Editor’s Note: To read Part I of Voices from NESAWG, “The Young Farmer and the Future of Food,” click here:
Fifty-four percent of New England farmers are convinced that wild new weather will cause some sort of disaster next year. But another impassioned lecture about climate change is going to leave them cold — unless somebody tells them a) what they can actually do to reduce their particular farm’s carbon footprint and b) whether they can afford it. At last month’s conference of the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG), Prof. Vern Grubinger of the University of Vermont Extension Service talked about the practical work of convincing farmers to join the fight to save the planet.
“We have to try and change the behavior of people, not their philosophy,” said Vern Grubinger, Extension Professor at the University of Vermont. “We have to focus on getting them to do what we want them to do without driving ourselves crazy trying to get them to think what we want them to think.”
A vegetable and berry specialist, Grubinger gives personalized technical advice to farmers in our region. He knows that a “one size fits all” response to climate change is not going to work. Each farmer is different. Each farmer has a different backlog of debt to contend with, a different market forecast. “I try to create a learning community where we develop alternatives together, which are responsive to the requirements of climate change but which have enough variation to suit the individual farmer. You have to be able to navigate a landscape of possibilities — and it has to be developed in the field.”
One of Grubinger’s signature success stories was changing the way that some farmers heat their greenhouses.
Imagine a farmer with a greenhouse containing $100,000 worth of seedlings. Along comes the climate change activist, asking her to spend a lot of money to save the planet by changing her way of heating the greenhouse. Grubinger’s job is to bridge the divide between the activist and the farmer. Perhaps instead of fossil fuels, the farmer might try burning a biomass mix of seed corn and wood pellets. He could cut his fuel bill in half that way. But he would have to install a new furnace to burn the changed fuel. Maybe he has to borrow money to buy that furnace. How long will it take for him to pay himself back for his investment? “If he can see the new technology pay him back in 3 years, well maybe he’ll go for it,” said Grubinger. “If it will take 20 years, well, that’s a different story.”
Isn’t this complicated financial research for a farmer to undertake? Grubinger says no, not in today’s agriculture. “The veterans of the ‘back to the land’ movement who are now in their 70s didn’t even know what a business plan looked like when they started out,” he noted. “But younger people today have way more business acumen. We sold the idea of using climate friendly biomass fuels for heating greenhouses by demonstrating that it would help their bottom line.”
Here’s the link to Professor Grubinger’s fascinating report, written with Chris Callahan, on farmers’ experience with biomass furnaces: Click here.
