NEWFANE-It's a mid-September afternoon, warm under a bright late-summer sky, and Laura Xiao of By Hand Farm in Newfane is sharing her love for raising cut flowers - and sharing her know-how - with eager participants in a workshop offered by the Northeast Organic Farming Association-Vermont (NOFA-VT).
Coming from as far north as Burlington and as far east as Haverhill, Massachusetts, and Londonderry, New Hampshire, participants listen, ask questions, and take notes.
The 29-year-old Xiao, who sells directly to customers and primarily through her community supported agriculture (CSA) operation, byhandfarmvt.com, a part-time and seasonal enterprise, introduces her disciples to the sprawl of beds she has rotating on her fields.
"Do you deal with witch grass?" one asks.
"What about tilling?" another inquires.
Xiao responds by offering nuts-and-bolts tips and facts: what tarps to use for what and when, irrigation, rotation of beds. There's talk of zones, perennials, soil, frost, and weeds.
Following the three-hour workshop, Xiao posts on Facebook: "I had a really fun day yesterday hosting a workshop with @nofavermont about growing and arranging cut flowers. Twenty people from all over came to the farm, some from hours away, and we nerded out about flowers together.
"People had lots of great questions, and I learned so much! We wandered around the farm, then we all selected stems from a flower buffet and talked about things to consider when making a bouquet."
Education, and some fun too
According to Lindsey Brand, NOFA-VT's marketing and communications director, the organization has "been around [for over] 50 years - started by farmers, still farmer-led."
She credits those original farmers for "a lot of the success we've had in keeping small-scale organic farms in the region."
NOFA-VT was the original trade association for Northeast farmers, from which farmers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island created their own respective state associations.
The seven independent state NOFAs comprise the NOFA Interstate Council.
Maine has a comparable Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association - "not technically a NOFA, but we work with them as a sibling organization," Brand adds.
One of NOFA-VT's more public and visible programs involves organizing and promoting farm events throughout the state every summer. Be it farm-hosted pizza parties or workshops on topics from soil health and floodplain farming to land care for pollinators to agroforestry planning, such events are mostly member-conceived and -led.
"They try to offer what people want - in this case, flower arranging," Xiao explains. "[In April] I was asked if I'd be interested in leading a workshop on floral design, so we figured out the details - for me, I was also interested in showcasing growing techniques: not just the flowers once they're cut, but how I grow the flowers."
"I know about NOFA," says Xiao, "because it's the main organization when you think about organic produce and flower farms. It's the certifying body for Vermont standards for organic. They do a lot of policy advocacy work, too. If you're an organic farmer, you'll learn about NOFA pretty quickly."
'Something that was going to stick'
Having grown up in San Diego, Xiao has been farming for several years, the last four in Vermont.
After her graduation from Middlebury College, "I got interested in maybe going more into farm policy. It's hard to be a farmer, and one of the main reasons for that is that accessing land is extremely difficult," she says.
"So I was interested in getting into land policy and maybe agricultural policy, [but] we need more policy makers who actually have been in the field, so I felt like I don't get to pursue a career in agricultural policy if I haven't actually farmed first," she adds.
She worked on an organic vegetable farm in northern California for a couple of seasons, after which she realized "this was something that was going to stick, so I've been farming ever since. I'd worked on several vegetable CSA farms and liked that model, so it made sense to try to do the same with flowers."
"I've had a range of jobs," says Xiao, who has wielded the chainsaw on forest fire abatement teams and "worked retail, odd jobs, construction, and welding."
"I've done remote consulting and contract work with a couple farm nonprofits, and I've worked with National Young Farmers Coalition," the mission of which is to "advocate for rural policy change that benefits young and new farmers," she adds.
Xiao, who focused on environmental policy in college, describes "some overlap with NOFA."
She had done some contract work with them and, for the past few years, has been a member of the review committee - made up entirely of farmers and farm workers - that awards NOFA-VT's Farmer Resilience Grants.
The organization grants up to $2,500 per farm for projects pegged to long-term resilience. The program involves minimal paperwork.
"These are small grants, super flexible, for a project, for improvements, whatever," Brand says. "We aim to spread that funding all over the state."
