Farms, Land, People: Stories of the Intervale Center

So, I'm Travis Marquott. I'm the executive director of the Interbell Center. [cheering] [applause] >> It's my pleasure um to welcome everybody here for the first ever Farms Lar people stories of the Interville. We've never done this. Um, and our whole goal was really to figure out how we can have people of the community who have experiences in the interell come share a little bit of that magic uh with everybody. And I think the turnout tonight and all the new faces um really underscore we've sort of hit the nail on the head with this one. Um I'm not going to talk a whole lot. I want to thank um Flynn uh Flynn Space for making this available for us tonight. It's an amazing space. Um the bar will be open um along the way. I think I'd encourage people to stay through the stories um and then engage in in the bar and some mingling afterwards. Um I'm going to introduce everybody uh here and then sit down kind of get out of the way uh and relax and then come back up and and thank everybody a little bit. So without uh further ado, I want to go through the list of people that are going to be speaking tonight. So, first off, we've got Mandy Fischer, our development director at the Intervil Center. [applause] Tom Hutzmith, a former board member and an amazing leader in our community, worked at UVM for a very long time. So, Tom Husb's going to come up. [applause] Bill Mayers, who you get to see here on the radio quite often and has been institution in the inner round bees for a very long time. Super excited for Bill to coming up. >> [applause] >> And Ron Prep's gonna share a story with us tonight. [applause] >> And Ron told me that the audience would say Old Woodchuck, so I didn't have to. So, welcome Ron, and thank you very much. Then we're going to move to Eric Sites, who's one of the co-owners of Pitchfork Farm in the intro. [applause] >> Melissa Passen is going to tell us a very nice story. a local author that you guys all probably know quite well. [applause] And we're going to round it out with Seth Gillum, who used to work at the Interbell Center uh and is now at the Simba program and is going to take us home with a great story. [applause] >> So, the storytellers are going to go one right after another um and they'll introduce each other along the way. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mandy Fischer, who I've worked with for almost 12 years now at the Interbell Center. Uh, an instrumental person on our staff. Welcome, Mandy. [applause] I was born in a rural hospital in Milford, Delaware, in the same delivery room where my father and his twin brother were born at six o'clock at night, dinnertime. Now, Milford is a poultry processing town. And what I mean by that is last year 605 million birds were raised and slaughtered within 90 minutes of the house where I grew up. When I say chicken processing, I mean instead of like a regular like this is a joke, so I'm messing it up. [laughter] In instead of a regular traffic report in the morning on the radio, you can call in to alert other drivers to where there's chickens literally crossing the road. >> [laughter] >> That's true. Totally true. So, my father was a fertilizer and feed salesman and my mother was a special education teacher and I was raised in a ranch house with red vinyl siding on about an acre of land that had a creek and a swamp in the backyard. Um, and my childhood was kind of hard. It wasn't very fun. I a lot of like bad things happened that I didn't understand as a kid. And I was also fat. I had terrible teeth. I couldn't read. Um, and I didn't really have any friends. But I did have one friend, Beth, who lived up the hill from me. She also didn't have any other friends. And, um, so Beth would come over after school and she and I would go play in the creek and in the swamp. And there was basically three things we like to do out there. One, fight. Two, try to get some snakes on sticks and then fight with the snake sticks. And three, dare each other to smell stinky stuff in the swamp. I [laughter] I also played these same g games plus crabs in the salt marsh in the summer with my two cousins who would hang out with me. Um, so but all that being said, the marsh, the swamp, the creek, these were real refugees for me as a kid. And another place that I really love to go was the convent. Um, my great aunt Daty, who's still alive. She's 102, um, was Mother Superior when I was a kid. And I'd go to the convent and I would play in the orphanage where they were no longer children. And I was like a superstar child at the orphanage, I mean at the convent. And um I just really loved sitting among the nuns while they sang and I loved how devoted they were and I loved how they treated me like they're equal and they asked me big important questions. This was a place of big questions every day. Um and I fell in love with those questions. Um and and eventually went on to study theology starting in high school then in college and then ended up at Harvard Divinity School where I was training to become a theologian. And in particular, what was interesting to me was the problem of evil, which in the theology is known as theodysy. And basically the problem of evil is if God is all good, all knowing and everywhere, how does evil exist in the world? Another way to think about it is how do you justify the existence of God given evil? Um, and this is a question that I became very very curious about. um my studies led led me to the University of Chicago and while I was there I started to become kind of disillusioned. I was wondering about what this education I was getting was going to do for the world. Um and I started to get more and more interested in um kind of vernacular American life and and sort of getting back into an interest in landscape and agriculture that I'd had as a child. Um, and one day I was I remember very clearly my sourdough was out on the counter. I was reading a book and I came upon in this book I don't know what book two lines about this place the inner veil and this place the innervale that I knew nothing about started to haunt me. I started to think about this place and um eventually I went to my dissertation committee and I said, "Hey you guys, I think I want to go to Vermont and like check this place out." Um and they were like, "Do it. You know, you can go for a year. We'll keep your fellowship. Come back." Um so over Thanksgiving, I packed up my stuff and we moved to Vermont December 1st. That's a joke. [laughter] And uh you know and then I so then a few days later I I walked down the hill to the intervvil and I walked in the doors and there was no heat and there was like plastic and stuff boarded up and I didn't question why I had done this. Um, I met Aziza Malik, who's here, who, um, was then the coordinator of Healthy City, and she put me right to work raising money. And, um, then spring came and I was in the greenhouse. And then eventually I was out clearing, you know, uh, hay from the strawberries that had overwintered. And, um, with my friend Aziza. Um, and some people would maybe say there was like some divine intervention