(no audio) (no audio) (letters shuffle) (birds chirp) (no audio) (no audio) - Laughter - We're determined, ski poles and all.

- We wouldn't miss a town meeting.

(Upbeat music) - Historically, town meeting has played a very important role in building community in Vermont.

In fact, its roots go back to before Vermont was Vermont.

- There's debate over where town meeting came from.

It came from the English vestry.

It came from the Puritans.

It came from the Congregational Church.

- [Deb] Came up with the settlers, they brought the tradition of town meeting from Massachusetts, the tradition of meeting together as selectors and making decisions.

- Article 5: elect a selectperson for a term of three years.

Do I hear any nominations?

- I nominate Jim Blouch.

- [John M.] But that democracy.

- [Chair] Stand up.

That Vermonters cherish, I'm convinced, is the direct outgrowth of Algonquin and Native peoples' way of governing themselves democratically with a small D when the Pilgrims first arrived and the first settlers came.

- If you think about Vermont when it was just being settled, it was forest.

People were clearing land, and they might not know they even had neighbors until March town meeting when people got together to make decisions.

It was a way to know who your neighbors were so that, in case your barn burned down, you'd know who to go to for help.

- If you were a citizen of the town, you were a legislator.

The decisions were made face to face in a meeting of the whole.

- All in favor of the amendment, say aye.

- [All] Aye.

- Any adult male was allowed to come and participate in deciding how many hours did each family need to dedicate to building the roads.

How many cords of wood do you supply to help make sure the school was heated?

And if you wanted a community center, who was gonna help build the community center and with what lumber?

So it was very practical issues.

- [Frank] Little tiny towns made all the decisions themselves, and a huge majority of Vermont citizens grew up in these town meetings.

- As time went on, some of the hot questions were whether or not you could let pigs roam free.

And that's because, if you didn't, they would become wild and would become a nuisance and would dig up people's gardens.

And another hot topic was the polio vaccine.

When it first came out, there was a lot of people who were concerned that it caused the disease, and some towns outright banned it.

- Make your legs straight, good boy.

- They fought a lot in these town meetings, but, by God, at the end of the day they learned to get along with each other.

And they had to.

- [Deb] And it's not Norman Rockwell because sometimes people are really grumpy with each other, and there's feuds.

- Jesus Christ, God forbid we spend some money on our roads.

You gotta spend it for some stupid study or... - [Deb] But when push comes to shove, there are people in the community who come out to help.

- I mean, why is it that I'll stop and help you out of the ditch if I'm driving home from work on Big Hollow Road?

Is it because I'm a rural person who, as Jefferson said, is one of the chosen people of God?

Hell no, I'm a sinner like everybody else.

I'll help you out because I know that you know what my truck looks like.

And I might see you down at the village store and you'd say, "Why didn't you stop and help me, Bryan?"

Now, with that kind of relationship over time, certain kinds of requirements develop, and it's called civility.

And it doesn't come from God, it comes from size.

- Now, I have friends that, if I'm not on my computer and said something, they call up to make sure I'm all right.

You know, "You didn't answer my email.

"Just wanna make sure you're okay.

"You wanna do anything today?"

"No," nice and tactful, you know, not implying that I'm 85 years old and can't do it.

- [Frank] The strongest supporters in our town meeting are people that moved in in the '60's and '70's and '80's, and they came here to live small.

- We've been inundated by outsiders.

And I'm not even calling them flatlanders anymore because that used to just be a little bit of a label we gave the tourists that came and, you know, sort of wandered around the state and got in the way a little bit and then went home.

You know, these people are here to stay, and they wanna change it.

- Sadly, another year has gone by, and unfortunately we still don't have any kind of comprehensive broadband solution for this community.

Does anyone have any questions?

- [Attendee] We just need to remain patient is what you're saying?

(attendees laugh) - I struggle with this because I understand sort of the nostalgia.

There's the sense that the state is changing irrevocably and change, although it's hard sometimes and we can fight it and resist it, sometimes makes things better and makes us stronger.

- I'd like to point out that, when the telephone came to Vermont many decades ago, there were probably people that thought of them as frivolous.

"Who really needs that telephone?

"Heck, I can go down the road and talk to my neighbor."

But the internet is a communication medium that makes it possible for the smallest business.

- And you don't have to be born here to have the Vermont values.

And the Vermont values are freedom and unity and valuing people based on what they do.

- Certainly, there are a few people in town, our hardworking road crew, these guys have been working their tails off for the last few months, and we just thought it'd be great to give them a little something extra.

And we just thought maybe each of them should have a dinner for two so they can get reacquainted with their wives.

(attendees laugh) So we're gonna do that.

And any extra funds we have we can put into the pothole fund.

(attendees laugh) I'll leave it at that, thank you.

- They've been hugely helpful preserving the Vermont culture that a lot of us old natives love so much.

You know, we grew up that way, and it all seemed pretty damn good to us.

- And what's so fabulous about Vermont is that ethos from so long ago really remains today.

(attendees chatter) - [Chair] So we have a new member today, so we're gonna start with Zoe and go around and say our names.

- [Zoe] Zoe.

- [Ben] I'm Ben.

- [Emma] I'm Emma.

- [Ellie] I'm Ellie.

- I'm Willa.

- I'm Mallory.

- I'm Heidi.

- I'm Leah.

- I'm Mary.

- I'm Sarah.

- Jenny.

- It's a group of teenagers that do stuff to help the bigger picture of things but also locally do little things that end up making a big difference.

- Like in the Change the World Kids Chapter here we have about 40 to 45 members.

It's Woodstock, Sharon, Hartford, Hanover, Vermont Academy.

We're trying to start a chapter in Australia, and then we have one in Maine.

I mean, we have kids all around the country and the world doing stuff.

- Well, the two beginning members were twins, and their name were Phoebe and Mika.

Nika.

(Chloe laughs) Anyway, and they both lived in Vermont.

- They looked at their feeder outside and saw that there were less birds at their feeder than they would normally recognize.

- And they went down to Costa Rica and saw the deforestation and they said, "Well, we should start something with our friends."

And so they got a bunch of friends together, and they came back to Vermont and started the Change the World Kids.

- But we're not just one specific thing.

We have projects like from humanitarian stuff to like environmental work, and it's just really cool, so.

- Whether it's how many people are volunteering not just in the town government but also in civic organizations, Vermont has some of the highest civic indicators of the country.

And I think it's in large part because of our small population.

You end up feeling personally responsible in a way that you don't in a larger place.

- A neat thing about our jobs as they evolve and when we start out with a job that's like stacking wood or something, we are led into this whole other component of their life, and we become sort of like a support system.

So, for example, one lady, we stacked her wood for a couple of months and then we eventually renovated most of her house.

- And it just feels really good to have something to do where you can see like right away that you're helping people.

- Oh yeah, well, we set up clothes lines throughout Vermont and actually some other parts of... Did we do some in New Hampshire too?

I think yeah, we've done some, Hanover.

Yeah, people call us to have 'em built for them to conserve energy.

- So I think that everybody looks at, you know, what's needed.

We're in Vermont, we looked and saw that there were changes in the environment, and we became an environment and community-oriented group.

- Certainly in my own experience, my own readings and stuff, you see it clearly in the 19th century as a concern.

Vermonters tended live in the natural world.

They were an agricultural society.

They were dependent on that natural world around them for the success of their agricultural endeavors.

And they began to notice things.

So in an early history of Hubbardton, you have the person writing the history stop and go, "You know, all the birds "that I remember growing up with are gone.

"What happened to them?"

- As agriculture transitioned into the sheep era in the 1800s, the forest in Vermont basically went from about a 70% coverage to less than 5%.

