NOFA Vermont | Grace Oedel
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Executive Director Grace Oedel of NOFA Vermont joins us to discuss the vital role food and farming systems play in local resilience and sustainability. Discover how building a strong, community-focused food shed aligns directly with our Net Zero Energy goals. Grace shares critical insights on mitigating climate impacts, supporting local farmers, navigating systemic challenges, and strengthening community connections. Learn how everyday choices regarding food access, organic farming, and supporting local markets contribute to a thriving, ecologically sound future for all Vermonters.
transcript
00:00 Jennifer Green: Hello, Burlington and welcome to Net Zero Energy. I’m Jennifer Green, director of sustainability for the City of Burlington, where our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel usage. Today we have Grace Oedel with us. Grace is the executive director of NOFA Vermont. For folks that don’t know, NOFA is the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Grace. We’re so happy to have you with us.
00:34 Grace Oedel: I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:36 Jennifer Green: So you and I both co-chaired the Mayor’s Climate Advisory Group. Last year. We came up with a series of recommendations. Many of those recommendations were based on sort of mitigating climate change with reduced through reducing carbon. And we talked a lot about buildings and transportation, but we also talked about food and farming, because food and farming plays such an important role in resiliency and adaptation for climate.
01:01 Grace Oedel: This tension that you’re talking about, about how we sort of address immediate harm, like, and mitigate the harms that are ongoing. Climate crisis is ongoing. People are hungry economically. It’s hard to survive. And how do we build towards transformative change such that we really change our systems and the policies that govern us, so that we can live in a way that really works for people in the planet. It’s providing strategies and services, and building power along that whole continuum is what NOFA is really up to and has been up to for more than the last fifty years. And we were founded by a group of farmers who believed that farming could be done in a way that was beneficial for both people and the planet. And it was highly participatory. It was people teaching each other skills, going to each other’s farms, helping each other grow organically and learn how to do that. And from there, this organization grew and we’ve grown to now we have almost three thousand members around the state, and we have a staff of forty people who work all around the state to help build power and bring people in to build an ecologically sound, socially just and economically viable food and farming system. That’s really good for the people and for the planet here. And so we work through a variety of strategies to achieve those goals, whether it’s working with farmers to teach each other the climate resilience things that they’re doing on farm to make themselves more climate resilient, or whether it’s business planning services or bringing together cohorts to learn innovative methods of growing or cohorts to learn. Like right now, we have three cohorts going. We have a cohort of agroforestry, so people doing tree crops and long term perennial crops that sequester carbon alongside annual crops or animals. We have a cohort that’s about accessing land together. So shared collaborative alternative models of land access. In this climate of increasing land costs and decreasing numbers of farmers. And we have a cohort about soil health stewardship going. That’s all farmers and farm workers. We also have teams that work on bringing local and organic food to schools to shorten the miles between where food is grown and where it’s eaten, to make sure that good quality food is accessible for all kiddos, and that our public institutions are putting public dollars back into the hands of our farmers that we want to see thrive. We organize the Vermont Farmers Market Association. We administer Snap for all folks using Snap at places outside of the grocery store. So like, if you snap at a farmer’s market or you snap at a direct point of sale, we administer that. So programs that support hungry folks, limited income Vermonters, and also support farmers directly. And then a final way that lots of folks know us is that we also own Vermont Organic Farmers, which is the LLC arm of our organization, which is regulatory in nature and inspects farms to ensure that they’re complying with the national Organic Program. So if you see an organic seal on a product, some of our inspectors will have checked that out and work with that farm to make sure that they’re complying.
04:22 Jennifer Green: I’m feeling like there’s a thread or a sort of a little theme that runs between, you know, B E D where we’re working in sort of buildings and transportation. We want to encourage people to drive electric. So they’re buying local electricity, which of course, you know, keeps that money in the economy. And that definitely seems like a theme that runs throughout your work.
04:42 Grace Oedel: Totally, totally. We constantly are thinking about how can you know? I think that old like think global act local is something that you’ll see really embodied in our community, people making choices to really consider the impact that their, that their personal and our collective choices have on the spaces and people around us. And in a place like Vermont where it’s so human scale, you can see it makes a really big difference. You know, if a local egg farmer gets into the school, it’s hugely impactful for that farmer, for that school, for the for the, you know, earth around that place and the community and culture of that place.
