Vermont

There are a lot of things that hit me now when I think about Vermont.  Before last week I either didn’t know about some of these things or if I did know I had forgotten about them.  We went up to visit friends of ours that used to live here in TN and it is a long, long, long drive.  As small of a state that Vermont is a good bit of the drive is actually was actually in Vermont.  It’s a long narrow state that runs vertically on the map and as luck would have it our friends live near the top.  Six or seven of the sixteen hour drive (with two kids in the car) were in Vermont.

The first thing that hits you is that it is really pretty.  The pictures and the postcards you may have seen are entirely accurate.  Not only is it pretty, but there’s no billboards to spoil the view.  I looked it up and they outlawed them the very year I was born (so as to mark the occasion I am sure) of 1968.  In addition to that there are very few box stores.  I saw a Lowes Hardware store in Burlington. I never saw a Wal-Mart, but I did a Google search and it looks like there are a few (less than half a dozen).  Another thing I never saw was a football field.  I’m sure there are some…somewhere, but I never saw any.

We picked up several magazines and brochures to read about Vermont and saw several interesting things.  It seems that in some High Schools the sport of choice is downhill skiing.  I though that was pretty cool.  I have downhill skied before…at Ober Gatlinburg.  I’m sure it is different in Vermont.

One thing that hit me was some of the brand names that come out of Vermont.  For some of these companies I just never quite made the jump to associating with the state.  For instance, Cabot.  We went to their factory and watched a little video about them and bought cheese and whipped cream. What made that one particular visit more interesting for me is a post I had just seen on Facebook.  The post was about dairy farmers selling off their farms or facing the threat of bankruptcy with changes to the market.  The key change is that Wal-Mart (the Voldemort of retail) has cancelled it’s contract with Dean Foods that supplied most of the retailers milk.  Dean worked with a lot of small farmers.  Wal-Mart will be working mainly with agribusiness type dairy businesses (think super large dairy farms that don’t give a crap’s ass about cows and are only run by dark princes of evil reminiscent of Vlad the Impaler…of course I exaggerate a little…but only a little). 

www.cabotcheese.coop

So, before I digressed I was talking about Cabot Creamery.  Cabot is actually a COOP.  You can go to their web-site and read about their COOP, but the bottom line is that the farmers who participate with the COOP have a much greater control of their destiny.  This kind of concept permeates Vermont.  The idea that if we work together and support each other we actually have more freedom and control of our destiny.  I think sometimes in America we have this idea that freedom is all about being free of rules.  There's this idea that if we all do what we want then some sort of magical fairy dust makes everything work out for the best.  

But life doesn't work that way.  Economics doesn't work that way...the farmers of Vermont realize that.  Ask any farmer who has had a contract with Dean foods. 

The visit to Cabot for me was more than just a visit to a cheese and butter house, it was a lesson in economics.  A lot of my relatives were dairy farmers.  My granddad was a dairy farmer. My great granddad was a dairy farmer.  A lot of my great-aunts and uncles were dairy farmers.  It’s hard work and they deserve to make a living.  COOPs are the way to make it happen.  Don’t buy dairy at Wal-Mart.

Let's do a flashback to before I was in Vermont, before I had kids, even before I was married.  I had left seminary and went home to work in the family business.  We opened a store in Chattanooga that I ran for nine years (nine really, really long, traumatic, hard years).  Our main products were for home interiors.  We did customer window treatments, wall art, lamps, stuff like that.  My mom’s store in Cleveland had been named “Linens for Less” for years, but we changed the name for the Chattanooga store to “Nancy’s Home Fashions.”  From a marketing standpoint I eventually learned that no one has any idea what in the world a, “home fashion” is.  Cest la Vie. 

Well, in addition to all the stuff for the house we also had gifty type stuff.  One of the lines I almost brought in was Vermont Teddy Bear.  They are really high quality teddy bears that you can get for kids to play with (they won’t fall apart in two weeks) or collect.  They aren’t cheap.  They are a good quality product.  

