn’t good because then you get a bitter taste. Lost Nation’s Pitch Black or their darker beers are great.

Any beer with a more malty profile is the way to go.”

When I wondered aloud if all of the liquid in the Brewer’s Bread was beer, Blair answered, “No, it’s mostly water—all beer would be too sweet.”

“And too expensive!” Andrew interjected.

“We make it with a little beer,” Blair continued, “toasted Continued on page 23 S p r i n g

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local banquet 15

The Shearer’s Daughter

by Helen Whybrow

At just past 8 a.m. we pull into the Jericho general store so Gwen Hinman can buy a half-gallon of local chocolate milk. “This stuff is incredible,” she says as she tosses the jug into the truck bed with her shearing board and toolboxes. “I think I go through a half-gallon a day.”

We’re heading up the road to Joe and Carol Haddock’s place for Gwen’s first sheep-shearing job of the day. Having crisscrossed New England’s maze of back roads for many years now, shearing at huge farms and tiny homesteads, Gwen not only knows the rural landscape like few others; she also knows the best places to grab a much-needed mouthful of calories to sustain herself for work that is nothing if not physically demanding.

During peak shearing seasons, Gwen often leaves her house at 4 a.m. and doesn’t return until after 10 p.m. Over those long days she might shear more than 100 sheep and drive several hundred miles, barely stopping for a meal. She estimates that annually she drives 40,000 miles and shears 8,000 to 10,000 sheep.

“Today,” Gwen says as we pull into the farm, “will be pretty simple: 35 sheep here, then a few Shetlands at another farm, and then home.”

As is the case with many of the farmers she shears for, Gwen met the Haddocks through her father, David Hinman, who lived in Acworth, New Hampshire and sheared throughout New England for nearly 50 years. David and Joe Haddock shared a wild sense of humor as well as a love of sheep, and they developed a deep friendship over the years, marked by the seasonal ritual of shearing the flock. David would time his twice-annual visit so that the barn work was done just in time

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to watch a hockey game with Joe. Gwen hollers hello to Joe and Carol and gets right to work in the small barn near the house. The Haddocks raise Lincoln sheep, an old English breed with fine, crimpy fleece that can reach the ground. The Lincolns—tall, heavy-looking specimens with corkscrews of fleece hanging over their eyes—crowd closer in their stalls as Gwen positions her shearing board in the alleyway and starts setting up the electric motor that powers her clippers.

Shearing has been practiced in much the same way for hundreds of years, with the exception of a gradual change from hand-operated blade shears to electric shears in the mid-20th century. (Some purists still use blade shears.) All that’s needed is a dry holding pen for the sheep and a board or floor space that can easily be kept clean and where the shearer can slide the sheep into a scripted sequence of unsheeplike positions— first on its rump, with its back leaning against the shearer and its four legs straight out and head flopped to the side (imagine a beanbag with legs), then pinched between the shearer’s legs, and eventually stretched out on its side.

If you’ve ever tried to hold a nervous sheep, you’ll appreciate why speed and efficiency are so prized in shearing. A good shearer will work astonishingly quickly, and very neatly, shaving the sheep in long strokes that are carefully patterned to remove all the wool in one piece, like a blanket. By quickly I mean really quickly. The world’s top contenders (and their competitions are legendary) can de-wool an entire sheep in approximatley 30 seconds. But it is not just about speed. The best shearers are as precise as they are fast, taking care that the animal’s skin doesn’t get nicked and that the wool is all cut to a uniform length.

Watching a shearer, for me, is a lot like watching a fire: you can’t take your eyes off it. It’s astonishing and beautiful to see a very woolly, round sheep rapidly transformed into a sleek, velvety form.

Although shearing itself has not changed much over the years, the number of sheep to shear has. At the height of Vermont’s sheep fever around 1850, there were 1.6 million Merino sheep in the state and wool was worth a lot more per pound than it is now. With sheep farming in decline for 150 years in New England, largely due to shifting global economics around the wool trade, it is no surprise that skilled shearers are hard to find today. There are 6 shearers and 165 sheep farms registered with the Vermont Sheep and Goat Association, and although there may be more shearers out there, it’s clear that folks like Gwen are among the few keeping a centuries-old, rural profession alive.

photos by helen whybrow

Joe and Carol arrive and greet us warmly. Gwen tells me later that at first it was very hard for her to shear alone for all the people who were close to her father. David Hinman died from a heart attack while shearing at the age of 64. Much beloved throughout New England for being a skilled shearer who charged little for his craft—as well as for being a big-hearted raconteur—he left huge shoes to fill, especially for a daughter who is by nature shy and not inclined to take the stage.

