Our New Partnership with VPR!

The Vermont Folklife Center is pleased to announce a new partnership with Vermont Public Radio, which will feature monthly four-minute stories produced by the Center for broadcast on VPR’s daily news program, Vermont Edition. This builds on a decades-long relationship that includes such notable programming as the Center’s 1990 Peabody award-winning radio series Journey’s End and the 2004 documentary Prisoners of War.

This new venture is drawn from field research exploring locally produced food in Vermont, which was undertaken with support from the Library of Congress. Through this research we met Greg Cox of Boardman Hill Farm in West Rutland whose twin priorities are growing food and building farm infrastructure.

Lindsay and Scott Courcelle. Photo by Macaulay Lerman.

Greg sees immense opportunity for young people in Rutland County. To that end he and his wife Gay offer flexible term internships for aspiring young farmers and offer access to prime agricultural land, equipment, irrigation systems, and on-farm infrastructure to help launch new businesses.

Thus was born our radio series Growing Food, Growing Famers, which will profile young farmers in Rutland County. Up first are Scott and Lindsay Courcelle of Alchemy Gardens in Shrewsbury. They made a carefully considered decision to establish their farm in Rutland County because of the vitality of the local food movement in the Rutland area. In the coming months we will meet others who share this feeling of promise and possibility.