(Keese) A concert in Brattleboro Friday by world music saxophonist Paul Winter will benefit a microloan program for New England farmers.
The loans are a project of Brattleboro’s Strolling of the Heifers organization.
VPR’s Susan Keese has more.
Sounds from field – walking and cutting
(Keese) In a field in Pownal, Lisa MacDougall and her crew are cutting cauliflower for her farm’s CSA subscribers.
(MacDougall) "These aren’t ready yet…"
(Keese) MacDougall and her partner Chuck Currie are the proprietors of Mighty Food Farm. With 186 leased acres, they represent a new breed of farmer in New England – young, diversified tillers of the soil who didn’t inherit family farms.
Currie says Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA’s, have given many new small farmers a way to start. In CSA’s, subscribers put up money for seeds and fuel each spring in exchange for a weekly share of vegetables, eggs or meat later in the summer.
But when the couple needed to buy attachments for their tractor, they were at a loss. They’d never applied for a bank loan.
(Currie) "First we tried credit cards and see if we could get zero percent financing or something on a credit card for 9-month , and we got turned down on three different credit cards."
(Keese) Then they saw an ad in a farming magazine for a low interest microloan sponsored by Brattleboro’s Strolling of the Heifers. They successfully applied for $10,000.
(MacDougall) "Immediately we bought a potato digger and a precision cultivator, and that’s taken a lot of the hand weeding and the hoeing hours down for the employees, which cuts down on wages …"
(Keese) The Strolling of the Heifers is best known for its annual parade of cows down Brattleboro’s Main Street.
Orly Munzing of Dummerston helped found the festival in 2001, to promote community support for sustainable farming.
(Munzing) "A few years back I asked the farmers I was working with, what else can the Strolling of the Heifers do to help farmers."
(Keese) Immediately, she says, the farmers talked about the need for access to capital. So in 2008, Munzing organized a benefit concert in Brattleboro with folksinger Pete Seeger. She teamed up with a Boston-based non profit called the Carrot Project for help in administering a low-interest loan program for New England farmers.
The program has awarded half a dozen loans so far.
Susan MacMahon is a planner with the Windham Regional Commission, and a member of the Carrot Project’s board.
(MacMahon) "Many of these farms cannot find financial assistance elsewhere… maybe a lot of their money is wrapped up in the land or they’re renting the land and so they don’t have any collateral. And you really … a small business needs a line of credit to grow."
(Keese) MacMahon says the microloan project helps recipients learn to work with banks and become credit worthy. This weekend’s Brattleboro concert – and a second one Saturday in Pittsford, Mass. – will help extend that opportunity to more farmers.
For VPR News, I’m Susan Keese.