The Intervale Center

Will Raap is no ordinary businessman. He seems to blend Bill Gates’ large-scale ambition with the small-scale values of E.F. Schumacher, economist and author of Small is Beautiful. In fact, after getting an MBA and an urban planning degree, Will actually went to England to work with Schumacher.

In 1983, Will founded the Gardener’s Supply Company (GSC), in part because of his interest in food systems. “When I was a student in California, I was watching agricultural valley cities shift to suburban malls, and watching them lose their identity. I believed for a very long time that investor agriculture was going to burn itself out as soon as the oil burned out.”

Despite his commitment to small scale, Will had no qualms about growing his business to catalyze big social changes. Today, GSC is a successful mail-order company for home garden products that employs 250 people and is one of the largest companies of its kind in the United States.

Back in 1985, after two years of growth, he moved his first store to five acres at the entrance of the Intervale, where part of an abandoned pig slaughterhouse was standing. Two years later he approached then-Mayor Bernie Sanders (now a U.S. Senator) with his ideas for growing Burlington’s local food system. Needing a new solution to the city’s growing solid waste problem, Mayor Sanders liked Will’s offer to move into the Intervale and set up a compost operation. The city leased land for operation to a division of GSC.

Since then, the Intervale Center has created a variety of self- financing projects related to local food systems. The revenue from these businesses supports various social initiatives. The Healthy City Program, for example, offers job training for and educational programs about local food to Burlington’s at risk youth populations. A Gleaning Project provides local food to local social service agencies. The Intervale Community Connections Project allows the city’s kids to engage with local food producers and brings hundreds of volunteers to the Intervale each year to work at the conservation nursery, school gardens, and at public events.

All this public education has fed back into more food business. The Healthy City Program, for example, has helped opened doors for the Burlington schools to buy more fresh produce from Intervale farms.

The Intervale Center is a work in progress. Sometimes programs work and sometimes they don’t. For instance, the Intervale’s composting program got to be too big, complex, and legally challenging. The decision was made to lease the land and facilities to the Chittenden County Solid Waste District. The District was able to hire existing staff and easily take over the operation because it had been a key partner in the operation from the outset.

Another ambitious project not quite realized has been the EcoPark. The idea was to create an “industrial ecology” model, where the waste of one business would provide the inputs to another. Will recruited John Todd, one of the pioneers of the concept. The waste heat from the city-owned McNeil power plant was to support a beer company, whose water waste and mash would feed into a greenhouse, where mushrooms and hydroponic vegetables would be grown and tilapia would be harvested. The political vagaries of federal funding and complications with a neighboring industry sidetracked the effort in 2002. The Food Enterprise Center emerged as a more modest and simpler concept, still incorporating the use of waste heat but focused more narrowly on season extension and value-added processing.

The past five years have witnessed huge changes, because of Will’s decision to move on to other programs. There has been a rapid succession of executive directors, each modifying the mission, tweaking old programs, and starting new ones. Glenn sees this as a natural evolution. “We don’t want to have programs that are static. So much of the learning that happens through the Intervale Center is experiential, not systematic.” He is now focusing on the emerging food infrastructure necessary to get more local food into local markets. “We are working through a new way of looking at Intervale... as a succession of products and services that ties the food system together.”

Will himself co-founded another company that specializes in rangeland and farmland restoration using carbon credits, wetlands banking credits, and other payments for ecosystem services. His underlying philosophy—that the way to grow markets for local food is to increase the number of local farmers and the quantity of productive local farmland—remains the same, only now he is applying it outside of Vermont. He’s developing the first organic CSA in Central America as one land-based enterprise in a 25,000 watershed restoration project. He still keeps one foot in Vermont, however, and is developing a 20-acre organic community farm at the South Village Community conservation development.