This post is part of Katie Michels’ 2022 Global Food Fellowship.
Dairy cows grazing near Montpelier, Vermont. Photo by Katie Michels.
This summer, I interviewed 20 Vermont farmers about how and why they manage their land, and what influences their relationships with their land. I asked questions like: Why do you manage your land in the ways that you do? What enables or constrains your ability to farm in the ways that you want to? What does land stewardship mean to you? I spoke with livestock farmers who are managing their animals in different ways, seeking to understand a variety of land management practices and the reasons why farmers use them.
Through these conversations, I was able to hear directly from farmers about their relationships with their land, and the reasons why they make the land management decisions they do. I learned so much about not just the specifics of different land management practices (i.e. what does management-intensive rotational grazing look like on a farm that was abandoned for 50 years prior?), but also the depth of factors that inform farmers’ land management choices. Many farmers I spoke with described the importance of growing food for their communities; fostering habitat for animals both large (bears, deer) and small (bobolinks, butterflies); continuing family legacies; and farm viability. I heard farmers describe how they think of farming as an environmental act, because it places them in relationship with land and offers space and time to know it well. I also heard farmers speak about the value of having many farmers in a community, for how it creates volunteer capacity for municipal bodies like select boards, school boards, and fire departments, which form the lifeblood of rural communities. Many mourned the loss of community ties and capacity that has come as small farms have closed or consolidated and there are fewer full-time farmers.
My time in Vermont allowed me to deepen my own layers of connection to this landscape and place, and to better understand the ways that farmers have made Vermont’s working landscape what it is. The stories I heard were rich and deep. It was a gift to sit with farmers for spans of time ranging from one hour to three days to hear their stories of place, land, animals, and people and the ways they are in relationship with each. Through this work, I learned what farmers are doing, why they are doing it, and how they articulate what land stewardship means to them. I hope to continue to share stories of how the impacts of farmers’ actions ripple out into the human and more-than-human communities of which they are part.
Thank you to the YSFP Global Food Fellows Program, Jubitz Family Endowment for Research, and the Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Grant for supporting this work.