For the second year, CAE took Vermont Food Venture Center clients to the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City! The Show is the event for specialty food producers, with 2,500 food and beverage manufacturers displaying their products over a three day show. This year, more than 14,000 manufacturers, buyers, and industry professionals attended the show, which spanned 345,000 square feet of space in the Javits Center.
The recent news Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) decided to “idle” the St. Albans milk plant echoes challenges that are not new to the dairy industry. The closure of the St. Albans plant will leave workers without jobs and farmers with more uncertainty about what happens next. Despite other recent milk plant closures, we will keep investing in dairy as a state because it continues to be the largest economic driver in our agricultural economy and dairy farms significantly contribute to maintaining our open landscape. While we continue investing in dairy, we must do more to invest in other types of agriculture with the same vigor.
On Saturday, June 6th, 2026, about 300 Vermonters and folks from around the county showed up to the Barton Fairgrounds to kick off a series of Survival Revivals happening around the country in Illinois, Alabama, and Kansas, anchored by NEKO’s relationship with the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. This also launched a new phase of “Survival Organizing” for NEKO and deepened relationships we hold with the VT Workers Center and others.
Barred Woods Maple is an organic and ecologically conscious maple sugaring business located in northern Vermont. They produce maple syrup from their 300 acre sugarbush, which is part of a much larger parcel of land conserved through the Vermont Land Trust. They also use their syrup to create value-added products including maple sugar and granola at CAE's Vermont Food Venture Center (VFVC) in Hardwick.
At the end of February 2026, CAE's former Community Programs Manager, Bethany Dunbar, received a Kiwanis Humanitarian Award. She was nominated by CAE's Community Connections team and Kristen Leahy, Hardwick's Resilience and Adaptation Coordinator.
The challenges of constructing and implementing new infrastructure are immense. It requires significant capacity, constant problem solving, and securing a considerable amount of capital. It is also clear, however, that developing new infrastructure can lead to unexpected, yet beneficial community opportunities. In one short year since moving our Farm Connex and Community Connection programs into the Food Hub, we have learned that this building not only provides critical physical space for operations, but has also become an anchor for community-directed organizing and opened the door to unplanned collaborations.
Makeshift Farm is a diversified vegetable farm in Derby, VT currently growing on 1.5 acres. First generation farmer and Derby native, Owen Tatum, of Makeshift Farm has been a partner of CAE’s Produce to Pantries (P2P) program since 2023, growing storage crop staples like potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, and beets. Now for a third consecutive season, CAE has facilitated the purchase and transport of these crops from Makeshift Farm to our site partners who serve community members in need from Holland to Hardwick.
In early February, the backroads of the Northeast Kingdom were soft and quiet, the landscape blanketed by snow and settled into a deep cold. As Punxsutawney Phil made his prediction for six more weeks of winter at 7:25am, a winter day at Sweet Rowen Farmstead was already underway for several hours.
Sweet Rowen Farmstead is a grass-based hill farm in the Northeast Kingdom. Their small herd of pasture-raised Vermont Heritage Lineback cows produces milk, which they bottle and craft into cheese and yogurt.
With the help of Hazen students from the Dare To Be Me Class, a restoration of disturbed wetland next to the Food Hub has begun! In the first of a 3-phase tree planting project on the Wright Farm Road site owned by the Town of Hardwick, 75 trees and woody species were planted to begin repairing the ecosystem health of an area that was heavily impacted by recent development.
As the deep cold began to settle in last week, we welcomed a group of Hazen students and teachers into the warmth of the Community Room at the Food Hub for an all day baking workshop as part of Hazen's "Winter Wellness' program. Reeve Basom from CAE and Martha Machia from Salvation Farms planned the day in partnership with Hazen's community schools coordinator, Vaiva Velzis.
In 2011, when the Vermont Food Venture Center (VFVC) opened its doors to clients, the craft and local food world was in a different place. Although Vermont has always had a robust local food economy, that economy lacked many of the supports in place today. There were fewer financial resources for food businesses, fewer food-focused business advising programs, fewer opportunities for small businesses to sell their products outside of New England, and the food tourism industry was just beginning in Vermont. As the VFVC became established in Hardwick, we worked to change that—and change it we did!
