BROOKLINE-In Vermont, it seems that every generation is concerned about the future of the working land. And with good reason.
The original settlers grew their own food, yet profited from the making and selling of potash. Merino sheep owners flooded the state when potash was no longer a usable commodity. Dairy farmers produced milk - sometimes too much milk - along with butter and cheese. Organic farming came about in the 20th century.
From today's makers of award-winning bespoke products like craft beer and wine, cheese, goat milk caramels, and luxurious jams, jellies, and chutneys, to tomorrow's potential marijuana barons, nothing is certain about Vermont's working landscape.
No one is more steeped in the past, present, and future of Vermont's agriculture than Brookline's Roger Allbee, 80, who has just published a page-turner of a book, Turning the Soil: 250 Years of Vermont Agriculture.
The book, which Allbee calls "my passion project," was published by the University of Vermont's Center for Research on Vermont and the White River Press of Amherst, Massachusetts.
"I am so inspired by people who are working the land and trying to make a living and doing what's important to them and creating that sense of making Vermont special," Allbee told The Commons.
Allbee's roots go back to Vermont settlers who arrived here in 1766.
Raised with his twin brother, Ron, on a generational hilltop farm, Allbee studied the economics of agriculture and dairy farming at the University of Vermont. He has a long working history in agricultural banking and finance, both in the private and public sectors, including a stint as executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency for Vermont.
In 2006, he was appointed as Vermont's Secretary of Agriculture by Gov. Jim Douglas. Oddly enough, Ron, his twin brother, had served in the same position before him.
People in Windham County might better know Roger Allbee as CEO of Grace Cottage Family Health & Hospital, where, among other things, he learned about the importance of rural and community health and local food systems connected to better health.
He served in that role from 2014 to 2017.
"My personal and professional journey has provided me with a comprehensive understanding of farm and food policies and programs at local, national, and international levels," Allbee writes in his book. "My love for Vermont, its land, the people who work it and our local communities - historically reliant on an agricultural economy - stems from this background."
Allbee still lives on a part of the family farm, and he has a lifelong interest in Vermont's farming history.
"When I was up in Montpelier and did the agriculture secretary work, there was the old National Life building that had two big safes," Allbee said. "And in those safes, they had all the old yearbooks of agriculture. Many times, late in the evening, because my wife wasn't up there, I'd go in and read those books.
"I always felt that you had to understand the past to sometimes deal with the future. And having grown up on a small hilltop farm [...] I knew some of the trends that had been taking place. And I knew that from my work experience as well.
"So that sort of gave me a lot of indication of what I call the farmers always reinventing themselves, and the fact that we were always trying to figure out how to deal with the competition that increasingly was coming from the West."
Potash, pearlash, and sheep
The first European settlers in Vermont had to clear land to build their homes and start farming. That made wood abundant for making potash.
Potash is a chemical salt made by burning hardwood trees to ash, soaking the ash in water, and then boiling the resulting lye solution down to a powder. Pearlash is further refined potash. Both types of products were used in glassmaking and other manufacturing processes.
Early settlers in Vermont exported potash and pearlash to England and Canada, as well as to domestic markets in New York and Connecticut. They also traded it for store-bought goods like tea, coffee, tobacco, and calico, a type of cloth imported from India.
Potash didn't keep its trade value, however. New inventions in manufacturing eventually made it obsolete, and "The great potash kettles around many farms and communities in Vermont lay abandoned, and farmers had learned a hard lesson," Allbee writes.
The hard lesson was about diversification. As the farm economy grew, there were herd drives of "lowing, honking, and bleating livestock" to markets as far away as Boston, Allbee writes.
"Prior to 1850 and the maturing of railroad transportation, southeast Vermont and southwest New Hampshire benefited from being major transit zones," Allbee quotes a Vermont Commission on Country Life from 1931. "Every autumn, many tens of thousands of sheep and cattle, horses and pigs, turkeys and geese would be driven to market."
That must have been something to see, those large flocks of flapping geese being herded from Brookline to Boston.
By then, Vermont was also producing wheat, corn, potatoes, maple syrup, and all sorts of other foods.
Toll roads led to canals - the first in the country was built in Bellows Falls - and finally railroads. And once the railroads were in place, the West, with its open farmland, could easily ship products to the East Coast, where farmers who were working smaller plots of rockier land could not compete with them.
The next big thing for Vermont then was sheep.
A Westminster man, David Humphreys, a former aide-decamp to George Washington, was this country's foreign minister in Spain. There, he learned about Merino sheep, which were protected from being exported by Spain. Using his connections, he smuggled 100 sheep to his home in Connecticut and his farm in Westminster and thus began a mighty wool industry.
"The sheep industry transformed Vermont and New England's landscape in the 1800s," Allbee writes. "Vermont's Merino sheep grazed on the hills and in the valleys and became known for their fine wool.
By 1840, Vermont boasted 1.6 million sheep (and a human population of 300,000). Sheep meant wool, which meant wool processing factories and weaving mills. These became a huge economic driver even as the sheep gnawed their way through the landscape.
"Merino sheep could have turned the Champlain Valley and the eastern slopes of the Adirondacks into a desert," Allbee writes.
