Hardwick, a hardscrabble town in rural Vermont (pop. 3,200), once
based its economy on a non-renewable resource locked up in its
surrounding hillsides: granite. But then the granite ran out — taking
the town economy down with it. More recently, the town has embarked on a
wild experiment. Its economy is now based on farming and food
production at a variety of scales, from niche veggie farms to a national
organic seed business, from a locavore café to a statewide salad-greens
producer. It’s worked. While the national finances plunged into the
abyss in 2008, Hardwick kept adding jobs.

As someone who’s interested in food production as a tool of
community-scale economic development, I’ve been watching
the Hardwick story enthusiastically ever since Marian Burros sang
the town’s praises in
The New York Times back in 2008. So I
was excited this past winter when Ben Hewitt, a Hardwick-area farmer
and writer, came out with a book called
The
Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food.