MONTPELIER — The city-owned Feast Farm is deep into its harvest season, with about 2,800 pounds of produce grown this year so far. It’s the farm’s first season since its former site was flooded during the summer of 2023.
Top crops this year, by weight, include tomatoes, Swiss chard, lettuce, salad turnips, and eggplant, in that order, according to farm manager Jeannie Bartlett. The roughly quarter-acre property on Country Club Road had 35 different crops in production.
Bartlett, who managed farm operations this year, works with volunteers, community organizations, and city departments to get produce to food-insecure residents. Most of the food goes to three programs run by the Montpelier Senior Activity Center: Meals on Wheels, which delivers meals to seniors at home; the Just Basics food pantry; and a Tuesday free lunch open to the public. A smaller portion goes to Community Harvest of Central Vermont, which gleans food from farms and distributes it to other sites.
Bartlett also works with high schoolers in the Montpelier Youth Conservation Corps, an eight-week program in which students rotate between the farm, city parks, and working with an arborist on city land.
At the farm, they plant, weed, mulch, and harvest using no-till methods, almost exclusively hand tools, and do a lot of aggressive manual weed management.
Sulaiman Hairan, a senior at Montpelier High School, is one of eight students in this year’s cohort.
Hairan focused his work at Feast Farm this summer and also earned class credits this year while working in the senior center kitchen, prepping and cooking food from the farm under chef Joey Buttendorf.
Buttendorf said she uses the farm’s vegetables, along with produce gleaned by Community Harvest, in almost everything she cooks from June through October. She pays little or nothing for the vegetables during that time.
Hairan said he wanted to join the corps and work in the kitchen with Buttendorf because he loves farming, cooking, and fixing things. “And I wanted to be at Feast Farm because they help the community. I like that.”
Among his favorite parts of the farm rotation were learning how strawberries are propagated and talking with other students and volunteers while planting and harvesting.
Montpelier Parks and Trees Director Alec Ellsworth said he has seen how much the farm can mean to the students who work there. “It’s amazing how transformative this is for them, that they get to see growth, from seed to harvest,” he said.
He said the farm has also focused on teaching new skills, while continuing its work around food access and community programming.
“That’s where we excel, and where the biggest area for growth would be,” he said.
From left, Montpelier Parks Department AmeriCorps member Marissa Hoffman and Montpelier Youth Conservation Corps (MYCC) members Forrest Kid and Tristan Bradley with a Feast Farm harvest. Photo by Jeannie Bartlett.
Feast Farm got its start in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding. City staff members envisioned a farm that could grow food for food-insecure residents while bringing together volunteers and other city departments, and offering education and community programming. The city already had the tools and agricultural expertise through its Parks and Trees Department, which runs the farm with the Community Services Department.
Staff members and volunteers watered the crops by hand for the first few years, while the harvest grew from 1,000 pounds in the first year, to 3,000 pounds the next, and 4,500 pounds by the third. In addition to launching the Montpelier Youth Conservation Corps, staff members also started farm camps for kids ages 6 to 12, dug a well and installed water lines and hydrants, and raised hundreds of chickens for meat. In fall 2022, the farm hosted a public meal featuring its produce.
Then, in July 2023, severe flooding covered the farm in thousands of pounds of silt. Staff members and volunteers spent the rest of the summer cleaning it up.
By the following year, the farm was relocated to a small portion of the city’s 133-acre Country Club Road property. It now sits adjacent to the Parks Department’s tree nursery, where about 400 trees grow near the BIPOC-focused Paij Wadley-Bailey Community Garden.
The program stalled last year, mainly because it lost AmeriCorps funding, “but by now we have good systems in place,” Bartlett said. “The soil is good. And this summer we got a greenhouse.”
Next spring, they’ll use that greenhouse to grow vegetables and plant starts and tree seedlings, which can be costly to buy.
“The flood created some chaos, and we’re trying to work toward a stable plan,” Ellsworth said.
He told The Bridge that funding is the farm’s biggest challenge, in part because the farm doesn’t generate revenue, and selling produce in a way that competes with local farms would be problematic.
Running the farm requires about $50,000 a year, with most of that going toward the seasonal farm manager position, he said.
Ellsworth said any city could run a small farm program because they already have many of the tools, equipment, and other infrastructure. The challenge is more about figuring out how to get people involved and how to fund it.
“But it’s totally in the lane of what a city can do,” he said.
Feast Farm will be continuing to harvest produce through early October with a small group of volunteers, and they’re seeking more volunteers. Those interested can get in touch with Bartlett at farm@montpelier-vt.org.
