[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 95 (Thursday, June 21, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4413-S4414]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
UNIQUE SIGNIFICANCE OF SHELBURNE FARMS
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, Vermont boasts many gems that draw visitors
to our Green Mountains. Among them is Shelburne Farms, known to many
Vermonters--and many visitors to Vermont--for its work on historic
preservation, agriculture, sustainability, and nutrition. And so it was
with great interest and appreciation that I read an article about the
Farm's caretakers in the Burlington Free Press.
I have been proud of the work Alec Webb and his wife, Megan Camp,
have done at Shelburne Farms for the last many years. Through their
leadership, Shelburne Farms has become a first-rate educational hub,
promoting environmental conservation, food education and agriculture
sustainability. The partnerships initiated by Alec and Megan with the
National Park Service Conservation Studies Institute and with the
University of Vermont Center for Sustainable Agriculture have furthered
these goals.
Today, Shelburne Farms is a National Historic Landmark, a distinction
I was proud to help secure in 2001 because they earned it. During this
week's debate on the Farm Bill, I think it is fitting to highlight the
important work being done at Shelburne Farms. Others can take a page
from their successful playbook as we explore ways to bolster our green
economy, put food on Americans' tables, and promote the environmental
stewardship that continues to protect our farm lands and environment.
I ask unanimous consent that a copy of this article, ``A Vision
Realized,'' be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Burlington Free Press, June 16, 2012]
A Vision Realized
Alec Webb is living--and managing--a vision he returned home to create
(By Sally Pollak)
Shelburne.--The summer Alec Webb turned 18, he ran his
first camp. He pitched a tent in a field in his backyard--it
was a big yard, about 1,000 acres--and camped out for six
weeks with kids from Labrador, the Bronx, and a Cambridge,
Mass., housing project. There were a couple of locals, too.
``It was a funky group of urban and rural kids,'' said
Webb, who will turn 60 next month. It was the summer of 1970
and Webb, now president of Shelburne Farms, was a recent high
school graduate. He had left Groton School, a prep school
outside Boston, spring semester of his senior year and moved
back home. Webb spent his last semester at the Shaker
Mountain School, an alternative school in Burlington, where
he earned credit to graduate from Groton.
``Instead of going abroad, I went to Burlington,'' Webb
joked.
He left Groton because the school had become, to him,
irrelevant.
``It was the '60s and that (Groton) environment didn't feel
relevant to what was going on in the world,'' Webb said. ``I
wanted to be in an environment that was more real, more
connected to what was going on in the world. A place that was
engaged with more meaningful social issues.'' In that
context, Webb pitched a tent, built a campfire, and invited
kids over. The campers even spent a solo night in the field,
grown-up free (if you can call Webb, a newly minted 18-year-
old, a grown-up).
``They all seemed to survive,'' Webb said.
The camp was the original manifestation of Webb's interest
in ``meaningful education'' that is an intersection of
agriculture, nature and environmental awareness. From these
beginnings, at the boyhood home where Webb grew up the fourth
of six siblings, Shelburne Farms would become a nonprofit
(incorporated in 1972) whose various endeavors bring 140,000
people a year to the farm.
There are so many camps and school programs at Shelburne
Farms these days, the child-centric activity prompted Webb to
wonder on a recent walk--where packs of happy kids raced
around the place--if summer camps had already started.
He's no longer sleeping in a field with the kids.
These days, you can find him in his corner office in a
barn, surrounded by big maps and less-glamorous paperwork. He
says he's part town manager, part town planner. And full-time
fundraiser.
Webb lives with his wife, Megan Camp, the farm's vice
president and program director, and their cats Fanta and
Stella, in an 1850s shingled farmhouse that predates
Shelburne Farms. Other animals sometimes wander onto their
lawn. Chickens make regular appearances; goats jump the fence
and hang at Webb's place. A donkey came by one morning last
week.
The visitors come with the territory when you live where
you work and work where you live: a teeming campus with
activities including walking trails, a Brown Swiss dairy
herd, environmental education programs, harvest festivals and
a cheese making facility.
Shelburne Farms, a onetime private estate, was founded by
Webb's great-grandparents and designed by landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmstead in the 1880s. At the turn of the
century, the lakeside property of Dr. William Seward and Lila
Vanderbilt Webb encompassed nearly 4,000 acres. The barn they
built for work animals was colossal--so big, in its
reincarnated life it houses a cheese-making and packing
operation, a school, a woodworking shop, a kid's farmyard, a
bakery and offices.