On Friday afternoon October 31, Buffalo Mountain Market’s general manager, Emily Hershberger, reached out to a group of community leaders to see how they could work together to help fill the need for food left by the freeze of SNAP benefits. Hardwick Area Food Pantry (HAFP) Director, Stella James, said that fresh soups and stews in to-go containers ready for families and individuals would be the most helpful offering. From there a team quickly mobilized: by Saturday, the team at the Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE), had secured donations of local meat from Snug Valley Farm and Saw Mill Brook Farm; on Monday, there was a plan and CAE’s Human Advocacy Director, Kate O’Neil, took point on coordinating logistics; and on Wednesday, a team of volunteers and staff members from those convening organizations and businesses were working in the Community Room at the Food Hub in Hardwick, making gallons of soup.
Ben and Stacey Waterman, the owners of Waterman’s Orchard in Johnson, gave the former granary in Jefferson a new life, re-opening this summer as a multi-unit commercial space. A scoop shop featuring their own line of Old Tower Ice Cream is the centerpiece of the space, flanked by a commercial kitchen where Ben mixes ingredients sourced from local dairies, sugarmakers, and Waterman Orchard’s own blueberries.
Since January 1, 2025, CAE has had $400,000 in awarded federal grants terminated: It is clear that some of the values we hold most dear - our local food system, thriving rural communities, and the environment are being impacted by shifting federal policies. Shifting policies cause so much disruption and uncertainty to one’s ability to plan, and farmers are long-term planners - with much of their success dependent on thoughtful decisions made well in advance. Similarly, at CAE, the investments & choices we make today are meant to meet the moment of the present and the future.
✨ As anyone who has worked on either a farm or in the non-profit sector is well aware, there is ALWAYS more work to be done… For the last two years, CAE & the Hardwick Farmers Market have shared an intern from UVM who has helped to increase our capacity, learn about our org & our work, and support our programming. In exchange, the students gain skills & real life work experience that will help them in the future.
This year, we worked with Maya Bakowski, who showed us what true resilience looks like: She was consistently positive, flexible, and hard working. She helped with everything from community meals, special events, place-based education & youth programming, farmers markets, and more. We were so fortunate to have her join our team for the last 10 weeks and we’ll miss her terribly. We want to thank the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships for the opportunity to bring UVM to the Northeast Kingdom and to Sterling College for hosting the 2025 cohort. Below we’ve included a reflection that Maya shared with us about her experience. Thank you Maya!
This year, CAE brought its first client to the show after years of networking, learning how the show works, navigating the changes that COVID brought to the show and our producers, and helping our producers scale up so they could meet this opportunity. The three day event in New York City featured 2,492 domestic and global food and beverage manufacturers and over 32,000 attendees.
As long as there has been dairy farming in Vermont, harvesting and storing hay in the summer has been how farmers prepared for winter. Traditionally, it was the farmer’s job to make hay for the winter and the cow’s job to feed herself during the growing season, and so the farmer effectively operated two systems, one pastoral and one where the cows were confined.
Barn First Creamery is a family farm and micro dairy in the Northeast Kingdom. Their goats graze on fresh pasture; their cheese is handmade and aged in underground caves. Barn First is dedicated to happy, healthy animals, which results in clean, delicious milk and exceptional cheese.
The new Community Room at the Food Hub is coming to life! This multipurpose meeting and workshop space is currently in the process of being outfitted with both kitchen and conferencing equipment, and we are excited to be developing the guidelines and protocols for use of this great new resource.
Farm Connex moved into the Food Hub in early March without any interruptions to service, and has been operating out of the new facility at the Food Hub for nearly two months. They went from operating out of a space that was 19 feet wide, with just one dock, to a facility with three loading docks, and 7,000 square feet of space! Our communications team caught up with Meryl Friets, CAE’s Farm Connex Logistics Manager, to hear how the transition has been going.
For over a decade, organizations that operate food hubs have been working to strengthen Vermont’s local food systems. These organizations take different approaches to this work but share common goals of increasing the accessibility of local food, distributing local products to strengthen market access and farm vitality for farmers, and strengthening local communities. Since the pandemic these organizations have also responded to emergent crises. This included multiple pandemic response efforts and support to communities and farms after the 2023 and 2024 floods.
Late winter and springtime means maple sugaring season! If you drive around the back roads in Vermont and see brightly colored tubes hanging along among the trees, you are probably looking at maple sap lines. We all love to add maple syrup to our favorite breakfast (or any meal!), but the work that goes into turning maple sap into maple syrup is intense! Read more about how it's done here.
