Editor’s note: This commentary is by David F. Kelley, who is an attorney and a co-founder of Project Harmony (now PH International) and a former member of the Hazen Union School Board.
Working together has always been a Vermont tradition. We built our barns together. We’ve gone to town meetings together. We have traditionally been our neighbor’s keeper, as well as our brother’s keeper. If ever there was a place and time when that tradition was critical, it is here and now.
Northeast Kingdom agriculture and tourism are two of the sectors most severely hurt by the Covid-19 pandemic. One lodge owner in Orleans County calls the future “bleak.” One of the most successful food businesses in our area has had to reduce its workforce from 26 to six. Restaurant orders for our food products have dwindled. The once healthy bookings of early spring have all but disappeared.
Historically the Northeast Kingdom has been the most impoverished corner of Vermont. We have been dependent on logging and dairy farms that have been pummeled by the winds of change in recent years. We have school districts with as many as 80% of their students on free and reduced lunch, while districts in Chittenden and Addison counties have as few as 10% on free and reduced lunch.
We have an opportunity to change this picture. Growing concern for the environment, and growing awareness of health hazards and ethical questions surrounding food production elsewhere have created new opportunities for emerging food and agriculture enterprises such as Pete’s Greens, Jasper Hill Farm and Hill Farmstead Brewery. These businesses, in turn, are creating a new support system for our communities, family farms and tourism.
But our future is far from assured. We are at a crossroads and the current health crisis has rendered the future more precarious and this crossroads even more critical. We can become a replica of the mill towns in Maine and the mining towns in West Virginia or seize these opportunities with imagination and write a new story.
To write that new story there are steps we need to take now. There is a natural symbiosis between tourism and agriculture. One of the smartest business decisions in the history of Vermont was Ben & Jerry’s decision to build its ice cream factory halfway between Sugarbush and Stowe. Millions of tourists bought its products and then went home to promote them. At the same time, every pint of Cherry Garcia was promoting Vermont.
Vermont was fortunate that the industrial revolution passed us by. Our landscapes, mountains, lakes, rivers and streams are still pristine and unspoiled. We have what much of the world has lost in the way of “progress” and these resources will become even more precious with the passage of time. To move to a future that is no longer defined by the poverty of our present we need to imagine new ways to strengthen this partnership born of a “working landscape.”
Visitors to the Northeast Kingdom are not only an important market, they can be our most potent sales force. By the same token, as our food products find distribution here in the United States, and around the world, the “taste of place” can be our most cost-effective marketing.
Let other people have the Amazon warehouses, the computer data centers and the Tesla factories. We are better served by a working landscape. Tourism in agricultural communities in England and Italy have shown us the possibilities. Now, more than ever, we have to seize these opportunities for expanded hiking and biking in the Kingdom.
There are a lot of hands reaching out for the Covid stimulus funds, but few investments would be more cost effective than jump starting a new partnership for progress in the Northeast Kingdom — starting by bringing more fellow Vermonters from faraway places like Rutland and Bennington to visit the most beautiful corner of Vermont.