“There was no way I wasn’t going to shear for the people who knew my dad so well and where he talked about me all the time, but it was hard,” Gwen told me. “This isn’t just a job.

People depend on you. My first season [alone] was tough… here I was missing him so much, and people were disappointed that I wasn’t him.”

Gwen still lives close to where she grew up, on a homestead in New Hampshire. In the early years of her childhood, the family lived in a half-built cabin without running water, taking bucket showers on the porch even in winter. Her father sheared—he had begun passionately at the age of 15—and also taught school, while her mother raised three children.

David always invited Gwen and her brothers along on his shearing road trips.

“My older brother sheared exactly twice and still has zero interest in farming,” Gwen says. “My younger brother would shear now and then. I came to it last, reluctantly at age 25, but with me, it stuck.”

A big turning point for Gwen came on a trip to New Zealand in 2000. She went to go hiking, but ended up taking a shearing workshop and got so fired up that she returned home to partner with her father. “We had so much fun,” she recalls. “He was a riot, very quick-witted.” Gwen returned to New Zealand in 2005 to work on a crew of 13 roving shearers for a full season.

In New Zealand the farms are huge by American standards; Continued on page 21

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seeds for change

Building Brands in a Small Farm Food System Small farms in Vermont contribute tremendous value to our evolving food system by being nimble enough to respond to shifting consumer demand quickly. Small farms have pioneered niche products, such as multi-variety mesclun mixes and hybrid CSA memberships. They are engaged in cutting-edge production practices, such as air-cooled poultry processing, as well as land practices that benefit our water, air, and wildlife. Owners of small farms are easily accessible to customers through farmers’ markets and events, allowing them to tell (and sell) their story as individuals, families, and responsible stewards of the land.

By 2016, however, many of Vermont’s direct-to-consumer markets or direct wholesale markets (to restaurants and grocers), which have been the bread and butter for our small farms, have gotten very competitive. Since 2012, Vermont Farm and Forest Viability business planners have observed numerous farms pulling out of farmers’ markets or direct accounts due to lackluster sales. These farms are now seeking broader markets.

Why not encourage these small farms to simply scale up? To grow larger and reach an economy of scale that could increase profits? Many have tried but it turns out to be not so easy. Expanding a farm business almost always requires the recruitment, management, and retention of employees, which requires setting up formal payroll practices, absorbing costs to provide worker benefits, and institutionalizing specific farm management practices for others to follow. This requires new skill sets. Scaling up also leads to a customer service focus that many farmers are not interested in fulfilling. This does not mean

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that small farmers aren’t friendly and courteous to talk to— many excel at that. But an expanding farm must engage with all different types of buyers. Farming and marketing simultaneously is not for everyone.

Yet profitability is a major challenge for small farms that choose to remain small. The Vermont Farm to Plate Strategic Plan has collected U.S. Census data that highlights the financial woes of small farms nationally. Farms are twice as likely to lose money if the farm is a part-time endeavor of the owners. Farms that sell less than $100,000 in goods have a 50 percent chance of profits. Farms that sell between $100,000 and $250,000 when farming is the primary occupation have a more than 85 percent chance to profit. Again, many argue that individual farms need to scale up to increase their efficiencies. It seems like a no-brainer to scale up to meet market demand and also enhance profits, right?

Scaling up does look great on paper but it comes with significant financial hurdles, as expanding farms need to make major investments in land and buildings. An expanding beef farm, for example, will need to access large amounts of up-front capital (usually through debt or owner savings) to bring young stock in (or raise them), yet the stock won’t be sold as meat for up to two years. An expanding beef farm willing to borrow $500,000 to expand will be in a great position to advance their business, but the majority of Vermont farms are not able or interested to take those risks. A half-million-dollar investment entails at least a 15-year financial commitment,

photos by Meg Lucas (black river meats) and Caroline Abels (pastured chickens)

by Mark Cannella University of Vermont Extension, Farm Business Specialist

management of building projects, and adjustment of management practices that many small farms prefer to avoid.