And with a lot of open land it gets colder at night because there isn't a forest to kind of hold in the heat.

But during the daytime there's no shade.

And so temperatures increase.

- [Sarah] Who was it?

Was it Marsh, Billings, or Rockefeller who was the big tree person?

- I think was it Marsh?

- [Sarah] Was it Marsh?

- Many people point to George Perkins Marsh and to the Billings in Woodstock as being among the first people in the United States to say, "Well, wait a minute, "we really are changing our environment."

- Marsh comes out with "Man and Nature," the first book that really gets at mankind's impact on the planet.

- [Ian] Mount Peg was like all deforested, and it was all like sheep farms and stuff.

- [Howard] There was a lot of erosion that heavy storms were causing.

And that was what alerted him.

- By the late 19th century, you begin to see discussions within state government saying, "Okay, we're promoting logging, "we're beginning to promote recreation."

And recreation in the 1890s revolved partly around things like fishing.

But as we log, we silt the streams, kills the fish population.

So we have reports from the fish commissioners going, "What do you want us to do?

"Because we can stock the streams, "but if you keep encouraging logging, "we're not gonna be able to sustain tourism."

And by the 1920s, we're trying to reforest the hillsides, which we clearcut, and we're planting about a million saplings a year because we're experiencing more and more flooding.

- Kind of surprising.

Like if you plant, it's like three trees, you offset like a plane trip to Costa Rica.

Like it's not.

That's why I think people don't...

It's five trees?

Yeah, people don't realize how easy it is to offset it.

They're just too lazy to do it.

- And so there is a conservation ethic in Woodstock that I suppose comes from Marsh, and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park includes his home.

- Yes, George Perkins Marsh was a marvelous man.

Interesting man, learned man.

But if you look at the history of that property in Woodstock, it's a very, very narrow story.

It's a story of very, very much ruling-class individuals prospering and furthering individualism, acquisition, and aristocracy.

- The courthouse is in Woodstock.

It's the political and legal center of the county.

So the lawyers come there, and it becomes a town with very definite class distinctions.

- And so I took an afternoon off, and I went over to the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, and I took the tour.

And you get onto the piazza, the front porch, and the tour guide sweeps his arm out towards that beautiful floodplain where the Billings farm is, and he says to the group, "You own this view."

And we all kind of gush and everything.

And he says, "Well, Mr. Rockefeller, "with his forethought, back in the early '70's, "he bought the view easement."

But just that one statement: "You own this view."

Well, we own it now, 'cause, you know, Lawrence Rockefeller married a local girl, Mary Billings French, who was the granddaughter of the robber baron Northern Pacific Railroad head, Frederick Billings.

Eventually, Frederick Billings bought the old Marsh estate.

And, you know, Mr. Rockefeller adds this to his, what should we say, portfolio of beautiful landscapes.

You know, he himself grew up with Jackson Hole as his backyard, right?

So here we are in little Woodstock, Vermont where Mr. Rockefeller had the foresight to bury all the power lines.

And was able to do that because he owned 55 buildings in town, right?

And he was the largest taxpayer in town.

And, yes, there's a certain amount of communitarian impulse, but he could think large because he was from one of the wealthiest families in the United States.

- I feel like a lot of people around here and like especially Woodstock, we don't see the impacts of global warming.

We don't see the impacts of poverty.

- And really the point of any organization like this is to try and make change.

- Especially with like the magazine, just getting the message out about this kind of stuff, informing people.

Yeah.

- So we can see warm air.

This is the zero-degree line.

- The temperatures have been warming really since the Little Ice Age in the 16 and 1700s.

And in Vermont there's been a noticeable warming trend that's continued through the 1900s and now into the early 21st century.

- The potatoes are suffering through the heat.

I've watered these guys extensively, and they're like, "I don't like it, it's too hot."

They like Irish weather: damper, darker, not this glorious sun 24/7 for weeks on end.

It's brutal.

- We had some rain when we first seeded it, but not enough to really make it germinate and take hold.

Like when we walk through here and we look at what's on the ground, look at what's coming.

Some clover, some of the grass.

And there's a few spears of alfalfa in here, but not as many plants per square foot as should be.

- Brussels sprouts.

Hating it, just hating it.

Just too dry, lose soil, no dampness.

- You know, Vermont historically has a very strong environmental ethic and ecological sensibility.

It's really, I think, embedded in the culture.

There's a culture of stewardship and caring for the land and working with the land here.

Also, Vermont has a very strong tradition of progressive environmental legislation.

The Billboard Law of course was a landmark bill.

Act 250, the Bottle Ban, as well as the progressive social milieu that started to emerge in the late '60's.

- And at that time the social ecology movement, it was a movement, was pretty much based in Plainfield.

Lived at Goddard College.

- I was teaching at Goddard when I first met Murray Bookchin and we started talking about the Institute for Social Ecology.

And Goddard seemed like a very convivial home for this project to begin to unfold.

- I got to know Murray pretty well, and he was kind of a hero of mine till he died, yeah.

I always remember him walking up Church Street, and, you know, he looked like a 1930s anarchist, black leather jacket.

And you figured he must have a bomb under it somewhere.

And, I mean, he was worldwide scholar on anarchism.

- I had entered the communist children's movement, an organization called the Young Pioneers of America, in 1930 in New York City.

I was only nine years of age.

And by the end of the Second World War, and particularly by the end of the 1940s, I saw the end of the classical workers movement.

And I had to ask myself: why had this come about?

What did this mean?

The factories, and I had worked in factories for 10 years, and had worked in factories partly as a labor organizer in the old CIO.

In fact, the factory, which is supposed to organize the workers, have created habits of mind in the worker that served to regiment the worker.

And I began to try to explore: what were movements and ideologies, if you like, that really were liberatory?

♪ Give me the warm power of the sun ♪ ♪ Give me the steady flow of the waterfall ♪ ♪ Give me the spirit of living things that return to gray ♪ - [Dan] Well, social ecology is an exploration of people's relationship to the natural world and their impact on nature.

For example, in social ecology, we question the inevitability of hierarchy and domination.

- Hierarchy as it exists in the family, hierarchy as it exists in the school, hierarchy as it exists in sexual relationships, hierarchy as it exists between ethnic groups.

- Historically, there is a development where one group of people begin to dominate another group of people.

And that gave people the idea that they could dominate nature.

- We must see the connections, and we must make people aware of the connections between the environmental dislocation that is taking place throughout the entire globe and the social dislocations that are taking place in our own societies and in our own communities.

- [Dan] We used studies in field biology and ecology, and we drew on various new technologies that were coming to the fore at that time, things like solar energy and wind power, to examine how people could begin to reharmonize their relationship with the natural world.

- You don't necessarily have to devastate the Earth and ravage the Earth.

And so you would think about what you're putting into the ground.

You think about what does that do now and 25 years from now.

- Whoever heard of holes in the ozone layer in 1951, '52, '64, or '70?

- Murray Bookchin first wrote about global warming as a potential problem back in the early '60's.

- And I thought I was climbing out on a limb!

I thought I was going to be regarded as a nut!

- Today, it's not only the workers who are the oppressed class but really all of society because of the ecological problems that are coming to the fore because of the pollution, because of the cancer.

- Yes, we must recycle wastes!

We must stop the nuclear power plants!

We must stop the highways!

- Some of his stuff is off the deep end.

But what innovative, creative, revolutionary thinkers weren't off the deep end now and then?

- We must have an ecological politics relying on the old Vermont tradition of town meetings and town associations and town confederations.

- Well, we'd already begun a discussion on things like Act 250 and how growth occurred in Vermont.

But access to clear, clean water really drove the debate from a general discussion of the environment to a more focused: how are we going to limit our impact on what we've come to see as a natural right, that is, access to water, and begin to build out from there?

