Our Debt to Local, Organic Farmers

The know-how and equipment to help our customers be successful with these organic techniques often came from the new generation of organic market gardeners in the 1960s and 1970s. These farming pioneers bucked the trend toward "green revolution" chemical farming that had been growing quickly since WWII and continues today.

These innovative farmers were back-to-the-landers, environmentalists, vegetarians and visionaries who wanted to make a healthy living from their land. They employed land stewardship techniques from the past and also invented and popularized sustainable farming methods used increasingly today. Because of their horticultural leadership, Gardener's Supply can now offer home gardeners super-light crop covers for pest control and frost protection, porous soaker hoses, compost activators, ergonomic tools, low cost greenhouses, and more.

Our business owes these thousands of small-scale organic farming innovators a big debt for helping us see the way to gardening innovations that are still an important part of the Gardener's Supply product line. When our company was 5 years old and beginning to reach a degree of stability, we began finding ways to help repay this debt. We established the non-profit Intervale Foundation in 1988 as a model of sustainable community land use, emphasizing organic agricultural education and cooperative economic enterprise.

The Intervale Foundation's successful track record includes helping over twenty organic farms get started, grow, and thrive. Ten percent of the fresh food in and around Burlington, Vermont, now comes from these organic farms that are part of our community. Intervale Compost Products also began in 1988. It is now a model food and yard waste recycling program that brings top quality soil-enriching compost to the Intervale farms as well as to thousands of local gardens.

The Intervale Foundation is also active in the community, helping to establish new farmers' markets, working with teachers to develop curricula around sustainable land use, providing food to low income families, and teaching hands-on gardening, composting, and healthy cooking classes. The Foundation's goal is to become a center for ecological thinking, educational programming, and new ventures focused on food, farming, and land stewardship.

Gardener's Supply is helping the Intervale Foundation work on several new projects:

• A Food Enterprise Center will help food entrepreneurs develop value-added products to expand their markets and provide a bridge between farmers, food processors, and the community. The ecologically designed complex will include incubator food enterprises, a community kitchen, a co-packaging facility, and greenhouses.
• The Intervale Farm Center, located in a renovated historic house and barn, houses the Intervale Foundation's Farm Incubator Program and the Native Plant Nursery office. The building will include meeting and office space for farmers, a resource library, a technology station, and space to store equipment and supplies. It will also serve as a welcome center, teaching and outreach facility, and will include a farm demonstration area, exhibits and a farm stand.

Beyond our company's debt to organic agricultural innovators, Gardener's Supply supports the work of the Intervale Foundation because family farms need all the help they can get these days. It's true that consumers are shifting to organically grown food because of health and culinary benefits. But most everything in our economy and national farm policy is stacked against smaller scale, local farms: from government subsidies for large factory farms to biotechnology research to super market distribution.

And the challenges in the future will be even greater as the growing demand for organic farm products attracts competition from large international agri-businesses. These farming and food processing corporations are largely devoid of the ability or motivation to maintain farming as an integral part of our communities. Here in Vermont we see the value of locally owned family farms to our economic and environmental health. And, our cultural and political institutions are stronger and richer because of healthy local agriculture.

Europe has never forgotten the importance of family farming. And now the Slow Food Movement that began in Europe is spreading around the world. This movement defends the growing, preparing and eating of nutritious food as integral to diverse, healthy, independent cultures. Food not only feeds individuals; its growing and preparation nurtures families, communities, and cultures.

Credible alternatives to industrial agriculture are outlined by Frances Moore Lappe (author of Diet for a Small Planet, 1971) and her daughter Anna Lappe in their new book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. The book tells the story of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a city of 2.5 million. Its citizens, along with local politicians, decided that good food like human health was a basic human right, rather than a matter of economic forces.

In Belo Horizonte they focus on programs such as community and school gardens, fresh food delivery to poorer neighborhoods, and linking hospitals, restaurants, and other big buyers to local organic growers. It is the only city in the world to make food security--coordinated with local farms--a right of citizenship. Gardener's Supply is working with the Intervale Foundation to cultivate this same commitment here in Burlington, Vermont.

Learn more about the work of the Intervale Foundation online, where you can request a free copy of the Intervale Explorer or come visit our Retail Store at the gateway to Burlington's Intervale.

If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail: info@gardeners.com