Given these small farm challenges, it is necessary to look at solutions that don’t happen at the farm level. A new call-out to “scale up brands,” not farms, is needed to capture market opportunities and to remedy certain limitations in our small farm food system. Aggregated brands are companies that buy, market, and sell products from groups of farms under one brand name. They recognize that small farms in Vermont can’t “do it all” but still do many things well. With the right coordination, these brands and their distribution frameworks can improve the economics of independent farms by purchasing their products while helping to solve the key price point, volume, service, and quality issues that both producers and consumers want to overcome.

Selling products to a brand aggregator does not necessarily imply that a farmer has to resign herself to commodity agriculture. Dairy farmer cooperatives like Agri-Mark and CROPP (Organic Valley) support the movement of profits back to owner-farmers; emerging food hubs aggregate and resell numerous specialty products; and maple packers provide secure outlets for maple producers even in the most productive crop years and take on the task of marketing syrup nationally and globally. These collaborative brands often provide farmer incentives, such as technical assistance to solve production issues.

This past October, a dozen leading livestock farmers, business analysts, and distributors came together at the annual Farm to Plate gathering to consider the challenges of scaling up livestock farms. The panel included Black River Meats and Adirondack Grazers Cooperative, both examples of buyers that coordinate a consistent supply of meat from multiple farm suppliers. The panel also included independent farms managing production and marketing themselves.

Adirondack Grazers Cooperative is a newer business that sells meat from small beef producers in upstate New York to target markets that no single member producer could serve on their own. A farm in St. Lawrence County, bordering Canada, might never be able to manage sales and logistics to serve New York City but that is where the demand is. The cooperative can find good customers in New York City and elsewhere who pay strong prices and place large orders and then aggregate a single farm’s beef with products from other regional farms. Ver-

“It feels odd for me to have studied farm business management for a decade and come to the conclusion that barely breaking even is the end goal. But pushing small farmers into big farmer roles is not a guaranteed solution.” mont’s own Black River Meats, based in Springfield, is similarly sourcing beef throughout the region and managing the logistics to sell the product. Make no mistake, this is not an easy business. Representatives from both businesses acknowledge the real work of coordinating people, product supply, and sales.

The advantage, however, is that professionals can work full time on these tasks when small farmers can’t.

Time and time again, I have heard well-intentioned localvores shunning a farm that “got too big” to be hip. Similarly, I work with farmers who embrace their small farm and can’t conceive of buying 200 more acres of land, larger buildings, or complex machinery. It feels odd for me to have studied farm business management for a decade and come to the conclusion that barely breaking even is the end goal. But pushing small farmers into big farmer roles is not a guaranteed solution.

If we keep farms small, however, the food system still needs a way to adapt the romantic imagery of small farms to products that work for the broader population. Our farmers need the markets, and new entities are needed to sell the products.

It’s refreshing to see a new wave of support for private labels, packers, and distributors doing the important work of aggregating farm products. Hurray for the middlemen, middlewomen, and producer cooperatives! Hurray for the next wave of competition between distributors who can provide better compensation and commitments to farmers in exchange for the branding of their small farm image! Small farms can lead to big business when they work with collaborative brands that close the sale.

Mark Cannella is an assistant professor of Extension with the University of Vermont and directs UVM Extension Farm Viability programs. Farm Viability provides a variety of farm management education programs and undertakes applied research in farm economics for audiences statewide. He also operates a small farm growing specialty potatoes in East Montpelier.

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SHEARER Continued from page 17

photo by John Nopper

16,000 sheep is a respectable flock. Being the only woman, and at age 30 much older than the guys, Gwen’s nickname was “Grandma,” but she kept up with the best of them, once shearing 350 sheep by quitting time. (“It almost killed me.”)