- There was this conception generally that we have plenty of water in Vermont, we're fine, it rains and snows here seemingly all the time or a lot of the time.

And how could we have a problem with water quantity in Vermont?

But people came to us with their stories.

People in Williston, the big subdivision came to us because some newer subdivisions started taking water away from the older subdivisions, and people's wells ran dry.

And then a water bottling facility was proposed in East Montpelier.

- I'm the water manager in town, had been for about 40 years, and I see a lot of concern and a lot of fear in the room about the water supply here in the town.

And I'm here to try to explain to the people that we have enough rainfall that renews our water supply every year.

Even during the drought years, we never ran out of water.

And this is a renewable resource we're talking here.

This isn't something you're going to deplete.

- [Carolyn] It's low, right?

It is lower than what we are used to seeing.

- It is low.

I'd say two feet down, another foot and a half?

- Yeah.

- Foot down?

- Foot down.

- This is what Mr. Antonovich wants to bottle, the water that's here from this spring.

And this is a spring box containing that water.

- What is that gonna do to the streams and the rivers and the wetlands that's fed by that water that's being taken?

What is it gonna do to existing wells?

- People were alarmed to think that someone had such ambitious plans for such a insignificant site, insignificant in a business sense.

But for us, vital, since we all lived off of this aquifer.

- Vermont has thousands, probably tens of thousands of small aquifers.

They're basically rivers and streams underground.

And when you get into some of these intensive water extractions for water bottling or golf courses or industrial uses, you could be looking at hundreds of thousands of gallons per day, millions of gallons per day.

- That's what initially got people asking a lot of questions.

And we realized that we didn't know what our water supply really was, how much it was, how safe it was, any of the parameters.

And the numbers didn't match with what everyone had seen with their own eyes.

- So when we heard about the bottling, we decided to present the whole question to the community of who owns the water.

(light playful music) So one of the neighbors in East Montpelier started a community neighborhood dinner.

And we get together once a month as a community, and we all bring our plates and our forks and our cups.

So nobody has to do a lot of dishes.

- And it's potluck, you know, what they used to call a covered dish.

And what happens is that, if anyone's having a problem, if anyone is sick, if they need help with anything, you find out.

It's more than social.

- [Carolyn] And since we all get together and we all know each other, it was very easy to just say: "Would you like this informational meeting "about bottling the spring water?"

- We thought, "Well, it probably won't have "an effect on our well, but I don't know.

"And there are other people around here with wells."

And so I was a little bit uncertain about that.

- How fast is the water in that spring going to be regenerating?

Will the water withdrawal jeopardize the aquifer?

- [Carl] I just wasn't sure what would happen to the spring in the future.

- This starts out as a mom-and-pop operation, but the next thing you know, it's owned by Coca-Cola.

There are some things like that that I hadn't even thought of.

- You have to understand that 66% of Vermonters get their drinking water from the ground.

And in fact, in East Montpelier, most if not all residents get their drinking water from groundwater aquifers.

- More than anything, I began to really think about: what are the implications of removing water from one ecosystem and shipping it in plastic bottles to another ecosystem and selling it as a commodity?

And I became more and more uneasy about the idea.

- And one of the people was a lawyer, and he helped to draft a moratorium.

Let's take three years, and during this three years, no water would be taken out in large quantity and sent out of the town watershed.

We signed it.

There were 20 of us who signed it from the neighborhood.

And then when we had to gather a lot of signatures to be on the town meeting agenda, it was very easy to take a petition around and get signatures.

And I was thinking, "Oh, I don't know what's gonna happen "when this moratorium comes up.

"You know, it's gonna be real interesting."

And I noticed that it was on the agenda at the very end.

So the school budgets and all the things happened, and then there was a lunch break, and then there was articles, I don't know, 9, 10, 11 or whatever.

And finally the article about the town water.

And I thought, "Oh by that time, "you know, people are gonna drift it off.

"It's three o'clock, you know, "they're not gonna stay around."

Well, in fact, people stayed around.

- Anybody like to be heard on Article 15 as amended?

I am looking, I am not seeing... Oh, I'm sorry.

I see a hand back there.

- I'm Nick Neto.

I'm a sixth-generation Vermonter.

And I just want to urge people to think about what water is.

And does it make sense for us to allow somebody who doesn't even live in Vermont to start pumping it out and bottling it and shipping it out elsewhere?

And so I'm kind of asking that we look at the bigger picture here.

- [Chair] Anyone else who has not yet spoken who would like to speak?

- I'm Tara Chaplin and I live in East Montpelier Center.

I'm in favor of this moratorium.

I see a great yearning in this room for looking to the future and watching out for our descendants.

And I see hope, and I'm very excited by that.

Thank you very much.

- [Chair] Thank you.

- [Attendee] Call the question.

- [Chair] Somebody... Somebody called the question.

Mr. Cate, were you about to do that also?

- I move the previous.

- Thank you very much.

We will close debate.

We can now move to a vote on Article 15 as amended.

What I would like to do is have those of you in favor of the article as amended please say aye.

- [Attendees] Aye.

- [Chair] Those of you opposed to the article as amended, please say nay.

- [Attendees] Nay.

- [Chair] There's a clear preponderance.

I'm gonna declare it passed.

- How about that, huh?

- Where are you from?

- The moratorium itself was very straightforward.

It was just saying we need time to gather this information and allow for the town to do more mapping, more research, more understanding of where the pipes would go and how that would all happen.

- [Delia] Carolyn really, I think, was the major person pushing this.

There were a lot of people who did work on this, but she was the major person sort of keeping people on track.

- I didn't want it to be confrontational, but it just felt like, "Hey, this is our neighborhood, "it's all of our water."

And in the end it was a voice vote, and majority of the people felt like they did want to have this moratorium.

- I'm a strong supporter of floor voting, and that's because, in my experience what it does is it gets community members used to being in dialogue with each other, not always being on the same side of issues, listening to each other, convincing each other, and having a real debate that ends up in winners or losers 'cause that's the way it works sometimes, compromises.

And the important part of it is what it does to a community for later.

You know, when you've met your neighbors, when you've argued with your neighbors, when you've been friendly with your neighbors and had lunch with your neighbors 'cause that's all part of usually what happens at a town meeting, when there's a real issue that's challenging and it's a divisive issue in your town, you have some capacity for dealing with it.

Because you've already had civic practice, you've already been in rooms where you disagree with people and nevertheless come out with a result that everybody ultimately lives with.

- At the same time that the town was debating this, then in the State House the legislature was considering whether to put groundwater in the public trust.

And some of the same organizations that were working with the legislature were also working with us here in East Montpelier.

And the debate in town meeting definitely had an effect on the debate in the State House.

I saw that.

- [Clerk] Of Richmond?

- [Representative] Yes.

- [Clerk] Bissonette of Winooski?

- [Clem] Yes.

- [Clerk] Bostic of St. Johnsbury?

- [Donald] Yes.

- It's not a partisan issue.

The vote on the bill was overwhelming.

I think in the House there might have been 12 no votes.

And in the Senate there might have been one or two no votes.

And the legislature removed all ambiguity, and they said groundwater belongs to all of us, groundwater.

Because surface water was already recognized as a public resource.

- I think the thing about the groundwater to me that's so powerful is how old it is.

Hundreds of years old, ancient.

And that it cycles and comes back to us.

It's like one of our elders.

We really need to protect it.

- [Jon] That water that you can't see is flowing under the ground into streams and rivers and ponds and wetlands.

And if you have your own well, you're connected to your neighbor's well.

- And so all these things were making me think, "Okay, how can I make art "that will remind people of the value "and the beauty and the music of water?"

