Kayleigh Boyle and Doug Wolcik knew all the reasons not to farm in Vermont: the short growing season, the hilly terrain, the dirt roads that make it hard to get products to market.
Even the size of most farms here is a problem. For decades, farms across the United States have gotten larger as agricultural policies pushed growers to consolidate and scale up their operations. Vermont’s farms, however, have stayed relatively small. According to conventional wisdom, that means unprofitable.
But small was what the couple wanted. Ms. Boyle is from Vermont, and while studying at Emerson College in Boston, she worked an office job connected to the local food movement. But she quickly realized she wanted to be outside with her hands in the earth.
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People on both the left and right are becoming wary of the global and increasingly corporate food system. In Vermont, small farms are finding ways to thrive in a localized food economy.
Mr. Wolcik graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied sustainable agriculture and community food systems. He, too, realized he wanted a life close to the soil.
They met while working at a nonprofit farm outside Boston and soon discovered they shared a dream about buying their own acreage to grow food and flowers. They weren’t interested in a massive operation. Instead, their vision included no-till growing methods, hand tools, and a desire to build a “human scale” production system.
They also wanted to make their living entirely from their farm – something increasingly difficult to do in New England. Over the past 60 years, the region has lost 80% of its farmland.
“We really wanted to believe that farming could be a financially viable business,” Ms. Boyle says.
They spent years saving money and scouring Zillow listings and USDA soil surveys online. They eventually found a 16-acre property at the edge of Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom, complete with a house and a flat, 2-acre plot that got a lot of sun. In September 2020, they decided to take the plunge.
And they’ve thrived.
“We’ve just far exceeded any expectations that we set for ourselves,” says Mr. Wolcik. “We’re selling everything we can. We can’t even grow enough. There’s such demand for it, from restaurants to retail to wholesale to markets,” he says. “We can’t produce enough product fast enough.”
Some of this is because of the couple themselves: Ms. Boyle’s sense of marketing, Mr. Wolcik’s attention to detail and innovation, and the experience and high standards they share as growers.
But it is also because, when they bought these rare flat acres, they joined a community actively building a new storyline around farming, food, and resilience in New England.
Here, in this part of little Vermont, statewide population 648,000, a coalition of farmers, nonprofits, and residents is eschewing mainstream beliefs about what makes agriculture successful and what it means to create a prosperous economy.
Instead, they are building a system in which farmers are able to make a living and residents can eat healthy food grown nearby. They are intentionally moving away from a global supply chain vulnerable to market shocks – everything from pandemics to tariffs to natural disasters.
And while the epicenter of this movement is in Hardwick, Vermont – a town of 1,000 people that has transformed itself from a hardscrabble rural hamlet into a mecca of food and sustainability – the impacts go well beyond it.
Across the country, communities on all sides of the political spectrum are reimagining the way Americans produce and value what they eat, tapping into a simmering belief that something is amiss with how detached, both economically and nutritionally, we have become from this fundamental human sector.
“It is the narrative a lot of the time that farming isn’t a way to make a living,” says Ms. Boyle. “I feel like we need to shift that mindset, because I think more and more it’s going to be important for communities to have access to local foods.”
Local, healthy foods: a bipartisan issue
There can be, in some places, a certain connotation to that phrase, “local foods.” There are the stereotypes of well-heeled patrons at weekend farmers markets, expensive artisanal cheeses, and the prices at fresh food groceries. But these mask the point that historically, most of our food was local – and there was nothing bougie about it.
For centuries, most New Englanders were farmers who grew enough crops and raised enough livestock to feed themselves and their neighbors. The region’s farms weren’t economic powerhouses like those in the South, but they came to symbolize something deeper: a culture of uprightness, perseverance, and productivity, says Keith Stavely, a food historian and co-author of the book “America’s Founding Food.”
“That became more of a paramount value in New England than almost anyplace else,” he says. “Partly because they had to work so hard to make their farms good for them to live on.”
That culture began to shift in the 19th century as railroads brought cheaper wheat from Virginia. At the same time, industrial facilities lured laborers into factories and mills as fewer were needed to work the land.
Subsistence farming gave way to commercial dairying and gardening for market. Refrigeration, and the resulting large-scale grocery stores, meant individuals didn’t need to spend their time growing food. Urbanization and competition from out-of-region farms followed.