Gwen, who is built like an endurance runner—all long, lean muscle—seems to thrive on the physical rigor of her profession as much as her father thrived on its opportunity for storytelling. It demands balance, finesse, and the strength to spend an 8-hour day wrestling 150-pound animals between your shins and turning them with one arm while constantly moving heavy clippers with the other. Gwen shears year-round but barely complains about having bare hands in frigid open barns in winter or about the challenge of semi-wild breeds whose horns thrash against the shearer’s legs. It’s a job that demands self-sufficiency and pluck, as a shearer never knows what she will face when she shows up at a new job, and often has to carve out a space to work with difficult animals in difficult conditions.

Sheep owners sometimes treat Gwen differently because she’s a slight woman, until they see her work, see how smooth she is. Gwen explains how vital it is for a shearer to stay one step ahead of a sheep’s movements all the time, adjusting your hold before it struggles so you don’t have to muscle it down. It takes intuition and calm control, and it helps when no one comes in too close to startle the animal or crowd its movements. Gwen tells the story of her father shearing at a farm where the shepherd kept 17 full-grown horned rams just because he liked being around them. Rams are heavy and can be tough, so her dad would save them until last. (“That way if I hurt myself at least I’m at the end of the job,” he’d say.) This man brought all 17 rams to David’s shearing station and asked, probably feeling badly, “Is there anything I can do?”“Yes. Go away,” David said, knowing that no help was better than someone standing too close.

In the Haddocks’ barn the sheep mill around Gwen as she sits them down on her board one by one. The space is clean and sweet smelling, full of recently mowed round bales stacked in between the pens. By lunchtime Gwen has sheared all the sheep and Joe has carefully bagged and labeled all the fleeces, which have an incredible luster and softness. Handling raw wool makes you appreciate what a miracle it is: a natural fiber that is waterproof and warm, can be spun or woven or felted, and has made shelter, clothing, and rugs for humans for thousands of years. Carol Haddock makes intricate Scandinavian hooked rugs from her fleeces, each one a unique work of art.

She shows me an example as we head into the farmhouse for lunch.

Carol and Joe have made bread and chili, which we eat with their bright green homemade pickles. Joe puts a jar of them in Gwen’s hand with a check as we say goodbye. Gwen gets offered many gifts, and sometimes she will barter. Sheep shearing may be vital to the health of the sheep as well as a way to harvest the wool that some farmers prize and sell, but Gwen knows that it’s also more than that. Like her father before

David Hinman her, she is an intimate and vital part of the small farm fabric of New England—its seasonal demands and struggles and pride.

She has seen many sheep farms give up while others pick up the dream. Her work gives her access to something that is timeless, yet often sustained by the thinnest of threads.

As we head to the next farm, with Gwen’s shepherd pup, Lyle, curled up on my lap in the truck, I feel like taking a nap, and I’m not the one who did all the work. Gwen is unflagging.

Over the next several days she will be in New York State to shear at a farm with 2,000 dairy sheep. The sheep there are crossbreeds and weigh some 200 pounds each. She will shear in cramped quarters for 9 or 10 hours straight. It sounds brutal.

So I ask Gwen the inevitable question: Does she ever think about another career?

“Sometimes I fantasize about being a librarian,” she says. “Or maybe owning a flower shop. Something really quiet and gentle. But then again, I’d probably lose my mind.”

Helen Whybrow is a freelance writer and editor. She also raises purebred Icelandic sheep and organic berries with her family at Knoll Farm in the Mad River Valley.

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BEER AND BREAD Continued from page 15

fresh-milled barley, and malt syrup. Andrew basically does a ferment with it—it’s essentially making a quick wort.”

And, Andrew added, “to intensify that malted barley flavor, I’ll reconstitute the malt in water and mix in the toasted barley into the dough, make a paste, pitch in a little regular bread yeast, and let that ferment overnight.”

From grains harvested in a neighboring town to the Vermont-brewed beer, Blair and Andrew are proud to be a part of such a supportive community. “We count our blessings every day for the local cheese, the bread, and the beer . . . for everything,” said Blair.

Their partner at Lost Nation couldn’t agree more. “It is inspiring to be around other business owners such as [Blair and Andrew] who continue to evolve and hone their craft,” Allen told me. “Working with them is, to the core, the Vermont way: neighbor supporting neighbor, where everyone wins.”