Not to say that we think it's gonna necessarily change behavior 'cause it may not, but at least it will be a reminder.

I think it's appropriate, spit use on a water drawing.

- That's one of the really great things about water.

I mean, we have these communities where people feel connected to each other, but you're really connected with the water that you use.

- The well is slightly uphill from here.

So when we have a drought, I definitely get tense because I could watch the well go lower and lower.

The man who dug this said there were springs underground which were feeding this.

But just this year I found the old well where settlers that lived here before I did, probably in the 1800s, dug a well and stone lined it.

And it's up that way up in the woods.

At first when people knew I lived out here, they were worried about me being attacked by wild animals.

But that's the least of my worries.

I definitely get lonely, but, as I get older, I appreciate my solitude.

So this is such a beautiful well because look at the stone work.

What made me feel good about this well is that it's right up the same swale that my well is on.

So my well's on the same valley lower down.

I thought, "Oh okay, we're sharing the same valley."

- A settler would select the site, and he would make that selection on the basis of the soil and the topography of what would make a good farm.

Once he'd made that selection, he'd pick out the place where his buildings would be, usually where there was good freshwater and a good supply of water for the cattle and the people.

- And with the exception of a few big industrial towns like Burlington and Rutland, Vermont was mostly populated by hill farmers.

- The early farms around here before the sheep fever craze were just self-reliant farms.

So they might have one dairy cow, they might have a pair of oxen, they'd have some pigs, a couple of sheep, and that would be it.

- Milk!

It's always been that way around.

You ain't that lazy.

Little farms, yeah.

Always has been.

Everybody had a few cows, and they worked out to, you know, one or two had enough for beef, a bunch of pigs for eating.

- But the Portuguese had developed a special breed of sheep called the merino.

And this animal not only created a very ample fleece, but the wool made very fine woolens that were not scratchy at all.

So everyone clamored for merino wool.

- It was an era that gave us the Vermont that we sell today with the open fields and the red barns.

All that open hillside and wooded mountains in the distance were the result initially of the sheep farming era.

- But the sheep fever craze went bust in the 1840s, leading to a mass exodus from the state.

Vermont lost almost one half its human residents in the 1840s.

They all went out to the Ohio Valley via either canal or rail.

- So what Vermont farmers began to do is make the transition from sheep to dairy farming.

- My great-great grandfathers had sheep.

My great-grandfathers were dairy farmers in Vermont.

And they were small farms, you know, where they might have one team that they used to work the land with and 15 or 20 cows.

And the family didn't have employees.

They all took care of the cows themselves.

- And whenever you start seeing barbed wire coming up, that's a good indication that that original sheep pasture, sometime in the middle 1800s, probably by the time of the Civil War, was now transitioning into dairy pasture.

- And this actually, in many ways, returned farmers to the kind of economy that they'd known before the sheep craze had kicked in in the 1820s.

They grew a variety of crops, potatoes, and corn.

And they gathered maple and they gathered berries and cowslips and butternuts and had a very diversified and self-sufficient, once again, approach to the economy.

- Interestingly, times are changing and it's coming back.

So I'm hopeful about that.

(cow moos) - I came in here in the morning, and the sun was pouring in and the cows were shining and they were so happy, and it was just so perfect.

And I just thought how contentment and happiness affects our health and affects the health of our food.

I mean, their lives are so much better just in the milking department, just not going on a machine.

It's just so much stress to be milked by a machine, you know?

- [Producer] Really?

- Yeah.

I mean, these cows fall asleep.

I mean, she's already zoning out.

They do fall asleep when they're milked by hand.

It's much nicer for them.

- The big farms is pretty much taking over now, you know, 3, 400 head.

- [Suzanne] And the modern farmer just gets worse all the time.

Can't bear the thought.

- They all keep them in the barn now, the free stall.

You don't see or you never see a cow on pasture anymore.

That's our chain.

- Modern American dairy, a cow lives to one calving, and then they milk them for 680 days, and then they butcher them.

That's the modern average, you know?

- [Yvan] That's why they raised them inside the building.

And some of those cows, they'll go to a slaughterhouse.

They never step on grass their whole life.

And usually a cow will, after four or five years, their feet are completely shot.

They cannot even walk.

- So that's why my model is still the old cranky Vermont hill farmer of yesteryear 'cause I still think they did a way better job of caring for their cows and keeping them closer to their natural state, which is gonna be their healthier state.

- But there have been a new kind of farmer that's come up.

- Organic farming, if you're of a certain generation, you could look at it as being regressive.

You're going back to grazing cows on pasture.

But the grass itself is a fantastic forage.

It's high in vitamins, omega fatty acids.

So the cows tend to reproduce better.

They just live longer.

And from a more biological perspective, they're harvesting the grass, but they're also fertilizing the fields as well at the same time.

- Not quite as much production.

But to get that extra production, the conventional way I thought was very costly.

- [Ross] My parents are still involved in the business.

Very much so.

You can hear in the distance my dad hauling the last loads of cow manure to spread for the spring.

- I've become more support, and, as I get older, there's some things I can't do near as fast.

So I pick the things I can keep up with.

He kicks me out sometimes, says, "Go home, dad."

So that's a good feeling.

I'm very happy he's taken over all the management.

- [Ross] We have 11 acres of vegetables, and the dairy farm helps provide all the fertility for that.

- Aren't these adorable?

- [Stu] Amanda made the first change in growing organic vegetables.

- We do everything from seed, which is cool.

We don't bring in any plugs.

Both perennials, annuals, all the veggies.

This had been a cornfield for like 20 years, and I had started an organic transition to it, and it was just a mess of weeds and, ugh.

But the cool thing is Beverly and Stu were always very supportive.

Beverly later on would help me sell at farmer's market.

And I had access to compost, to manure.

- [Stu] We don't use any hormones, we don't use any antibiotics.

- [Ross] And we move the cows every 12 hours during the grazing season.

- We've added on over the years land.

But I'd much rather see 10 50-cow farms than one 500 myself.

- Not many left.

Gosh, when I was a kid, you could have 30 head of cattle and make a living.

You'd have to do everything yourself, you and the family, but you could make a living at it.

Now you gotta have 500 head, and it's questionable.

(cow moos) Altogether different.

- Talking to me, cow?

- My wife and I had five children, and we grew from 50 cows to where we are today, about 450 cows.

And that has allowed us to raise a family, allowed us to send the kids to school.

And, in turn, you know, we're employing probably five to 10 people extra to make this farm run, so.

- Today they hire a bunch of Mexican, and they work those poor fellow.

Some people don't want them around.

But I was no different than a Mexican when I came up here.

I didn't know the language.

I came up here with nothing.

- There were Frenchman jokes.

You know, you have to have somebody to make you look better.

- [Yvan] I look at Mexican the way probably French Canadian came in 30, 40, 50 years ago.

Nothing, just clothes on their back.

- But certainly French Canadians, hell, we were overrun with them there for a while 'cause they were good workers.

- [Yvan] I used to get up at four o'clock in the morning and work till eight o'clock, 7:30, 8:00, like all dairy farmers.

So in the next generation, probably if the Mexican learn English, they'll be accepted and take their place in society.

But they've gotta learn English.

- They don't want to come here to move here.

I think they want to come here to work and bring a better life for their families in Mexico or Guatemala or whatever part of the country that they're coming from.

But they show up for work, they don't grumble.

They're very respectful, honest people.

And what we provide them, they provide back home to probably tenfold of themselves.

- I don't think I'm an organized enough manager to have an operation like that.

And it's just we have a different economic model, you know?

- [Stu] We don't have to rely on migrant workers.

We have more people asked to work here than we have jobs for.