Still, what we think of as the modern food system is largely a phenomenon of recent decades. This includes a global supply chain, factory farming, and ultraprocessed foods, which now make up more than 50% of the calories in the American diet, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
What people tend to think of as the “local food movement” is also relatively new. Although its roots are connected to the “back to the land” movement of the mid-1960s, it expanded along with the proliferation of animal factory farming and Big Agriculture in the ’80s and ’90s – along with growing environmental concerns about pesticides and other chemicals.
Farmers markets sprouted across American cities. Author Michael Pollan published his influential book about the industrialized food system in the U.S., “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in 2006; the New Oxford American Dictionary picked “locavore” as its word of the year in 2007.
Although this fascination with locally grown organic foods became popularly associated with progressives – and was regularly criticized as elitist – there was also an emerging libertarian and conservative desire for a different, more localized sort of food system.
“I have long believed this is a bipartisan issue,” says John Klar, a Vermont farmer who in 2022 ran for a Vermont state Senate seat as a Republican, a bid that fell short. “If there’s one thing that should bring Americans together, it is local, healthy food.”
To him, the small farm is inherently conservative – a rejection of what he sees as dangerous globalism. It is a return to self-sufficiency, and far more environmentally and climate friendly, he says, than the traditionally liberal causes of electric vehicles and solar farms.
Mr. Klar also sees corporate malfeasance in claims made both by Republican-leaning corporations and by United Nations organizations that commoditized agriculture and genetically modified produce are the way toward global food security. He wishes more Republicans would reject the cultural premise that fast food and cheap meat equals freedom.
There are some signs that this wish is coming true. The MAHA movement – Make America Healthy Again – has brought anti-industrial agriculture activists into the Trump administration, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the new nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means. Even Ivanka Trump has gotten into the movement, co-founding a “profit-for-purpose” company called Planet Harvest, which pledges to cut food waste and expand access to fresh food.
In other words, the partisan lines around America’s food systems are increasingly scrambled.
“Both sides have been lulled by modernization of agriculture and the technological sirens,” says Mr. Klar. “But both sides are coming back and coming together. These things don’t lend themselves to the red-blue dichotomy.”
And few places, he points out, are better for this reunion than Vermont. Although the popular perception might be that this little state is crunchy granola through and through – this is, after all, home both to Sen. Bernie Sanders and to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of progressive ice cream fame – there are many districts that voted for President Donald Trump. The rural parts of the state are particularly red.
The economic challenges of locally produced food
When Jon Ramsay drives to meet farmers, making his circumference around Hardwick, he tries not to talk politics or climate change or anything else that might bring in the nation’s partisan divisiveness.
He wants to talk about what farmers need. And he wants to hear about how his nonprofit organization, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, can help.
Mr. Ramsay spent his younger years in northwest Connecticut, where he saw firsthand how development pressure can take over farmland, before he moved with his family to a dairy farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Here, he learned the economic challenges of New England agriculture, particularly in Vermont’s dominant dairy industry.
For generations, Vermont has been the dairy capital of the Northeast, and it still supplies two-thirds of the milk in New England. But dairy farmers here, and across the country, have struggled.
Most milk in the U.S., including in Vermont, is sold as a commodity to cooperatives or directly to processors. Its price is determined by a combination of federal regulations, market forces, and regional agreements.
Dairy farmers might not even know what they will get for their milk until after it leaves the farm. In recent years, these payments have not covered costs.
“We’ve been seeing the active number of dairy farms in New England, Vermont, decrease over decades,” Mr. Ramsay says. “When you have milk coming in across the country, everything is global or national. And those macro markets have shifted over time.
“So, we’ve been shifting our focus to ‘OK, what else can we grow and produce here?’” he says. “‘What else can we grow and produce that folks can buy directly from farms?’”
It’s not an easy transition. Most dairy farms have debt, whether because of land costs, large capital investments, or other reasons. Even if the commodity pricing system doesn’t provide a livable wage, it generally pays enough that farmers can make their loan payments.
These farmers can’t easily cut costs – cows, after all, need food regardless of the milk price. But selling those animals and trying something new means income loss in the short term, and failure to make loan payments could, literally, risk the farm.
Mr. Ramsay’s organization, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, was founded in 2004 by a fellow Vermont farmer and businessman named Andrew Meyer. Mr. Meyer had spent years working in federal agricultural policy in Washington, but he returned to his home state, convinced that national policies wouldn’t help Vermont farmers.
