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Local Food Movement 2.08

Food for thought

Growing movement in Carbondale promotes local agriculture

A turkey wanders the garden at Sustainable Settings on a summer morning. Sustainable Settings is both a farm and an educational center for local organic-food production. (Paul Conrad/Aspen Times Weekly)
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Scott Condon
Aspen Times Weekly
February 16, 2008

Goin’ to the country and living off the land — it’s a quintessentially American dream.

For many, there’s something intoxicating about the concept of a simpler life where we plunge our hands in the dirt, sow the seeds, nurture the plants, then reap a bounty of fresh fruits and veggies.

Growing our own food is a lost art, although some folks in Carbondale are trying hard to revive it. The fact that the Roaring Fork Valley barely produces any of its own food is ironic, considering that farming and ranching sustained the Roaring Fork Valley for the quiet decades between the town’s mining heyday and the skiing and tourism era.

Billy Grange is a third-generation rancher on the outskirts of Basalt. His grandfather bought the property and paid it off in a few short years by growing and selling potatoes. Grange recalled that as a boy growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, the school used to cancel classes for a week or so each fall so the kids could pick potatoes.

The Granges had a huge garden. They canned vegetables to get them through the winter. They butchered their own beef, pigs and occasionally sheep. Cows supplied their dairy products. They took their wheat down to a mill along the Roaring Fork River in Glenwood Springs and had it ground into flour. They even made their own soap.

The only staples that Grange recalls the family purchasing were sugar and coffee, which they acquired at Basalt Supply, where Mason and Morse Real Estate is now located on Midland Avenue.

“Then it was a farming community and now it isn’t,” Grange said.

How to feed Carbondale
The only “harvesting” that most people do now is at the produce section of City Market or Clark’s. Most of the farms and ranches have been gobbled for rural subdivisions and mansions.

But not all the land has been converted. For some residents, this provides a flicker of hope that the Roaring Fork Valley can be more self-sustaining when it comes to feeding itself.

Sustainable Settings founder Brook LeVan holds a live and a processed chicken at his farm south of Carbondale. In order to get local fowl to the dinner table, LeVan explains, the bird must be sent to a processing plant in Fort Collins, and then sent back to Carbondale, a wasteful, energy-intensive process. (Paul Conrad/Aspen Times Weekly)
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Malcolm McMichael is part of a dedicated core of folks in Carbondale who promote the idea of “localization” in the economy overall, but specifically with the food supply. Growing food locally has the potential to provide some jobs. More important, it builds a stronger community, McMichael said.

He became intrigued last year in wondering what it would take to make Carbondale self-sustaining for a year. He put his training as an accountant to work and, with Carbondale farmer and educator Brook LeVan, studied how much food would be required, how much land would be needed to grow the crops and raise the livestock, and how much land is still available.

That diet would require sacrifices. “We’re not going to consume 200 pounds of sugar per year like we do right now,” McMichael said.