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Farming into the future

Christine Kaiser and Stowe Land Trust find the right buyer for her farm

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The inside of a Vermont barn is a place of layers, the accumulation of years — layers of grit and grime, manure and mud, cobwebs and sawdust forming agrarian stalactites.

The Kaiser Farm in Stowe’s Nebraska Valley is no exception.

“Sweeping cobwebs. That’s not one of my favorite hobbies,” Christine Kaiser laughs.

Now 70, with a sparkle in her eye and a chuckle in her mouth, she’s been trying to get out of the farming game for some years, but wanted to make sure the property was sold to actual farmers who will take care of the land.

Enter Annie and Andrew Paradee, a young couple — he’s 30, she’s 28 — who stand poised to take over the Kaiser family property and rename it Long Winter Farm.

And, thanks to a lot of help from a lot of people, farmers forever into the future will use the 49-acre property.

The Stowe Land Trust and the Vermont Land Trust are working with Kaiser to buy an easement that will restrict development, and keep the property affordable for purchase by farmers in the future. The land trust has an option to repurchase the property at its appraised agricultural value, if it would otherwise be sold to a non-farmer.

The land trusts are trying to raise $327,200 to help buy the easement, and are about 85 percent of the way toward that goal.

The easement will permanently protect one of the few working farms remaining in Stowe, said Caitrin Maloney, director of Stowe Land Trust.

“I think this is a great story all around, because everyone stands to gain,” Maloney said. “Christine gets to see the land that she and her family stewarded for decades remain in farming, the Paradees get the opportunity to establish an exciting new farm operation, and the community benefits in that this land will be protected for farming forever.”

Added Kaiser, “I wouldn’t sell the easement to just anyone.”

Old farm, vibrant farmer

Kaiser’s parents, Clyde and Bernadine, bought the farm in 1945.

In 1977, she inherited the farm and in 1983 moved there with her husband to begin farming. Eventually she and her husband divorced.

It’s no secret the 49-acre property would make a real estate developer salivate, Kaiser noted in a 2006 interview with the Stowe Reporter.

“I’ve had people make offers,” she said. “But I tell them no way unless they want to pay well over a million.”

The Kaiser farm used to have a dairy operation, but when Kaiser got divorced and began running the operation mostly solo, she switched to goat milk. Showing off her goats last week, Kaiser spoke of a delicious ground goat hamburger recipe that won best in show at a recent farm show — the kids ignore the talk of yummy ways to prepare them.

Tucked into a nook near the 7-foot roof, a radio played classic rock, serenading the chickens and goats as Kaiser led a group into the barn.

The diminutive farmer yanked a push-broom from one of the manure channels, the business end of it caked in icy muck, and used the very tip of the handle to push the radio’s power button, whack, whack, whack.

How long has the radio been up there? Has it been on the same station since it arrived? Why not just have the radio at to a height you can reach? Or does the situation illustrate how long-timers have approached farming for generations?

In a state where the official state beverage is milk, and there’s a good argument to name duct tape the official state fabric, generations of Vermont farmers have stuck to solid, tried and true methods, using Yankee ingenuity to make things work on a shoestring budget.

But the ever-dropping price per hundredweight for liquid milk has forced longtime farmers to figure out how to add value to their operations.

Kaiser has been ahead of the curve, with a diversified farm that doesn’t rely heavily on just one thing. She has eggs and the chickens that lay them, she has goats for their milk, and she hays her neighbors’ properties.

Those neighbors will be happy to see the farm pass on to the next generation, Kaiser said. Not only does the permanent easement make the land more affordable for farmers, but it also keeps it out of the hands of developers who might want it for condos or a nice, big house in the middle of a large spread of land with postcard views.

“This is a community project,” Maloney said. “From the beginning, we have heard from many Nebraska Valley neighbors who were concerned that the farm would be sold for development.”

Local food, long winter

Stowe has dozens of restaurants, with more opening and closing just about every year. It’s a major last stop in Vermont’s food chain.

But the town isn’t known as a major agriculture producer, especially vegetables.

Pete’s Greens, one of the state’s largest veggie farms, has a farm stand in Waterbury Center, only a mile from the Stowe town line. The farmers’ markets on Mountain Road and at Spruce Peak are popular draws on weekends, but only a small percentage of the vendors are vegetable farmers.

“Not a lot of produce is produced in Stowe, but there’s a lot of places to eat,” Annie Paradee said. “People in Stowe love food. They love good food. And they love the environment.”

She’s going to be largely in charge of Long Winter Farm’s veggie production. It will be a limited operation this year, since farms should already be starting their tomatoes, peppers and onions indoors, and the Paradees just don’t have the space to do much this year. But in following years, they hope to help fill Stowe’s veggie void.

The Paradees don’t want to oversell themselves, or jinx Long Winter Farm, cognizant that farms don’t just happen overnight. And after all, the farm isn’t theirs yet, even though they have bank approval for their loan.

But they also don’t want to sell themselves short. They plan on running a diverse operation, with vegetables, eggs and pork products. They plan on keeping Kaiser’s “handshake deals” to hay the Nebraska Valley neighbors’ fields.

“Our scale is going to start small and local, but we definitely plan on selling very local, whether it’s directly to customers or to restaurants,” Andrew Paradee said.

Their five-year plan includes a farm stand and a different take on community-supported agriculture: Instead of the farm delivering a boxful of produce, a CSA membership will give people points to spend at the farm stand, where they can pick what they want.

“They’re going to be adaptable, which you need to be in Vermont,” Maloney said.

Help from all over

Stowe Land Trust isn’t going it alone in securing the Kaiser farm easement. While Maloney and her crew know all about the local picture, the Vermont Land Trust has the names of people all over the state who want to buy a farm.

It’s like the agri-business version of a dating site.

“Stowe Land Trust is the boots on the ground, while Vermont Land Trust has the resources, the connections to farmers all around the state,” Maloney said.

John Ramsay is director of the Vermont Land Trust’s farmland access program, which helps farmers buy or lease affordable agricultural property so they can start or expand their own farm operations. He said the Kaiser farm is the first farmland access program in the greater Stowe area.

“We’re seeing all shapes and sizes of farm seekers,” Ramsay said. “And all kinds of farms are out there. The more geographically diverse we can be, the better.”

At the middle of it all is Kaiser, the land steward who all these years has resisted selling the property until the right folks came around.

“I think it’s very cool what a huge role she played in contacting us about the sale,” Annie Paradee said.

That involved connecting the couple with a business planner, Sam Smith at the Burlington Intervale, who took the couple’s very rough business plan — we’re talking cocktail-napkin rough — and fleshed it out. Smith also advocated strongly on the Paradees’ behalf before the Stowe and Vermont land trusts.

Now that Kaiser can truly plan for life after the farm, she has time on her hands. She’s thinking about spending more time with her grandkids, traveling, enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee at the Pizza Joint in Moscow, maybe getting back into the dating game.

That’s fitting, since the quest for a suitable farm buyer played out like an agricultural version of match.com, for a certain spunky 70 year-old with a lot more time on her hands. And she’s definitely not shy, as her neighbors know.

“I wave to everyone who drives by,” she said. “Usually, I walk right up to the car and talk with them in the middle of the road.”

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