In 1972, Shelburne Farms was incorporated as a nonprofit--a
decision that was useful in setting the farm on more solid
financial ground, Webb said. (His father had to borrow money
to pay property taxes, he said.) In seeking a new direction
for Shelburne Farms, Webb and his five siblings saw that the
property could and should be a community resource and asset,
he said. The six young Webbs did not want the dairy farm
where they grew up to become a carved-up, high-end suburb of
Burlington, Webb said.
``If we all had one-sixth of this place,'' he said, ``we
would've spent the rest of our lives dealing with that.''
The common experience of growing up on the farm, a love of
the land, and an interest in ``responding to the context of
the world we were living in at that time,'' helped shape the
siblings' shared vision for Shelburne Farms, Webb said.
``Those threads of agriculture, youth, community, those
were our intentions,'' he said the other day, eating lunch at
a picnic table in the farmyard.
``We started Shelburne Farms because we were worried about
all the things that are more pressing now,'' he said, noting
climate change wasn't an issue people were thinking about.
``We wondered: `How are we going to get ourselves on a path
that could be more sustainable for people and the planet.'
The farm would be an expression of a pathway to a better
future. Not a model for that, necessarily, but an example of
how things can work given a different set of intentions,
around sustainability.''
They wanted the land whole and accessible to the public.
Their father, Derick Webb, made that possible on his death
in 1984 at the age of 70. Derick Webb--who had retired to
Florida--rewrote his will before his death from a heart
attack. In his revised will, he left the 1,000 acres he
inherited to the nonprofit that was established by his kids
12 years earlier. An earlier version had given the property
to the six children.
Though Webb and his siblings agitated for this change--
including writing letters that Webb says make him cringe to
read today--they didn't know their father had gifted the land
to the nonprofit until after he died.
Now the integrity of the property was assured. Suddenly,
the nonprofit was in a more formidable position.
``At that point, we were playing for real,'' Webb said.
That meant fundraising, restoring and managing the property,
building an organization and related programming.
Making the world a little bit better is something of a
bureaucracy--with custodial work on the side.
``When I'm walking around, I'm always looking for deferred
maintenance and potholes,'' Webb said. ``It's not a downer. I
kind of enjoy that.''
His primary focuses are finances and farming; his brother,
Marshall Webb, manages the woodland and special projects.
The farm was in disrepair when Webb was a kid, but he liked
his father's Brown Swiss herd and chores related to dairying.
In those days, a milk hauler rumbled up the long driveway to
transport the milk to a creamery. Earlier still, the family
delivered milk in cans to Shelburne.
Back then, the barn roofs leaked; plumbing didn't work in
portions of Shelburne House, now called the Inn at Shelburne
Farms; and Alec and his brothers, wearing plain white T-
shirts, ate corn on the cob at picnic tables on a terrace,
goats sniffing around the table for scraps. ``It's a whole
different scene down there now at 6 o'clock at night,'' Webb
said.
At 6 o'clock these days, spiffy diners--guests, not
family--eat dinner on the terrace at the inn, a dining spot
that overlooks formal gardens, Lake Champlain and the
Adirondacks. The food they're eating, chef-prepared, was
likely produced on the farm. Not counting work-related
dinners, Webb said he eats at the inn about once a year.
He still prefers dairying hours, rising by 5 a.m. and
eating a bowl of oat bran before heading to work. His commute
is walking across the farmyard. With the exception of two
years working for the state Department of Education--
fulfilling duty required for his conscientious objector
status in the Vietnam War--Webb's work has been connected to
Shelburne Farms.
In his office is a black and white photograph of a young
girl standing at a table of vegetables. It is the summer of
1973, before the existence of the Burlington Farmers Market.
The table is set up on St. Paul Street in front of the
original Ben and Jerry's.
It holds cabbages, cauliflower, and bushels of beans. Hand-
lettered signs describe vegetables that are organically grown
and reasonably priced. The girl grew the vegetables at
Shelburne Farms. She's an early example of the farm's
decades-long yield: sustainable agriculture, community
connections, youthful energy and vision.
[[Page S4414]]
``We didn't say, 40 years ago, we're going to have an
inn,'' Webb said. ``We had the intention of seeing this place
being used as a place for learning--creating a living/
learning environment for kids and others to increase their
awareness of the environment and community.
``There was something that would seem wrong about doing
anything other than treating Shelburne Farms as a community
asset. Maybe it's Olmstead's design: (But) the importance of
conserving this land was not as clear as it is now.''
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