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organic producers, the premium for a local guy with a couple of acres of really nice organic tomatoes started to shrink. He had no niche left. For two decades, “organic” had meant more than just “pesticide-free”; it also meant “some local guy grew this with his own hands.” Now that meaning was evaporating.
    But there was a possibility for another story, this one harder to co-opt. If “local” could become the new buzzword, then perhaps it would provide sizzle enough to justify a premium price again, that ten cents more a pound meaning the difference between a farmer making it, and a farm becoming Olde Farm Acres at $49,900 a building lot. That’s what Chris Granstrom had been talking about when he noted that Finger Lakes wine was still selling in the Finger Lakes. It’s why our local food co-op started posting pictures of the farmers above stacks of their cabbages. And Del Monte simply can’t do it—their economies of scale would disappear if customers in Rochester and Eugene and Tampa began demanding food from Rochester and Eugene and Tampa. That’s what we studied in our class, anyway—reading Wendell Berry and theother prophets of a new agronomy, and taking field trips to Vermont innovations like The Farmers Diner, a Barre eatery where almost all the ingredients in the hamburgers and milk shakes and french fries are raised within fifty miles of the kitchen door. “Think Locally, Act Neighborly” is their slogan, and so far it seems to be working.
    As is usually the case, the best thing about the course was the students, who turned out to be remarkably reflective. I knew from listening to them introduce themselves on day one that six or seven of my twenty-five charges thought they wanted to be small farmers someday. But I wondered if they had actually figured out what that meant—most of these kids were from the same backgrounds of privilege and semi-privilege as the rest of the Middlebury student body. They had the same handsome ease and offhand self-confidence. 1 They were, in other words, made to order for the economy now emerging in our world, and every last one of them could grow up, if they wanted, to make a bundle of money. So one day I asked them to try to figure out how much they thought they’d need to earn a year in order to have the kind of life they wanted. They spent the night figuring, and talked about their results the next day—some said they needed to emulate the suburban lifestyle of their parents in order to feel secure, but for the rest their answers converged inthe neighborhood of $30,000. Which perhaps reflected a certain sweet naïveté—twenty-year-olds don’t value insurance quite as highly as do the rest of us—but also a certain deep understanding that I admired. Instead of working to afford certain pleasures, many maintained, they would find their pleasure in their work. Which is a good strategy if you’re planning to be a small-scale local farmer.
    High on that list of pleasures was food. When I was in college, food and grease were more or less synonymous—a cheese-steak sub was my idea of just fine. I told these students that two of them were to be responsible each day for cooking the rest of us lunch, from whatever local produce they could scrounge in midwinter. Our classroom opened onto a kitchen, and all through the discussion smells would flavor the air. Before long, truly astounding dishes were emerging: leeks gratinée, smoked squash soup, gorgeous frittata. (One fellow took things to their logical extreme, scavenging the January countryside for cattail flour and high-bush cranberries the birds had missed. It tasted…local.) A kind of emerging sensual appreciation for this place kept us all in thrall—what would come next? It wasn’t like we were in Napa—this was Vermont in January. And yet we ate well, just as people ate well in Vermont for hundreds of years before anyone thought of flying in iceberg lettuce.
    And now, out at the garden in midsummer, we