VPT Online: ReGeneration: Kit Perkins






	HOME episodes host & producers teacher's guide feedback Interview Transcript The Intervale Center - Kit Perkins The Intervale Center in Burlington, Vt., is a model for local and regional sustainable economic development. We spoke with executive director Kit Perkins. Q: Please introduce yourself. Kit Perkins: I'm Kit Perkins. I'm the Executive Director of the Intervale Center and the Intervale Center is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to develop farm and land-based enterprises that generate both social and economic opportunities but also protect natural resources. So really trying to approach and promote sustainable agriculture and build strong local food systems with a triple bottom line in mind. So we are promoting farming and agriculture, agricultural enterprises that deal with social, economic, environmental, other well-being issues. That means that a farmer needs to be making a good living. A farmer needs to have a good quality of life or take a vacation every once in a while. The farm is actually contributing and delivering, contributing to their local community. They are performing at a very high level from an environmental point of view in terms of the treatment of the soil and the work, the growing of the food that they're doing. Q: Bridge the farming gap. KP: Sure. I can talk a little bit about our programs in particular and I'll start with Intervale Compost Products which is the oldest program. But a tiny, just a brief history. This place has centuries of history in agriculture, this land here, and then there was about a 30 year period in the '70s and '80s when it had really been abandoned due to a variety of issues including the decline of the dairy industry. It had turned into a dump, a very unsafe place to be, and Will Rapp founded the Intervale Center to really restore this land back to its agricultural roots and feed Burlington. So this is an amazing proximity of this kind of land closest to a state's largest city, most populated area. We started with a compost operation where we were literally going through a trying to re-nourish the depleted soil. The soils are amazing here, but they had become depleted over time, so there was a portable composting operation that went from field to field recycling leaves from our community. So we're really taking, helping to reduce the amount of waste going into a landfill, serving that purpose of sustainable waste management but at the same time sustaining our soils here and it's now the largest commercial composting operation in Vermont — that's Intervale Compost Products — so we're really looking sort of from the soil well-being point of view. The next program that was established is our Farms Program which is otherwise known as the Incubator Farms Program. The farms program was started as a way to help new farmers get started. If you're working on a farm and you want to start your own business, it's nearly impossible from a financial point of view to buy land, buy a tractor, buy all the things you need and have all that up-front capital and get started in farming, especially organic farming. And so what the Farms Program does, it provides access to land, leased land, and then shared, access to shared equipment and other resources to do the farming. Right now there's 13 farms in the Intervale, independent farms. They're private businesses that are leasing land and sharing equipment that we own currently which provides affordable access to farms that want to get started. And the idea is to incubate them. Some will stay for a long time, if not for their lifetime, which is wonderful because one of the unique parts of this program, also I'll add, is the mentorship that happens between the farmers that have been here for a long time and the new farmers. Farming can be a real isolating, isolated type of business and that's also sort of touches on the social bottom line, just really trying to mentor young farmers or new farmers that are trying to get started. That's part of what the program does in addition. Q: Talk about CSA � Community Supported Agriculture. KP: CSA does a few really great things to support farming. It's called Community Supported Agriculture because a community member can purchase a share of the farm produce essentially. They give the farmer a check, a certain amount of money in the spring, when they need the cash to get started, and in return they get a share of produce every week, a bundle of produce every week from May through October, however the season goes. And the second part of that, is that the community, by doing that, shares the risk of farming, too, because it's a very unpredictable business. It's dependent on the weather. It's dependent on a lot of things out of our control. So by helping community members get invested in agriculture in that way, they not only first of all get access to amazing, very fresh produce, but also get connected to where their food is coming from, how agriculture works, what the risks are involved in agriculture and what the returns are. Q: Of the work that you do here, what makes you the most proud? KP: Everything makes me the most proud. I think that raising people's awareness of about how critical it is to improve our connections to local food from a resource consumption, bottom line if you want to call it, its costs. We waste so much fuel and other resources and spew all sorts of bad emissions into the air importing food from California, from farms we don't even know where they're coming from, and not to mention the nutrient loss that comes from that, so making the connections � social, economic, environmental connections of local food, what local food means for all those bottom lines, I'm really proud of. Another very specific thing I'm proud of is that we glean. It's part of our Healthy City Youth Farm Program. We're training 25 kids every summer, sort of at-risk teens, to run an organic farm from seed to market. They're learning all sorts of skills, but they're also helping volunteers coordinate a gleaning program where we go around and collect extra vegetables that are in the field and deliver about 30 � 40,000 pounds a year to social service agencies for families in need. These are folks who have not had the ability to get fresh produce. They're hungry and they're able to get fresh, healthy produce through this program. We're also helping to get this fresh local produce into schools and training kids through the Healthy City Program to talk about this stuff with their peers, so there's great stories around that. Q: What's the most fun thing you do here? KP: I just love fundraising! No, I'm kidding. Let's see, actually I do like fundraising to some extent. I like talking about it. I love talking about what we're doing when I see somebody's face kind of go ah-ha, I get it, I get. And especially with a teen who really hasn't had this kind of connection to agriculture, to farming and where their food comes from, to sort of be suddenly standing in the lunch line with kids that last year were ostracizing him and this year he's standing up and feeling confident about saying, "Hey these are the tomatoes we grew. They're in the lunch line. You guys gotta try them." So it's this combination of building confidence in kids, in teens, but