A test farm for High Mowing Organic Seeds, nestled in Vermont's Green Mountains. (Courtesy Tom Stearns, High Mowing Organic Seeds)

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Before the long-haired people from the city moved into these tree-covered hills, Hardwick, Vermont, was known as the "Building Granite Centre of the World."

It boomed in the late 19th and early 20th century as thousands of workers cut deep into the mountains, blasting out sheets of granite that were then cut, ground, polished and loaded on trains for the boardrooms, post offices and city halls of America.

But in 1929 when Wall Street crashed, so did Hardwick. By the time of the post-war building boom, cement and plate glass reigned supreme.

Back to the land for the gang at Vermont Soy. (Courtesy Vermont Soy)

Granite had lost its lustre and Hardwick, nestled in Vermont's Green Mountains a two-hour drive south of Sherbrooke, Que., was just one more industrial town with a product that no one wanted.

At one point, when Hardwick became known as "Little Chicago," you could still go to Benny's bar for cheap beer or a fistfight.

But then even that nickname died.

Land sold for a song around Hardwick and in the 1960s and '70s, the hills attracted the hippies — the back-to-the-landers — who planted the seeds for its eventual rebirth.

Down from the hills

"A lot of the back-to-the-land movement was very much centred on these individuals' ability to take care of themselves," says Monty Fischer. "They didn't produce a lot of extra."

Fischer is the executive director of the Centre for An Agricultural Economy in Hardwick. He coordinates the growing number of food-based businesses in this town of 3,000 or so.

The walls of his office on Main Street are covered in charts that show how everyone from traditional dairy farmers and cheese makers to a soy-milk producer and an organic seed grower, even a lending circle called Slow Money, are part of the local network.

"What's happening is that with the new entrepreneurs there is a mass of production that allows for more produce, more value-added food products to be on the local market.

"Whatever extra there is can be exported elsewhere." And these extras are staring to mount up.

More than 100 jobs have been created in Hardwick over the past three years, all of them are related to North American's growing interest in healthy food.

Todd Pinkham, co-owner Vermont Soy, mixes grouind up soya bean for soy milk. (Photo courtesy Cory Hendrickson, Hendrickson Photography)

Not just hippie-dippies

"This is not an organic-only club or anything like that," says Tom Stearns, owner of High Mowing Organic Seeds.

"We want to have farmers who are good stewards and for some that may not mean being organic. That's okay."

In his early 30s, Stearns is giving me his sustainable-development-in-Hardwick tour. Had he been born a generation earlier, he would have been one of those back-to-the-landers who thought going into business was a sellout.

Instead he is an entrepreneur who lobbies everyone in the community to pull in the same direction so that the Hardwick residents will prosper from a local economy designed for the 21st century.

"From High Mowing to Jasper Hill Cheese we are going to be passing about 15 organic farms," he says. "Next door to Vermont Soy is the Vermont Milk Company, which is transforming itself into a dairy-based incubator building. The food venture centre is an incubation kitchen that will be built later this year."

In the space of an hour you can see quite a bit of Hardwick because everything is within a couple of kilometres.

Here we are passing the soy guys who will soon be exporting to New York City. Over there are the compost guys who teach everyone from kindergarten students to seniors about environmentally friendly waste. And these are the cheese women who hand out hairnets and sterilized boots before you tour the Jasper Hill, underground cheese-aging cellar

It is as big as a hockey rink — 22,000 square feet — and filled to the rafters with thousands of rounds of cheddar, blue and goat cheeses.

The cheese centre is brand new and, it is said, there's nothing like it in North America. Local cheese makers pay Jasper Hill to take care of the ageing and the marketing of their cheeses in order to reach the broadest market possible.

Recession-proof

When Tom Stearns was a college student in Arizona, his hobby was mailing homegrown vegetable seeds to his friends.

Eight years ago, Tom sold $35,000 worth of seeds from his kitchen table.

Something you don't see everywhere: a field of red kuri squash, a kind of oblong pumpkin without the ridges. (High Mowing Organic Seeds)

Now he has 30 employees, including a seed research scientist, sells over 400 kinds of vegetable seeds and is one of the leading organic seed producers in North America.

More to the point, with businesses crashing all across the continent, High Mowing's sales are up 80 per cent over last year.

With the recession in full bloom, it seems that more people are planting home gardens to save money and many of them want the seeds that come from the fields just outside Tom's front door.

Researchers at the University of Vermont have chosen Hardwick as a case study of how a community can pull back from the economic brink.

As Stearns sees it: "We have this global broken food system where food travels thousands of miles and nobody knows what's ripe. E. coli is in spinach and tomatoes and peppers, you've got poisoned or dangerous peanut butter, all of these different things that are going on are very connected to this industrial system we've developed.

"When people realize this and want to do something different they look around for examples of a healthy food system and mostly they see a scattershot of interesting things but not too many that have put things together in a comprehensive way, like we're doing in Hardwick."

Supper at Claire's

Kristina Michelsen is one of four owners of Claire's Restaurant on Hardwick's Main Street.

She was a lawyer who worked on economic justice issues. But she found that she was becoming more and more interested in the politics of food. So she gave up law and, with like-minded friends, started Claire's.

The menu is the kind of food you would expect to find in a high-end California bistro, not in a hardscrabble town in rural Vermont.

"This restaurant is a political act," she says. "In addition to providing a community space and meals made from incredible ingredients, we are definitely part of this sustainable movement.

"We compost, which becomes the dirt which feeds the seed we plant in the soil and we buy the food and, yes, it sounds like one of those farmer-in-the-dell songs. But it is true, it goes round and round."

When Kristina and her friends first got the idea to open a restaurant they looked at their bank accounts and discovered they really couldn't afford the bistro of their dreams.

Also, they didn't want to take out a hefty bank loan so they looked at a scheme used by Hardwick's cash-strapped organic farmers — community-supported agriculture.

Farmers ask their customers to pay for a season's worth of carrots, squash and beans at planting time.

"We adapted it to the restaurant and called it CSR — community-supported restaurant.

"We have no commercial loans of any kind but we sold 50 CSRs at $1,000 a piece and, in return, the people who bought CSRs can come to Claire's once a month and get $25 off of a meal. In four years they are paid back their $1,000."

The social divide

Except for Claire's, Main Street in Hardwick is dark. The thermometer at the gas station reads 32 below zero. There are plenty of boarded-up storefronts. But the 20 or so tables at Claire's are full. Warm light bounces off the polished wooden tables.

With her sensible boots and grey hair in a ponytail, Martha Zweig has come for supper. Martha is a long-time Hardwick resident who, she allows, is a little put off by the ambiance.

"There is real Vermont, which is very poor and very rough, then there is the nicey-nice people who come from away and spruce things up.

"It is a class divide and it's getting further apart. When I came in 1974, the co-op was all about having low prices so that poor people can shop there. Now the prices are very high, everything is organic.

"A working class person would starve at the co-op and it is a shame. I wish that real people, working-class people had power or would take power, but I don't know how to do it as a practical matter. So I stay home and write poetry."

A woman walks in to Claire's wearing an "Obama for President" T-shirt under her parka.

There's a rumour around town that one of the White House lawns may be torn up this spring so that the Obama's can plant a vegetable garden, and that the organic seeds will come from Hardwick.

It is all part of the dream, of course.

But "we're hoping that this becomes a model that can be replicated," says Michelsen, "so that you have small-scale communities producing food and sustaining themselves and creating a local, thriving sustainable economy versus all of us getting our things from somewhere else. This is a community that cares."