- [Amanda] We hire young people, high schoolers, college-age people.

And the relationship is not just a job.

I think it also ends up being kind of a mentorship.

- And that's what's made it so much different than 20 years ago when Bev and I were working here.

It was almost like we were the bottom end of the totem pole.

Nobody wanted to get involved in agriculture back then.

- And now it's actually really cool to work on a farm.

Also, I think it's nice to have a personal relationship with everybody you work with on the farm.

I mean, not that you can't have those same relationships with a Jamaican field worker or Mexican field worker, but it's different.

- It's a farmer program, yeah.

Whenever time we got the money, we send it home.

- These two guys have come back for, this will be the fourth or fifth year.

They come onto this program, it's called H2A.

It's the official way of getting migrant foreign labor.

- You miss your family, but you know that it is not forever.

So you just came here for a season.

- We work.

We work.

- It's good.

- This year it's really difficult because they've tightened up on the rules.

I mean, I understand why 'cause they say they want you to hire American workers.

- But we have to rely on foreign migrant labor sometimes to get certain jobs done.

- And that's 'cause you aren't gonna find anybody around here that is gonna want to milk an eight-hour shift, I don't think, anyways.

I milk an hour twice a day, and I wouldn't want to milk two hours a day, you know?

Two hours at a time.

- It's a little bit frustrating that we can't get enough American people to do this job.

But it is work.

- [Suzanne] It's funny: the whole dairy system is just like, this year has to be an improvement over last year.

Otherwise you're a failure.

- 25 cows is a nice number.

60 is too many, 40 is too many.

30, borderline.

You know, 2000, forget it!

- [Suzanne] One of our biggest problems is that enough isn't enough.

Gotta be more.

- Capitalism as an economic system is based on growth and expansion.

- [Suzanne] The whole history of H.P.

Hood & Sons in Boston and how they used the railroad and consolidated the milk supply and rubbed out the little farmer.

- Farmers had to compete with a very large agricultural, what I'd call agribusiness ventures in Florida and California.

- Some cooked-up scheme to reduce the number of farmers and knock off the pasture and independent mountain farmers.

- But also there were safety regulations, and the coming of the bulk tank really hurt hill farms 'cause the hill farmers couldn't afford to go to bulk tanks.

And even if they could, it was hard to get the big trucks out on those dirt roads to empty the bulk tanks.

Just one of those things that happens.

- My father milked cows till '61, which was I think a year or so after he put the bulk tank in.

He did put a bulk tank in and redid the milk house and stuff like everybody was supposed to.

But he really didn't like farming that much.

He didn't like the cows that much.

And he also didn't have a gutter cleaner either, you know, and that'll wear you down pretty quick.

Manure will wear you down.

- It's a fun industry, it's a challenging industry.

It's really hard for a new person to jump into it.

It's just so capital-intensive.

- A lot of those guys are in debt right up to here, and they're just barely making.

That's why they're all going outta business, you know?

They cannot borrow anymore, they get out.

- At the end of World War II, there are still 24,000 dairy farms in Vermont.

But by the time you get to the present, Vermont has about 800 dairy farms.

And that is a loss of about two dairy farms per week every single week since 1945.

- The farm I worked on summers, Charlie Cole's farm, was one of the last farms to have milk cans.

Charlie, for instance, he had his cows in a stable, wooden-floor stable, but then he had to put his cows on cement.

So bulk tank, moved the stable, cemented underneath the barn, and Charlie's farm lasted about 10 years after that.

And I'm not against regulation or cleanliness, but that's what it was.

It had to be cleaned, of course it did.

- We got 6,000 gallons of storage in one tank, 1,200 gallons in another tank.

And these rooms have to stay away from the animals so there's no contamination of manure or cow hair or anything is getting into the milk.

- [Dairymaster] Hold milk, dry off, 60.

- [Producer] Do you homogenize and pasteurize and do all that stuff?

- Do I?

- [Producer] Yeah.

- No.

I wouldn't dream of it.

I would never milk cows if I was caught in that little perversion.

- I'd never had any processed milk.

We drank it from the cow.

Well, it tastes different.

- [Producer] Yeah, I guess you're right.

- Well, that I know I'm right.

In my own mind anyway.

- All these E. coli, bad bacteria situations, really stem from, number one, confinement out of the sun, number two, high-grain feeding.

- Because the cow is made to walk in the grass and eat grass too.

- [Suzanne] To me, the cow's health is the product and the cheese is the byproduct.

So if I make a beautiful cheese, that's just the frosting on top of the cake.

I'd rather give it to my townspeople than have a barcode slapped on the side of it and shipped off to the big, big city.

- [Producer] I like that it's sharp though.

A bit sharp.

- [Taster] I think it's good.

- Are you gonna try and and hit up the restaurants?

- No, 'cause I don't have a legal cheese operation.

- Ah, what would it take?

- It would take me caving into the state, which I intend never to do.

I think that the whole commercial enterprise is got a lot of problems, not the least of which is the overhead.

It ends up being so high that you have to triple the number of cows you have so that you can work 21 hours a day so that, you know, if granny next door needs you to help with her clothesline, you have to say, "Sorry, granny, "I got more important things to do."

- If one person becomes a big scientific farmer and makes a lot more money, it disrupts the interdependence of the community.

- [Suzanne] So I'd rather get people that taste the cheese and see what happens when you farm in a way that these old Norwich farms were farmed originally.

- But there's some awfully good big farms left in Vermont, and we'll always have 'em, I think.

Especially in Addison County and places like that where there's great rolling fields and you can farm in an industrial way.

- I think what's happening in dairying is there are some very, very large operations that are scraping by on economies of scale.

They're making money.

There's some very, very small operations that are doing organic dairying and they're making money.

- We were so close to being organic because we hadn't used any commercial fertilizers or pesticides or herbicides, and we'd just used remedies on the cows for several years.

So the only thing we had to do is feed organic grain for 30 days.

And that's what we did.

And then we went organic, and they needed the milk, so it kind of worked pretty well that way.

That was in 1995, I think.

- And I'm proud of having written the Organic Farm Bill, the first organic agriculture bill this country's ever had.

Nationwide, it's become about a $20-billion industry.

It's also become a significant industry in Vermont.

- You know, organic is great, it's wonderful, but it's never gonna feed the world.

I think the organic industry is maybe 5% of the market, maybe 10% of the market at best.

- They call it niche.

Well, over the long haul, if we have dairy farming survive in Vermont, that'll be the model that works.

- And part of that is the organic industry kind of keeps track of supply and demand good that way, and it's watched very carefully.

The price of milk, it stays the same, it doesn't fluctuate up and down like a conventional market.

- We're basically in a two-and-a-half or three-year cycle of high production, high milk price, low milk price again now.

It used to be milk price fluctuations of $1 per hundred weight were drastic.

And now we're seeing price swings of $5, $6, and $8 in a three-year window and trying to read into the milk policy and trying to read into: are we gonna get paid this week or aren't we?

And we're the only industry in the world that produces the product and, 30 days after we're done, we're told what we're gonna get.

- But that's tricky because a lot of farmers have made these big farms.

The only way to pay for 'em is to make the milk.

So if the price drops, ooh, they've got to make this payment.

So they've gotta put on more cows to make those payments.

It's a nightmare, I think.

- If the milk price had stayed at parity, which was a figure which was tied to the cost of living, milk prices would be about at $38 to $45 per 100 pounds versus 17 to 19 that we've been getting for the last five years.

So that in itself, it would've kept all the farms at 50 or 80 cows.

So we've either gotta get bigger or smaller.

It seems to be the way the farming industry's going.

(cow moos) - Progress is okay, but it's our current paradigm about it that I think is problematic.