Miss Weinerz In the winter of 2014, Ren Weiner was working at American Flatbread in Burlington while making doughnuts for the coffee shop Scout & Co. as part of her collaboration-based business, Miss Weinerz. When the Flatbread kitchen asked if she wanted to create a sweet treat in the wood-fired oven, a new collaborative project was born: cinnamon beer buns.

In these brunch-time sweets, Ren includes Zero Gravity’s ground-up spent grains and their Green State Lager—“an homage to Vermont.” The pastries are served with a side of dipping glaze, also made with the beer.

The early dinner crowd was just filtering into American Flatbread’s Burlington Hearth as Ren, Destiny Saxon, and I sat around a table, talking about using beer in bread. For Ren, it’s “like grain tea. It’s not the alcohol for me—it’s the grains and the flavors.” As for the spent grains, she’s eager to incorporate them into her baking. “I’m really into using byproducts from other processes,” she said.

And Destiny, Zero Gravity’s head brewer, certainly has no shortage of grains after she brews. “Even after farmers take the bulk of them,” she said, “there’s plenty left for bakers.”

“It’s not inedible—it’s not garbage,” Ren added. “It’s all fiber.

And it’s preferments. If anything, it’s like more digestible grains.

So why wouldn’t we incorporate that into our diet?”

Using beer with her levain isn’t without challenges, though. Ren heats the beer to concentrate it and kill off some of the yeast. Otherwise, its interaction with the sourdough can be a bit unpredictable. “Sometimes it’s like…” She imitated an explosion with her hands. “And other times, meh.”

Destiny laughed. “I should put one of your buns in a cask of beer. Then it will be full circle.”

“The baker and the brewer—at one time, they were like…”

Ren clasped her hands. “I like the collaborations up here in Vermont. You just don’t get that in New York.”

Pamela Hunt lives in South Burlington with her husband and two dogs and writes about travel, food, and general Vermont goings-on. Follow her at pamelahunt.com.

HUNTRESS Continued from page 11

completed the State Hunter Safety Course, but she left it feeling isolated and unsure of where to begin. At the Huntress Intensive, the balance between skill development and group discussion created a community that helped Marie find the confidence she was looking for.

“I loved sitting in the woods for hours, learning how to identify signs of the rut to track where deer hang out,” she recalls, “and then finally learning how to harvest a kill [through processing the ram], holding sacred space ceremony for the animal and being grateful for the nourishment it would give us.

There was downtime around the campfire to hear stories and process our experiences, which was key for infusing the learning and sustaining our goals.”

After the intensive, Marie put her newfound skills to work on a hunting trip led by Murphy and her hunting mentor from the AT, Chase, on his farm in North Carolina. There, she successfully harvested a buck and has since bought a tree stand of her own. “I will always look forward to the hunt,” she says, “because it takes you into nature and quiet and a connection with listening, watching, and learning about wildlife. It increases one’s appreciation for the great state we live in.”

have never hunted before. Although she began her classes with a focus on getting women into the woods, Murphy sees her mission as getting all nontraditional groups hunting, and has taught many gay and transgender people in her courses, as well. In 2015, in response to a growing demand from men, Murphy taught her first co-ed intensive.

She also teaches workshops at Fall Doe Camp, a weekend backcountry retreat for women in Canaan, as well as at the Maine Primitive Gathering. Through her outreach, Murphy meets folks with varying views on hunting. She tells me, “[Many] people who are living thoughtful lives and trying to be responsible for their choices think of hunting as something that is violent and disconnecting, and my message is more that hunting is something that can bring you into deep connection with your food and the land.”

Whether it’s vegetables, livestock, or wild game, isn’t that what local food is all about? Ethics, responsibility, and the understanding that our own vitality is inseparable from the vitality of the land.

To learn more about Mountainsong Expeditions and Murphy’s courses, visit mountainsongexpeditions.com.

Like Marie, many of the students in the Huntress Intensive come seeking confidence. Some have husbands or fathers who hunt, while others come from non-hunting families. Most

Katie Spring is a farmer and writer in Worcester, where she and her husband run Good Heart Farmstead, a CSA farm with a mission to increase accessibility to local food for low-income Vermonters.

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Your Locally Grown, Community Owned Grocery Store Since 1976!

