Vermont farmers who raise goats for milk have no use for the male babies their animals produce, and often ended up euthanizing them. Meanwhile, immigrants to Vermont from Africa and Southeast Asia were importing thousands of goats a year from Australia and New Zealand to use in preparing familiar dishes from their home countries. These two facts made a light bulb go off in the head of Karen Freudenberger, who volunteers with refugee communities and conservation groups.
One day when she was mentoring a Somali family, Freudenberger noticed that an older man named Mohamed seemed depressed. She asked him if he’d ever kept animals, and he immediately began telling her about his days raising goats, camels, and cows in his home country. “His eyes just lit up, and he was a different person. It hit me harder than any day since…what a hugely important piece of people’s lives is missing when they come here,” she told Kathryn Flagg of Seven Days.
Working with two immigrant goat farmers from Bhutan, Freudenberger formed the Vermont Goat Collaborative in Colchester, Vermont two years ago. She contacted goat dairy farmers, many of whom were glad to supply the project with kids. The farmers raise the baby goats until they are big enough to eat, and then immigrant families come to the farm to pick out the animals they want to buy, which is a lot more convenient than the trek to Boston many Vermont immigrants were making to find goat meat. Last year they sold 100 goats to immigrants from 15 different countries.
Several groups have come together to support the project, including the Vermont Land Trust, which supplied the farmland that was too flood-prone for crops but perfect for grazing, the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which gave the collaborative a $20,000 grant to pay for fencing and feed.
“The whole project is really designed around trying to meet this particular niche demand that this community has…in a way that meets the particular cultural and taste desires of their communities,” Freudenberger told Lisa Rathke of the Portland Press Herald. Meanwhile, it’s making the farming dreams of some new Americans come true. “I never thought, when I lived in Nepal, that I could be a farmer in America,” Chuda Dhaurali, one of the goat farmers involved in the project told Flagg.
MORE: Think You Can’t Afford to Give? These Inspirational Immigrants Will Change Your Mind.
Tag: Vermont
How One Organization Encourages the Love of Reading
Clifford. Harry Potter. The Boxcar Children. These storybook characters have entertained and inspired countless American children. And now, they can do the same for a whole group of immigrant kids.
Some new book worms at the Integrated Arts Academy, a school that serves many English-language-learning students whose parents emigrated from countries such as Somalia, Nepal, and South Sudan, in Burlington, Vermont, took home free reading material this week, thanks to the Children’s Literacy Foundation (CLF). This nonprofit aims to inspire a love of reading in low-income and rural children in New Hampshire and Vermont. According to CLF’s website, it has served 150,000 children since 1998 — donating more than $3 million worth of books. Donations from the community make it possible for the kids to start their own home libraries.
This year, Duncan McDougall of CLF gave the families a literacy seminar before the kids each picked out two free books at the book fair. McDougall spoke to the parents about how they can support their children’s reading habits, offering them techniques to engage the kids in the story, even if the parents themselves can’t read English well. Five translators were on hand to help the families select good books for their kids.
McDougall told Lynn Monty of the Burlington Free Press, “These children are all very eager to learn and to read more often, but many of them have few, if any, books of their own at home. Their parents often work multiple jobs which makes it hard to take children to the library, and many of the parents themselves have limited literacy skills.”
“We are newcomers who want to help our kids at home,” Mon Gurung, who moved to the U.S. from Nepal, told Monty.
MORE: Can a Book Make You a Better Person?
For These Vets, There’s Solace in the Simple Act of Making Bread
Anyone who likes to cook knows there’s something therapeutic about baking bread from scratch. So King Arthur’s Flour Company in Norwich, Vermont, is opening up the kitchens of its baking education center to patients staying at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction. The veterans gathered recently to mix dough and bake bread together as a part of King Arthur Flour’s Bake for Good program.
They will donate the bread they bake to a farmer’s market the VA holds each week, raising money to help veterans. Susan Landry told Adam Sullivan of WCAX, “It makes me feel very good knowing I am helping my brother and sister veterans.”
Stephen Guidry, another veteran who participated in the bread baking, told Sullivan how much he enjoyed it. “Anything when you are having problems to take your mind off it, people to talk to. Something like this is great.”
MORE: These Sisters Created an Incredible Place to Help Veterans
Hungry Families in Vermont Are Getting Help From the Last Place You’d Expect
At first glance, the 1,800 square-foot Salvation Farms facility in Vermont seems like any other produce-packing site. But it’s part of a prison, and the nine men who cleaned and packed nearly 70,000 pounds of potatoes there last year are inmates. The food was all would-be waste, but thanks to Salvation Farms, it went to 270 food banks around the state. The program is proving valuable for the corrections department, too, providing service to the hungry while giving prisoners a productive outlet. The program has drawn support from state government officials and private donors alike.
This Farmer Delivers Local Food — From A Sailboat!
Vermont rice farmer Erik Andrus has created the Vermont Sail Freight Project, an initiative to deliver local goods down the Hudson river via sailboat. His objective is to use this project as a symbol for buying local and minimizing the impact on the environment, while still being able to transport and sell goods. On their first journey, Andrus and his crew were able to sell $60,000 worth of food. If you were curious, the man built his ship from scratch too.