Well, about the time I was considering Vermont Teddy Bear the  TY Beanie Baby craze hit.  Cheap little crappy bear products with cute names and low prices...and people bought them up like crack cocaine.  We became dealers for crack cocaine and we didn’t ever carry Vermont Teddy Bears.  I did use money from the sale of the Ty Beanie Babies to raise money for medical research for Multiple Scloersis so I don't feel entirely guilty.

www.myelin.org/ - A great research organization

www.vermontteddybear.com

We didn’t go see the Vermont Teddy Bear factory place.  We passed it on the way to Burlington…maybe it was while we were in Burlington.  The important thing was that our daughter wasn’t watching when we passed by.  Every year our kids have to do some sort of educational project during the summer and for this summer she is doing a lot of reading.  Luckily for us when we were passing all those Vermont Teddy Bear signs she had her head in a book.  Next time we visit we promise she'll get her visit...and a bear.

Now we are going to go back in time...again  That’s really fine because one of the movies the kids watched in the car on our 16 hour journey was, “Back to the Future.”  Before we had kids, in fact back all the way to when we first got married we went on our honeymoon.  No surprise that we went on a honeymoon, but there’s a story there.  The night before our wedding we changed our honeymoon plans.  We were gonna go south from Cleveland, TN down into Georgia to a secret rendezvous on a beach somewhere.  Instead we headed north into Virginia.  Among our other stops we spent a few days in the historical city of Williamsburg.  Because if you are going to have a honeymoon you should do something historical right?

www.colonialwilliamsburg.com/

www.bedandbreakfast.com/williamsburg-virginia.html

Don’t ask.  Historical…honeymoon.  I know it doesn’t go together, but somehow it worked.  We stayed at Bed and Breakfasts Inns instead of hotels.  We never had reservations anywhere.  We had a blast.  One of the little stores we went in at Williamsburg was Danforth Pottery.  Guess where Danforth Pottery is made?  Vermont!!  In fact, that Williamsburg store is the only store they have outside of Vermont.  It’s just one more Vermont brand I didn’t associate with Vermont.

One company that you do likely…maybe…associate with Vermont is Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.  Just another comment about our wedding.  At the reception we had an ice cream bar…with Ben & Jerry’s.  At the time there was no Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop in our area of Tennessee, so we had to arrange for it to be shipped in.  My mom had a catering business years earlier so I just called found the number for the company and called.  I just told them I was with “Bennett’s House of Catering” and that we had a client that wanted Ben & Jerry’s and what did we have to do to make that happen.  You can see Ben, Jerry, and I go way back.

www.benjerry.com/

The friends we were visiting in Vermont were in the ministry and on our way to Ben & Jerry’s we were discussing, “The Poor People’s Campaign.”  I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but it’s pretty obvious social justice and ice cream go together.  It’s the middle of Vermont you have to talk about something…right?  There we were driving to Ben &Jerry’s talking about the Reverend Barber, institutional racism, the Koch brothers, and the efforts of some to fight back for the poor, the working class, and the middle class. 

www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/

And then we showed up at Ben & Jerry’s to eat delicious ice cream.  We took the tour, watched a little bit of the production, and we watched their little movie about the company.  Then, surprise, surprise, surprise at the end of the Ben & Jerry’s company movie they talked in the movie about their support for the Poor People’s Campaign.  Just what we were talking about on our way to eat the fattening ice cream. 

So what all have we learned so far…the Cabot Creamery COOP helps protect dairy farmers from the evils of Wal-Mart, Vermont makes great Teddy Bears, and Ben & Jerry’s supports fighting for the little guy.  Regardless of whether that little guy is black, gay, trans, a farmer, poor, or even a white straight dude.  Vermont is freakin’ AWESOME!!!!