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We’re celebrating our 75th year serving the vibrant Putney community!

Stay tuned for our birthday bash at the 1-91 Exit 4 - Open 7 Days 802-387-5866 end of this summer! www.putneyfood.coop

Farmers’ Kitchen

Caprine Cake

by Rachel Ware AlpineGlo Farm AlpineGlo Farm, tucked on a hillside in Westminster, has been the site of our homestead since 2001. We originally intended the property to be a place to raise and train horses, as my husband and I both have a strong equine background, but we soon found many more uses for the land. As the years passed, the property truly became a homestead that allowed us to transform our lifestyle into a self-sufficient way of living: we began processing our own firewood, raising our own meat (chicken, pork, duck), and growing our own vegetables. The only thing we were missing was our own dairy products.

I had always had a handful of goats around. They serve as great animal companions for horses, earn their keep as portable lawn mowers, and provide great entertainment in any barnyard. In 2011, I decided to take my love of goats one step farther and enter the dairy world. I purchased three registered Alpine does with the intention of producing milk for the family. I decided to pursue Alpines because of their strong dairy lineage, friendly personality, cold hardiness, and of course for those irresistible cute faces! In 2012, we had our first taste of fresh goat’s milk and loved it. It’s nothing like the rumors you hear, that it has a “goaty” or “gamey” flavor. It is fresh, creamy, and delicious.

Goat’s milk is great in your morning coffee, and makes a variety of soft cheeses, ricotta, mozzarella, feta, yogurt, and even caramel sauce. I was hooked.

Soon we were successfully fulfilling all of our dairy needs, and each year the herd has grown. This spring we’ll have a dozen does in milk. And I should have known that my homesteading partners would multiply and eventually turn into a business; April 2016 will mark the official launch of AlpineGlo Farm cheeses. I have been working on my cheese processing room throughout 2015 and am excited for our spring grand

opening. We will start by offering chèvre, a variety of goat cheese spreads, and feta. I have so many favorite recipes for our milk and cheese, but I have a real sweet tooth, so here is my favorite: Goat’s Milk Cheesecake.

AlpineGlo Farm currently sells prepared meals at local farmers’ markets made from our farm-fresh selection of goods. We will be expanding our offerings during the 2016 season to include a full line of goat cheeses. We also offer farm-to-table-style catering services for private events, birthday parties, etc. We are happy to host tours for special interest groups and schools, and we host an open house every year on Mother’s Day weekend. For more information: visit vthorseshoer.com/events, find us on Facebook, or call 463-2018.

photos courtesy of AlpineGlo Farm

Goat's Milk Cheesecake 1 ½ cups crushed graham crackers ¼ cup ground pecans (or nut of choice) 1 tablespoon sugar ½ cup melted butter 3 (8–ounce) packages of AlpineGlo Farm Goat Cheese Spread 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ cup goat's milk 3 chicken eggs or 2 duck eggs ½ teaspoon lemon zest

Crust: Combine graham crackers, nuts, 1 tablespoon sugar. Stir in melted butter and press crumb mixture onto the bottom and 2 inches up the sides of an 8-inch springform pan.

Filling: Beat goat cheese, 1 cup sugar, flour, and vanilla with an electric mixer until combined and smooth. Beat in goat's milk.

Stir in eggs one at a time and finish with lemon zest.

Bake: Pour filling into crust-lined pan. Place pan on a cookie sheet and bake in a 375 °F oven for 45 minutes. Turn off oven, but leave cheesecake in the oven for another hour. Cool in pan on wire rack for another 30 minutes. Remove sides of the springform pan and cool cake completely. Cover and refrigerate before serving.

If desired, and highly recommended, top with our special goat's milk caramel sauce!