that led me to the interval. Um, which is interesting because I've always considered it the first real decision I've ever made in my life to come here. Um, but that's also very American of me because Americans always answer everything including the problem of evil with free will, right? So maybe it was free will. Maybe it was divine intervention very elegantly disguised as free will. [laughter] You guys are really getting to know me right now. So eventually I got got an actual job at the interval. It was 15 hours a week, $11 an hour, and I was the grants coordinator, the administrative assistant, and the assistant to the director of agricultural services. So basically, I just did whatever anyone told me to do. I had no desk and no computer. I had a file, like a little file folder that I just carried around with me and I sat at anyone else's desk when they weren't there. This is staff laughing really hard. [laughter] And um eventually I did get a computer and then I got a desk in Travis's office which he was not happy about at all. Um but but from that office, you know, we weathered the transition of compost. We weathered the departure of over half of our colleagues and we really started to build with a with a you know a handful of really brilliant people some of whom are here um the Interville food hub which is now a thriving social enterprise for our community and um our agricultural services programs that now serve 100 farmers all over the state of Vermont every year. Um so and I just kept doing whatever was asked of me. Um, that's kind of been my philosophy the whole time. Um, so obviously there are some similarities between Milford and what I do now, but there's also some really big differences. Um, in Milford, um, you know, Milford is a town that's run by Purdue. And no offense to Purdue or any other multinational corporation, [laughter] looking at you guys. Um, but they don't care about people. They don't they don't care about farmers, workers, eaters. They don't care about animals. They don't care about the earth. And the reality is, if they did, we would live in a much much different world than the one we live in. But at the Intervale, we care about all beings. And instead of extracting wealth from our rural communities, what we're really trying to do is put wealth in. Put wealth in terms of soil, in terms of community, in terms of business, in terms of ecological health. And that's what inspires me every day at my job and inspires me. All of you come here tonight to celebrate that with us. It's amazing. So obviously I'm not yet a professional theologian but I still like to ask big questions and those include like who am I? Why am I here? Um I'm still also really interested in this problem of evil. There is so much evil in the world. But I think my approach now to this question is what good can I do now? And one thing I do not question is whether or not I am in the right place to do good because I know that I am. Thank you. [applause] [applause] >> [applause] >> Got the squat there. I'll get you set up. Thank Thank you very much. I'm Tom Hudsmith and ever since I came to Burlington in 1972, the Intervil has played a very important role in my life and subsequently my families. My wife, our daughters as they grew up, and even now our four-year-old grandson and six-month old granddaughter when they come visit us from Putney. I like to take long walks in the Intervail, almost always with the dogs, bike some on the on the road, and in the winter cross-country ski except when I have both knees replaced. I love to uh commune with nature. Uh so I've seen lots of beavers, a few mink, lots of foxes, um and even some coyotes crossing over the frozen Wooki River. A whole a whole pack of coyotes one time. While I've never seen bear, I have found bear scat on a few occasions. nor have I ever seen moose, but I did see the moose tracks, the big hoof prints for the moose that wandered around in the Interval a few years ago that I'm sure quite a few of you did encounter. And of course, lots of birds, including bald eagles along the river and in the former Interville compost site and great rafts of Mecanzers, common and hooded morganzers around the bend of the river uh in the in the wintertime lots of times. also like to botonize uh especially in that rich um silver maple ostrich fern nettle forest uh riverine floodplane forest that's often on a hot summer day easily 20 degrees cooler in the shade than the nearby adjacent uh farm farm field. It's been sad for me to notice the changes in the lower baceous layer of that floodplane forest over time. Back in the 70s and 80s and 90s, I would see very colorful spring wild flowersowers at this time of year. And keep in mind this we're very late spring this year. We should have a lot all these things I'm going to mention, you know, bloodroot and um hpatica and [clears throat] um trout lily and lots of different kind of violets and even some uh trillium. But over the past couple of decades, they've all been smothered by the invasive uh plant called agopodium, bishop's weed or goutweed, and to a lesser degree by another invasive, the Japanese knotweed. Our family has gone on uh to the Intervil lots as our as our daughters grew up. Picking blueberries at Adamsberries when it was there. Uh picking pumpkins at Fat Mitchell's Pumpkin Patch when it was there and strawberries at Full Moon Farm when it was there. All along getting to know many of the farmers. Uh quite a few of whom are former environmental studies or natural resource students and many of whom we would also see regularly at the Burlington Farmers Market on Saturdays. In the early 90s we joined uh one summer we joined the CSA community supported agriculture associated with ICF inville community farm. I think it was the second year they had the CSA. And when we bought our share in the fall we had these visions of going down every week and picking up our share and getting you know tomatoes and lettuce and squash and beans and and um beets and onions and so forth. And that summer was very cold and very wet and they didn't have the ICF did not have the hoop houses at that point. So when the summer came along, we were somewhat disappointed when we go down and those vegetables I mentioned that would be relatively skimpy little portions of those, but there would be volumes and volumes of bok choy and cilantro. So needless to say, we had to become somewhat creative u that summer in coming up with culinary uses of these bushels of bok choy and cilantro. I've also helped glean for the food shelf um usually zucchini squash and sometimes I've never seen zucchini squash that are that big before, but they they get that big in the interval. and also helped out together with some the uh Interval Conservation Nursery staff and other volunteers in in collecting cutings of redwig dog woods and seeds and nuts and berries. And as Travis mentioned, I served on the board of directors of Interville Center from 2005 to 2010. So three years ago, I retired from teaching and doing research in environmental studies and natural resources at the University of Vermont after 43 years. My teaching approach