Who Farms? Towards a Fuller Picture of the Vermont Farmer and Agricultural Landscape

FAIN: ZR-256724-18

University of Vermont and State Agricultural College (Burlington, VT 05405-0160)
Linda Berlin (Project Director: February 2017 to May 2024)

The creation of a community-wide learning project—in the form of digital storytelling videos and a middle-school Farm-to-Schools curriculum—that recounts farmers’ oral histories and diversifies public understanding of who farms in Vermont.

Agriculture shapes the economies, social life, and landscape of rural communities across the country. In this panorama, Vermont is recognized as a national leader in our commitment to farmers, an agriculture-based economy, and locally produced food. But the image of who is a farmer is often fairly constricted. To address this, we propose a community-wide learning project to enrich our shared understanding of who farms in Vermont, and the context in which farmers do their work. Specifically, we seek to document diverse farmers’ oral histories, and then use those as the foundation for comic books and digital storytelling videos. Those will then become the center of a curriculum for middle schools participating in Vermont’s Farm to School programs.