How to Rebuild Our Local Food System: What Texas can learn from Vermont

by Farmer Skip

After spending the past year working on a local food plan for Bastrop County, I feel like a farmer in spring waiting for muddy fields to dry and no sunny days in the long-range forecast. Fortunately, a bit of unexpected sunlight arrived this week with news that two non-profits dedicated to increase local food production and regenerative agriculture are bringing their mission to Central Texas.

Unlike unaffordable housing, unaffordable farming is a nationwide crisis that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. For mega-growth cities like Austin, where 16 acres of prime farmland are gobbled up by development each day, local food growers have been forced to join the flight of the creative class:  move farther out or move over to a new career path. It’s the modern variation of the famously arrogant imperative to farmers 50 years ago — get big or get out.

Welcome to the era of the farmless farmer. 

Nearly 50 years have passed since Wendell Berry’s withering critique of Big Ag, “ The Unsettling of America,” documented the erosion of rural landscapes and lifelines.  How the resettling and regeneration of rural agriculture might take shape is deftly explored by Brian Donahue, a New England farmer, writer, and board member of The Land Institute. Donahue’s optimism for regenerating the countryside comes from the Vermont experience and is laid out in his compelling treatise,”Go Farm, Young People, and Help Health the Country.” It is the latest in a series of pamphlet published by New Perennials Publishing.

Rebuilding a gutted rural America, says Donahue, requires more people — especially young urban progressives — heading to the hinterlands and investing in its small towns and sparse counties, which hold disproportionate electoral influence. 

“My advice is, go now. Light out for the country ahead of the rest. Learn to get along, but live and vote your values. The relocation of a relatively small slice of the citizenry could first enable, and then fulfill, the vision of a just, sustainable world.”

That call is what urban fringe counties like Bastrop need to amplify and support, especially for minorities and displaced immigrants who possess the farming skills but lack the resources to get started.

“We’re losing farmers at time when we need to be gaining them,” says Sue Beckwith, founder of the Texas Center for Local Food, which developed the county’s first local food action plan. ‘The good news is Bastrop County is ready for change and has a strong desire for more collaborative efforts toward building a more resilient and equitable food system.”

Back-to-the-Land Movement 2.0

Before the back-to-the-land movement of the early ’60, Vermont was largely a landscape of failing small dairy farms dotted with ski slopes and summer homes of wealthy Bostonians. Then came the “hippies” touting copies of Whole Earth Catalogue and their laid-back version of the pastoral myth.

Only a few survived as farmers, Donohue notes, but many of their children grew up and remained, becoming contractors, teachers, small business owners, social workers, and, yes, senators. 

“For decades they have served on town boards, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations,” he writes. “The new rural culture they helped forge has drawn another generation to tend the same rocky ground. The New England rural economy still isn’t that great, For better or worse, this influx of flatlanders has remade Vermont. Forgive me, woodchucks, but I would say for the better.”

Unlike its more innovative neighbor, Northern Maine attracted less young people a generation ago. Its countryside, he notes, “has been reduced to a flattened paper industry and old potato fields full of pucker brush, and votes more like central Pennsylvania.”

When Erin and I left our comfortable middle class urban life nearly 20 years ago, we carried with us my parents’ back-to-the-land ideals seasoned and tested by real-life experiences. Our jobs in public health opened our eyes to how the Western diet was the leading source of preventable illness and disease. Was our mission to prove that a small but intensive vegetable and flower CSA farm close the urban edge could sustain itself physically and financially. Our answer reflects the underlying and seemingly irreversible failures of our food system:  It can and it can’t. Each year, between the rise of unaffordable land, climate disasters, and competition with cheap processed food the “it can’t” seems to be winning out.

“Everything depends on healthy, affordable land that is protected from development,” Erin told a crowd during Food Tank’s SXSW conference last month. “We need dedicated agriculture zones and food hubs and cooperatives but that isn’t what we are getting here.”

Less than 1% of farmland in conservation trusts.

Two organizations — one just getting started, the other a long-time player in land conservation — are hoping to reverse the steady erosion of the small family farm by focusing on the most critical barrier — affordable land.

The Conservation Fund, founded in 1984, has protected more than 7 million acres in the US, mostly forest and wetlands, with several large projects in Texas.  Three years ago,  it created the Working Farm Fund to address the need for protecting farmland and increasing local food production around high-growth urban areas.  Its approach is to acquire prime farmland threatened by development, put it into conservation easements, and launch young and beginning farms on a path to purchase the land at its agricultural value. After successful launches in Atlanta and Chicago, the Fund is looking at doing the same in the Austin region. 

“Sprawl and development are just chewing up what is a lot of historical farmland,” program manager Stacy Funderburke told the New York Times. Funderburke and his staff met at Green Gate two years ago with potential funders and local food stakeholders to see if Austin was a good fit. Since then, land prices have continued their upward trend with no reversal in sight.

One key element of the program is guaranteeing markets for new farmers, most of whom will come from underserved and refugee communities. In Atlanta, for example, Emory University is partnering with the Fund to provide food purchasing agreements for campus cafeterias at the college, as well as the hospitals it operates.

Downland Launches in Austin

Last week, a new non-profit called Downland is launching a regenerative farming program that also focused on matching farmless farmers with like-minded landowners who want to put their land to better use. It’s founder, Jessi Roesch, is an Austin-based entrepreneur and seasoned operations and product leader who saw an unmet need in Central Texas.  A visit to a friend’s regenerative farm outside Seguin three years ago inspired her to use her finance skills to help gear up the regenerative farming movement.

 “That visit is part of a longer personal arc of understanding where our food comes from and how it helps (or hinders) our pursuit of full lives, said Roesch, who also is a cross-fit trainer.

The concept is still evolving but Downland’s goal is to link beginning farmers with absentee landowners who want to invest in the health of their land. As with the Working Farm Fund, assisting new and beginning farmers in acquiring the tools, skills, and financing is the start-ups mission. It’s launch featured a short introductory film, much of it shot at Green Gate’s city operation at Village Farm.

These much-need programs have their work cut out for them. The statistics compiled for the Bastrop local food plan are sobering. Of the more than 2000 farms in Bastrop County, only 5% sell locally. The number of vegetable farmers is a heartbreaking 7!

Beckwith, who raised pastured chickens in Elgin before starting the Texas Center for Local Food, is familiar with the cultural and financial hurdles for creating a thriving local food system in a region dominated by cattle and commodity crop production.  Her effort four years ago to create a food hub with a small-batch processing facility didn’t get the local support it needed. That missing middle in the local food system is hard to fill with the way the current system is designed.

“Farming is a noble calling but a cruel business that has long been precisely engineered to drive small farmers out,” Donahue writes. “To succeed, these young farmers will need more than a good business plan. They need new mechanisms, first to connect them with land on favorable terms, and second to empower them to manage those farms and woodlands in ways that deliver a wide range of social and environmental benefits—not just a flood of cheap commodities.”

The Lone Star State  is about as far from the Green Mountain State Vermont as you can get in this country, in more way than one. Where Vermont has one of the highest concentration of certified organic farms, TX has one of the lowest. On the flip side, Texas has a growing population and vibrant economy while Vermont struggles to attract new residents and jobs. If you want to see what the Texas model could look like — creating a more resilient, equitable, thriving environment for new and beginning farmers — the Bastrop Local Food Action Plan is a good place to start.