Sheep were also being sold to farmers in the Midwest, and inevitably, Vermont lost the breeding competition.
Around this time, the state also lost many of its farmers, who were attracted to larger and less expensive farms (with fewer boulders) in the Midwest.
Everyone who spends time in Vermont has seen the low stone walls that served to pen in sheep and still dot the landscape many years after the sheep have gone.
From dairy to pot
But all was not lost. By this time, dairy farming had entered Vermont, and would dominate the working landscape for the next hundred years.
Dairy led to cheese and butter manufacture, and increased competition from Western farmers and, for butter, the introduction of oleomargarine.
"Margarine competition increased during the Depression and World War II eras, and overtook butter consumption in 1957," Allbee writes.
Vermont also led the way in agricultural education. The state is naturally proud that one of its own, Sen. Justin Smith Morrill, who entered Congress in 1855, is credited with creating land grant colleges to study and teach agriculture across the U.S.
The 1862 act to create the schools was signed by Abraham Lincoln. Vermont was one of the first states to accept the land grant, and the current campus of the University of Vermont is the result.
Allbee's book extensively deals with many of the other elements of growth and competition in the complex world of agriculture, such as major floods, world wars, and farmers' cooperatives.
And what about agriculture today?
"I think the future is to diversify and specialty products," Allbee said. "I mean, look at what you're seeing with wine production and spirit production, with new varieties of grapes. There's even evolution in things like apples, where people pick their own. CSAs, or community supported agriculture, is a big thing with people wanting to know where their food comes from. Go to farmers markets and you see people doing all sorts of nice new or different products. Whether it's specially cheeses or spirits or wines or all these things, food connects."
Allbee cited the Miller Farm in Vernon, which is bottling and selling organic milk, and Howard Prussack in Westminster, whose organic High Meadows Farm grows and sells a large mix of vegetables.
Allbee is also very interested in hemp and marijuana.
"I remember the argument over hemp, where I argued that its production should be allowed because its use for many products is beneficial," Allbee said. "Likewise, marijuana has many medical benefits and having it more open to standards and control is better than having cash crops grown in woods. I took a course about the medical use of marijuana, so I know it can help many people. As we know, it is a very scientific, controlled growing process today."
When you boil it down, agriculture is all about soil health, water quality, growing good food, and then, developing markets for it.
"When I was in Montpelier, we had 1,300 dairy farms," Allbee said. "We're down to 440 now in the state, and they're tied to an antiquated pricing system that was put in in 1937. I used to say there were three people that understood milk pricing. Two are dead, and the third has Alzheimer's. And we can't compete on the commodity milk side."
Allbee said he is concerned that so much of the country's food system is now consolidated.
"I mean, six companies in the world control seeds and agriculture chemicals, four firms control 80% of beef and 70% of pork processing," Allbee said. "On the retail side, I think Walmart controls about 23% of the food retail trade, and then Kroger and a couple of others control, together with Walmart, over half.
"So we have this whole consolidated food system today. It's hard to have access to, and it's not the kind of food that most people probably should be eating. But that's why the growth of CSAs and farmers markets and specialty foods that we have in Vermont is encouraging. But it's not easy."
The current federal government does not give Allbee hope for the future.
"What are these crazy people doing down there?" he said, days after President Donald Trump laid off half of UVM's USDA research unit.
"If you look at the federal budget, In terms of agriculture, much of it goes to SNAP. And in terms of the commodity side, about four commodities are responsible for the majority of the commodity budget."
It gets more complicated from there, because the U.S. exports products like soybeans to China.
"And on the dairy side, Mexico is responsible for the majority of the cheese exports of the dairy industry," Allbee said. "The whole export side is very intertwined with our ag policy in the U.S. And on the nutrition side, our school lunch program, our SNAP program - there doesn't seem to be any regard for that in this crazy authoritarian regime down there."
The new administration's anti-immigrant policy is also worrying to Allbee, who recognizes and admires the guest workers from other countries who work in Vermont agriculture.
"Many of our vegetable producers and apple orchards depend on immigrants," Allbee said. "It's a very highly regulated program."
Migrant workers "come here seasonally, many of them from Jamaica," he continued. "It's a very, very important program in terms of the those who come here to work on dairy farms. Many of them are undocumented, unfortunately, but they're critical to the dairy industry, and have been for some time. So much of the food supply and needs of labor today are related to agriculture, because farmers can't find local help that wants to work in many of these positions."
Still, Vermont is known for the beauty of its hills and valleys reaching into the distance. Its open land is our heritage, and also our biggest draw for tourists.
"Vermont today is increasingly known for its food systems, an authentic connection to the land, and the strength of the Vermont brand," Allbee writes. "This brand manifests itself in the working landscape, a clean environment, a place of recreation and tourism, quaint villages, scenic vistas, notable cheeses, local foods and beverages, and friendly and hospitable citizens.
"This Vermont brand helps to support and define our state, its past, present and future. It helps support a vibrant tourist industry and connects people to places. In 2009, National Geographic Traveler rated Vermont as the No. 5 place in the world. It is a true Renaissance, reinforced by the many products produced on or from the land."
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.