[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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