Let’s not mention Green Mountain Coffee.  Green Mountain Coffee is well, it’s good coffee.  The company is incredibly environmentally sensitive as are most Vermont companies.  King Arthur Flour is sold in the South, but in Vermont it’s as ubiquitous as White Lilly.  If you go to a church social and people ask you for the recipe they just reply, “It’s just whatever’s in the King Arthur Cookbook.” 

www.kingarthurflour.com/

www.gmcr.com/

I think Wisconsin may have a stronger marketing presence when it comes to cheese than Vermont, but as far as “craft cheese” (think craft beer…smaller organizations making higher quality product) my guess is that Vermont has Wisconsin blown away.  Get this.  I mentioned the dairy COOPs earlier when I was writing about Cabot Creamery, but when it comes to cheese these Vermonters are downright zealous about their milk.  So quite a few cheese makers dry the hay that they feed to their dairy herds.  The idea is that summer, fall, winter, spring, or mud season (more on mud season later) the milk coming out of the cow tastes the same because they have consistent feed all year long. 

They have whole barns for drying hay!  Maybe this is widespread across the nation…I don’t know, but I haven’t ever heard of it before.  For that matter it was interesting I hardly ever saw any dairy cattle in Vermont.  There’s the Cabot Creamery COOP farmers, the dairy farmers that supply Ben & Jerry’s, the local cheesemaker dairy farmers…but where are all the cows?  It turns out they are in the barn.  Think about it…it’s so darn cold with so much snow on the ground they can’t let them out during the winter…and the winter, harsh spring, harsh fall, and mud season take up most of the year…so they just keep them in the barn.  The barns are huge.  Big, big barns.  My grandfather was a dairy farmer in Bradley County, Tennessee and I don’t know that I ever saw a barn as small as his.

burlingtonfreepress--story on drying hay

Now…about mud season. I haven’t witnessed mud season, but I hear it’s crazy.  It comes just as spring is ending.  Just do an internet search for “Vermont, Mud Season” and look at the pictures.  What I didn’t understand when I first heard about it is that Vermont has a tremendous number of unpaved roads.  The paved roads they clean religiously during the winter and if you have access to one you can get anywhere.  Even the unpaved roads are largely passable during the winter.  It’s during mud season it can get squirrely.  We heard that last year they never closed schools (at least in the area we were at) for winter, but they did have to close them one day during mud season.  I’ve never heard of such!  😊

Last, but not least…maple syrup.  You can find an infinite number of brands of maple syrup.  We stopped by Goodrich’s Maple Farm for ours.  One of the Goodrich daughters was there an gave us an excellent history of her family’s operation (now in it’s 3^rd generation) and the maple syrup industry in general.  The Goodrich’s do not distribute through grocery stores but sell and ship direct out of their store…everywhere in the world.  They have actually shipped their maple syrup to nearly every country in Asia…and Moscow.  It could be that Putin shared some of Goodrich’s maple syrup with Trump in that secret meeting!! 

www.goodrichmaplefarm.com/

But really, maple syrup farms are everywhere.  In the south if you throw a rock you might hit a Baptist church.  In Vermont if you throw a rock you might hit a maple syrup farm.  The way they make it is very similar to the way we make sorghum down here.  When the juice comes out of the sorghum plant it has a lot of water in it so you put it in a big tray and boil it down.  Same thing with Maple syrup.  When the juice comes out of the maple tree it’s about 98% (I think that’s what the Goodrich lady said) water.  Then they just boil it down.  There are four different grades of maple syrup that are dependent on what time of the year the juice is harvested (and probably on how long your boil it down as well).  We don’t have that with sorghum. 

Anyway, that just about sums up a lot of our trip to Vermont. It’s an absolutely beautiful part of the country.  They have really structured things up there to support their environment, their families, and their local businesses.  They take the long view.  Some of that stuff (conservation, etc) has a cost to it, but that’s what they have decided to do with their state.  It makes it a place were visiting or moving to if you have the hankerin’.  Just don’t forget about mud season.

"The Town That Food Saved" by Ben Hewitt - I ran across this book about a little town, agriculture, and working together. I got it at a local bookstore in Vermont. You should order it from the author or a local bookstore..either way.