Vermont Fences Cover Story

One Chicken at a Time
A Passion for Agriculture

Brad Tuckerman married the girl next door. Both his and Tina’s families were backyard farmers with large vegetable gardens, some livestock, and outside jobs. When Brad and Tina married, both working in property maintenance at the time, they built their colonial house on part of his parents’ property in Barnard. They looked around at their land and thought, “What can we do with this?”

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Article by Dorrice Hammer

Green Mountain Harvest

Making Seasons Disappear

ISituated on two acres in Waitsfield, Vermont, the partners of Green Mountain Harvest have a plan to make seasons disappear. Pick a month—any month—and when this start-up is fully operational, they’ll have the capacity to grow, for instance, eighteen-thousand heads of lettuce that month, with maybe a few days to spare. Come July, thanks to two eleven-thousand-square-foot greenhouses featuring computer-controlled hydroponic systems, each and every other month on the calendar will be similarly productive: beans, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplants — they’re on the way. Next year, maybe strawberries.

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Article by Christopher Ross

Family Partnership at Silloway Farms

A Place for Everyone

The winter sky is cracking open. The blue that signals spring oozes through. Where snow peels from the sunny sides of low-lying pastures, green grass flirts—even before Nature has a chance to shed Farmers Gold, the last wet snow, on fields thirsty for manure. Underfoot in the barnyard and up at the sugar house is mud and more mud.

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Article by Sara Duncan Widness

Betsy MacIsaac Lives Her Dream

Crooked Fence Farm

Betsy MacIsaac of Putney jokingly blames the birthday cards decorated with gamboling spring lambs she received as a toddler for sparking her passion for sheep and fiber. But give her credit for never giving up. Decades later, Betsy is living her dream on agricultural land older than Vermont statehood.

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Article by Megan Price

Roadside Agri-Tourism

Vermont Farms Welcome Kentucky Farm Bureau
On Their Roadside Market Summer Tour

 “It seems like there’s an agri-tourism operation or roadside stand on every road in Vermont,” quipped a Kentucky Farm Bureau member in his distinctive southern drawl. Another delighted in the lesson learned at farm stands across Vermont about variety and maintaining customer interest for success. Still another member listened with interest to the political process in Vermont and farmers’ focus on good state agricultural policy.

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Article by Tim Buskey

Tim Bryant’s Ode to a Father’s Love
"A Father's Gift"

Tim Bryant’s book, A Father’s Gift, is a collection of stories about growing up on a rural Vermont dairy farm. It’s an ode to the love a father bestows on his son. This ode fosters the sense of learning, family values, and community that generations of family can pass on through compassion and connection to each other and to the land. It’s an uplifting read that restores one’s faith in humanity.

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Article by Laura Cahners Ford