"The idea is that farmers should be the ones to have a say on how resources can be allocated to support other farmers," Xiao says.
Not just for farmers
NOFA-VT's membership of over 1,200 spans the state, with the highest density of member farms in central Vermont.
"In southern Vermont, there are 54 [members] in the NOFA community," Brand explains. "That's people who are certified or not certified organic, but they believe in NOFA's values and mission."
The list of members also includes "a handful who aren't farmers - we have people we work with who are processors, who create value-added products, who are certified organic producers," Brand adds.
NOFA-VT's work is funded in part by grants, as well as through donations from members and the broader community.
"Membership does provide really important funding," Brand explains, "particularly flexible funding that can be used in response to priorities from our membership, regardless of whether or not those priorities can be grant-funded."
The organization does "a lot of our work on behalf of farmers, but there are plenty of farmers who aren't yet aware of NOFA," Brand adds.
The organization helps members access a business development team to help with business planning, including working with an advisor one-on-one.
"We also offer direct one-on-one services related to farming practices, so if, say, you want to implement cover cropping on your farm or you want to become more climate resilient in general, or maybe you want to weave together a few practices that will help your farm become more resilient, we offer technical assistance to help meet such goals," Brand says.
Offering workshops where farmers can gather with experts and opportunities to meet hands-on with peers, NOFA-VT also facilitates mentorships to help farmers transition to organic and for people in beginning stages of their farming careers.
In addition to the direct resilience grants, the organization has the Farmer Emergency Fund, which has been employed widely after the last two years of widespread flooding.
"It's been in place for many years and it can be used in case of barn fire, flood, drought," Brand says.
As director of programs, Helen Rortvedt works closely with all NOFA-VT program teams. She notes that, in addition to farmer services, "we have a wholesale and direct market team that's really focused on the consumer side; we have local food access programs that help limited-income folks access local food at farmers markets and through CSAs."
Another team works on "connecting classroom, cafeteria, and community through NOFA-VT's farm-to-schools programs and we have our marketing communications team and our policy and organizing team. They're in the State House and working at the federal level as well."
The focus now is for the federal farm bill - federal legislation that's passed approximately every five years "that has a tremendous impact on farming livelihoods, how food is grown, and what kinds of foods are grown," as described by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
"Covering programs ranging from crop insurance for farmers to healthy food access for low-income families, from beginning farmer training to support for sustainable farming practices, the farm bill sets the stage for our food and farm systems," the Washington, D.C.–based agricultural lobbying organization continued.
Rortvedt says that "right now, we're trying to keep the steady drumbeat about needing a farm bill, first and foremost, and a farm bill that works for Vermont farmers," noting that the country and its farmers are "a year and a half overdue for the new one."
She describes the bill as "an important piece of legislation that affects our whole food system," but acknowledges that it "does a great job of supporting soybean farms in Iowa, but not a great job of supporting small farmers such as we have throughout Vermont."
"Our policy team is focused on trying to realize better policy at the federal level," Rortvedt says. "We have a little bit more luck working at the state level."
NOFA-VT works closely with Rural Vermont, Addison County Relocalization Network (ACORN), and other organic farm-support organizations statewide.
No promises
How sustainable is small organic farming?
"I'd love to keep farming," says Xiao. "It's hard to think of not doing it, but I also know that to keep farming will continue to ask of me many sacrifices and challenges: I'm not right now promising that I'll sacrifice anything and everything to make that happen."
Despite myriad challenges, Brand is optimistic about the future of farm operations in Vermont like By Hand Farm.
"We've been able to continue fostering a really community-centric agricultural system here [and that] makes me optimistic about our ability to keep surmounting the challenges that we're facing on a larger scale," she says.
Noting that the food system has changed so much since NOFA-VT started 50 years ago, Brand adds she still feels "really optimistic about the future of small-scale farming in Vermont, partially because of the incredible successes we've had here so far."
"As long as people want to engage in this really, really good work, I think there's the will power in the region to figure out how to make it happen," she says.
For more information on NOFA-VT membership - open to all in various member categories - and programs spanning advocacy and policy, food access, education, and community building and Vermont Organic Certification, visit nofavt.org.
This News item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.