SmartTranscript of House Agriculture – 2025-02-13 – 1:00PM

[Maddie Kepner]: Yes. [Chair David Durfee]: Which we have not discussed except possibly anecdotally or informally. So it'd be good to have that introduction. [Maddie Kepner]: Yep. We've introduced it briefly to just in concept. It hasn't been officially introduced. It has not. [Leland Morgan]: To the house yet, but it's on the way. I saw it. Bill. I'll type Yeah. [Chair David Durfee]: Okay. Would would it be helpful for us to just quickly introduce ourselves to That would [Maddie Kepner]: be great if you all [Chair David Durfee]: Well, welcome. Good afternoon. I'm David Derby. I live in Shaftesbury, down in Benton County. I represent a district that includes Shaftesbury, Sutherland, and Blossombury. [Leland Morgan]: I'm Leland Morgan. I represent Line Country, Grand Isle County. And West Milton. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: Yeah. I would she represents the loyal one, Snow, Speed Country, and they're soon to be in line with me. [Leland Morgan]: Michelle Boslin, Windham three, Westminster, Brookline, and Rockingham, and also known as the Banana Belt. [Maddie Kepner]: That's so true. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Greg Burt, Cabot, Daniel Peachen. [John O'Brien]: I'm Brian Raltson in Tunbridge. Orange County, [Michelle Bos-Lun]: but we've grown them over. [Maddie Kepner]: Maybe someday. Yeah. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: Representative Richard Nelson, Earley's won Derby, the land of the polar tomato. [Maddie Kepner]: Polar lots of it. [Chair David Durfee]: And you've all met Sedona. Or if you haven't, she's our assistant. She helped with any technical issues and hearing of documents. [Maddie Kepner]: Well, thank you for having us. I'm Maddie Kepner. I'm mostly just here for the record and to kick things off. I'm policy director at NOFA Vermont, And we have some farmers here today to share a little bit about their experiences, in the past couple of years and the challenging growing seasons that we've had, as it relates to our effort to establish a farm security funds going forward. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: So [Maddie Kepner]: that's all. And if it works for you, Chair Durfee, we have, Bill up first and then Jacob and then Justin and David. And I have some photos that Justin and David are planning to show during their testimony that I'll run from my computer. [Chair David Durfee]: Great. Yep. You have the ability to share? [Maddie Kepner]: I think so. I should double check before I say that. I do. Yeah. So I'll send them. [Chair David Durfee]: So next on the agenda that we've been billed [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: I got billed. [Chair David Durfee]: Bill, come on up. Now? And if you could, just say your introduce yourself so you know who to the Bill. Where are you from? [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: I'm Bill Chintzy. I'm formerly from Hardwick, but I got flooded and had to move to Greensboro. So as part of my support for the security fund, I wanna pass around a, flip chart that will show you some pictures of the flooding that destroyed my farm. So my testimony here is not about re, just replacing some lost equipment or repairing a damaged field. This is about a property that's no longer useful to humans, except for taking walks with your dog, perhaps some fishing. I'll pass this around, and I'd like to say I'm very grateful for a BGAP payment, which you can see in full. Right. And I'm also very grateful for our agency of agriculture for their efforts to help as well as NOFA and a farm, forest, and viability program, which has helped me recover. So I wanna press the button here so I don't go over my time. To me, the the fund is very important because the DGAP application process that I participated in in twenty three and then again in twenty four was extremely taxing. And it completely retraumatized because this flood just put an end to what I was the equity I was building on that property, the market, the standing in that community, and my future plans, which actually include aging in place. It ended because the river is bigger than me or whatever I could do to stop it. So the BGAP process was just this computer application, and it was asking questions that I knew were totally irrelevant to my situation. So I'm hopeful that if this is a possibility and could be administered through the a Agency of Agriculture, there would be more of a human presence. Yeah. We had listening sessions by the agency of agriculture. In the very last page, you'll see a printout, and that was very helpful. But, I'm also hoping that this program can fund human a human being who could come and it's really not rocket science to see where the flood damage is in our state. It's right in these river valleys. To call, make an appointment, come over would