Intervale makes environmentalism important
The group has also formed Vermont’s first community supported agriculture farm.
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) – Down the road from Charlebois Truck Parts and Wrecker Sales, past a steel salvage yard and over a set of railroad tracks on the northern edge of the city, the road turns to dirt lined with heavy vegetation.
The wide floodplain of the Winooski River then opens up to acres of organic farm fields, flower and vegetable gardens, berry bushes and greenhouses.
Trucks rumble by with loads of manure and food waste to dump for compost.
And a molecular biologist tinkers with a prototype to turn cow manure into an alternative source of energy.
Fifteen years after the nonprofit Intervale Foundation was formed to rejuvenate hundreds of acres of historic farmland along the Winooski River, 11 organic farms cultivate city land that was once a city dump, junkyard, dairy farm and corn fields. A grassroots effort to recycle leaves and yard waste has grown into a large-scale commercial compost operation.
And the Intervale Foundation has won a federal grant to develop technology to turn manure from small dairy farms into methane gas.
“There’s a lot of momentum here,” said Intervale spokeswoman Andrea O’Connor.
“People are seeing what’s possible – that the Intervale could be a leader in creating different market niches and innovations that are going to help small farmers be successful in the future,” she said.
What started as a recycling project where city residents brought leaves in exchange for compost, expanded to farming and producing food at the Intervale, and then a mission to turn farm waste into food and possibly fuel. The Intervale strives to be a cutting edge national model, said Dr. Guy Roberts of the Intervale’s Advanced Farm Ecosystems program. “More than just community supported agriculture.”
One of its innovations, the Intervale says, is a prototype Roberts is building that would turn manure into energy. The anaerobic digester – a series of pipes measuring 30 feet by 5 feet – would store manure that would eventually emit methane gas to fuel greenhouses, generators and cooling equipment.
The technology has bee n used on large farms but never retrofitted to serve small farms, with as few as 45 cows.
The Intervale also has plans to build a 41,000-square-foot complex of greenhouses heated year round to grow food from composted manure. Building space would be rented to six small food companies for food processing.
The greenhouse would expand opportunities for farmers and create an industry for winter crops, says Erik Wells, who is working on the project. The model could be adopted by other farms, he says. And one day down the road it could be heated by a methane digester.
Exporting ideas has long been at the Intervale’s core.
“What the Intervale is best at is that breeding ground, that incubator for innovations that really connect people, farm, communities and land,” said Will Raap, who founded the Intervale Foundation in 1988, after moving his mail-order company Gardener’s Supply to the Intervale.
The Intervale has also formed Vermont’s first community supported agriculture farm, where members share the economic risk with farmers by buying annual shares in exchange for weekly bundles of produce throughout the season. The Intervale Community Farm started with 12 members and now has 400.
The Intervale is now taking its expertise to other farmers. It’s paired farmers with entrepreneurs and other experts to help them with marketing, bookkeeping, production and other aspects of business to make them more profitable.
“We’re now finding there’s a lot of the work that we’ve done here has applications outside the Intervale itself,” says Gaye Symington, the interim director. “And there’s finally a realization that there’s exciting opportunities in farming in Vermont.”
The Intervale also leases land and equipment to 11 organic farms through its incubator farm program. The Intervale farms produce 6 percent of Burlington’s fresh produce during the growing season; the goal is 10 percent.
Farmers not only benefit from the land and the resources at the Intervale, they also exchange knowledge.
“Everyone’s always sharing information about growing techniques, marketing techniques. So even though we’re all kind of in competition with each other down here we’re also very much in cooperation with each other,” Migner said as his partners packed basil and other produce into a van to deliver downtown, less than two miles away.
Early on 100 percent of the compost was used at the Intervale to improve the soils. Now with so much being produced only about 4 percent is used at the Intervale. Companies such as IBM, Ben and Jerry’s and hospitals and farms pay tipping fees to drop off their food waste and manure.
In 1995 the Intervale sold its first surplus compost.
Last year it recycled 20,000 tons of waste and produced 20,000 cubic yards of compost and top soil for farms and gardens. The sales contributed $100,000 to the Intervale’s operations.
The success of the composting and the farming programs has allowed the Intervale to take some risks in recent years, said Dave Lane, who recently stepped down as the Intervale Foundation’s director to take a job as deputy secretary of agricultural development for the state.
The Intervale invested in such ventures as the methane digester and a nursery to grow native trees and shrubs to repair riverbanks.
The demand for these trees, such as willows and silver maples, has taken off in recent years as more riverbanks are restored to prevent erosion and farm runoff and to filter pollutants before they enter the water.
The state requires 100,000 to 150,000 of these native trees a year and imports some from as far away as Oregon, according to Intervale officials.
The native nursery sold a couple thousand of trees and shrubs this year. The plan is to sell 10,000 to 20,000 next year and eventually meet the state’s needs, said program director Simon Hurd.
It’s an example of what Raap says the Intervale does best and what he hopes it will continue to do: “To see the opportunity before the market accepts it and make the preparations to allow momentum in those areas to happen.”
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