One of the best times of the year in Windham County is when the first apples of the season arrive. That first bite into a freshly picked apple is pure heaven.
It's shaping up to be a good apple season in Vermont. The hard spring frost in early May did little damage to local orchards, and the dry and hot weather of the summer has apparently improved the size and quality of the apples.
Vermont used to be one of the leading suppliers of apples in the United States. In 1910, the UVM Extension Service counted 1,183,529 trees in Vermont, with 152,627 of them in Windham County. That was also the decade that saw the McIntosh become the top apple grown in Vermont.
That figure has dropped considerably since then, but the Vermont Agency of Agriculture says almost 4,000 acres of commercial apple production remain in the state today.
Today, more than half the apples sold in the United States come from Washington state. It hardly makes any sense for an apple to be coated with carnauba wax, stickered, and stored in a sealed, oxygen-reduced, atmospherically controlled storage room for up to eight months before it shows up at the grocery.
It also doesn't make any sense for that same apple to shipped 3,000 miles to Vermont, an act that is totally dependent upon cheap energy to move it across the country to our grocery stores. To ship a pound of apples to Vermont takes more than 50 times the fuel and releases more than 50 times the greenhouse gases than shipping a Vermont apple to a Vermont grocer.
It makes even less sense to be shipping apples from China, which has surpassed the United States as the world's leading apple grower.
As the age of cheap energy winds down, local agriculture has become more important. It will soon no longer be possible or practical to ship fruits and vegetables all over the globe.
Small-scale farming, community supported agriculture, and local farmers' markets are not just better for the environment. They're better for the farmer.
On average, according to the Agency of Agriculture, it costs Vermont's apple growers about $12 to produce, harvest, store, and market one bushel of apples. At the same time, on average, only about 20 cents of every dollar that consumers spend on food goes to farmers. The other 80 cents goes to processors, middlemen, and retailers.
Direct sales of fruits and vegetables at farm stands and farmers' markets allow farmers to recapture some of that money. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Vermont now has the highest per-capita direct sales of food of any state in the country. Quite simply, the more products that farmers can sell directly to consumers, the higher their profit.
The pressures on farmers in Vermont are considerable - high land prices, high energy costs, and a scarcity of farm labor. But the demand for fresher, more local food is growing, and Vermont is at the forefront of this trend.
Buying local is the best way we can preserve local farms, help the local economy, and preserve the environment.
And, best of all, the apples taste better.