Everything we know of will grow to a certain size and then growth stops.

That's the case with all of us.

Old growth forests grow to such a size, then they stop growing.

Everything does that.

So the notion that we can just keep growing, growing, growing is pretty fallacious and it's not sustainable.

- [Yvan] The tractor trailer costs, well, 12, $1,300 to fill their tank.

And, you know, somebody's gonna have to pay for that sooner or later.

- It's a rotten system.

And very few people I know have the guts to really look at this system of production and consumption.

It's the Indonesians, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Mexican farmers doing things so we don't have to pay too much to accumulate, consume, accumulate, and accumulate.

So my neighbor, Tim Matson, the pond guru in Vermont, said, "Hey, Ian..." He's as lugubrious as I can be.

He said, "Hey, Ian, I go to a funny little group "up at the Social Ecology Institute in Plainfield, "and we talk about secession."

And I paused.

- It's the Republic of Vermont.

It's like Switzerland.

We have our own passports, our own money.

- Being in a dimly lit room and someone threw a switch and a light suddenly came on.

I said, "Yeah."

I would love to be involved.

- [Tim] We already got rid of billboards.

Let's just get rid of the United States.

(Ian laughs) - Be it resolved that we the citizens of the town of Kirby call on the Vermont State legislature to convene a special session to debate the following one-sentence resolution: be it resolved that the state of Vermont peacefully and democratically free itself from the United States of America and return to its status as an independent republic as it was between January 15th, 1777 and March 4th, 1791.

- [Attendee] I move that we do.

- [Attendee] Second.

- [John] Moved and seconded.

We can talk that resolution.

Discussion?

Dennis?

I'm Dennis Steele from Mud Hollow.

Hopefully most of you got the letter.

- Ideally, we would get people in every one of Vermont's 256 towns, villages, and gores to sign up and bring the question of secession onto their town meeting agendas.

- I'm a father of two children who sees the future of the United States as a sinking ship.

The empire's going down.

And I believe that if we don't take steps to actually start thinking about it and discussing it, that Vermont's gonna end up actually sinking with the ship.

Is secession unconstitutional?

- I mean, after all, Vermont did everything for itself up until 1950s, everything.

- Farmers just want to be able to sell raw milk to their neighbors.

They wanna be able to slaughter their meat on their own property and sell their food.

We are so far ahead in this game that it's incredible.

And freeing up our farmers to allow us to actually do what they do best is to plant food and feed our local neighbors.

- Dennis, I'm gonna ask you to cut it off there because you used your time up.

I'm gonna ask other people to speak now.

- [Dennis] Okay.

- Keith?

- In the history of this country, we've gone through a number of experiments over the last several hundred years, and the decision was made that the United States could not survive as individual states operating independently.

- I disagree with that.

Vermont is set up to be an agriculture mecca.

People, listen, you guys don't understand, this is an incredible time that we're living in.

This is just, gosh, man, I wish... We are going to have an agriculture mecca, and Kirby can become the agriculture role model for the states.

People, listen, the United States empire is going down.

How many more dollars can you print?

How many more stimulus packages can you do?

- The fool speaks truth to power.

That's why the nation will look to a place like Vermont if Vermont can still be a fool.

We're saying something that nobody else will say.

- Here is a clear-cut proposal, bye-bye, to break away from that arbitrary historical decision to throw all these states together into one state.

So I think that has come to its end.

It's not useful anymore.

- Basically, guys, all we're doing is sending a message to the legislature to allow them to debate the issue.

It's not whether we're gonna secede right now.

We can set the new metaphor for what it is like to live small and local.

If all of you are concerned about the environment.

- Quixotic, crazy, or frivolous?

I don't think we're any one of those three because of what's coming down.

And when the price of oil gets high enough, whether that's $200 or $300 a barrel, the world's gonna change.

It's gonna have to reinvent itself.

And there are quite a few Vermonters that understand this.

- In the summertime, you can get within about a quarter of a mile of the house.

In the winter, it's more like a half a mile.

We come in either in the winter on snowshoes or skis and in the summertime obviously just on foot.

Hi, Sam, welcome.

We really try to minimize our fossil fuel usage.

I mean, I'm not naive enough to think that we could completely get away from it, but it's a carry-in and carry-out situation.

So you get pretty mindful of what you bring in and what you have to lug out.

- By no means do I feel like or do Rowan and I feel like this is the way it's gotta be done and, you know, we've got it figured out.

I mean, we learn things every day, and we change things all the time.

And it's a big experiment is what it is.

Even though, you know, in a lot of ways we're trying to live like people did in the late 1800s, early 1900s before fossil fuels became really prevalent.

- Up here around us, there's lots of young folks who want to be that way.

They would love to be.

But I think they're smart enough to not fool themselves.

- We don't have a dishwasher or washer and dryer, but we do have high-speed internet access.

(Rowan laughs) - It definitely takes some juggling, and you have to make a lot of choices and some sacrifices.

But ultimately I think we're better off for it because we are being nourished by pretty much everything we do.

- The nice thing about the root cellars is that your produce doesn't come out overpackaged.

I don't have to go to the dump very often.

- [Producer] So, Renee, do you find yourself ever buying vegetables at the grocery store?

- Actually, no, not lately.

When I'm an old lady, I don't know how I'm gonna do this.

In here, oh yeah, here are some beets.

- [Producer] Nice.

- You know, while I'm in here I should pull some stuff out 'cause I am low on... - [Producer] Shall I go grab you a bag?

- One thing that we don't have here is animals.

Besides our dogs.

We think about it sometimes, we think about it a lot actually, but we haven't gotten to it yet.

And that's okay.

Because there's a lot of people in this area that are also living similarly to this.

And, you know, different people are sort of doing different things, and we don't actually feel like we need to be completely independent and do everything for ourselves.

- Now there's so many local people who do the other things.

We can get milk from Stratford Organic Creamery, and, you know, we can get local cheese and meat.

- We don't wanna do everything ourselves.

It would be too much, it would be too isolating.

So we have a good friend who raises chickens for eggs, and we get eggs from him.

And we barter, we help him do garlic, 'cause he has a little garlic business.

And so we help him with his garlic when he needs it, and in exchange we sort of have a running supply of eggs coming our way.

It's more about that.

- We grow, I would say on a year basis, 20% of our food, not much more.

- [Producer] Do you want to be completely self-sufficient?

- No.

- [Producer] Why not?

- Because I don't believe in it.

- We're sort of going for a functional interdependence.

- Are these trees individuals, that maple and this maple, or are they connected?

- Underground, trees are directly root grafted together.

And through those root grafts, energy and nutrients can go from one tree to another.

And this can even happen between species.

So all these trees actually are doing a lot to support each other.

- Ditto human beings.

And we somehow got sidetracked into the myth of the individual.

- The blacksmith makes knives that get sold to the butcher.

The butcher uses those knives to butcher meat, which then gets sold back to the blacksmith.

So in fact they are interrelated in supporting each other's business.

- And because of the Green Mountains, it's very hard to do in Vermont topographically what we've done everywhere else in the country.

Now, we have our malls, but these are anomalous.

So it's remained a place for the small scale.

- The perception to be a Vermonter is we got our own space, we got our own piece of land.

When I look at a piece of land, I look at it as one acre of land should be able to support so many people in the world.

We sell protein to a lot of the third-world countries, and that's necessary for the viability of the world, not just Vermont.

- I mean, I'm not saying we'll stop global trade and everything else, but I think we have to have more of a focus on local, regional economic enterprises that are working in ways that support each other.

- Good morning.

- I live out of my garden for probably three or four months a year.

And of course I harvest all my potatoes, my onion, and everything else.

I even pick up all my own seed.