What was needed, he believed, was a “whole-of-economy” local approach, one that understood the unique challenges facing his region.
Over the next few years, the Center for an Agricultural Economy started trying to fill the gaps that farmers and residents saw in the local food system. It purchased a downtown green space for community gardens and a farmers market; it built incubator kitchens where food entrepreneurs could develop new products, from hot sauces and kombucha to packaged heritage grains; it contracted with local food pantries and schools to give farmers a place to sell their produce.
It also began the Vermont Farm Fund, which has $1.6 million in revolving funds to provide loans to local Vermont farmers and producers. It has provided more than $4 million in loans since the program started in 2001. Ms. Boyle and Mr. Wolcik, for instance, received money to help build a new barn with a cleaning station for their produce.
Others have received no-interest emergency loans after fires or after the flooding that devastated Vermont farms in the summers of both 2023 and 2024.
These days, the Center for an Agricultural Economy continues those programs. It also hosts community meals and teaches “grow your own” courses. It has a program called Farm Connex, which runs a freight pickup and delivery service for farmers and other food producers in the area, helping them collect and aggregate product and then redistribute it to larger markets.
“We have a lot of agricultural capacity here in terms of farms and resources and land and so many things, but we’re also critically lacking markets for viability,” says Mr. Ramsay. “Some of the unique challenges are where we are situated in New England: our growing season, lack of critical infrastructure. We’re attempting to fill that gap.”
Small farms diversify
On a recent weekday, in a warehouse off one of Hardwick’s two main roads, a team of food workers is busy shredding carrots. There are bags and bags of them, bright orange, ready to be brought to schools, hospitals, and other institutions.
They are part of the Just Cut program, yet another of the organization’s initiatives. Farmers from across the region sell shelf-stable produce to the center, which then does the first-step food processing necessary for institutional kitchens. Then the nonprofit contracts with the buyers.
Connecting farmers with nearby schools and food pantries has also been a goal of federal policy in recent years. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded $14.3 million in Farm to School grants to 154 projects nationwide, reaching an estimated 1.9 million students.
But the Trump administration recently cut more than $1 billion from two pandemic-era initiatives, the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools programs, which had helped schools and food pantries buy directly from small farms. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called the programs “nonessential.”
These cuts will trickle down to the Hardwick program, since the state cannot distribute the money to institutions, which in turn may not have funds to pay Just Cut for the produce.
But those involved with the food economy here say there are other programs and initiatives that could help fill the resulting gap – a sort of diversified approach that many farmers are trying to employ in their own businesses.
This is especially important for Vermont’s struggling dairy industry. Indeed, on the other side of the warehouse, across from the Just Cut workers, the staff of the Vermont Food Venture Center is helping farmers and other food entrepreneurs with business plans. And many of these plans, says Daniel Keeney, the center’s farm and food business specialist, have to do with diversifying existing dairy farms.
Over the past two decades, nearly 1,000 Vermont dairy farms have shifted to producing beef, heritage wheat, or other value-added products like yogurt and cheese. It’s a move that requires assistance, Mr. Keeney says, as well as a supportive local economy.
From baking bread to making flour mills
Blair Marvin grew up in Johnson, Vermont, about 30 minutes northwest of Hardwick. She traveled across the country to attend a culinary school in Washington state, where she met Andrew Heyn, her husband.
When she and Mr. Heyn moved back to her home region, Ms. Marvin started running a café in the town of Morrisville. Baking, she says, was never the plan.
But when the local hobby bread-maker who supplied her café announced he was retiring, he asked her if she might take over his wood-fired oven – which also happened to come with 10 acres and a house.
As soon as she saw the property, she remembers, she knew it was home. So, in 2004, Ms. Marvin and Mr. Heyn decided to expand, launching a business called Elmore Mountain Bread.
As Ms. Marvin settled into her new production routines, she realized that bread and gluten were becoming out of fashion among some seeking to optimize their health. And she noticed, too, that while the community around her was newly focused on where its meat, eggs, and cheeses originated, it didn’t seem to think much about what went into the bread.
Flour, it seemed to her, was the final frontier of the local food movement. She started exploring where her primary ingredient, wheat, was grown, and how.
She learned of the national commodity wheat system, and how monocrops are grown in the Great Plains, stored in grain bins, and then milled elsewhere. That flour gets shipped across the country, is warehoused, and finally ends up on grocery store shelves.