also in the community. Educating the community about how important it is to be connected to our food source. Q: What is it that they "get"? KP: Every time they go and pick up a piece of food, they're asking the question, "Where did this come from? What kind of resources went in to growing this? What kind of impact did this piece of food have on the person that grew it?" From an economic, social, environmental, health point of view. So we're constantly getting people to ask the questions: "Gee, I wonder how much oil was consumed to get this carrot to this store and why couldn't, what's the difference between this carrot coming from California and this carrot coming from 2 miles away in the Intervale? And why does that matter to me as a person, from my health point of view, as a citizen trying to think about our environment, from a citizen thinking a healthy, vital economy, thinking about our neighbors and their social well-being and the social, the well-being of our community as a whole?" So that's what I think I meant by that. Q: Is this a roadmap to future? KP: On many fronts, but sustainable waste management, composting, I personally believe composting is solving one of the most dramatic environmental problems in the world, which is soil fertility. If you were to say what's the number 1 problem in the world, the problem is soil. We're dealing with that on a local scale, regional scale, statewide scale, but still, if we can model that for other communities I just, it's gonna, you know, save the world, if compost can do that. In terms of a road map, sustainable waste management, a secure source of fresh, healthy, organic food that we know where it's coming from, we know how it's grown, we know who's growing it, we're friends with our farmers — we're always going to need to eat, we always want to improve our health, especially with our kids. That's a real connection that people can make. Folks, like adults that might not even think about this stuff, when their kid isn't healthy because they're not eating right, that's when they're going to pay attention. So we are providing ways for kids to really get involved with this. Q: Your goal is to provide 6% of Burlington's food? KP: Right now the farmers that are part of the Farms Program here produce, oh, about 550,000 pounds of food every year and that's about 6 � 7% of what we have estimated Burlington consumes. Our goal is about 10%. That is what we think that the land here that we manage can support. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of other land that might potentially, has been preserved for either, preserved for agricultural purposes, or could be preserved for agricultural purposes. But I think having people in closer proximity to their food sources is the way of the future, and it's going to solve land use problems, it's going to solve resource consumption problems, emissions issues that are causing global warming. And then, of course, the way we farm is going to have an impact on all those bottom lines. Having people in closer proximity to their local food sources is going to solve a lot of different problems, both from a land use point of view, resource consumption, oil and fossil fuel consumption, carbon emissions that are causing global warming that are indisputable at this point. The closer we are to the food, the less it has to get transported. Health concerns — we're dealing with serious diabetes and obesity problems and that is something that healthy food can address as well. Farming and gardening, gardening, in-community gardening is an excellent recreation and exercise. Q: How about economics? KP: Great question. Right now, another program that we run is another social enterprise like compost. We're actually selling goods and services, goods in these cases, to help sustain the enterprise. It's under the umbrella of a non-profit, but it's really operating like a business. It's creating jobs, creating revenues, so we believe that we can do well, do well by doing good. At our Intervale Conservation Nursery, we're currently growing 35 species of native Vermont-source trees and shrubs for riparian restoration which is one of the best ways to protect water quality by improving the force of buffers along river banks, along Lake Champlain. You know, you can't turn the page of any newspaper in Vermont these days without hearing about the problems of the water quality in the lake due to stormwater runoff, and one of the reasons is because we have these depleted buffers along our surface water bodies. We want to be able to plant those with species that are going to be more hardy and Vermont-source. Again, it's sort of coming back to the buy local and create local, but this is an enterprise, we can't grow enough trees right now, the demand is huge. People love the idea. We're serving a very, very critical environmental purpose but we're also creating an enterprise. We're seeding an enterprise that will become profitable into the future, we believe. So we're sort of ahead of the market at the moment. That's part of starting it within the context of the non-profit. I mean, hopefully you're going to check in with Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, which is the highest number of businesses within this kind of trade organization in the country, by number, not even per capita. So people have demonstrated that we can do well by doing good. I happen to be the granddaughter-in-law of Lyman Wood who's a very well-known entrepreneur in Vermont that completely believed in that. It became his mission to do that, through the development of Garden Way. I'm going off on a tangent here, but it's real. It's possible. Look at Gardener's Supply. I mean, they're doing really well, and I personally think we are at a point in time, we're at a tipping point right now, with all we know now about global warming. It's just, it is indisputable that evidence right now that we have 10 years to do something, to change our behavior, to make a difference, in order to stop the progress of global warming and save ourselves essentially. From conservatives to liberals the evidence is there. So if we can use the market economy to drive businesses that are doing things to help, in ways that can reduce fossil fuel emission or fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions, for example, that can help reduce poverty, that can really help feed people that need food. I think that from our point of view, we're a non-profit organization, very enterprise oriented, and we're really trying to tap into market trends that, we're trying to create enterprises that are tapping the market trends where we can bridge economy and environment and social well-being and health and all the bottom lines there, and really believe it. I don't just believe it, I see evidence all over the place that we are at a tipping point, whether it's just from folks just really understanding the impact of eating local, all the ripple effect that that has as I explained earlier, to thinking about every single purchase they make. We're always, we're consumers, everything, every purchase we make does make a difference, so I feel like we are at a tipping point and people are starting to get that. Not to mention the oil prices, that sure is helping people get the message. Return to top