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Beyond simply providing healthier food, she sees the IGI mission as a "back-to-the-future" effort to reshape the stewardship of the Vineyard's agricultural land to a model that existed before the rampant real estate frenzy made farmland too expensive to buy and the death tax made it too expensive to inherit.

"Small farmers get beat up and controlled," says Steve Bernier, owner of both Cronig's Markets and another founder of this IGI project. "Local farmers aren't getting enough business from Islanders or tourists, and we want to change that." The Initiative has also designed an "Island-grown" logo to be placed on shelf tags at grocery stores and local farm stands to identify homegrown products.layered transparent silk diffuse afternoon sunshine and billow like butter-colored spinnakers in the whisper of a lazy August wind.

Value versus cost - dollars and sense
The price of local products often deters Islanders from buying Vineyard-grown food, but Ali Berlow considers the quality of local fare worth the sticker-shock. "Local food just tastes better," says Ali. "Food travels on average 1,500 miles before it reaches a table. Many tomatoes, for example, are grown with pesticides and picked a month before they are ripe. Refrigerated and shipped, they might sit on a shelf for weeks. With a local tomato, you know it's sustainably grown, picked when it's ripe, and doesn't need to travel very far."

According to Steve Bernier, Islanders have shown a keen appetite for locally grown produce, even if the price is at a premium. Even at close to $3 a pound, some days Cronig's will sell 800 pounds of Thimble Farm tomatoes. "The customers have shown me that they are interested in locally grown products," he says. "They are concerned with quality, and IGI will put a face on quality."

"In America we're brought up looking for the cheapest food," he says. "Consumers did that with milk and helped kill 85 percent of the dairy farms in New England. Now we introduce BST Bovine Somatatotrophin, a growth hormone] to increase production and in the same glass pump chemicals into our bloodstream when we drink it."

Not by broccoli alone
But Island farms aren't just about tomatoes and strawberries. Local farmers produce rhubarb, state-certified milk, meats, blueberries, micro-greens, Shitake mushrooms, garlic squash, melon, peppers, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, grass-fed chicken, and much more.

One of IGI's supporters is Allen Healey, a Chilmark farmer with the only state-certified milk-producing farm on the Island. "We wanted milk for ourselves, but then the demand was so high, we went and bought another cow," says Allen, who runs a stand by his Mermaid Farm & Dairy on Middle Road everyday in the summer. "We will be selling English hard cheeses by the fall too."

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