The Humanitarian Awards ceremony is sponsored by the Hardwick Kiwanis Club, which puts out a call every year for organizations in Hardwick to honor someone who goes the extra mile for their community, either as a volunteer or an employee. This year nine area residents were recognized, including two people near and dear to CAE. We are delighted to share that Reeve Basom, CAE’s Place-Based Education Coordinator, received an award. She was nominated by the Civic Standard and presented with the award by Rose Friedman. We are also pleased to share that CAE nominated Vaiva Velzis for the Humanitarian Award. Vavia is the Community School Coordinator at Hazen Union School, and works closely with Reeve in Place-Based Education.
The Barton Hub is a community meal site and giving pantry in the basement of the Barton Memorial Hall. This is a community site with a rich agricultural history located in the heart of the town of Barton in the middle of the Northeast Kingdom.
The Barton Hub is a project of Northeast Kingdom Organizing’s (NEKO) Social Connection Campaign and the NEK Working Communities Challenge, which advances local collaborative efforts that build strong, healthy economies and communities in northern New England’s rural towns, regions, and smaller cities.
CAE works deeply with community partners, including NEKO, towards the goals of equitable access to local food, productive land, and economic opportunity for all. CAE’s Food Sovereignty Organizer, Allyson Howell, works closely with NEKO to build collective, local resilience through community organizing, shared learning, and food justice at the Barton Hub.
By Thanksgiving morning, the annual Pies for People project based in Hardwick will have supplied over 300 pumpkin and fruit pies for holiday tables in Hardwick, Craftsbury, Albany, Barton and surrounding towns. This year Pies for People will go back to its roots from before the project even had a name.
Mighty Mudita is a new producer at the Vermont Food Venture Center (VFVC) who has utilized most of the resources and services offered by CAE to food producers. Owner Andrew Wild began working in VFVC kitchen this summer after consulting with Daniel Keeney and Colleen Crist of the CAE Business Resources team. He now operates Mighty Mudita full time and has one employee, Jennifer Cornelius. They have been working in the kitchens to create plant-based deli products with basic ingredients, some of which are organic or local. The four products they offer are Original Seitan, Sun-Dried Tomato and Basil Seitan, and two chickpea and pea protein-based products: Smoky Beet and Spicy Chipotle Carrot mini-loaves. We talked to Andrew and Jennifer in the kitchen this month while they were making the Original Seitan and Sun-Dried Tomato and Basil Seitan loaves.
The ‘Recipe for Human Connection’ (RFHC) class at Hazen Union School is a special part of CAE’s place-based education partnership with Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU). The RFHC experience is designed to center creativity, collaboration, and community-building through the lens of food.
Hillside Farm is a diversified livestock farm in Albany, Vermont. They raise pastured pigs and poultry, processing chickens on the farm every week of the summer and selling fresh from the farm and at the Capital City Farmers Market. Find them year-round at the market in Montpelier!
Pastured poultry is a seasonal enterprise. Owners Hannah Pearce and her father Bill are working toward growing the business to a sustainable and efficient scale where it is sufficiently profitable for Hannah to earn an income from. A big piece of this is making the weekly farm operations run smoothly and efficiently, in order for the farm to generate enough produce in a 20 week growing season to cash-flow over a 12-month sales window. Hannah and Bill have worked with Daniel Keeney & Silene DeCiucies from CAE to develop long-term business strategies to further these goals.
Hillside Farm is also a proud Vermont Farm Fund borrower, having used VFF funds to support a solar array on the farm, scaling up their chicken tractors, and most recently to replace their market delivery vehicle.
We are pleased to have a new client in the Vermont Food Venture Center Kitchens, Vermont Cheeseless. This mother-daughter duo is on a tasty adventure, handcrafting gluten- and dairy-free frozen desserts. As they say, “We may have taken the cheese out of cheesecake, but you would never know!”
Place-based education is about connectivity - bringing people into a more meaningful relationship with their learning, both in the moment and over time. The stories below help us tap into the power of continuity and celebrate how students develop connections, relationships, traditions, and communities that provide throughlines and ongoing support as they travel and grow along their learning journeys.
Below are some stories about CAE’s work within our local schools in the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU), and is written by Place-Based Education Coordinator, Reeve Basom. All photographs by Reeve Basom unless otherwise noted.
Bob Duggan first came to CAE to take a food safety class at the Vermont Food Venture Center in 2018, and he ended up working as a Just Cut production staff member for two years. As a side gig, he assisted Vermont Food Venture Center clients with their various food production projects, and learned more about the local food economy.