was to provide active, engaged, authentic, hands-on experiential learning opportunities for the students, blending theory with practice and often having service learning opportunities where the students could engage with community partners in real world problem solving uh that hopefully benefited the community partners. More often than not did benefit the partners, I should add. And often those partnerships um had some relationship with some of the research that I was doing at the time and the writing that I was doing at the time including Interval Foundation and subsequently Interval Center. One of the courses was environmental interpretation which has to do with communicating about natural history and cultural heritage and environmental issues to visitors to national parks and nature centers, museums, botanical gardens, zoos, uh forest or farms like the Intervil. And for that class, the students would uh develop interpretive master plans and self-guided trails and exhibits for such partners as the uh Green Mountain Ottoban Nature Center in Huntington, um the Kingsland Bay State Park, Green Mountain National Forest and many others. But for the last couple of decades, the focus of the course became pretty much interpreting food and beverage in Vermont. And so the partners for which the students developed their interpretive media tended to be like Champlain Chocolates on Pine Street and Cold Hollow Solderm Mill and Waterberry Center and of course the Intervil Farms, the farms in the Interval Center. The 25 seniors in the environmental interpretation class gained valuable experience leading almost 300 firstear environmental studies one introduction to environmental studies students on field trips on guided field trips of the farms in the interval during the week and the fall semester when the students were studying sustainable agriculture and agroecology uh in their readings and lectures. In the early 90s, um, we join, our family joined, uh, CSA, community supported agriculture, one summer. I think it was the second summer that I see Interville Community Farm had sponsored it. And when we signed up for our share in the fall, we had these visions of going down every week. Um, and I already I already went there. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. So, I got there. Okay. So, the interpretation class. Back to the interpretation class. Um, besides that class, there was a creating environmental s environmentally sustainable communities class. And over a quarter of a century for that class, I uh developed over 300 sustainability stories about individuals and groups in the greater Burlington area who serve as role models or exemplars for others to follow in transitioning to more sustainable, environmentally sustainable lifestyles. people who inspire, encourage, empower others. Uh these kind of creative visionaries who have a create a vision of a sustainable future, an alternative to the status quo, to business as usual, which in two far too many cases is is not sustainable at all, and then work to achieve that vision, to put it into reality. Since sustainability, development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs has become a concept or principle. Some 30 years ago uh in the publication of our common future, the Bruntland Commission report, there have been people who uh challenge it and are critical of sustainability claiming that it's too vague, it's too abstract, it's just a passing fad or it's something that happens in the global south. but certainly not in places like here. So my response to that has been all along to try to operationalize sustainability, to try to make it come alive, to try to make it more concrete, to humanize it and put a face on it through these stories that hopefully inspire and uh that are local and place-based and yet have global implications and ideally also serve as an antidote to the doom and gloom stories that we tend to be hammered with far too often. So, of these some 300 stories that were developed for that class, the ones that readers and listeners find have found to be by far the most engaging, most compelling, the ones that they have most follow-up questions about and want to know so much more about have to do with the farmer program in the Interale Center and the individual farmers in the Interval, incubator farmers, enterprise farmers, mentor farmers, and as most of you probably know, a lot of the incub Incubator farmers go on to become enterprise farmers and mentor farmers. And of course, some of them successfully transition away from the innervale when they purchase or lease their own farms uh often on Vermont Land Trust conserved properties. So, it's been my delight to share stories of the innervale farmers with students in my classes over the decades as well as with visitors to the innervale on field trips at elite uh such as in the summers for UVM has a campus sustainability leadership program that brings educators from across the country here and over the decades to hundreds of participants at conferences that UVM has sponsored. conferences in environmental education, sustainable communities, environmental studies, natural resources, and ecological economics. So in summary, over the 46 years that I've had the chance to interact with this amazing and special place called the Intervale, there's been a lot of continuity, but there's also been change, much of it for the better, especially the increase in the reputation of Interval Center for its farm program and for especially the incubator farmer program is providing a replicable model of local organic place-based agriculture that provides a sustainable alternative to the conventional faceless industrialized agriculture that mines our top soil that pollutes with herbicides and pesticides and that uses fossil fuels to transport food on an average of 1500 miles from where it's grown or produced to where it's consumed. So sustainability and community building are right here before us, right before our very eyes right now. and the inter the folks in the interval center are leading the charge. Thank you. [applause] Not too far. Can you all hear me? >> Okay. Um, thank you all for coming. This is an incredible turnout. Um, and um, thank you all for supporting the uh, intervail. Um, um, I was um, raised in Texas in a very small town. In fact, it was so small that the welcome and goodbye signs were on the same post. Um, I had a horse uh and my brothers and I had chickens and that was our outdoor activities um until about 20 years later when uh my wife and I moved to St. Osbury and uh I was working for a newspaper across the river in um New Hampshire and uh we were living in this old rundown farmhouse and so it was a time when people were doing back to the land things and uh so we dipped our toes into a sheep and um a large garden and um what else? Chickens. uh bees and I made a lot of homebrew, not very well, but the two things that stuck for me anyway were the beer, which is not tonight's subject, but and also the bees. And one of the reasons that I did that was because in um St. Johnsbury or in Laura Waterford which was the joining joining town