How community-supported agriculture is working for one northern Vermont city:

You might think it would be difficult to find a cheerful and optimistic farmer the year a hurricane wiped out most of the crop, but I did so in Burlington, Vt., the day after Thanksgiving. I was visiting the Intervale Center, a nonprofit that manages a 350-plus-acre flood plain not far from downtown.

The Intervale, which is on the Winooski River, has been farmland for nearly the entire time humans have lived in this region, not only because land that floods is especially fertile (think of the Nile), but because it isn’t much good for anything else. “The Intervale was always a smart place to grow food,” says Will Raap, the founder of Gardener’s Supply, headquartered in the Intervale. “It’s fertile and flat, and there’s plenty of water. And as Burlington grew it didn’t get developed because it floods.” Twenty-five years ago, part of it was planted in corn and much of the rest had become an informal dump.

Raap happened upon the land back then, saw its potential and teamed with Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders (the now-heroic Vermont senator, with whom I was touring the Intervale Center) to begin seeding and incubating small businesses and farms in the Intervale. The Center’s goals are familiar ones, but worth repeating: to use the land responsibly and sustainably, to help farmers make a living, and to make needed connections among people, farms and food.

A $7,000 loan from the city helped create a central composting facility (it’s now a profitable business), but the big plan was to provide a home for new farmers, on plots ranging from one to 40 acres. This goal was quickly realized, beautifully, and the results form the core of a regional system that’s providing local food in significant and ever-increasing amounts.

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