have been a big difference for me in my recovery. Because in twenty three, I had a hard time even facing up to my own personal trauma. I during the flood, I was chaining equipment to post poles in the pole barn, hoping that if the river took half of it, it wouldn't take the whole thing. That was, like, hand to hand battle, basically. So the process of asking for help was very difficult for me. I'm not used to asking for help. I've had to learn how, and I still don't know how. So that's my testimony today. If you have any questions about it, I'd like to be a resource for you for the future, and I'd like to take what I've learned from it to help others, both present recovery farms and what I fear to be an ongoing problem that we're gonna be facing together. [Chair David Durfee]: We've, we've heard stories and we've seen pictures, but I don't think we've had an actual person come in and with your tell us directly and firsthand what it's been like. So thank you. And I see a couple of questions here, representative of Brian. [Leland Morgan]: Yeah. Bill, can you just tell us a bit [John O'Brien]: about your farm, what you were farming, and you're right on the memorial, and and, historically, like, what happened during Irene or I'm sorry. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Memorials. My story is a long story. So I was born the year Eisenhower was elected, his first term. So I come from that kind of background, farm family from day one. There were some dysfunctions, so I didn't inherit my famous farm. And I was passed off to be a mechanic because I was a farm mechanic. So my career has been mostly HVAC contracting. With any time I had a chance or a piece of land, I would grow something. And always the lure of a cash crop because I'm a for profit farmer. It's a business. It's an opportunity to get ahead. So just before moving to Hardwick, I just came off a decade of taking care of my mother, which was time consuming with the Alzheimer's. And I'm glad I did that, but it definitely put me out of distance in terms of farming. So to describe my farm in hardwood, it was a beginning farmer, starting out, getting going with growing grains and beans and a specialty crop called, willow for basket making, which I'm very optimistic about because it has so many different, parts of our economy from craftspeople to agritourism to wholesale. So that's what I was growing. Sorry to take so long, but [Brian Ralston]: Yeah. It's [John O'Brien]: good to know. Yeah. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: I would have loved to inherited my parents' farm, my grandfather's farm, and been in that secession, but that was not a possibility for me. [John O'Brien]: But you had a piece right on the Lamoille? [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: No. So I was, but you'll see, between Route fifteen and Lamoille. Okay. Very small property, beautiful bottom land. I mean, you could take your hand and just put it down to your elbow in the most beautiful so I never had soil. Yeah. And I had irrigation. I had two dry summers. Twenty one, twenty two, I irrigated. And twenty three, it just started raining, and things were not good. And I wasn't paying attention because when the big rain came, it was too late. [Chair David Durfee]: Where is that important? [Leland Morgan]: I live on the lower Limonell River, and the water got very high, not like yours, so I didn't get flooded, luckily. [John O'Brien]: But I suspect [Leland Morgan]: a lot of your farm went right by my house in the river. Yep. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: The small particles. [John O'Brien]: Small particles because it was small. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: I never found one farm tractor. You'll see the vehicles in the back pages. They were only two miles downstream. Devastating. I had to get them out of the river. Five hundred foot pole. Well, in any case, I don't wanna take too long here. Thank you very much. Would you please consider me ready and available to make a difference? Appreciate it. Work to do. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. [Chair David Durfee]: So next, we're gonna hear from, Jacob. Jacob Pausier. [Jacob Pausier]: Hey, everyone. Thanks for having me. I will say your view is better than the Senate ads. [Leland Morgan]: It's not [Jacob Pausier]: it's not a competition. Anyways, my name is Steve Alsner, and I farm on a fourth generation farm down in Rutland County in the town of Chittenden. We got a lot of little hustles. We grade some beef. We harvest some timber. It's almost a six hundred acre farm, but we really pay the bills, making and selling maple syrup. I got a lot of bills. I got this HBO Max bill that keeps on going up, but I'm trying to watch white Lotus. You do this one. Okay. I'm going to try to stick to my script, but hopefully we get off script. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Even the [Jacob Pausier]: past two summers, we witnessed unprecedented flooding that devastated our state's agricultural communities. Raging waters, destroyed crops, eroded fertile soil, and that took generations to build. It damaged farm infrastructure and washed away livelihoods. The flooding caused millions in damages with some farms losing an entire seasons of production, As you all know too well, and as we heard from Bill, right, these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more severe, leaving our farmers increasingly vulnerable without adequate support systems in place. The tools such as crop insurance simply don't exist, certainly in in Maple. I'm on the Maple Association board. I don't know anyone in Maple who's ever had crop insurance for Maple. And as we'll hear, you know, the crop insurance, it really isn't a good fit for most of our Vermont farms. Our farms aren't just growing food. We're stewarding land that makes Vermont what it is. When we fail to protect our farms from climate disasters, we risk far more than a crop. Here's what I know is at stake. The economic stability of our rural economies, where farms provide essential jobs and drive local economies, our food security and our resilience of our local food systems, the environmental benefits that well managed farms provide, including flood mitigation, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration, and the preservation of our work and landscapes that define Vermont's character and support our tourism industry. So after the tragic floods of twenty twenty three, like many Vermonters, our firm tried to step up and do something. We ran like a it was a fundraiser for the NOFA emergency fund where a lot of our sales went to support the NOFA emergency fund. And it wasn't just NOFA. Right? As you know, the Vermont Community Foundation, FSA, the Center for Agricultural Economy, you know, everybody kind of ran a fundraiser, including farms, right, with all their GoFundMe's and Kickstarters. And, it was a silver lining of hope for many engulfed in the flood cloud clouds. But in that, there's a problem. When we rely solely on private individuals and nonprofit organizations to respond, we risk a recovery that is inadequate, and equitable, uneven, inefficient, and untimely. There are, of course, better positioned firms in any recovery, popular firms with wide audiences. Large TikTok following. Are you on TikTok? The bigger funds with more resources, older firms that have learned to navigate these funding bureaucracies better than younger firms. Right? I worry about small firms, the ones that haven't been to an FSA firm, FSA office, ones that haven't gone online to start a GoFundMe and no wouldn't know where to start a GoFundMe account. In twenty twenty three, NOFA raised one point seven million ish. In twenty twenty four, they raised three and a half thousand. Right? Large gap. And I worry about the sustainability of depending on nonprofits for the long haul. And that's why it's so crucial for a fund to be positioned in the state budget that can be equitably and efficiently administered through the fund sitting and a path forward when we know there's gonna unfortunately be another flood. Right? It's just a matter of time and probability. The proposed farm security fund isn't just about emergency response, though. It's an investment in Vermont's future. By helping farmers recover quickly, we are maintaining our agricultural infrastructure and protecting generational knowledge. We're preserving local fruit production capacity. We are keeping working lands in production. Right? Otherwise, they're just gonna get developed into housing lots, which is another crisis. Other end, we wanna support the next generation from getting into farming and not be deterred by climate risks. We can't prevent all the disasters brought on by a changing climate, but we can choose how we respond to these disasters. By establishing these funds, we can demonstrate our commitment to agriculture as a cornerstone of the Vermont economy and environment and identity. And I think it's the bare minimum to protect the investment that this committee and the state has already put funds and public dollars into making farms viable and working in the state of Vermont. We can show our farms that they're not alone in facing these challenges, and we can invest in the resilience of our entire state. The cost of inaction, we can measure in lost crops or fields or farms. But this investment this loss far exceeds the investment that this fund requires. I urge you to support this vital legislation and protect the future of Vermont agriculture. And most importantly, I encourage you to support the language as is and the funding scope of the bill. As we all know, for a bill to be effective, it needs some teeth behind it. There needs to be an adequate amount of dollars