BY WALTER ZEICHNER

griculture has a rich history in Vermont
ranging from vegetable gardens and ﬁeld

crops to dairying with cows, "goats, and

, sheep. to orchards. There has been agriculture in

Vermont since the Abenaki were the only humans
here. Europeans brought their agriculture to
Vermont before it was a republic, prior to joining
the ﬂedgling United States. The Roman goddess of
agriculture and brewing, Ceres (Demeter to the
Greeks) stands atop the state capital building in
Montpelier.

Currently, according to the US Dept. of
Agriculture, Vennont exports $11.5 million in
direct agricultural products like milk, Christmas
trees. and other unprocessed items..According to
Jason Aldous. spokesperson for the Vermont Dept.
ofAgriculture, Vermont exports another $985 mil-
lion worth of processed foods like cheese, ice
cream. salad dressing, etc. --

Vemionters spend an average of $5500
per household per year on food. 1 f Vennonters
boughtjust 10 percent more local products than
they already do. it would put $130 million back
into the local economy. Currently Vermonters
spend 2-3 percent of their food money on organi-
cally grown items. The amount spent on organics
goes up by roughly 25 percent a year.

1 spoke with some queer-identified peo-
ple who are involved, in one way or another, with
agriculture in Vennont. I asked them about their
involvement with the land, about politics, and
about queer-specific issues.

I spoke with a woman in her mid-50s, a
horse farmer in north central VT since 1997 who
asked not to be identified by name. She and her
partner of 11 years are not “out” locally but they
figure people in their community have “figured it

out.’_‘ Both partners are ministers and perform civil _

unions, weddings and handfastings. “People know
we’re different in that we’re both ministers,-into '
Native American [spirituality], it’s "obvious that we
are different. People who are not churchgoers ask
us to marry them, and we fit into this [rural] com-
munity where people don’t have a lot of money, .
many people have three jobs, households can have i
a number of people  but we stand out some as
two women in same house, with no men ﬂirting ‘
with us.

“My partner is like one of the boys, she
works with the horses. Women who work with

horses oﬁen look rough anyhow, and dykey, so she '

is readily accepted. We used to have a social group’
of women that met monthly for potluck, but the
money to ﬁmdthese gatherings dried up. There are
a few male couples we’re friendly with. An
A-benaki medicine man once said to me ‘Gay peo-
ple make best medicine people,’ which was his way
of letting us know that he knew.’’-

arry, 45, grew up in a farm family. He is not a

farmer now, but he was in partnership with his - ’

dad in a dairy farm for a few years in his twenties.
He decided, he says, “It wasn’t for me.” I asked
him if he missed anything about dairying and he
said “I can see a ﬁeld of beautiful jersey cows and
wax longingly ...'I liked haying." He doesn’t miss
early mornings.

Currently he sugars with his extended A

' family every year on the family farm. Harry also

raises some animals still: exoticvehickens and pea-
cocks, ducks, and draft horses.

    

Queer
Farmers:

The horses are necessary for sugaring
but they are not moneymakers. “They don’t spin in
the mud or get stuck, and I prefer their exhaust to
tractoriexhagust,” Harry pointed out. “They are also
a connection to my dad and his forefathers who all
worked horses on this land. My dad loved draﬁ
horses.” Sugaring is a piece of his family culture,
keeping six of the seven siblings'in'vo1ved every
spring. “The 7th is too busy farming to help.”

I asked 1-Iarry about some of the politics
of farming, what he sees happening. “There used to
be 40 farms in this town, now there are only three,
that's pretty dramatic. A large dairy farm down the
road sold his cows in the last year. He is now is
boarding 200‘ miniature horses. Diversification is
what we’ll see more of, farms producing specialty
items, etc.”

When he was in his 20s and still on the
farm, Harry wanted to meet other gay farmers. He
put a personal ad in a Boston paper looking for
other farmers — and got maybe three responses.
“lt’s pretty tough to find someone else who is
involved_in or interested in agriculture  it’s that
much tougher to ﬁnd someone compatible.” Harry
was not aware of any gay farmers’ organizations. A
Google search found that niralgaycom was the

only site with a section just for gay/lesbian farmers.

David is 45 and newly coming out. He changed
occupations recently so he wouldn’t feel like V
he had to be closeted anymore. Before, he worked
in a school "system, and eventually decided he was
not going to hide anymore. ' _

David's involvement with the land also
started in childhood. He grew up in a large family
with a large garden. His father was a game warden,
and his mom grew up on a dairy farm. When his
Dad died, David was sent to live with an aunt and
uncle on the farm his mom had grown up on,

« . becoming part of that family, including doing farm

chores. When his mom remarried, they still had a
garden. .
‘ David was always involved with plant-
ing, weeding, harvesting and putting away, “[That

' was] the lifestyle I grew up with,” he said. David

eventually moved to Eden (in the northeast comer

V of Lamoille County), got some land, and the garden

got bigger and bigger. V

“You struggle to earn a living, to pay
your property taxes...” and that became his first
goal: to get his garden to pay his property taxes.
“I’m a garlic farmer commercially. Over the years

, the garden grew and eventually I had 5000 plants

in the ground, and I thought, maybe that’s my ‘out’
to pay the taxes. I converted another garden to gar-
lic and went for it. If you’re selling one item you
have to have a good inventory. I figured if I could
sell 5000 plants I could-pay my taxes  that’s how
_I'got into farming today."