there was a retired geologist a man named Arnold Waters who had spent his professional life searching for diamonds all around the world. He worked for Debeers and he was um a sort of banam rooster kind of guy. He he weighed about 125 pounds soaking wet with a brick in each hand. Um, but he was tough as nails and what's more he was an excellent beekeeper and even more than that he was a great teacher and he became the pied piper of beekeeping in the northeast kingdom and he's the one who introduced me to bees. Uh he showed me what to buy. He comforted me when my uh bees were destroyed by a bear. uh and uh I swore at the time that if ever I grew to his age, I would be a teacher as he was. Well, uh five or six years later, my wife and I moved to Burlington and I wanted to take my hives with me and I searched around and I had a succession of homes for those bees. first in Willist and then in Shelurn and then in South Burlington and uh finally uh a couple of highs behind my house in on South Will Willard Street and also at uh up at UVM off of Spear Street. Well, in the 80s um I think it was Penrose Jackson who was the um executive director of the foundation. she invited me to go on the board and I was on the board. Well, I didn't contribute very much, but I do remember a board meeting where we were talking about numbers and I was sort of daydreaming and and I was looking for another place to put bees and I thought, well, how about the intervail? So, I asked Penrose and she said it was okay and other board members seem to be okay. So, I brought three or four hives and we put them on the burm down there below the settling pond and that was really nice. Uh, and so I had three places where I had bees. But at the same time, and this was talking about uh I don't know, not free will or fate. Um the uh Vermont Beekeepers Association, of which I was the secretary, decided that they wanted to move their um they had a lot I mean a a set of hives down in Addison and they wanted it closer to the population base of northwestern Vermont. And so I said, "Well, why don't you bring them up to uh the intervvil and we'll or if you don't, we'll use my hives and we'll use those for our seven workshops that we uh spread out through the course of the year." Well, they did that and uh so then we had this great set of of hives to uh to teach with. And at this about the same time I was teaching history at C view high school. They started a a program to teach [clears throat] uh well it was called access and you the the the the motto was teach your passion and I said well I could teach beekeeping. So we started a evening class uh we first year we had six people and then the next year we had 12 and then the next year we did it twice and the next year after that we did three times. And so over the last 15 years, we probably taught 800 900 people beekeeping. Um, so the great thing is this is this marriage, this this linking of the two kinds of teaching where we can do the classroom teaching at CBU and then people can come and get some hands-on experience at the intervail. And um, teaching beekeeping is really great. I mean it's um I I I the first thing I always say in the class is you know teaching beekeeping is like dealing legal drugs because you you really get a chance to uh challenge to turn people on to this incredible hobby that is helps it helps to sustain our world. Uh the bees frankly are not going to survive without humans now. They're under a lot of stress. Uh the beekeeping is both an art and a science. It's uh uh farming for intellectuals says uh Sue Hubble, woman who wrote a great book about bees and um you get a chance to work with nature and work it's art and science. So it's it's really it's been a wonderful experience to both teach in the class and to teach uh out in the field. And um so I've been grateful to the Intervale Foundation for the Intervale for this this space. And um even now I have two partners um Dan Gusen who's here and Ron Hernandez. We are BTV honey and we sell our honey to food hub. So if you're buying stuff from the food hub, we hope you're eating our honey. Um, and I am happy to say that uh I've gotten to that I hope Arnold Waters uh at his just reward is uh approves of my work in in his memory. And uh I like to remember what Kirk Webster, who's a beekeeper in Brickport, says um that the bees are the color, everything else is black and white. Thanks very much. [applause] >> [applause] >> Oh, thank you. >> I've been a member of the Tommy Thompson Community Garden for about 20 years, give or take. Not sure how [laughter] many. but it's been a long time. Uh Tommy Thompson is an amazing place. We have about three acres of community garden. It's by far the largest community garden in the state. It's surrounded by fields, forests, and the Wooki River. I remember early on when I was gardening down there, if I stayed too long, Reena Caukins um cows would get ahead of me. They'd be meandering down the road and I'd get behind them. And in a way, it was good because I slowed down. And after all, we all have to slow down. Um >> Yeah. You don't see the cows there anymore, but the barn, they were going down to where the Interville Center is located. There was a barn nearby, so that's where they ended up. And eventually I went home. Uh it was like meditation practice. Um over the years uh we've had many immigrants come and garden down at Tommy Thompson. They generally it was generally because of the wars that were taking place all over the world. Um, Aayika Sarasova from Eastern Europe came with her heirloom tomato seeds which she gave to me and I grew tomatoes and then I gave tomato seeds to other folks who grew tomatoes. Um the my my family from Vietnam grew greens and they grew lots of greens and one time they gave me some crosanthemum greens. So I took them home and I put them in a salad and boy were they nasty tasting. [laughter] So I went back the next day and I spoke to the m my family and they started chuckling. They said, "Ron, you got to steam them and then you got to add herbs." So they said, "Come back the next day." And they steamed some up for me and they put garlic and herbs and and they were delicious. Phoebe and uh Ramun [clears throat] Phoebe and Raundo were from Managa, Nicaragua, which I had visited a number of times. and they brought with them peppers and of course they gave me the seeds and I grew them and then I gave other folks seeds and they grew them. Now Phoebe and Raundo um one night in the middle of winter they invited me over to their house in the old north end. They said they were going to have a barbecue and I was thinking to myself, isn't it a little cold to be having a barbecue? Well, I I went into their house and next to the window with a fan, they had a barbecue [laughter] and it was a very interest I mean, I I chuckled to myself and I said, "This is like being in Nicaragua out in the countryside where many people have poor homes and they don't have the kitchens. They use uh they use wood to cook on." And so there would be smoke in the kitchen. Phoebe and Raundo worked at Costco and they ran the bakery with other with their other