for this program to have wheels. Right? I think that's it. I wanna thank all of you for listening to my editorial on White Lotus. I think it's gonna be a great season. But I do appreciate and sincerely, I appreciate all that you y'all do for the state of Vermont and for farms. And if you have any questions, I'm happy to take them or talk about maple syrup. Any questions? [Chair David Durfee]: I think that season three of [Jacob Pausier]: White Lotus that's coming up. Supposedly in Thailand. Yeah. [Chair David Durfee]: Representative Bert. [John O'Brien]: How many types do you have? [Jacob Pausier]: We're trying to get up to fifteen thousand trees. It's mostly direct to consumer here. So we do a lot of agritourism. We see thousands of visitors, a lot of out of staters, but most of our syrup doesn't get sold bulk. It gets sold in a tiny little jug. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: You said fifteen thousand trees. The question was how many paths. [Brian Ralston]: That's a good [Maddie Kepner]: hit. I know. [Chair David Durfee]: I know. Maybe I see. [Jacob Pausier]: There's maybe eleven to twelve thousand ish trees, but there's more untapped trees. Those are the trees I'm looking at. [Chair David Durfee]: Did the you you're you're a diversified farmer, I think you indicated. Did the did the inclement weather damage or impact your sugaring operation at all? [Jacob Pausier]: Not this past two seasons, not with the high water events. We've had, as you may be aware, there's been wind events that have, met the threshold for some federal assistance in the past couple years. Wind events is what we see in maple the most that really have a direct impact on crop. And then there's larger climate risk to maple, as you well know, right? It's a very weather variable crop. The maple belt is traveling northward every year, and we have more and more volatile weather that will lead to like, this is all a bag. Right? Like, when you have crop volatility, you have price volatility. Right? And there's farms that have the cushion and means to post through those volatilities, and then there's farms that don't. [Leland Morgan]: So, in regard to mark, maple trees, a number of years back, there was this, I think it was called a maple threight or some such thing, disease they thought was going to come into the area and devastate the maple trees. Did any of that ever materialized? I [Jacob Pausier]: have a list of existential crises that keep me up at night. What? Maple. The seed really a lot of maple farmers are worried about, like, the next maple blight, essentially. There are significant pest pressures. There's, there's, there's hard science on some of this data, like droughts can affect how trees store carbohydrates and can affect future seasons. There's, there's significant invasive species pressures, right? Most Vermonters will talk about lanternfly or sponge moth. Jumping worms come up, [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: you know, about these things. [Jacob Pausier]: We've been burned. Yeah. So [Maddie Kepner]: They have [Leland Morgan]: an effect on the maple tree. [Jacob Pausier]: Yeah. They have an effect on the the overall health of the, the overall health of the woods. Right? Yeah. And the soil. And so, it doesn't stop us from farming. Right? I mean, we've kind of do all the things that get us through the night in order to get up the next day and go and drill a hole in a tree because it's what we love to do. Right? No one's making us sugar, but it's a it's a real cornerstone of Vermont identity. And and the maple industry is is growing in Vermont. Right? It's it's been a a success story of recent history in the past twenty years. [Leland Morgan]: But that's why the maple trees are doing okay. Yeah. [Jacob Pausier]: I I don't. I try to talk to them, but they don't talk back. [Leland Morgan]: Maddie, this might be more [John O'Brien]: for you, but you might know it too, Jacob. It's like, if we take any of these floods, do we know, like, what the total damage is to agriculture? [Maddie Kepner]: In twenty twenty, there is forty four point seven million to ag operations directly, and then the total impact on the food system, including other types of food businesses, was sixty nine million. And then twenty twenty four is fourteen, somewhere around fourteen million. [John O'Brien]: So how does this twenty million would help, but even you admit right there, right, it one bad summer and we're already, you know, underwater [Maddie Kepner]: Yeah. With [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: big summer. [Maddie Kepner]: The idea behind the twenty million is to cover to our best estimate, right, up to fifty percent of producers' losses. We know that the state is not gonna be able to make producers whole, and I think farmers understand that, and that's not what we're asking for. But given what we expect in terms of what Jacob talked about, the drop in philanthropy that we saw from twenty twenty three to twenty four and the uncertainty of funding at the federal level in so many ways right now, but especially around disaster relief. Congress is too slow if they act at all, and the funding there will also be insufficient. So we're trying to really be honest about what we think the role of the state is in supporting farmers through these events. [Jacob Pausier]: Now what we were talking about during lunch was I mean, I think there will be a self selection bias too where farmers will be too proud to a lot of farmers will be too proud to ask for money if they know there's people worse off than that. So, anyways I'm sorry. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: Yeah. Matty, just to clarify that forty four million in losses in twenty twenty three, was that the FEMA definition of losses for building structures, equipment, or was it crowd loss? And I'm concerned about the kind of loss that they all experience that is not replaceable for any amount of money. [Maddie Kepner]: Yeah. You know, [Michelle Bos-Lun]: loss of buying the aggregate. [Leland Morgan]: Operation? [Maddie Kepner]: The forty five weeks That's a really good question, and it's probably a better question for the ag agency because that's the number from their agri February task force from and, frankly, it's probably an under field because it's from the survey that they did in twenty twenty three. So again, to Jacob's point, you know, lots of folks probably didn't respond to that survey who had damage and loss during that season. So I can't say specifically what's included in that number, but I can pull up and give you that information. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: Thank you very much. [Chair David Durfee]: Alright. Thank you very much, David. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Thank you. Justin. Alright. [Brian Ralston]: Well, thanks for hearing us, everybody. My name is Justin Rich. I own and operate Burnt Rock Farm in Huntington, Vermont, and Maddie was encouraging me to this riff instead of reading this. But I really [Michelle Bos-Lun]: I don't know. I'm full of doubt. [Maddie Kepner]: With you, Jess. [Chair David Durfee]: I might [Brian Ralston]: just read it. So I have a statement to [Michelle Bos-Lun]: read it, and we do have a small slideshow that you [Brian Ralston]: can see my particular flavor of devastation from this year. So alright. I own and operate a medium sized vegetable farm in Huntington. We grow twenty five acres of vegetables, mostly potatoes, sweet corn, winter squash, cabbage, etcetera, primarily for local and regional wholesale markets. In addition to myself, we have seven full time employees in the summer and three or four in the winter, and we have trucks on the road delivering produce ten or eleven months per year. I'm also the current president of the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association, which represents over three hundred farmers across Vermont. I'm here today to ask you to pass the Farm Security Special Fund to ensure that farmers have access to financial support when faced with extreme weather events. After sixteen years on our current farm, our business has grown dramatically with the help of strong local communities and regional markets that appreciate the value and quality of what we grow. However, our ability to risk to manage risk in our business has not grown along with the increase in scale and complexity. In twenty twenty four, our our valley flooded at a level not seen in anyone's living memory. Five inches of rain fell in about six hours on July tenth. That's on top of one point four inches having fallen the night before and eight inches over the previous thirty days. For those who aren't meteorologists, that's we have we're supposed to have about four inches of rain a month here. I averaged five and a half at my farm, and this year, we got eight thirteen thirteen in June, July, August. Looking at a relatively small scale, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year before we put a seed in the ground in the spring. I purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of various insurance products, including crop insurance, but the current tools we have for managing environmental risk exposure are dwarfed by the weather events we have experienced in recent years. The crop insurance we have access to as specialty crop growers and dairy farmers is currently inadequate for us to hedge our financial Even doing everything by the book with crop insurance this year, we received a nine thousand eight hundred dollar payout on over two hundred thousand dollars in documented crop loss, and that policy carried a seven thousand seven hundred dollar premium. Doing the math, that's two thousand one hundred dollars net payout on two hundred thousand