Although David is a strong believer in
organics, his garlic is not certified by national stan-
dards. “There ‘are lots of hoops to jump through tb
get certiﬁed,” he said. “I’m not there yet. The
organic farming movement is growing but still
small.”

He hopes NOFA (Northeast Organic
Farmers Association, wvvw.nofavt.org) will be able
to fill some of the gaps so that there are enough
organic products to use on the farm, such as organ-
ic hay. “Organics [are] becoming moregopular but
the prices are still higher than "non-organics. Part of
the reason is that people are so used to big produce
grown non-organically, so people are skeptical
[about] paying more for smaller organically-grown
items. People haven’t sufficiently learned that
organics are better for the earth. It’ll take some-
thing catastrophic for people to see how much
damage the chemical farming is doing to the envi-
ronment.” ‘

David doesn't think of himself as a
farmer because he doesn’t make his living from '
farming. He has lots of respect for people who do
the hard work of full-tirne farming, and strong
opinions about the Vermont Department of
Agriculture. “They’re too focused on cows.
Agriculture in Venriont is changing. The
Department of Agriculture needs to step up to the
plate and understand that small-scale growers are
part of agriculture. We keep the land open” just like

' the big farms do, he said.

“Farms are going under all the time. The
family farm, to survive, has had to become a larger

 

farm, more than just 200 head of cattle with
extended family working the farm". Its _not like it
used to be, where one nuclear family could run a
farm and make a living. Now we have goat fann-
ing, llarnas, berries. and greenhouses," David fin-
ished. “The Department of Agriculture needs to
redeﬁne agriculture in Vennont to include the
smaller producer.”

I asked David what people could do to
support agriculture in Vermont. He said, “Families
without'a garden, when they go to the store, they
need to watch where things are produced. Buy
locally, support the local economy. lfl‘m buying
from someone local. I’m giving ajob to a local per-
son and they can buy what I produce. That makes
for a stronger market. People [in the cities] need to
think about that. If we buy goods from far away,
from folks who are not buying what we produce, ‘
then we are hurting our local economy."

I asked David what he thought about the
controversy regarding genetically modified organ-
isms (GMO). “I think of Frankenstein: scientists
working in a lab to make something. lfyou start
doing this with food products, what are you doing
to the food products?" he asked. “We‘ve produced
modiﬁed products and shipped them to places
where that food item is not what people eat there.
The big companies like Monsanto say they are try-
ing to better the world, but they charge a lot for
their products. Its a greed thing. lt’s big business."

Furthermore, he said, there are ethical
issues in modifying food. “What happens ifyou
end up with just a few varieties of any food crop?
You breed 90 varieties down to two or three. You
get a blight that knocks out the two or three vari-
eties, and then what have you got? Nature’s
strength is in diversity. We’re playing on dangerous
edges, mad scientists changing things."

David, a burly bearish-looking guy, is
single, and indicated that he has difficulty finding
places to socialize. There are few opportunities to
meet other gay men in his neck of the woods, so he
comes to Burlington, but prefers the country. The
bar scene isn’t his trip. He would like to find alife
mate, but doesn’t_have any out gay agriculturally-
involved friends or peer group.

ese few proﬁlestillustrate that there are ‘lesbian
and gay people involved in agriculture in
Vemiont through various activities. There might be
as many as 60,000 gay and lesbian people in
Vermont (10 percent of 600,000). 1 bet there are a
whole lot of those 60,000 who grow gardens, raise
animals, harvest and prepare plants, and participate
in so many more agricultural activities, some just
for home consumption and some for market.

There is no cohesive gay/lesbian agricul-
tural organization that any of these people knew of
or that I could find. Maybe there isn’t a need for
one? Maybe there is? We’ve also established that
we all can contribute to the local economy by

' actively supporting Vermont agriculture. What

would'$l30 million back into the local economy
look like? i

The two people who had both been
involved in growing food both pointed out that the

specialty market is an important part of what’s hap- -

pening in agriculture in Vermont. So feast on
Vermont food folks, and just think  some of it
was undoubtedly grown by a lesbian, bisexual, a
tranny or a gay man. V

Walter I. Zeichner is into ritual. gardening and
radio DJ-ing, and maintains a psychotherapy prac-
tice in Burlington.