“Vermont being an agricultural state, I was like, ‘How come bakeries and restaurants aren’t using local grains in their bread, pastries, pizza?’” she says. “There is so much farmland and so, so many farms here.”
She decided that she wanted to use 100% organic, Vermont-grown wheat, sourced directly from farmers within 50 miles of her bakery.
Mr. Heyn built a mill so they could process this local wheat into flour – a project that ended up blossoming into its own business, New American Stone Mills, which sells mills to other bakers and processors around the world.
But finding a grain supplier proved challenging.
“We had this goal,” she says. “But all of a sudden, we were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this mill. We’ve got the desire. But almost nobody is growing wheat.’”
Eventually, she says, a mutual friend connected her with a young couple who were hoping to diversify their dairy by planting organic wheat on some of their acreage.
“They had 20 acres of wheat but didn’t have a mill and didn’t know what to do with it,” Ms. Marvin says. “So, it was a match made in heaven. I agreed to buy everything they had for twice as much as what they’d get on the commodity market. And we started telling each other’s story.”
Other farmers took notice. So did other bakers. And consumers. Eventually, an organic wheat market grew up in Vermont, with farmers – often those who had been involved in dairying – planting more acreage of the grain. More local bakeries began milling.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when neither bread nor flour was on grocery store shelves, Ms. Marvin was milling “hundreds of pounds of flour every day.”
“It’s the goal to simplify the food chain,” she says. “That’s building so much resiliency into the local food system.”
Food security depends on human connections
The issue of food security has been in the forefront for many agricultural policymakers and advocates in New England. This includes the concept of food sovereignty, or the amount of self-sufficiency a region has in its food supply chain.
“Farms in New England, family farms, are losing their economic viability for a whole host of reasons and therefore are having to go out of business,” says Sarah Gardner an environmental studies scholar at Williams College in Massachusetts. “As we lose farmland, we lose our ability to be food secure. We are not even close to [being] food secure.”
At most, she and other analysts say, about 11% of New England food comes from New England. Some policymakers have set a goal to increase local food consumption to 30% by 2030, and to at least 50% by 2060.
But those numbers can mask the complexities of what a “resilient local food economy” means, say many who work in the Hardwick area.
Does it mean the local peanut butter producer using the Center for an Agricultural Economy’s test kitchen, but who sources her peanuts from another state? Or how about Jasper Hill Farm cheese, with its local milk and operations, but which sells to high-end markets across the country?
“Are we imagining people stopping by the farm stand that’s quaintly there on the side of the road on the way home from work?” says Martha Caswell, who is part of the Institute for Agroecology at the University of Vermont and who works with growers in central Vermont. “Or are we talking about having the food grown in a certain radius be affordable, with a dignified price to farmers?”
For a local economy to be resilient, she says, it needs to keep dollars circulating within the area. The modern food system, she says, with its global commodity supply chain, is made to be cheap at the point of sale.
But it has costs elsewhere – in environmental degradation, dollars leaving the region, and, according to many, the nutrition of the food itself.
Creating an alternative is complicated, Ms. Caswell acknowledges. That’s in part because it requires both mindset and behavior shifts.
“The root of these problems, yes, they’re economic,” says Kathleen Fitzgerald, co-author with Mr. Stavely of “America’s Founding Food.”
“But it’s people’s thinking that drives the market,” she says. “If you desire something different, like learning to grow your own food, that becomes a value.”
It also depends on human connections.
At the Craftsbury General Store, known in these parts as The Genny, co-owner Kit Basom points out the prepared food section, where an array of sandwiches and salads uses Just Cut produce. Ms. Basom is another Vermont-born food enthusiast who moved across the country but eventually returned to her home region.
She ponders the question of why a local food economy might work here, in rural Hardwick. Vermont, she guesses, is a small enough state, with enough of a culture of neighborliness that it’s possible to attempt this new approach to prosperity and food security.
Indeed, in a short radius around her store, there are larger dairies, family orchards, homestead farm stands, and larger operations growing organic greens. Among these are world-renowned cheesemakers and direct-to-consumer yogurt-makers. Restaurants and test kitchens and a farmers market each have regular patrons.
“There is a community of people who are trying to make sure that food produced here can be enjoyed here,” Ms. Basom says. “There is attention being paid to it. There are people making it a priority.”
Staff writers Troy Aidan Sambajon and Kendra Nordin Beato contributed reporting to this story.
