TOWNSHEND — Apparent enthusiasm, good food and better-than-ever produce plus some brilliant Chinese food made by two Chinese sisters,opened the third season of the Thursday Townshend Farmer's Market last week.
The market, which will be held Thursdays on the Common from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., featured 15 booths offering wares like heady bunches of bright green cilantro grown by Cory Walker of Guerilla Grown Produce in Westminster, sturdy heirloom tomatoes grown in the almost black dirt of Kindle Farm School in Newfane by students and farm manager Ashley O'Neal, and giant field-grown hollyhocks from Mary Hickin's Mountain Mowing Farm in Dummerston.
“I helped start this place,” Hickin said. “I also go the Londonderry market, and before all this, starting about 15 years ago, I went to Copley Plaza in Boston. It's my living. I'm a dirt farmer,” she added with visual irony before setting down her pots of hollyhocks.
Meanwhile, John Kurland of the Okie Dokie Bakery in Jamaica has become addicted to competitions since he began winning prizes this year for his scones, muffins, cookies and pies. “But I had my clock handed to me in Cabot,” he concedes.
Busy glass-blowing businessman and farmer Robert DuGrenier has suffered some from the decline in the luxury art glass market, but feels a little better since recently taking an order for six chandeliers from a fancy hotel in Turkey.
He was selling baby chicks at the market, some blown glass pieces and his own maple syrup and honey. His enthusiasm focused on expanding his farm and on hosting interns from an outfit called World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. The interns work for room and board and everybody presumably learns something from everyone else. Current interns include a young man from Switzerland and another from Chicago.
That organization is just one of the burgeoning businesses, nationwide and in Vermont, focusing on local growers, mostly organic, supplying local populations with so-called ethically grown food, from grass-fed meat to chemical-free eggs from free-roaming chickens and fruit and vegetables from organic sources.
Jean Hamilton, marketing coordinator of Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont in Richmond, estimates there are 80-plus farmers' markets in the state and five in Windham County, with these numbers increasing in the last five to 10 years. She sees such expansion as an “an antidote to the current way of the world,” and, more importantly, as viable options to the big business of farming.
She points to Act 54, the Farm to Plate Initiative, that was approved by Vermont Legislature in 2009. It directs several agencies to develop a 10-year plan to strengthen the state's farm and food sector. Already generated is an interim report calling for specific goals for the next 10 years, including investment strategies, necessary policy changes, coordination and collaboration systems, maps isolating demographics and infrastructure and local expansion plans.
Hamilton is particularly devoted to sustainability. A big challenge she believes is infrastructure.
“Yes, farmers can make a living,” she said, not just from production, but by developing a sound business plan that gives depth to the whole farming enterprise. She cites Richard Wiswall of Cate Farm in Montpelier, whose recent book The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook she considers valuable.
“Our organization provides a lot of technical assistance around crop and dairy production,” Hamilton said, adding, “We value not just ethics and heart but sustainable business practices.”
The West Townshend string musicians and singers Sally Newton, Michael Donahue and Alicia Moyer contributed to the general peace and lyricism.