Farmyard to diner counter

Tod Murphy has an idea that is at once simple and very complex: He wants to shorten the path from the farm to the restaurant plate.

Today that path involves a mind-boggling, long-distance maze of buyers and packers, wholesalers and distributors delivering an international array of products from farmers: New Zealand lamb, Chilean sea bass, hydroponic tomatoes from Belgium, California lettuce, Mexican strawberries.

For all its variety, argues Murphy - a pony-tailed farmer, entrepreneur, one-time short-order cook and food visionary who lives on a 200-acre farmstead in Washington - the current commercial food system is a mess. It's environmentally and agriculturally unsound and has enormous transportation costs. What's worse, its lowest priority is delivering fresh, wholesome food and a fair wage for farmers.

"So I had this great idea," says Murphy, who was driving to a meeting when he came up with what he calls "the diner thing": Create a restaurant featuring wholesome home cooking that's mostly made with local farm ingredients. Every plate served would be a healthy meal and another small step toward preserving Vermont farmland and promoting small-scale agriculture.

If all goes according to plan, this fall his 130-seat Farmers Diner will open in a prominent spot at the new Maple Tree Place mall in Williston, right off Interstate 89. Another is planned for Lebanon, N.H., and other sites are under consideration, all of them planning to get 60 percent to 80 percent of their ingredients from local farms. The rest will come from organic farmers and co-ops that promote sustainable agriculture, according to Murphy.

That prime farmland is being sacrificed for Williston's Maple Tree Place is an irony that doesn't escape Murphy, but he hopes to turn the prime location there to a good purpose by using the tremendous shopper traffic to promote local farms, create new markets and make consumers at the diner aware of the farm-to-plate connection. "Instead of pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, we'll have pictures of farmers," he says.

It's been two and a half years since the Farmers Diner idea first floated into his vision. Getting it going has meant a business plan that's expanded from five to 180 pages and rounding up investors willing to help raise $1 million.

"You see an elephant in your head, and then you have to make it appear in front of you," says Murphy, who concedes he "has become a zealot because you have to make it happen."

Murphy, 36, came to Vermont with his wife, Pam VanDeursen, five years ago eager to revisit the farm life he knew growing up in southeastern Connecticut. After having worked at Starbucks and run a start-up coffee company with other investors, he wanted to live the evocative "Jeffersonian ideal" of an agriculture-based farm community.

"It just seemed like a sane lifestyle," he says. A 100-foot cloche-style greenhouse barn on the foundations of a burned-down dairy barn now houses 70 black and white Friesian sheep, several hogs and a flock of handsome strutting chickens, all surrounded by a panoramic hillside view a few miles out of Washington village south of Barre. While his wife runs their farm, their drafty old farmhouse has become the nerve center for his hectic business plans.

Until the turn of the 20th century, before train transportation became more dependable and widespread, almost all foods Vermonters ate were local. Vermont grew its own wheat and rye and potatoes, raised all its own produce and livestock, and harvested game like turkey and venison off the land. Creameries and farm wives everywhere produced butter and cheese, and families put up their crops for winter consumption. Visitors to a Vermont hotel could count on almost everything being made from local ingredients.

"I've always thought that makes so much sense. I've always wondered why nobody is doing it," he says. Murphy now knows why: He's having to reinvent a complicated wheel that involves all the logistics of processing and supply and a tangle of federal and state regulations.

A key bottleneck in Vermont has been slaughterhouses and processing for meats, so Murphy has purchased his own federally inspected and approved facility. It's called Vermont Smoke and Cure and it's located in South Barre. Now he can handle all the Vermont-grown meats he'll need. He's also developed his own line of breakfast and gourmet sausages under the Farmers Diner name and has his own refrigerated truck. For winter when fresh vegetables aren't available locally, he's lining up farmers whose locally grown produce will be fresh frozen. Well-known Vermont producers such as Misty Knoll Chicken are on board, he says, and he's busy rounding up new farmers to provide diner staples such as eggs, bacon and sausage, hamburger and fresh vegetables.

On the financial end, he's talked up his plan to leading chefs in Boston and New York, and run an investor's road show. During a demonstration, he's apt to crack one of his chicken's eggs to reveal how bright yellow the yolk is when it's fresh, saying, "Tell me if you've ever seen anything like it." The response to his plans, he says, has been tremendous, thanks in no small part to "the whole awareness around food that's starting to happen in America.

"I've talked to over 330 people, and I've had only three say it was a bad idea," he says.

Murphy sees the Farmers Diners as one more cutting-edge trend for Vermont, which already is at the forefront of food awareness with its Farm Fresh Network, organic farms, roadside stands, healthy food co-ops and farmstead cheeses. But most of all, he sees a chance for that "elephant" in his head to leave a big imprint on Vermont's agriculture landscape.

"If we hit our sales numbers, we're talking (buying) $1 million from farmers a year," says Murphy. "These are brand new markets. I'm not taking anybody's business away."

Also see: poultry chicken

Author Notes:

Andrew Nemethy contributes and publishes news editorial to http://www.1st-in-steaks.com. Andrew Nemethy is a freelance writer, who writes about food, travel.