Have you ever wondered what the large "marshmallow" bales stacked in farmyards are, or the large piles of tires stacked in farm fields?
As our forests and fields become blanketed in snow, grazing becomes difficult, but the local livestock population still requires vast amounts of forage in order to get through the long winter and keep making milk and meat for us.
Most Vermonters know something about dry hay and the process of making it, but northeastern Vermont’s humid climate and small fields can make drying hay, especially the high-quality hay milking dairy cows require, difficult. Since at least the 1940s, Vermont farmers have experimented with various methods of preserving forages–overwhelmingly hay crops and corn–through ensiling or silage-making. Sometimes referred to as “pickling,” this involves storing the cut plant only partially dried in an environment that limits oxygen.
Read more about the why and how of ensiled feed on our website as part of an educational series by CAE Farm Business Planner, Silene DeCiucies, to help the everyday Vermonter understand the ins and outs of farming in our brave little state.
Construction is still going strong at the Hardwick Yellow Barn project. The historic Yellow Barn building has been reinforced and renovations are nearing completion. The new building adjacent to the Yellow Barn, where CAE’s facility will be, is also taking shape. The interior is being framed out and the exterior components including covered walkways and parking areas are being completed. Small farms and rural communities need infrastructure that is adaptable, reduces our carbon impact, and helps maintain our working landscapes. This exciting project will meet the changing needs of our state to build resilience and food security into our future.
In an average week, CAE's Farm Connex delivery service works around the clock to get food from Vermont farms out into stores across the state. Earlier this month though, Farm Connex took a road trip and delivered over 2,600 pounds of local Vermont food to Washington DC for the Taste of Vermont! The food represented 20 different farms and food producers from across the state, many who work with CAE and Farm Connex throughout the year.
The Center for an Agricultural Economy’s dedicated farm and food delivery service, Farm Connex, was invited to participate in the 16th annual Taste of Vermont event, in the nation’s capital, on November 9, 2023. Previously established at the suggestion of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), this year’s event was held by the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR), with special guest and host, Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Welcome to the Red, White and Stars Cafe at Wolcott Elementary School, where Head Chef David Jourdan prepares breakfast and lunch for nearly 100 students five days per week. Affectionately named Chef Dave’s Cafe by students, this kitchen sources local food, including Just Cut vegetables, on a regular basis. Funds from the Henry P. Kendall Foundation grant helped purchase a tilt skillet, which was identified by Wolcott Elementary as a specific need for this busy kitchen. A tilt skillet is functionally versatile; the large, deep braising pan tilts forward to easily transfer food off of its surface.
The Center for an Agricultural Economy was awarded $125,000 from the Henry P. Kendall Foundation as a 2022 New England Food Vision Prize recipient to expand local produce served in Northeast Kingdom institutions. This funding has allowed Just Cut to increase production to five days per week, increasing capacity for its current scale.
As you travel the local roads in early summer, you are seeing farmers of all kinds scurrying to make the most of the longest days of Vermont's short growing season. Produce growers are seeing lush crops of lettuce, green tomatoes are getting larger, and garlic scapes are showing up at coops and farmers markets around the state. But your dairy farmer neighbors have been busy since late May with the first and most important harvest of the year: first cut hay. Hay-type forages are northern Vermont’s most important crop, both economically and in terms of their footprint on the landscape. With its cool summers and abundant precipitation, Hardwick and the surrounding area are marginal for raising most annual field crops typically fed to dairy cattle, but ideally suited to growing cool-season grasses and legumes.
Thank you.
A hopeful response to the devastation felt by so many across Vermont this past week has been the outpouring of support. From farmers who didn’t experience loss, to those who did, to individuals across the state, and family and supporters across the country, there has been so much compassion and funds flowing into the Center for an Agricultural Economy and to the Vermont Farm Fund. Those who can have also stepped up to muck out basements, clean up fields, and share meals and resources. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This week has absolutely rocked Vermont from top to bottom. In Hardwick and across the state we are dealing with washed out roads, flooded buildings, and devastated fields. Today we’ve watched the waters recede enough in most places to start on the next phase of cleanup and restoration, but more rain and unknowns are in the forecast.
t’s 4 p.m. on a Friday at the Farm Connex warehouse in Hardwick, Vermont. Zach Hoppe, one of the drivers of their fleet of five vehicles, is returning from a day on the road delivering glass bottles of milk, cream, fresh produce, artisan cheese, craft soda, and other Vermont-made products to stores and restaurants.