friends and I had never been to Costco and they kept inviting me and I said, "Well, okay." But they said, "We'll meet you at the front door." So when I walked in, I I was undergoing culture shock. I mean, what an irony. Here they were from Nicaragua. They came here. They worked in the bakery. And when I met him at the front door, they had to hold my hand. Eventually, Phoebe and Roundo uh moved to Brownsville, Texas, where they ran the greenhouse uh for Costco. And now and then they come back and we visit with each other with no barbecues. Um, there are many other folks I could talk about. Everything wasn't always beautiful down in the interval at at times. Well, it was what I called the dark side. I remember meeting a guy who was wearing a backpack and he had some binoculars and he was, you know, looking up at the birds and I know a little bit about birds, not a lot. And so I would point to a bird and I would name it and then I would point to another bird and I said, "What kind of bird is that?" And I kept pointing to birds and he didn't know the names of those birds. So I asked him to empty his backpack and it was full of vegetables. Well, another time there were two older ladies, sort of grandmothers that were driving an old Volvo station wagon. And I noticed they kept driving into the gardens a lot. And um I went over to speak to them and I asked them if they were members of the community garden and they said they weren't. And they said, "Well, isn't this a community garden?" And I said, "Yeah, but you got to pay and you got to do the work." So that was the last time I saw the the grandmothers. Sunny Martin was a homeless fellow and he um he was a very nice gentleman. He was living at a at a residence for homeless people who had disabilities and he loved being down in the Interville and he Burlington Parks and Wreck gave him a weed whacker and eventually he got the name Sunny the weed whacker because when someone didn't take care of their gardens, Sunny would whack them down. [laughter] He also had a lawnmower [laughter] and he he did this amazing he kept the he kept Tommy Thompson looking parklike. He'd mow behind the sheds. He'd mow along the fence line and sometimes he actually mowled people's garden step. [laughter] Well, he died a number of years ago and he sorely missed. It's interesting because he loved being down there so much that in late fall after the gardens had been put to bed. You'd see Sunny with his car down there just hanging out because he loved being down there so much. So, we really miss Sunny. Um, I'm trying to remember the rest of what I supposed to say. Um I remember I was a coordinator there for about 15 years and every year we had not every year almost every year we had a potluck supper and one year in particular there were no large number of Bosnian families down there and we [clears throat] had the potluck and the food that the Bosnian families bought it was So good. The hippie families brought carrot sticks and celery stocks. So, [laughter] but anyway, what was amazing about that night is I had an epiphany. I said, "Let's stand in a circle. Let's hold hands and let's share what our country of origin, where where your grandparents came from." And of course there were no Native Americans among the group. So every everyone came from different parts to the world. And it was amazing because you had this feeling that in a way we're all immigrants. And today is a very special day because Martin Luther King used to talk about this country as a nation of immigrants. And of course you all know that it's been 50 years of his passing. Thank you. [applause] >> [applause] >> Hello everyone. Hello. Can you hear me? All right. Great. Wow, there's a lot of you. Hi, I'm Eric. Uh, I am one of the owners of Pitchfork Farm. Uh, I've been down there since 2006. I started uh when I was 22. Uh I was out sort of on a one acre like modest parcel on the outskirts of the innervale. And um you know I don't really have like one big story, one long story to tell you. Um I want to share with you a story of my time down there. You know the last 13 years. Um and sort of some of the lessons I've learned over the years. Um, you know, not not like the technical farmy stuff like uh protek and reay or indeterminant versus determinant tomatoes, silver mulch and black plastic. That stuff's boring. I want to talk about interail stuff. I think things that you guys would be interested in stuff everyone should know. Um, you know, if if you don't eat eat anything all day and all you eat is the free popcorn at Ace Hardware, that's okay. Stuff like that. You know, like the stop sign on the way down the Interville, that's mostly a suggestion, I think. Um, it's pronounced Charlie Boys. All right. Um, you know, the Interell, it's among other things, it's a collection of farms. It's many things, but it's a collection of farms. And uh it's from the farmers I've learned a lot. Um you know Dylan at Diggers, he showed me that you want to if you want fall carrots, you got to start them in mid July. If you go into August, you're not they're not going to develop. Um halfpint farm Mar and Spencer, they showed me that the more spectacularly beautiful your farm stand is, the better your sales will be at the farmers market. Um, Thomas Case from Arthusa, he showed me that I'll never ever grow a beard as glorious as he can. Um, my dog, he showed me that if he kills and eats a groundhog, I don't have to feed him for 4 days. [laughter] Uh, the goddamn deer taught me about electric fencing. Um, the Intervil is a flood plane. We know that. Um, and I learned quickly. I think my first year, that first year in uh in May before Memorial Day, we had a flood. I think the river hit 16 feet. I don't think I looked it up. It hit 16 feet. And uh I uh I bought a canoe from Tom actually. And I was paddling around gathering up, ironically, boxes of irrigation equipment that were [laughter] uh floating away. and uh paddling through fields and trees where you know just the day before had been peas and chard and lettuce. It was a pain in the ass. But you know after the flood comes the mosquitoes and um but you pick your you pick your head up and uh you pivot and uh I learned to make sales and I I started with restaurants and I love restaurants and uh as my my business has grown over the years. of the restaurants I've worked with, you know, Flatbread, Skinny Pancake, The Farmhouse Group, you know, these institutions. And I've I've worked with restaurants that have gone I, you know, Lamonte and Ice House and Smoke Jacks. I've seen the inside of every kitchen in this town, I can tell you. Um, and I've made lifelong friends with chefs and buyers. And some of the lessons I've learned, the smaller, as a general rule, the smaller the vegetable, the better price you get. Um, uh, if you can, you always say yes to a chef in a bind. They need salad greens at 5:00 on a Sunday afternoon. You can, and you can do it, you do it. Um, it never ever ever gets old seeing your name on the chalkboard in the menus uh of the restaurants and grocery stores you work with. And I'll, you know, I'll never forget the first time that happened