November
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner is also the traditional local foods dinner in this part of the world. Which makes sense, since the Pilgrims weren’t in any position to import much food—they just hunkered down with the beige cuisine that begins to predominate as the summer becomes mere memory. (On Cape Cod, cranberries provide a flash of deep color; here, we have beets, which make a ruby slaw.) The kind of self-sufficient all-around farm with which the colonists covered the continent has essentially disappeared, at least outside of Amish country. Even the tiny growers in this valley specialize in order to stay afloat—I can show you a potato farmer in the hills above Rutland with 50 varieties on his three acres, or a bison wrangler on the lakeshore, or an emu rancher. Some of America’s original community-supported agriculture farms (CSAs) are in this area, and none produce vegetables more glorious than those from Golden Russet Farm, in Shoreham, where Will and Judy Stevens are busy threshing dried beans when I stop by one afternoon to pick up some squash. If you pay them a few hundred dollars in the winter, they’ll keep you supplied with a weekly bin of vegetables throughout the growing season and deep into the fall. But even Will and Judy go to the store for their milk.
Not so Mark and Kristin Kimball, the young proprietors of Essex Farm, on the New York side of the lake. If you want to join their CSA, you pay more like a few thousand dollars. But when you stop by on Friday afternoons for your pickup, it’s not just vegetables: They have a few milking cows, so there’s milk and cheese and butter; they have a small herd of grass-fed cattle, so there are steaks and burgers; the snorting tribe of pigs behind the barn provides bacon and lard; there are chickens and turkeys. Except for paper towels and dental floss, you’d never have to set foot in a store again—think Laura Ingalls Wilder, complete with a team of big Belgians. “There’s nothing inherent about modern ways that I don’t support,” Mark insists. “It just so happens that working with horses is—not better than working with tractors, but more fun. It’s a more dynamic relationship. You can understand an engine. You’ll never understand a horse.”
You can’t leave the farm without Mark loading your trunk full of food—“Do you have room for another chicken in there?”—and all of it tastes of the place. As you bump down the driveway, a look in the rearview mirror reveals Mark juggling carrots and grinning. “Occasionally I feel like I’m doing some work,” he says. “But usually it feels more like entertainment for myself.”
Is this realistic? Could you feed Manhattan in this fashion? You could not—every place is different. (And Manhattan is lucky to have New Jersey right next door, with some of the best truck-farming soil and weather anywhere on earth.) But you could feed Essex, New York, this way—Mark figures the 50 acres they’re farming can support ten families, a reminder of just how fertile the earth is in the right hands.
December
Here’s what I’m missing: not grapefruit, not chocolate. Oats. And their absence helps illustrate what’s happened to American agriculture, and what would be required to change it a little bit.
Once upon a time, oats were everywhere—people grew them for their horses, and for themselves. But oats aren’t easy to deal with. They have a hull that needs removing, and they need to be steamed, and dried, and rolled. You can do that more efficiently on an enormous scale in places like Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where a single mill can turn out more than half a million pounds of oat products a day. For the moment, this centralization works. But that may change if the price of oil (the lifeblood of industrial agriculture) continues to climb, or as the climate continues to shift, or if global politics deteriorates. Even now, stubborn people keep trying to rebuild smaller-scale food networks, but it’s hard going against the tide of cheap goods flowing in. A few years ago, for instance, a Vermonter named Andrew Leinoff decided to go into oats—he and his friend Eric Allen found some old equipment and started experimenting. But after a few years of struggling, they gave up, and a little bitterly. The state’s Agency of Agriculture talks a good game—a public service ad on the radio urges Vermonters to buy 10 percent of their food from within the state—but in the opinion of many small farmers, it spends most of its time and money propping up the state’s slowly withering dairy industry, not supporting the pioneers trying to build what comes next.
They sold their equipment across the border in Quebec, to an organic miller named Michel Gaudreau, who does everything from hulling spelt to pearling barley. And Gaudreau found a farmer in the province’s Eastern Townships, Alex Brand, whose family had been growing oats for many years. I tracked him down, delighted to find that Brand’s Fellgarth Farm was right on the edge of my Champlain watershed. But shipping a bag of oats across the border was going to be hard work—it might, they warned, require a trip to Customs. Happily, Brand had an American distributor—Joe Angello, in New York’s Columbia County. By the time all was said and done, my “local” oats had traveled on a truck from Canada to the lower Hudson Valley, and then back to Vermont in a UPS sack. Not precisely an ecological triumph. On the other hand, they were delicious—plump, if oats can be plump. So now it’s pancakes only every other morning.
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