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136 Main Street, Ludlow VT 05149 • 802–228–3238 thebooknookvt@hotmail.com • thebooknookvt.com

C A L E N D A R Tuesday, March 1 to Saturday, March 31

The Golden Cage Migrant Mexican farm workers began arriving on Vermont dairy farms about 15 years ago and continue to work in the state living hidden lives. Through photographs and intimate interviews, this exhibition strives to create a revealing portrait of dairy farmers and their Mexican employees and offers a glimpse into their interdependent lives, exploring who they are and what they hope for. This is a traveling exhibition created by the Vermont Folklife Center in 2008, with concept and interviews by Chris Urban and photographs by Caleb Kenna. Brownell Library, 6 Lincoln Street, Essex Junction. brownelllibrary.org 802-878-6957

Saturday, March 19

JR Iron Chef VT 9am–3:30pm Jr Iron Chef Vermont is a statewide culinary competition that challenges teams of middle and high school students to create healthy, local dishes that inspire school meal programs. Champlain Valley Exposition, 105 Pearl Street, Essex Junction. jrironchefvt.org 802-434-4122

Saturday, March 19

Vermont Farmers' Market Conference Farmers' markets are integral to our thriving local food culture here in Vermont. This one-day conference offers an array of learning and networking opportunities for market managers, board members, and organizers.

Vermont Law School, 164 Chelsea Street, South Royalton. nofavt.org 802-434-4122

Saurday, April 2 to Sunday, April 3

Maple Open House Weekend 2016 More than 80 Vermont sugarmakers invite you to visit their farms and sugarhouses. See for yourself how maple syrup is made. Because no two sugarhouses are the same, plan on visiting more than one! See website for locations throughout the state. Admission is free. vermontmaple.org 800-837-6668

Saurday, April 16 to Sunday, April 17

Made in Vermont Marketplace Saturday, 9am–6pm and Sunday, 10am–4pm The Made in Vermont Marketplace is the only trade show in Vermont that showcases the wide variety of quality products made right here in the Green Mountains. From wood producers to specialty food products to Vermont’s finest spirits and so much more. You will be able to meet and talk with each artisan, maker, and manufacturer of these fine goods. With more than 125 exhibits, you will discover products you did not know existed in Vermont.

Admission is $6. Champlain Valley Exposition, 105 Pearl Street, Essex Junction cvexpo.org 802-878-5545

Join us for our 2016 Market Season!

4 p.m.-7p.m. every Friday afternoon, May 27th-October 7th FEATURING

FRESH, LOCALLY GROWN & RAISED PRODUCE, CHEESE, & MEAT ARTISANAL SPECIALTY FOODS, HANDMADE CRAFTS, NICE PEOPLE 53 Main Street, Ludlow, VT | www.ludlowfarmersmarket.org | (802) 230-7706

7th Annual

Putney Farmers’ Market Sundays 11 am - 2 pm May 29 - October 9 PutneyFarmersMarket.org

Fresh Taste Local Flavors New Vendors Welcome

Wednesday, April 27

Book Discussion: The Town that Food Saved 6:30–8pm “Green” and “sustainable” have become such buzzwords, they have almost lost their meanings. This series explores how different authors and communities understand the multiple definitions and connotations of ecological sustainability and try to make it work in the world. Barton Public Library, 100 Church Street, Barton. barton-public-library.org 802-525-6524

Thursday, June 2 to Saturday, June 4

Nourish Vermont: Traditional Foods and Health Gathering Come learn the core principles of traditional diets, inspired by the teachings of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and explore how embracing this lifestyle can contribute to one’s health, wellness, and longevity. In order to make the program accessible, it is being offered on a suggested sliding scale.

Shelburne Farms, Shelburne. shelburnefarms.org 802-985-8686

Friday, June 3 to Sunday, June 5

Strolling of the Heifers The world-famous, agriculturally themed Strolling of the Heifers Parade—10 a.m. sharp on Brattleboro’s historic Main Street; pre-parade entertainment from 9 a.m. When it’s over, follow the crowd to the all-day 11-acre Slow Living Expo for food, music, dance, demonstrations, exhibitions, and fun, all related to our mission of sustaining family farms by connecting people with healthy local food. Downtown Brattleboro. strollingoftheheifers.com 802-246-0982

every sundAy 10Am - 2pm Shop with the Wonderful Producers in Our Region Local Musicians Weekly

J.K. AdAms Kitchen store, rte 30, dorset 35 regional producers bringing veggies and fruits, grass fed meats, award winning cheeses and wines, fresh eggs, maple syrup and honey, freshly baked breads and pastries, specialty prepared foods, pottery, paintings, jewelry & more!