I keep all my own seed.

And people want that fresh stuff out there.

It's amazing.

- Fennel is like number one veggie.

- Oh, it's my favorite.

- That people are buying right now, it's great.

- But the problem here is: small agriculture has got to be able to sell their products to working-class people at a fair price.

- It's more expensive local at the farmer's market.

- Well, there's two programs.

The one I think the most important program is something called the Farm to Family Coupon Program for WIC recipients and low-income seniors.

That is so great for farmers.

It's like these cash coupons that WIC recipients can bring to a farmer's market and buy produce directly from the farmer, and they're as good as money.

Thank you, that's all I need.

I don't need to make change or anything.

- [Buyer] No, we're done.

- The other thing that's really cool: we are part of the Vermont Farm Share Program, which provides CSA shares for senior citizens and low-income housing communities.

And that's actually one of the more engaging things to do right now, which is outreach and education, in addition to just doing the work.

I'm a little stressed out and busy.

- But a lot of these folks survive because people that have moved to Vermont are financially capable of paying a higher price for something for ideological reasons.

And God bless 'em.

I wish we had more of 'em that would pay high price for sweet corn.

- Yeah, that one's no good.

There's like a bug in it, yeah.

- For generations, there have been two Vermonts, the part of Vermont that has been attracting lots of new people, that has been attracting a lot of capital, that's been attracting a lot of jobs, where property values are high.

And there has been the other Vermont, which is more rural, which is more isolated, where it's difficult for them to maintain the quality of their schools.

It's difficult for them to get by on the jobs that are available to them.

And those two Vermonts have been in a very natural state of tension with one another for a long time.

And I think it has not helped matters that people have not called it to its face, have not pointed it out clearly, have danced around it.

- We still have that class problem.

We have a lot of poor people.

They live in hollows.

Have you ever noticed that?

Where the hills come together.

- They're out hunting for deer right now.

So in some respects they're more self-sufficient than I am because they've got deer in their freezer.

But I don't see them at the farm stands.

My neighbors will drive 30 miles to go get, you know, a head of lettuce for whatever it is, you know, a dollar.

Whereas maybe I'll pay a couple of bucks or three bucks 'cause it's locally grown or it might be organic.

- We butchered a cow a year ago, so there's my meat supply, but I don't go to many farmer's markets.

And it's just because I just don't have time.

(soft guitar music) - Vermont is a tough place to be a farmer.

The growing season is short.

One thing it does is grow grass really, really well.

But Vermonters have always had to live by their wits and have two or three irons in the fire to make a living at farming.

- And when I grew up on a farm in the upper Connecticut River Valley, if something broke, you figured out to fix it.

I mean, the farmer did the welding himself.

- And you learned to just look at something and see how something was made and see, "Okay, how can I fix this?"

And even if you had to manufacture a part or something.

Like something like this.

I mean, I could probably make this from scratch if I wanted to.

This wouldn't be that hard.

- [Frank] And they couldn't call in a consultant, they couldn't call in anyone.

They had to do it themselves.

- The land has a harshness.

It's not great lonely soil stretching as far as the eye can see.

It's not that.

You've got to invent your own gig.

- I know one thing I did years and years ago is when we were picking up bales in the field before we got the kicker wagons, I built a bale buncher that went behind the baler and it would bunch 10, 11 bales in one place.

And it made it so that two people could load a load of hay in about a half hour.

- [Ian] Also, just as a survival thing, it somehow promotes the land.

A sense of inventiveness.

Up in Hardwick, Pete of Pete's Greens.

Or High Mowing Seeds, Tom Stearns.

The new innovators.

- Every couple of months, it seems like, there's a new farm popping up.

There are people here who are milking cows, sheep, goats.

There's grains, there's every kind of meat, there's every kind of vegetable.

But what's been fairly new is value-added processing businesses.

- We got a lot of activity going on in Vermont now agriculturally.

It's gonna be very interesting to see these farms that are starting up now.

They're really small.

But we're all dealing with the same basic elements: animals, food, milking, trying to sell a product.

Whether it's raw milk or fluid milk or some value-added product.

How do you maintain an agricultural lifestyle and agricultural business and still try and make some money?

'Cause you have to, at the end of the day, not go broke.

- Hello, lovie, what are you doing, you nut?

Jeepers, chickens.

This is the beating heart of Vermont Yak Company.

We took this abandoned dairy barn that's been sitting here idle and we've turned it into sort of a commercial meat business.

Primarily that's what we do.

But right over here you can see we're salting and drying some new yak hides that just came off some animals last week.

Heads go in the pond to get cleaned up, and the hides go here to get salted and dried, and then the hides go out and come back as leather.

Yeah, that's sort of our way of getting some value-added products out of the yaks.

It's pretty cool.

- Value-added, you basically start with a raw material, like, in our case, milk.

And then you do something with it to create another product.

And that other product has more value because of what has gone into making it.

So we have our caramel from our goat's milk and from organic sugar.

And our cheese.

- To make it as a farmer, you've gotta be really sort of a Jack or a Jill of all trades.

You can't just sort of get into one particular product and ride that wave.

You gotta do it all.

- So instead of just growing soybeans, there is now a tofu company in town.

And us, instead of just growing vegetables, we're growing them out all the way to a seed crop and adding value to it by packaging it and sending out to other farmers and gardeners.

- We do have a lot of interns.

It's part of our mission to help younger, I'm gonna say younger women, because 95% of the intern applications we have are from women.

And 95% of the interns we've had are women.

- His legs are building strength.

- That being said, there are also a lot of young men who are partnering up with their women and doing the CSAs, doing the small sheep farms.

- We were, in my opinion, too much all dairy for a long time.

And I think that is changing and the sheep are coming back and the vegetable farming and the fruit farming and diversity is coming back.

- It is going back to a model, but it's a model that mimics the way the forest like this functions.

Well, it's because in this forest we have so many different species.

I mean, around us here, if I look around, I can instantly see 20, 30 different types of trees that are photosynthesizing.

And looking around further, we would find probably thousands of fungi breaking down the deadwood we see around us and returning it to the soil.

So if any one of them should falter, the system's fine.

- The diversity is what creates resilience.

And I think many farmers realize this too.

If you were to just be a 500-acre broccoli grower here in Vermont, that'd be a little risky.

- Look, there's nothing, there's nothing.

But, yeah, say we were like all strawberries, we would be so disappointed and definitely economically impacted by the weather.

But, you know, when something goes bad in a diversified system, usually something benefits.

So we have some crops that are looking fine, looking good.

- Can we compete with huge thousand-acre wheat farms in the Midwest?

Of course not.

We have to compete a different way.

- This yak over here coming through with the white, she was the first female yak born in Vermont.

That's Natasha and that's her baby.

And the thing about yaks is that, you know, they're super hardy animals.

They evolved over 8,000 years in the highlands of Tibet and Nepal and near Mongolia.

And they're hardy, they're adaptable.

They love the cold.

They have no interest in being in a barn.

And the colder it gets, the happier they are.

It's good to be a yak in Vermont.

- So a diversified, highly diversified mosaic of farms that are doing all kinds of things.

Including artichokes!

- So you have a commodity, dairy, but you find a way to add value by going organic and belonging to a farmer's co-op.

And then you have maple syrup and lumber and Christmas trees.

But now you add horticulture to that, and, you know, the older generation getting along with the younger generation, figuring out how to pass the farm on.

At the same time, bringing new people on the farm, training them to be the future farmers of our region.

- Just bring 'em all.

- And to top that all off, you have land conservation.

I'm wearing my Vermont Land Trust hat.

Protecting the land from development.

And that's a really huge piece of sustainable agriculture.

- About 12% of the state, about 600,000 acres altogether, have been conserved.