to me. I uh I was a skinny kid, skinny muddy kid. I wandered down into the basement at Smokejacks. It was the first time I met our all of our good friends, uh, Frank Pace. Um, he was the chef there at the time. And I I wandered down to make a sales pitch. I was bringing what we call a a toy box. It's a a box of mixed vegetables, stuff that's ready at the time. And I think I brought him like purple peppers and little Asian eggplants and tiny artichokes. Uh what else? Zephr summer squash. And he freaked out. It was amazing. He kicked me out of the kitchen and I which was actually okay. He sent me back to the farm and told me to bring back bring him back a couple cases of everything [clears throat] and uh and it was amazing. He ran a special that night uh with all that stuff. And I uh I'll never forget it. It was just an incredible act of encouragement and uh and you know, we've been partners in food ever since. What else have I learned? Um it's better to have the crop and not the sale than to have the sale without the crop. Um early on, I forget which season it was. It was very early though. We grew like I don't know 1,200 habanero plants, an insane amount of hot peppers. And uh that September as uh as they all ripened and obviously the deer weren't eating them, I um I scrambled. I had to find a home for them and I called around and I found a hot sauce company in South Burlington. They had a like a copack facility [snorts] and I got on the horn and uh the guy answered the phone. I said, "Hi, I'm Eric from Pitchfork Farm. I grow all these hot peppers. Do you have any need for, you know, I grew like a ton of them? And the guy was like, let me think. Ton, huh? Yeah, we could take 2,000 lb. I was like, okay, wait, wait. [laughter] I back it up. Okay. Uh, you know, I think I sold him four or 500 lb. But the next year, the next year we sold him, I think, a ton of hot peppers. Um, and then, uh, 2011, uh, I learned that when it rains it pours. That was a hard year, I think. Um, it was a a snowy winter, a lot of snow in the mountains, and then a cold, wet spring punctuated by a lot of rain. And you guys may all remember, but the lake couldn't take anymore. And the water sat pulled in our fields for a long time. I don't think we were actually able to do anything till mid June. Um and then in July, uh my dog of a long time and actually the farm's namesake, he died suddenly and we buried him under a tree right next to the field and where he uh he's uh eternally scaring away deer and feral cats and uh and then yeah, late late August was Irene. The river hit 23 feet, jumped the banks, came roaring into our fields, and uh you know, if you said, "Hey, Eric, here's a calendar." appointed a date. What's the worst date for a catastrophic flood? I think August 28th would be it. Um, you know, we got summer crops and like full bloom and then fall crops and their early stages of development all just washed away or rendered unsellable. Um, I think that was a low point for all of us, but we persevered clearly. Um, and in that I learned that uh pigs are not my spirit animal. They are uh smelly Jerks. Strong head jerks. They uh they will scatter like kids from a high school party that the cops have just arrived at. They just take off. Um I learned that nettle stings in your armpit will last for weeks. Uh that a uh you know a car battery I think fetches a thief five bucks. And that 20 [clears throat] questions with your co-workers never ever ever gets old. Um, you know, I learned that farms come and go. You know, people and farms, they come and go. Open Heart Farm, Striker Farm, Samara Farm, Bessie Field Eggs, Fat Mitchell's Pumpkin Patch, uh, you know, Full Moon Farm, Adam's Berries, Needy Farm, Innerbell, Intervil Beaned Grain. uh you know they just it's it's unbelievable all these people that I've known that have come and gone and all these fine people I've I've had the immense pleasure to to know to work with to learn from. Um yeah uh I've learned uh what else have I learned Molly? What's after Oh yeah. Uh thank you. I've learned, thank you, my wife. Uh, I've learned that in this life, it's really, really important to have people on your side. Uh, people guiding you. People like Mandy, like Travis, like Bobby, like Sona guiding you and pushing you, you know, uh, pushing you, [clears throat] rooting for you. Um, I've learned that an appendecttomy in July is a setback. Um, I've learned that uh there's big fish in the Manooki and fishing for them at the end of day is a great way to end a rough week. Um, and I've learned that geniuses geniuses walk amongst us and having one as a business partner is helpful. Um, speaking of geniuses, I've learned that nothing burns like a wax box except a large pile of them. And on a related note, that springtime grass fires are possible and that the Burlington Fire Department can carry their own water and fire trucks. So, so that's good to know. Um, I've learned that the uh the best place in the world, I think, to watch the sunset is uh the picnic table next to my field with a cold beer and your co-workers on a Friday laughing about the week. Sorry, I got a little time up here. Uh, and I've learned that uh, you know, I've learned what the Interval means to the city. Um, that the, uh, the sum of the Interval is greater than its parts. It's not just the farms or the the tree nursery. It's not the river or, the paths, the cross country skiing, the food hub or um, CSA pickup or any of that. I mean, it is those, but it's it's more uh you know, you see it in the people um in the uh the poet farmers from the Iowa Writers Workshop or uh the DJs with the insane Prince Vinyl Collection who moonlight as the food hub director or the um uh you know the entrepreneurial immigrants and the uh conservationist mechanics and the foodies with the dog to walk. um in 30 you know I'm 35 now and the last 13 years I've learned uh that if Church Street is sort of the beating heart I guess of of Burlington then the inner rails it soul right it's like the ideals and the values of its people sort of rot into form a form you can uh you know see and hear and touch and taste and uh tomorrow at 7:30 I'll be back at the farm and uh I can't I can't wait to see what it has to teach me. So, THANKS [applause] >> [applause] >> HELLO, I'm Melissa. My story starts on a late August weekend, beautiful day. We were going to take a hike as a family. So, I went over to the computer to look up some trails, maybe find something we hadn't done before, and I saw that things were not looking good for the weekend weatherwise. Saturday was going to be great, but there was a big hurricane. You can guess it was 2011. And among the many things buzzing on social media, the emails coming into my inbox, there was a note from the Interail Community Farm. We as a family had belonged to the farm at that point for over a decade. Now we're approaching two decades. But Andy, you were only 13 when I first met you there. And there was a request, a very [laughter] polite request from ICF saying, "If any members have a few extra hours today, Saturday, and could come help us, we are embarking upon operation onion