Trouble Ahead For The Family Farm!

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The development of creative forms of crop marketing has also been im portant to Shelburne Farms. Several members of the Webb family helped to organize Vermont's first modern farmers' market, so that growers would have a local outlet for their goods. And, in an even more innovative move, the owners leased spacein the huge central structure known to everyone as the Farm Barn—to small enterprises that would use Shelburne products. These include a bakery (getting its flour from farm-grown wheat), a weaving shop (obtaining wool from the farm's sheep), and a cabinetmaker (working with wood from the estate's forest).

In a sense, Shelburne is reinventing the village for the post-hydrocarbon society that may well be a part of our future. There are even plans afoot to create a small group of homes on the farm, for folks who draw their living from the acreage!

Shelburne Farms hasn't overlooked agricultural innovation, either. The SFR has established a test plot of some 1.500 black walnut trees. representing 60 different varieties. The farm's organization—in cooperation with the University of Vermont—is examining the potential of this dual-purpose silviculture, in which an annual cash crop of nuts helps to pay costs while the trees grow to marketable timber size.

Fields of barley have been planted in an attempt to discover whether that grain can be grown for feed in New England as an alternative to corn. (Barley produces a lower yield than corn, but requires much less energy to grow.) And, for fertilizer, Shelburne—again, with the cooperation of the University of Vermont—is testing the use of sewage sludge. Furthermore, the farm boasts the state's only raw-milk dairy . . . and will soon begin to generate methane from the cow manure produced by that operation.

Shelburne Farms is, then, an experiment in "re-regionalizing" . . . in developing appropriate methods of responding to some of the problems facing America's family farms. By shifting their focus from a national market to a regional and local one, the Webbs have been able to revive some locally neglected techniques (such as the farmers' market) and to introduce new crops to what had become Vermont's milk monoculture. As teaching and example-setting operations like Shelburne Farms spring up across the country—and MOTHER firmly hopes and believes that they will—the family farm may find a new lease on life in America!

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