But our objective is not merely to preserve the land as open space, it's to have that land stay in production, continue to provide all of the economic, environmental, and cultural benefits that a working farm does.

And we are constantly working with farmers who want to change their operation in some way, adding new buildings or moving from dairy into producing cheese or wanting to build a methane digester.

So there's a constant dialogue that is going on with people who are earning their living off the land.

- So this is Apollo or Artemis, and I don't know which one it is until I look at the number.

- People are trying everything, and they're building a network of independent food producers that use local food, and it's all part of the locavore movement.

- And we're all right here, literally within a two-minute drive of each other.

So we started getting together about two and a half years ago and just saying, "We should work together."

It's called the Floating Bridge Food & Farms Co-Op.

And we drag ourselves to the meeting and go, "Oh my god.

"And I just need to sit down for a while.

"Thank goodness we're having a meeting."

(Judith laughs) I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

- We're processing beef.

So we sent three steers last week, three this week.

We finished processing lambs.

- A lot of the times I think what we're doing is providing ourselves with the foundation for times when things might not be so easy.

Something might happen to one of us or things get a little harder from the economy and then we're all there for each other.

And I think that's gonna be really important, so.

- As a business owner myself, having peers in other agricultural businesses in the area has been incredible for inspiring each other, bouncing off ideas, collaborating, co-branding and co-marketing with each other, buying and selling to each other, lending money.

All of those things have helped us act as this cooperative venture even though it's, you know, a couple of dozen independent food and ag-based businesses.

- There's this mythology around farming that it's kind of like a solo enterprise.

It's like the heroic yeoman farmer and his or her family eking it out.

But there's this very cool tradition in Vermont.

When a new farm is established or new animals are brought to a farm, word kind of gets out and the old-timers show up.

Like they show up to say hello to the animals.

It's really neat.

And, you know, I knew nothing about this.

But when the yaks first arrived, pickup trucks kind of would show up to the farm sort of at random unannounced.

And these older couples would get out, and they would sort of walk up to the pasture fence, and they would just sort of nod and sort of smile.

(Rob laughs) Say hello and give their blessing, you know, to this new project.

So that was really one of the more amazing things that happened in the first few months we we were farming.

- A lot of the places that used to be dairy farms are either now just strictly residential or they have been taken over by some of this new farming that we were talking about.

You know, the buildings are still there, the fields are still there, but the cows aren't there anymore.

And the guys who were farming it are probably around somewhere but not farming anymore.

- Farming has to change like everything else to go with the times.

My uncle Charles wanted to modernize the farm, but grandpa just continued to hay with 1880s technology right up into the 1950s.

And that pretty much doomed the farm.

- Copenhagen Market cabbage, rainbow chard, one, two...

This person is getting two packets of almost everything.

I don't know that seeds are totally recession-proof, but all the trends that we are connected to and our customers are connected to are all soaring.

Local eating, small farmers, more gardening, and more organic.

- But the irony of the thing is: basically organic is doing it the way your grandfather did it.

- Because something I'm not sure if people really know or understand or get is that we picked all this stuff this morning, like I picked these beets at nine o'clock.

- You return to something, a new version of what Vermont was.

(farmers chatter) - What motivates me is recognizing, learning more from every turn of the season.

You know, how things are progressing.

Okay, well, right now the cows are grazing among violets and dandelions, and in about a week and a half the buttercups will be coming up and the dandelions will be in a seed globe.

And as soon as those seed globes start to disperse, first cutting is among us.

And for me it's just interesting and inspiring to see how it all sort of flows together.

- But it's really easy to romanticize farming when you're not in the midst of it.

And I think until someone really has to get their hands and their feet dirty and kind of get out in it every day, they'll never fully appreciate what it takes.

And I have tremendous amount of respect for farmers now and my neighbors who've been doing this, many of them, for generations.

- Yeah, no, the children did not wanna farm.

They thought that he worked too hard, too many hours.

Basically, until recently, you worked seven days a week all our married life, except when we'd go away for a week's vacation.

They didn't like that idea.

And he wore too many hats.

The kids didn't think they could handle being, you know, the farmer, the milker, the calf man, the business manager, the banker, the everything.

- Electrician.

- Accountant, nutritionist, plumber, electrician, he knows how to do all of that.

- [George] But if you want to run a small farm, that's what you have to do.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

I think sitting on a beach is a little overrated anyways.

I don't know.

- [Producer] You don't take a vacation?

- No, I don't take vacations.

I went on vacation once for three days, and I think I got it out of my system.

I think I'm all set.

I don't know, it's just nice here.

- So we're gonna go get some water.

I mean, I think people get way too hung up on convenience, and they lose the connection to the things that sustain them.

I think that, you know, if we know where our food or where our water, where our heat comes from and we can participate in it, it's very nourishing.

It's very enriching.

And that's a lot of why we do this.

It means a lot to us to maintain those connections, keep our bodies strong.

(baby cries) (soft guitar music) - Come on.

(soft guitar music) Ow!

A little love pat there, you see that?

And I would say the dairy farmers aren't terribly overreactive based on their lifestyle.

- I guess I forgot to tell her I was coming.

- Maybe that provides good citizens, people that aren't too reactive.

- No, I usually say something, and I didn't that time.

She let me know.

(milk sloshes) - I just wondered if this concave part of a cow's body is that way because somebody's put their head there for 5,000 years.

♪ Looking down the way ♪ By a row of apple trees ♪ A boy working on his father's farm is what she sees ♪ ♪ She'll watch for hours on end ♪ ♪ As you come back again ♪ Hope someday that you'll ask her to marry him ♪ ♪ And she would ♪ And she does ♪ She's a farm girl (soft guitar music) ♪ Cows are on the hill ♪ Gotta bring 'em down to milk ♪ Along the cow paths that twist to and from ♪ ♪ Bring her old cow dog and her oldest son ♪ ♪ Trying to think of what to get for supper later on ♪ (soft guitar music) ♪ And what to hay ♪ Speaking of which ♪ Probably ought to go mow a little more today ♪ ♪ Mm-hmm ♪ She's a farm girl ♪ Now the children need shoes and the taxes are due ♪ ♪ They won't be buying that new spreader none too soon ♪ ♪ She juggles the books ♪ That ain't half ♪ Out in the barnyard will pull a calf ♪ ♪ Drive her daughter for piano lessons in the afternoon ♪ ♪ Mm-hmm, mm ♪ She's a farm girl (soft guitar music) ♪ Maybe bake a pie and hang the clothes to dry ♪ ♪ And then rake some hay to maybe bale it later today ♪ ♪ And hope that them knotters work ♪ ♪ They always have temperamental quirks ♪ ♪ Miss every other bale like it was law ♪ ♪ And that'll make her swear ♪ And oh boy she can swear ♪ Something that she learned well from her pa ♪ ♪ And she learned real well ♪ She's a farm girl (soft guitar music) ♪ One cow they had got milk fever and died ♪ ♪ Buried her on the hill behind the shed ♪ ♪ And he sat down on the storm wall there ♪ ♪ Run his fingers through his hair and cried ♪ ♪ 'Cause it was the best cow he ever had ♪ ♪ She sat down beside him ♪ Put her arm around him ♪ Didn't say nothing she didn't have to ♪ ♪ She understood ♪ And he knew ♪ She's a farm girl ♪ That's a long road to hoe ♪ And sometimes only weeds will grow ♪ ♪ Broken fences and heifers running the neighborhood ♪ ♪ But when she looks around at all the things to do ♪ ♪ A little overwhelmed ♪ In the same breath it seems mighty good ♪ ♪ Mm-hmm ♪ She's a farm girl (soft guitar music) That's that.