The Center for an Agricultural Economy is home to a variety of programming including its farm-to-institution social enterprise, Just Cut. Just Cut was originally established in 2013 as a farm-to-school program serving in a middle person role to get more locally grown produce into area K-12 schools. The enterprise has since expanded, and in recent years have been serving the hospitals and college/universities of the region.
But what is Just Cut? Just Cut is a food processing program that takes locally grown produce, minimally processes it, and then packages it into a ready-to-use item for sale to area institutions. Fresh or frozen, diced or shredded, Just Cut is able to make local produce into something that institutions can use and purchase in quantity, a commonly cited barrier that prevents institutions from buying locally grown produce in the first place. In serving in this middle person role, Just Cut is also opening markets for the hardworking farmers who grow this food.
Adriana Munch, the mastermind behind Green Mountain Peanut Butter is the definition of a driven, independent woman. Wanting to improve her English proficiency, she packed up her bags and left sunny Costa Rica to arrive in snowy Vermont in the winter of 2013. Splitting time between the sun and snow for the next 3 years, she fell in love with Vermont (especially its winters) and became a permanent resident in 2016.
The Northeast Kingdom possesses an abundance of agricultural history, pride, knowledge and skill that can still be found on our local farms today. One person who has been deeply involved in promoting and celebrating this culture is the Center for an Agricultural Economy’s (CAE) Community Programs Manager, Bethany M. Dunbar.
This summer our Just Cut production team got out of the kitchen and onto the fields to see how the vegetables they slice, dice, and package are grown, and how they get onto plates around Vermont and New Hampshire. Just Cut Program Manager, Lotty, and Production Manager, Fawn, coordinated visits to Honey Field Farm and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. The team got a first hand look at the reach Just Cut Products have, and how they positively impact the farms who grow for the program and the institutions who use those vegetables. Come along with us for a tour of the Upper Valley, a region of Vermont and New Hampshire along the Connecticut River, as we introduce Honey Field Farm and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, through the lens of Just Cut. Produce. Prepared.
It’s common that businesses and farms will work with a few different parts of CAE, but rare that a single family has two separate agricultural businesses that both utilize CAE’s resources to help them grow and expand. Holly Simpson & Angus Baldwin are that rarity...
Our farm business planner, Silene DeCiucies, recently completed a dairy cost of production study with 7 dairy clients. With funding through the NE-SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program, the study focused on conventional dairy farms milking fewer than 100 cows who primarily grow hay as their main feed source, utilize pasture, and feed purchased grain. These farms are most vulnerable to changes in the industry and a large portion of the dairy farms in our service area. Silene worked with each farm to collect past financial and farm data to determine the costs to each farm to produce 100 lbs of milk or a “hundred-weight” (cwt). Compiled data was then brought back to each farm so that they could compare themselves to the group (participating farms were anonymous to one another) and identify things they were excelling at, and/or areas where they could improve.
On a steep slope on the edge of Mt. Cabot in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, there sits a maple operation with a long history and a new legacy, Mount Cabot Maple. Founded in 2005, Mount Cabot Maple produces a limited amount of single sourced organic syrup each year from trees that have been supplying sap since the 1800’s. Fast forward to 2020, when Morgan Hill, who grew up on the land, had the privilege and opportunity to purchase the business from its founder. With Sophie Earll, her partner in all things, Morgan and Sophie now own and operate Mount Cabot Maple together. As their new label proudly states, the business is “Women Run. Queer Crafted. Family Owned.” Only 30 years old and in a predominantly male industry, the two are figuring out how to navigate the trade, create the business they want, and forge ahead together.
Day to day, our program staff is out in the world doing the work - delivering food, chopping vegetables, working with farmers on efficiencies, helping food start-ups scale up, taking students to meet a cow for the first time - all while collecting stories of those experiences. Meaningful and inspirational, these stories describe not only the work that CAE does, but the importance of that work. The challenge is then how to best share those stories with the community.
In April of 2021, Vermont Everyone Eats celebrated one million meals served. Just nine months later, in January of 2022 that number climbed to two million meals served since 2020. The mission of Everyone Eats is to bring the community (eaters, farmers, and restaurants) together to address food needs, and support each other through the pandemic. CAE is pleased to continue to partner with that program, and has served 50,000 of those meals through the Hardwick Area Community Meal project, the CAE hub which supports weekly meals in Albany, Craftsbury, Hardwick and surrounding towns. Below are some stories about the impact the program has on people in our community.