WWW.DORSETFARMERSMARKET.COM

eBt, deBit, And credit cArds Accepted S p r i n g

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LAST MORSEL Sheep aren’t raised for their skins, but the soft pelts that are a byproduct of meat and wool production are a fluffy reward for farmers and homesteaders who spend many hours tending their flocks.

For years, local shepherds have had to send their pelts out of state to be tanned. Without a local tannery in the state, most Vermonters have relied on facilities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but the cost of shipping skins there are high, and the tanneries use odoriferous chemicals.

Now a new business in Randolph is offering custom natural tanning of sheep and goat skins. Vermont Natural Sheepskins was started by Sarah and Rick Scully in an effort to provide a local, chemical-free tanning alternative.

The couple was a few years into raising sheep of their own in Tunbridge when Sarah discovered she was having skin reactions to the chemicals used in the commercial tanning of her sheepskins. “I came to this as a frustrated customer,” Sarah says.

One day she was searching online for an alternative when she came across a woman in England who invented a way to tan sheepskins using a particular type of tree bark.

(She doesn’t reveal what type it is, for business reasons.)

Sarah and Rick went to England to learn the woman’s unique process, and so far they are the only Americans who use it commercially. In fact, Vermont Natural Sheepskins could be the only chemical-free sheep and goat tannery in the U.S. Sarah was a full-time librarian at Dartmouth College when she decided to open the tannery. She has no background in tanning, but it helps that she has “farm cred”: she and Rick raise a few Shetlands at home and a Navajo-Churro.

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(The finished sheepskins for sale on their website come from local butchers who would otherwise throw them away.)

Like their mentor, the Scullys consider the tannin they use to be proprietary information, but Sarah says the process is similar to the traditional oak bark process of tanning. Both processes take longer than chemical tanning but leave no odor on the sheepskin.

At the Randolph shop, skins soak in the tannin solution for one to four weeks. Prior to that they are cleaned in industrial washing machines, and the fat on the backs of them is shaved off. After soaking in the tannin, the skins are pinned to wooden boards to dry, and a sanding machine makes the back of the skins feel soft and supple. Finally, the edges are trimmed with a razor blade to give the skin that “sheep shape” that people expect from a sheepskin rug.

Although Vermont Natural Sheepskins has only been open since the fall of 2015, word has gotten out, and Sarah is busy. Roughly 80 percent of her customers are from New England but she also gets skins mailed to her from other parts of the country.

On the day I visited, Jennifer Megyesi of Fat Rooster Farm in South Royalton was dropping off a dozen sheepskins and a few goat skins. She said she is thrilled to have a chemical-free alternative and is glad to avoid expensive shipping costs.

“This is in my backyard,” Jennifer said. “I’m five miles away. It’s awesome.”

For more info visit vermontnaturalsheepskins.com —Caroline Abels

photo of the scullys by caroline abels

A Slow Tan

Vermont’s food system plan being implemented statewide to:  increase economic development and jobs in the farm and food sector;  improve access to healthy local food for all Vermonters.

www.VTFarmtoPlate.com Farmers, Food Businesses & Service Providers: Get Listed for FREE on the VT Food Atlas

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From a farm near you...

All natural humanely raised local meats, artisan cheeses, dairy, produce and more!

Farming, Friends and Outdoor Fun Overnight Camps Ages 9 to 17 Barn Day Camp 4 to 10 Plymouth, Vermont www.farmandwilderness.org

1 800 228 5481 blackriverproduce.com

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Rural Vermont presents er farm nds stipe le* ab avail

Sma l F RM

Act on da s!

MARCH 30th & APRIL 26th at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier

The needs and interests of small farmers MUST be heard!

At Small Farm Action Days, stand up and speak out!

• FARMERS - introduce your farms • EVERYONE - learn practical to legislators and policy makers, and share stories about the values and regenerative practices that support your farm.

*All are welcome and farmer stipends are available for transportation, childcare, and farm help.

Stipends are made possible by a Vermont Community Foundation Small & Inspiring Grant.

skills for influencing public policies and put them into action!

• EATERS - show support for your small farmers and how your food is produced!

More info, stipend application, and RSVP at www.ruralvermont.org or (802) 223-7222.