dollars loss, which at least makes for a very neat penny on the dollar figure. Our dairy farmer friends did not fare any better. That relatively meager payout still required dozens of hours of administrative work at a time when we are knee deep with flood cleanup and in season farm work. This led many of us to rely on Vermont's BGAP program to cover our large uninsured losses. However, the ad hoc nature of the program left affected farmers with much uncertainty in the first months after the flooding as the program was unannounced until September and payouts for some took over four months. This support is unbelievably appreciated though the uncertainties surrounding its implementation led to suboptimal cleanup and recovery efforts in the months following the flooding. For instance, we applied in October after finishing up storage crop harvest but did not receive confirmation of assistance until late January. Having a permanent disaster recovery program designed to support the agricultural community as outlined in the Farm Security Special Fund would be tremendously useful to farmers who are faced with existential losses caused by extreme weather events and would be an important tool to help strengthen Vermont's working capacity. Thank you. Come. [Chair David Durfee]: Wanna show us the pictures? [Maddie Kepner]: Yeah. We can [Leland Morgan]: take a quick tour of [Brian Ralston]: the building holes where they shouldn't be in piles where there's cincy. That field, everything that's not green was crop ground, and Hannah in the front right corner is standing in what was the corner of the sweet potato field, and the river was over one hundred feet to the right of her through a wooded riparian buffer. So even people say we need to plant more trees along the river that'll stop flooding. [John O'Brien]: What river is this? [Brian Ralston]: This is the Huntington. So it's an alpine river that typically doesn't flood in most of our fields. Some I've never seen water in seventeen years. [Chair David Durfee]: So if we look towards the top, is that that's the buffer? Or Yeah. [Brian Ralston]: You can see yeah. You go back. [Leland Morgan]: Yep. [Brian Ralston]: The field come up to right here. It curved around the river. There's a bend in the river there. So the river ate through a hundred feet of riparian buffer and then made a boat ramp out of the channel and into our field and then just race that field at probably twenty miles an hour. So it's a very aggressive, abusive method of flooding. It's not a supplicatory flooding. It's a bullet style. Next. Oh, that crop was destroyed. This is about a thousand feet downriver in the same field. And this is what it looked like where the water was just running along our cultivated ground. So we had huge amounts of scouring and then huge deposits in other spots. So in some spots, the soil was four feet removed. Some places, it was three feet deposited. And at the far end of the field, you really can't see in this picture, but we had at least two thousand yards worth of topsoil and sand deposited in a drainage, which was fantastic to have there to cut all the water. So we spent most of the summer hauling soil from one end of [Michelle Bos-Lun]: the field back to the other and filling [Brian Ralston]: in these scour holes. Next. Yeah. This is the same field, just different view. So that's just the rubble that we got in the field. Trees, garbage cans, cones. This is our sweet cornfield, which is a couple miles upstream. As you can see, we didn't have the physical damage to the actual soil in this field. And this sweet corn was almost ready to harvest, but the water got right up to the tops of the ears, and we can't harvest any fresh eating crop that's touched floodwaters for fairly obvious contamination reasons. So basically, the first three plantings of sweet corn were awash, and we had to mow those in. Next. And the same story in potatoes, but they hadn't really set their tubers yet. So we were able to bring these to maturity and, obviously, but the yield was less than that of what it would have been if it hadn't been flooded. This is the part of that field I told you about where there's a drainage just that filled it with sediment. So and this is kinda where I I point out the the b gap. I wanna say fall short because it was tremendous program, but the timing wasn't perfect, and the uncertainty wasn't perfect. So I own a little excavator, and we moved thousands of yards of sand of soil with a three and a half ton excavator, which is hilariously cute to operate on that scale. So we might have invested in some better machinery if that were, you know, if we'd known there had been relief. But when you're looking at a couple hundred grand and lost revenue, it's not when you say, you know, maybe go to people buy some machines. But we wrote some friends with bigger machines to come help out too and just