rescue." And then I also saw through other social media, other farms, folks that I knew asking for help. And I thought, "Yep, there's no way we're going on a hike. We're going to go down and help question. Have you ever tried to get teenagers out of bed before 9:00 a.m. on a weekend morning? You know what makes it harder? Hey kids, we're going to go pick onions. But we did manage to extricate our two sons, teenagers at the time, a young teenager and middle teenager. And we headed down to the intervvil where there were a group of at the time we arrived probably a dozen or so members along with farmers, friends, family helping to pick onions. And it was a beautiful day. Felt sort of surreal like really it's going to hurricane tomorrow. Okay. And there was farm grown sweet cold fresh watermelon and cantaloupe. And the kids were like, you know, this is okay. It's not so bad. As our older son said, at least it wasn't beets. I hate beets. So, we picked for a while and I pushed it when I said, "Maybe we should go help with the tomatoes where you had to kneel in the dirt and like something." And they were like, "No, no, no. We're not doing that." So we we did some more onions and I think put in several hours and all the onions were laid on a table in the hoop house and and and we felt pretty good about helping and you know we did something and we came home and we sort of watched the weather and the next day it started pouring pouring pouring more pouring but the wind wasn't as bad as it had been or expected to be. So, we thought, well, maybe they're going to dodge the bullet. Towards the evening, [clears throat] Sunday, the rain tapered down. And I was checking my email obsessively, of course, as I always do. And I saw more posts and emails on social media, etc. from farms saying, "Okay, we're okay for right now. We're kind of holding our breath, but knowing what we know, it's likely the river will break the banks." And so could anyone come help? And as we all know, next Monday morning, the river came up with ferocious force from places apparently it had never come up from before in directions it had never come up. And I remember a photo that Kathy I think posted on the Intervale Community Farm Facebook wall of like a tractor with like people hanging off of it and the tractor is like like fleeing ahead of the impending you know doom of waters rising like a biblical flood which I think it probably felt like when you guys were down there and of course we know that it wasn't just the farms that suffered immensely from that flood. There were whole communities, people's homes obviously gone. And in the weeks and and days and months following, everyone was sort of trying to deal with the terrible destruction. And the farms again were posting and sharing how sad they were about the abruptly interrupted season which as Eric mentioned had started awful that year too with incredible spring flooding. But at the same time, they all were so thankful for the help and the support of the community, the teenagers who had gotten up out of bed to come help save a few onions. And as a parent, when you're raising kids, what you're trying to do is make them into healthy adults, good community members, responsible citizens. You expose them to a lot of things. You make them do things that they maybe don't want to do because you hope that someday in the future they'll go, "Oh yeah, that's why my mom or my dad made me do that." And I have to say, I think I'm kind of proud and a little surprised that both of our boys, now 23 and 20, have chosen to sign up for CSA shares on their college campus and deal with like, what do I do? As our 20-year-old texted me a few weeks ago, what do I do with this hairy, scary, knobbyby thing? And what the heck is it? Anyone want to guess? celery. And our kid who hated beets figured out how to cook them and make them taste like something he'd want to eat. [laughter] And I remember when they were little and they loved to go and pick strawberries and raspberries and cherry tomatoes. And then I remember when they were like in middle school and they couldn't quite stay at home alone. And I'd bring them and they were like, "I don't want to go to pick up." and they'd sit in the car and read whatever they were reading because that was before iPhones. Oh my gosh, I'm feeling old. Um, but you just you just never know what's going to take. And it's good to see that they appreciate local farm fresh food and that they're willing to cook it. I think it helps that the parents are willing to pay the bill for the CSA with no questions. But, you know, we'll take what we can get. And the thing that I I really hope is that they also realize that that beautiful late August day that we dragged them out of bed down to pick onions, that we were doing more that day than just saving some onions from a flood. [applause] Can people hear me? >> Okay, good. So, um, the Interbell Center turns 30 this year, right? And, um, and that's not an insignificant birthday. Um, in fact, in in some cultures, it it's fraught, uh, with meaning. Um, for instance, in in my culture, right, which I would describe as um white um socially anxious and kind of like um irrationally overconfident in my intelligence, um it kind of it kind of presents you with with a stark uh set of options, right? Um on the one hand, you can decide that you're not a kid anymore and you can embrace the challenge and opportunities of adulthood, time to grow up, right? Um, but then there's this other choice uh that some of us make uh which is to uh take a good look in the mirror and take a deep breath and and do something incredibly uh kind of shortsighted and stupid, right? Um in my case, I did the latter uh because when I turned 30, what I really decided was that I wanted to become an actor. Um now, never mind that I lived here in teenytiny Burlington, Vermont. uh right or that I didn't really have a plan for how this was going to happen or that I had friends who by that point in their lives have already been like this is way too hard and given up their dreams of a life on the stage. This was this was the life for me. Um and and I suppose um you know like the 70 some odd percent of Americans who consider themselves above average uh that that I had somehow fallen prey to this seductive illogic that that what was going to make me happy was by living uh a life that was distinguished that was unique somehow right that I wasn't a normal average person right that that joy was somehow synonymous with exceptionalism uh and so I uh packed packed it up, moved all the way to California, uh, Blue Lake, California, where I enrolled at the Dell Arteé International School of Physical Theater, right, where I would spend the next year of my life, um, rolling around on the floor, um, quite literally clowning around uh, and, uh, as my classmates's father put it at graduation, borrowing good American money to learn how to stand on one leg. Um, so, uh, the unofficial motto of Delarte is effort, risk, momentum, joy. And I figured out pretty quickly that that I was actually pretty good at the effort, risk, and momentum part. And I was really, really lousy