With a little research it would be interesting to find out where in the world one would have the easiest time starting a business. Certainly there are basic requirements: access to raw materials, shelter, and some basic level of security. In many of the poorest countries of the world one finds street vendors selling prepared foods of all types. So perhaps it is in these places that one would find the lowest barriers to entrepreneurship. But looking at a place like the United States, from where we write, one sees a country of vast opportunity yet relatively high barriers for starting business. Certainly “the land of opportunity” is woven into the fabric of the US but even here the opportunities are not evenly distributed. Some agency certainly has documented where in the US people are more likely to start up a “grass roots” business financed mostly by their own personal desire but lacking any hard facts to back it up it would seem that Vermont most rank fairly high among places where people just start businesses.

Traveling the state you find cheese makers, inn keepers, back country guides and, of course, pizza makers. There’s a place called Pizza on Earth in Charlotte, Vermont which is the outgrowth of a two people’s desire to move to the country and live off their land. Jay Vogler and his wife Marcia bought some land in 1991 not far from the southeastern shore of Lake Champlain. They moved up from New York City to start an organic farm built around the CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, model. CSA is a business model that makes a lot of sense for small farmers. Farms of this size need a fresh infusion of cash early in the spring when the expenses of getting their crops into the field are coming many months before they start receiving any income from those crops. With a CSA, “subscribers” pay a certain amount of money up front and in return receive boxes of produce later in the year once the fields start to produce. This was the Vogler’s plan and they steadily worked their 64 acres of fields and green houses and built up their CSA. Their version of a CSA was ‘self-service’ meaning that their customers came to the farm every Saturday to pick up their boxes of produce. And at one time, they had over a 100 people traveling to the farm for their vegetables.

Jay came from a restaurant background that he left behind when he moved from NYC. A desire to find a place for their kids grow up and continue working with food is what brought them to their farm in Vermont. He had always had an interest in baking but mostly his experience had been with pastry in the restaurants in which he worked. At some point, with the steady stream of people showing up on the farm each week the idea came to him to start serving pizza as well. About this time a building in Burlington, VT was being gutted for renovations and in it was an old wood fired oven. Jay bought it, took it apart and moved it to an outbuilding on his property. Some concrete workers were doing work at his house about this time and offered to build him a hearth for the oven. And with the purchase of some used bakery equipment he started selling pizza from his oven each week.

Eventually they decided to lease their land to another farmer and start to build up their bakery business. Pizza remains the heart of the business, but Jay’s interest in bread and pastry has given rise to a full scale bakery. They make great, smoky hearth breads. Smoky, not so much because they want them that way, but the oven, and the need for pizza at a certain time requires certain compromises. Their oven isn’t one of these dense heavy stone/and fire-brick beauties that one finds being built around the country these days. It doesn’t absorb a lot of heat so a fire is built on the morning of the pizza bake and after several hours the bread has to go in. The oven temperature has to remain high enough for the pizzas later in the day so the coals are not raked out and the fire tends to smoke some during the bread bake. Early on Jay said their customers thought they were making “bacon” bread because of the smokiness. Later in the day, once the breads are baked the oven is re-fired to get the temperature back up for the pizzas which require a hotter oven.

The pizzas come with interesting combinations of toppings with the herbs and vegetables provided for by the farm. Their breads and pizza dough are made with organic flour and they do their best to source local ingredients. Right now they bake on Wednesdays and Fridays. But they change with the seasons trading Fridays for Saturdays in the summer.

What the Vogler’s have done should be an inspiration to bakers and would-be bakers everywhere. It’s great to see someone who takes advantage of the resources they have: a farm with customers in the case of Pizza on Earth, and capitalize on them in a way that can support them: not only financially, but emotionally as well. It certainly must be tough convincing people to drive out into the countryside to get their pizzas but if any where it was possible, it would have to be in Vermont.