Stephen Leslie
Cedar Mountain Farm

Stephen Leslie, alongside his wife and business partner, Kerry Gawalt, owns and manages Cedar Mountain Farm & Cobb Hill Cheese company, where they grow vegetables and maintain a herd of 20 Jersey cows. Stephen & Kerry moved to the Upper Valley in 1996 to be part of the eco-village & farm that would eventually become Cobb Hill Co-housing in Hartland, VT. Stephen has written two books on draft animal power (The New Horse-Powered Farm & Horse-Powered Farming for the 21st Century), and has written numerous articles for farm journals and been a regular presenter at animal-powered field days and NOFA conferences.

Stephen has always considered his farming activity to be an expression of "non-violent direct action". In 2018, alarmed by the report from the UN's IPPC on accelerated abrupt climate change, he joined the Climate Justice movement and helped found a chapter of Extinction Rebellion in the Upper Valley. Since then his activism has focused on showing up in policy spaces as a farmer activist & soil advocate.

More recently on the farm, Stephen and Kerry have begun incorporating elements of silvopasture and agroforestry into their management practices.

To learn more about Stephen and his work as a citizen/farmer activist, please watch the video below:

To read the edited highlights of Stephen’s interview, see below :

So just the big picture, how did you start farming and how did you become connected to rural Vermont? 

Well, I started farming in 1992. I had been a Benedictine monk at the Western Priory in Vermont, which is a small Benedictine community. And we had a strong alliance with people doing community development work in Mexico and other parts of Central and Latin America. And through my travels in Mexico and Latin America, I really felt like I wanted to move beyond the work I was doing as a monk here in the United States to doing more grassroots community development work. And so to that end, I went and became a farm apprentice at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Columbia County, New York. And that was a two-year, ended up being a three-year apprenticeship. While I was there, I became more aware of the farm crisis, so to speak, here in the United States and the importance of small, diversified family farms. And I met my future wife there, Carrie, as well, and kind of reoriented my direction from thinking about kind of the white saviorism of going to Latin America to do community development work in organic agriculture to maybe becoming more part of the grassroots movement here in the U.S. And we began farming here in the Upper Valley in 1996 and pretty soon got into small-scale dairy. And I think I first became aware of Rural Vermont because of the push that Rural Vermont was doing in the early 2000s to gain greater access to raw milk and the raw milk issue and the rules around that.

And so I think that was probably my first engagement with Rural Vermont was through the raw milk issue. 

What are current challenges farmers are facing in your area and what specific policies are impacting you, for better or worse? 

Well, obviously, you know, climate change itself is having a huge impact on all of us who are producing here with the extremes of weather.  I think in the larger trends, I mean, basically, I'd say that the capitalist system is killing farmers in general. Here, where our agricultural sector is dominated by large-scale dairy and commodity milk, I think it really it's like 31 families who own more than half of the dairy farms and the big dairies are currently dominating about 80 percent of the prime agricultural land in the state.And I respect the families and the hard work and the tenacity they have to be staying in dairy.

But I think the fact that we've gotten to a point where we're so imbalanced, where 80 percent of our agriculture is dependent on international commodity milk and the broken pricing system, it just feels like the consolidation continues, but that it's being built on a house of cards. And land access is probably the greatest obstacle for young or new farmers, BIPOC farmers, wanting to get in in the state of Vermont. So I think some type of just transition towards greater land access and equitability in how land is distributed really needs to buck the current trend, which is towards more and more wealth and consolidation of land ownership in the state.

What is your utopia? What do you dream the future of farming could look like? And are there any steps you see that can move us closer? 

Sometimes when I think about the future of farming, I think I look back to the 1990s post collapse of the Soviet Union and what happened in Cuba, where the people there suddenly found that they had been entirely reliant on monoculture of sugar cane being sold to the Soviet Union, and they were getting all their fertilizer and diesel and other commodities, food commodities, in return for that.  And when the Soviet Union collapsed, all of a sudden all that fertilizer, oil, all of those supplies were shut off, and the people had to resort back to their own resources and realized collectively that they could be food self-sufficient. They went up into the hills and found the old people who knew how to work the oxen still and brought them back, urban gardening.

But all of this was, for better or for worse, the Cuban government with its one party system was able to bring together the resources to mobilize the citizenry. And I think in many ways we're facing that kind of situation with disruption of supply chains and collapse of breadbasket failure, multiple breadbasket failure, that's going to be happening around the world as the climate crisis accelerates. And as terrible as that news is, it also presents us with an opportunity to relocalize our food and energy systems and to reorganize how we go about that collectively.  And to me a utopia would be where people who can responsibly, regeneratively, organically manage land are recognized as front-line workers who are doing the essential services and providing, by caretaking soil, providing the most essential public good on a par with providing clean air and clean water, providing healthy soil is like the foundation of any functional, healthy society. And right now we're in a dysfunctional and unhealthy society. And so if we were to guarantee universal base income to people who could caretake land in a responsible way that actually regenerates soil, restores landscape function, restores health to our environment, while at the same time producing local food and fiber and medicine and building supplies from the forest, and universal base income doesn't mean that we supply the entire income to the farmer, it just means that beyond what that we guarantee a Vermont living wage.

So if the farmer can only make $13.25 an hour, producing a market garden and paying their employees even less or the same or sometimes like many of us actually pay more to employees than ourselves, then society says we will make up that difference through supply management or price parity on the carrots or green beans that you sell. We'll find ways through providing health care, childcare, we'll find ways to ensure that your total income does meet a Vermont living wage so that it doesn't kill people to devote themselves to being farmers in the United States of America.

Stephen’s interview was coordinated and administered by 2024 Rural Vermont Communications Intern, Melissa MacDonald.