at the joy part that I just couldn't find any happiness in this path that I had chosen for myself. But like like any diligent student, I decided I was going to grit my teeth and I was going to power through and I was going to be happy. I was going to be happy being an actor, right? And the more I efforted, the harder it got and the further away it got. And uh I just couldn't find any happiness at all in the work. And uh if if the job of an actor is to be a student of the emotions, I was a dismal failure. And so after a year, I decided I was going to hang it up, right? So now here I am. I'm 31. I'm more or less an MFA dropout. Um, no plan, uh, no real direction, no sense of what I'm doing with my life, but I had a couple of key things that were going uh, going for me. First of all, I had my wife who, um, against all odds had followed me out to California. Uh, we had about 800 bucks between the two of us, and we had this crappy 1997 Saturn that my parents had given to us, right? Uh, you had one of those, too, huh? Yeah. So anyways, uh so um so what do you do, right? Uh well, in that moment, you kind of do what anybody has done, uh since the Europeans conquered the continent, right? You just strike out for the territories, right? You get in whatever vehicle you have and you you wander around and you hope that happiness or enlightenment or something kind of resembling home will find you along the way, right? So, we launched on the great unplanned North American road trip and we had been on the road about two weeks and we were driving through central Oregon and I don't know if anyone's ever been out that way, but they really like their chainsaws out there. Um, and coming from Vermont, I grew up in Vermont where here logging is is really as much of an art as a science, right? But out there, there is just mile after mile after mile of these massive clear cuts. And I had never seen anything like it before. It it blew me away. Like here was miles of this ancient primeval forest being turned into toilet paper. And people thought that was a good idea, right? And um we're driving along and I'm sitting in the passenger seat and and in a in a rare moment of self-awareness, I realized that um that I was having more of an intense emotional reaction to seeing those trees cut down than I had had in an entire year of acting training. And so I turned to my wife and I said, "Kayla, I don't know what this means, but I want to do something to fix this." and she said the most wonderful thing a partner can ever say to you, which is,"I support you in that." And so many twisted turns of the road and about a year later, we found our way back to Vermont as these things happen. And uh and still now I'm 32, no plan. All right, no real direction, but I have this vision like I'm this I'm this transformational change agent who's going to protect and restore the planet. And so I went and I got a job at a deli, right? because right nothing nothing says transformational change agent like making reubins right and um and so I'm not going to pull any punches it was it was a just a terrible awful time in my life I woke up every day with this with this feeling of of of dread and uh a feeling of very very little sense of selfworth just thinking what the hell am I doing with myself and um the the the more the more I had this feeling of dread the more broken I began to feel and the further away I felt uh from a life of effort, risk, momentum, and joy. Um and it just became this terrible vicious cycle that I didn't really know how to break out of. I didn't know how to arrive at some place. And and sure the life the role of you one's life or the goal of one's life isn't to be exceptional, but at least to be useful. Uh seems like a modest goal. Certainly I can uh I can be useful somehow. Um, and I would drive home every day in tears, just just feeling uh incredibly broken. And one day, um, without really intending to, I uh drove down to the Interell to go for a walk. And it was what it was one of those um early June days where Burlington is at its most seductive. You know, like the trees had that flush of like emerald green growth and the birds were singing and the air smelled like freshly tilled soil. You know, everyone's so happy. And I thought to myself, what is this place? Like, has this really been here all this time? I mean, I knew about the Interville. Like, I'm I'm from here, but I hadn't really experienced it. I hadn't had that moment of of arriving and really understanding what the the Intervil was. And so, um, so it became a little ritual. I I would wake up, you know, panic, make Reuben, have an existential crisis, drive home in tears, and then go for a walk at the Interbell. Like, not an ideal life. Um, but not altogether without redemption either, right? Um, [laughter] and so it was it was uh it was a day I was going for a walk down there and I was walking along the river and there is um there's a place people may know along the river where the two trails converge and there's those old car chassis just sticking up out of the flood plane, right? Sort of like Burlington's miniature version of Cadillac Desert, right? And um and I was I was walking along the trail and I just stopped dead in my tracks. And in that moment, I realized I knew that everything around me that I had come to value and appreciate so much had been at one point had been a dump. Right? The interbell was a dump, right? That's when you had a car that you didn't need or a dishwasher or a pet, you just brought it down there [laughter] and that's where you that's where you got rid of it, right? When something was broken and didn't have any worth, the inner veil was was where you dumped it. And it's only through the collective visioning and collecting collective effort of of this community and day after day after day of many many people in this room deciding that this place is worth something that we've changed it. It's become this place we call the Interville. this place that that reminds me of a a concept I once heard from someone who uh teaches permaculture called sight repair which means that we don't just we don't just fix the earth so we can use it again it's not a button or a zipper right but that we we fundamentally restore the planet so that it restores us right that that the things that we choose to fix in our lives in turn will fix us so on its 30th birthday to the inner veil I say happy birthday And thank you uh for being a place when you're feeling lost or broken or uh in need of just the tiniest little bit of joy can help you to find your way home. Thanks. [applause] Um, I want to invite all of our storytellers to come on up and just one more [applause and cheering] huge round of applause. [applause] I I also want to invite Sue Schmidt to come on up. Come on up, Sue. [applause] Sue is a a moth producer and has helped us pull this event together. And so, thank you, Sue, and all of our amazing storytellers. [applause] >> [applause] >> And finally, thank you all for coming out tonight. We'll have a big 30th anniversary celebration June 23rd and hope to see a lot of you there. Thanks again for coming tonight. [applause]