After participating in the USDA Farmers to Families Food box programs in 2020, our CAE team asked "how can we localize this effort? Can we use our existing relationships and infrastructure to involve local small-scale farmers and our local pantries to meet the needs of our communities?"
One of our goals early in the pandemic was to adapt the Hardwick Community Supper, previously a weekly in-person dinner at the Hardwick United Church, to a safe curbside model. We recruited restaurants to prepare meals for $10 each, and volunteers to help manage reservations. In the second half of the year this grew into the statewide Vermont Everyone Eats program, with 14 community hubs organizing meal sites across Vermont.
Renee and Chet Baker bought their Hillside Homestead dairy farm in Albany on December 4, 2019. It was a dream come true for the couple who had each grown up with agriculture and had operated rented farms for the past five years. They have 55 milkers and are working on plans for a farm stand to sell theirs and some neighbors’ products. The Route 14 location makes it ideal not only for the farm stand, but to be sure their milk will always be easily accessible for pick up by their cooperative.
Harmoney Peets, a rising seventh-grade student from Hardwick, taught a Grow Your Own workshop about taste tests of smoothies, dips, and tea and how to grow the ingredients.
CAE has been working to procure funding for a microgrants program so that farmers can make adaptations to respond to the current crisis to strengthen our local food system.
CAE works with key partners in every area of our work. For our food access and place-based programs, this means working closely with a number of partners to connect local and regional resources. Over the years, our work with the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU) has evolved from direct farm to school support into a deep partnership working for the long-term transformation of our rural education system.
These are the questions members of Northeast Kingdom Organizing (NEKO) answer every day through their vision, commitment, and hard work. Through NEKO, the CAE joins organizations across the region to improve the quality of life for the people and places of the Northeast Kingdom. By sharing our stories and building relationships across perceived differences, NEKO marshals the resources for collective action to meet local challenges. In November, representatives of all 10 of NEKO's member groups convened in Orleans and voted unanimously to approve three campaigns.
Occasionally, CAE will work with a client in one capacity, and realize there are many other ways that they can plug into the resources and opportunities available. Andy Shelter, of Shetler Family Farm, is one of those clients who we are fortunate to work with in many ways.
What do bread baking, soil science and building cold frames for the garden have in common? They are all topics that community participants learned about in 2018 as part of Grow Your Own.
Nicolas and Oliver like to ride their bikes on the pump track at Atkins Field because they can make new friends that way. New friends are one of the best reasons to spend time at Atkins Field where our community gardeners, farmers market vendors, students, volunteers, and everyone else can gather to use the trails and learn about the history of the Woodbury Granite Company. Our goal is that Atkins will be a launching pad to trails including the Granite Junction History Trail on the property itself; the Hardwick Trails; and in the future to the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail.
In 2016 and 2017, the Town of Hardwick partnered with CAE and Northeastern Vermont Development Association (NVDA) to work jointly on an assesment of infrastructure needs for business growth in Hardwick. This feasibility study includes:
-economic cluster analysis
-site analysis
-in-depth interviews and competitive industry research
Download the study to learn more about the next phase of business development for Hardwick.
The minimal processing program at the Vermont Food Venture Center (VFVC) was launched to better support local farmers. Staff at the Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE) realized farmers weren’t taking advantage of the shared kitchens to carry out value-added processing themselves. At the same time, staff knew that the facility could be used to address one of the factors preventing greater use of local food in area institutions: namely that many had neither adequate storage space nor sufficient staff time to work with local produce in its whole, raw form.
The Farm to Institution program developed from there!
“The Food Venture Center has played a vital role in the growth of our business. To have a state of the art commercial facility accessible to us with a staff that is always there to help has been a game changer."
Butterfly Bakery of Vermont is a small bakery and food processor started making maple sweetened baked goods in 2003. In 2011, owner Claire Fitts Georges started talking with farmers and tried making a few hot sauces using excess hot peppers from local farmers. The hot sauces kept selling out, and production has increased year over year.
Julie Nichols is a community gardener. But more than that, she’s a community builder. Whether it’s pitching in to help with teaching how to start seeds, working with school children to build a greenhouse, or cooking at a potluck, Julie is one of those special people who gives of her time and energy.
