After flames, hope spreads at Pete's Greens

Twelve days into the new year, Pete’s Greens, a year-round organic vegetable farm in Craftsbury, Vt., suffered an unthinkable loss. When owner Pete Johnson ’97 went back to bed after helping to load a truck with fresh produce at 3 a.m., he never imagined that he would wake up less than two hours later to a real life nightmare: the main barn engulfed in flames. Seeing the orange glow from his window, he immediately called the fire department and proceeded to move nearby tractors and trucks away from the flames. Then, he simple had to wait.
“By the time they [the fire department] got here, it was past its peak,” said Johnson. “It was mostly just a containment thing.”
The farm lost all of its harvested crops, vegetable washing and processing equipment, coolers and freezers, some of which were full of meat, tractors and other equipment. Johnson managed to keep a few potatoes that had survived the fire and he can use their seeds for next season’s planting. Many root crops made it as well, but Johnson said they were “mixed in with burnt foam and melted crates and charred wood,” and “did not smell right.”
Currently, Pete’s Greens can still run its greenhouses and it continues to sell produce to a wide variety of buyers, including co-ops, chain grocery stores and restaurants as far as Boston and New York. It also has a stand at the farmer’s market in Montpelier, Vt. Yet the farm’s Good Eats program, which is based on the CSA (community supported agriculture) model and provides customers with fresh produce each week, is on hold temporarily, as there is little produce to deliver.
While the cause is not confirmed, Johnson and his crew think that the farm’s three-phase converter, a piece of equipment that converts energy to operate machinery, blew up and sparked the fire.
The barn, which had been undergoing construction for a new addition, was underinsured.
“Insurance is kind of expensive and easy to skimp on,” said Johnson. “Vegetable farming is not the most profitable venture around. You kind of cut some corners here and there. That was unfortunate but probably not too uncommon.”
Johnson, who started Pete’s Greens in 1995 and bought the farm’s current 190 acres in 2003, is looking ahead. Construction of the farm’s new barn started in early March, and will most likely be completed by June. According to Johnson,  who build a solar greenhouse at the College for his senior thesis, the new structure will be “a pretty ecologically sound building,” with a renewable energy component. He is considering either burning wood or installing solar panels.
“We are really excited,” he said. “The planning has been fun. We have learned a lot.”
Other groups have played an important role in the barn’s construction as well. Johnson and his farm crew are extremely grateful for the community support after the fire, both financially and emotionally. In addition to letters and cards of support from customers, local organizations have stepped up fundraising efforts for the farm. A benefit concert at Higher Ground in Burlington, Vt. raised about $25,000 for the reconstruction. The Mad River Valley Localvores, a group that encourages people in the area to eat locally, organized an online auction that allowed businesses and individuals to donate items or to place a bid. The auction brought in over $65,000, said the group’s co-founder, Robin McDermott.
McDermott, a Wakefield, Vt. resident and a friend of Johnson, organized the auction along with Nancy Baron, former CSA manager at Pete’s Greens. The two wanted to give people an opportunity to help the farm in an easy way. According to McDermott, the auction, which ran for just one week, raised, “the most amount of money in the least amount of time with the least amount of work.”
“Pete’s Greens is such an important member of the farming community,” said McDermott. “Pete’s … the guy that’s led the way. He’s kind of like the role model. He needs to be up and running to continue to be that role model.”
Even others outside the community have reached out. Though the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op (MNFC) purchases only $6,000 or $7,000 worth of produce from Pete’s Greens per year (a relatively small amount), general manager Glenn Lower supported the Localvore’s online auction and other fundraising efforts. The College even helped publicize the auction McDermott set up by advertising it on the College’s Facebook profile.
Generally, support from the community has been overwhelming for Johnson.
“It’s been way beyond what I’ve imagined,” he said. “It just really feels like people are rooting for us.”
In keeping with the local spirit, Johnson plans to “pay it forward” in two or three years by starting a fund for other farms that have sustained similar disasters and for school programs. After seeing the Localvore’s success, he is also considering organizing an online auction.
“We are hopefully turning this bad event … to build a movement to support small ag[riculture] in the state,” said Johnson. “It was given with such care and love and needs to come back around. It really needs to keep doing its good work.”