05:20 Jennifer Green: Yeah. And I get the sense that people, when they want to be engaged and they want to make change, they often start with food. Would you agree that it’s sort of an entree into sort of social change?
05:31 Grace Oedel: I hope so. I do think it’s so basic. You know, everyone eats and whether or not we see food as a human right, which we certainly do, that becomes like this incredible mandate, you know, what kind of food and where is it grown and who gets access to that and why? Food and farming is a place of joy, like coming to the table together. Sharing a delicious meal offers you this tantalizing taste of the future that we could be building. So it’s not all about sacrifice, like local food grown by people you know, taste better, you know? So it’s a great organizing tool.
06:08 Jennifer Green: So Grace, with all the good that’s going on, I mean, there’s still upstream work to do. What are the challenges you’re facing or you see Vermont farmers wrestling with right now?
06:20 Grace Oedel: There are there are many. I talk and think about this probably like you, as a time of poly crisis, like multiple intersecting crises that all compound the cost of land are astronomical. Vermont farmland has skyrocketed in cost at a far faster pace than land other places in the country. The costs of production are high, particularly at our scale in Vermont. I mean, one of the beautiful things is we’re small scale. We can never compete with corporate consolidation. And so in this stage of extreme late stage capitalism, in my read, where the push from corporations to get larger and get consolidated is ever stronger for a profit motive, it is very hard to compete with that. We see that with Pullouts, like just a few years ago, horizon, which was a major buyer of Vermont Organic dairy, was bought by an international company that wasn’t even based in the U.S. that company determined that it was, you know, it was too expensive to buy milk regionally. And they dropped our farmers. Eighty seven farmers lost contracts essentially overnight. And that was an incredible hardship. Just a few decades ago, Vermont had something like fifteen plus thousand dairy farms, small family scale dairy farms. We have four hundred total today. It’s a direct product of corporate consolidation. We have an ICE terror campaign that is continuing untrammeled, and it is extremely like present. It has been present even before this administration, but it is certainly intensified. But farms and farm workers. Living under fear is very dangerous and bad for our food security. Right now, there was just a story run about how there’s currently a creamy mix shortage in our state, because there’s only three producers of creamy mix, and one of them is at a farm that just had a large ICE raid where many people were taken and others left out of fear. And that farm cannot find enough folks to continue production. And then there’s climate instability. You know, several years ago now, three years ago, we had catastrophic flooding that was supposed to be one hundred year flooding. We had enormous losses, over forty million dollars of reported losses on farms just from that one July eleventh flood. And then the following year, we had another flood on the exact same day, and then the following summer, catastrophic droughts. So the client, you know, this myth that Vermont is going to somehow be unaffected by climate change. That bubble has really been popped, which is why all the work like that harm mitigation work of saying when you are flooded, we’re going to stand up a public fund that will have your back and at least be able to help you get through the season. You know, that seems like a bare minimum effort. So that’s something we’ve been fighting for. And we did get passed as policy last year. We now we need it funded, but we work on that scale and we also give out emergency grants. So all the time we’re giving out small five thousand dollars grants to our farmers if they have some kind of emergency just to help them make it through.
09:33 Jennifer Green: So Grace, if for folks that are listening and they, they want to do something that impacts your work and our food systems more generally, what any advice you would leave for folks?
09:43 Grace Oedel: Heck yeah, we want you as a member. You can join. We have sliding scale membership down to a dollar. So come and get involved. There’s any number of ways to do this. We have long handled spoon dinners going on right now where just community members can come together and host a dinner for their neighbors, talk about safety and resilience, talk about food. And we supply some funds to help people lay the table with local and organic food. We have sort of entry points all along up to getting really deeply involved in policy work, but we need everyone’s gifts to come to the table for this movement of really building a local food shed. That makes sense and that will nourish our kids tomorrow. So we want you as a member.
10:28 Jennifer Green: I really learned so much about NOFA and your work, and feel proud to live in a state that is thinking so comprehensively about these bigger challenges and the ramifications at the local level. Thanks so much for being here.
10:42 Grace Oedel: Back at you. Thanks for all the work you do.
10:47 Jennifer Green: Thank you again for listening to Net Zero Energy from Burlington Electric Department. If you have any questions about this show or what BED offers regarding rebates or technical support, look for us at burlingtonelectric.com or call us at 802-865-7300. We’re here to help you on our mutual path to Net Zero Energy.