Community Supported Agriculture for the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont

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Of Sunrise’s 98 acres, all but a dozen are forested, making the forestry aspect of the operation the most significant from an ecological perspective. We are very fortunate to have a working relationship with Redstart Forestry in Corinth, Vermont, who wrote our forest management plan and through whom we are “green certified” by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international body that handles the equivalent of organic certification in the forestry world.

Sunrise is also enrolled in Vermont’s current use program, in which agricultural and forestry lands are taxed based on their current use (producing food and wood) instead of on their so-called “highest and best use” (being bulldozed for houses.) This saves us about $2,000 per year in property taxes and is the only “subsidy” of any sort that we receive from the government. (I put “subsidy” in quotes because current use is merely a correction for the perverse incentives of our current economic system.)

On an annual basis, we cut about 12 cords of wood per year to heat the house and fire the sugaring arch. We cut diseased and ill-formed live trees for this, leaving the best trees behind for wildlife habitat and future saw timber. We also leave most dead trees behind, since dead trees are an important wildlife habitat that is under-represented in the middle-aged forests around Sunrise.

In 2005, we hired a commercial logger to thin old pine and reclaim a portion of the pasture that had grown in since the 1950s. As you look south down the pasture from the crop lands, the reclaimed pasture is the sloping hillside on the right. This logging job produced enough chips (sent to the wood-fired power plant upriver in Ryegate, Vermont) to power Sunrise’s electricity needs for several hundred years! We also ended up with some nice wildlife habitat and new walking/skiing trail off the pasture to the left.

In July of 2008, a micro-burst thunderstorm blew out about six acres of pine and mixed hardwood on the Hartland end of the main field. We immediately conducted a salvage operation for sawlogs and firewood, but the area still looks quite ravaged. The plan is to remove invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle that’s now sprouting in the sunlight and allow most of the acreage to return to forest, except for the flat area off the end of the current field. We’re hoping to turn the pigs loose in there in 2010 to reclaim a few acres for pasture.