spend, you know, a couple weeks just moving dirt from one end to the other over and over and over again. Kinda calming, but not the best way to spend the summer when we were actually engaged in farming at the moment too. These are some scour holes that the river that one was about five feet deep probably, sixty feet wide. Yes. We're just dumping sand and topsoil back into the holes from which it came. But even with that in mind, we did have some crops that survived or got planted afterwards. Like, this is a field of cabbage and kale that was actually in the ground for a week when it got flooded and it survived. Because remember, our river floods very fast and aggressively, so it's probably underwater for two hours. It was at night. It's hard to tell. So we were able to get some crops out of ground. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: But So, Justin, what [Brian Ralston]: There's one. Yeah. [Chair David Durfee]: What are [John O'Brien]: what are the rules then on on floodwaters touching? Like, you said the corn, you couldn't harvest, but certainly potatoes had floodwater, you know, reaching plants or or these these edible cabbages. Right? [Brian Ralston]: The food safety rules are if flood waters touch the edible portion of a food, it's just you cannot. [Speaker 8 ]: But, like, the cabbage [Brian Ralston]: Right. So the thing is those cabbage plants were plants. They're this big. They were transplants that have been in the ground for a week, so they hadn't made the leaves that would become the cabbage that you eat. Okay. So that's the technicality and also three months time passes too. Yeah. And then on crops that you cook when you eat them, it's a slightly different metric. But, again, like, if it's lettuce or strawberries or corn that you basically eat raw, just Yeah. You don't wanna be giving people. So we were able to harvest the potato crop and everything, but, you know, it came in at about sixty percent of what we well, it was about half what we usually get, but it's better than nothing. But I'll I'll just point that again. We actually buy crop insurance, and we actually buy the increased coverage on it. And we yielded between one penny and one and a half pennies on the dollar for coverage. And it was just I will continue to buy it because being in the FSA system is how you get access to other programs. So I say it's it's a it's a pretty good program. It's just not insurance even though it's called insurance. I I I had a hard time finding any situations where it actually makes you hold the way your car insurance would be for you to crash your car. You can more or less afford to buy a new car or replace the car. Our crop insurance does not work. [Chair David Durfee]: That could be a whole separate conversation, cut crop insurance, the return, your your ability to access or be closer to other FSA programs. Let's take a note of that. Maybe there's others in the same boat that would help the committee better understand that. And it's [Brian Ralston]: it's really complicated. So I'm happy to answer a question. [John O'Brien]: Yeah. I'm not [Chair David Durfee]: and I'm not gonna put you in the spot by asking any, but just I'll just put everybody's side. That has come up before and yeah. Thank you for [Brian Ralston]: Well, I'll say a lot of people do complain about crop insurance and they've never bought it. Their complaints aren't invalid, but I'm coming at it from the perspective of somebody who's bought it for years. And it's like, it pays, but it's not insurance. It doesn't pay when you need it. [Leland Morgan]: Representative Morgan. As far as the river was concerned where it flooded, were you allowed to resoil that area, or is that now river and you can't mess with it? [Brian Ralston]: The first picture where I didn't have enough dirt to fill there. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: So I just wondered if [Leland Morgan]: you were allowed to We had [Brian Ralston]: we can as farmers were allowed to do certain things with the stream bank that a non farmer wouldn't be allowed to do. Is it worth doing it is a very different question. And we just found the side of it's not you know, we'd be ten tens of thousands of dollars into rehabilitating, you know, a quarter acre section. So it's just a [Michelle Bos-Lun]: stone. Yeah. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: A total of five quarter acre. That's right. [Brian Ralston]: Yeah. These are, like, the cruel calculus you [Michelle Bos-Lun]: can employ in those moments. [Chair David Durfee]: I don't understand. Yeah. I guess I [Michelle Bos-Lun]: could follow-up on perhaps on board. When you were transporting soil with the new pollen pulling a trailer, it looked like it was pretty sandy stuff. Mhmm. I mean, it didn't look like prime mag soil necessarily. There's different parts. Yeah. But did you decide what you put down first to build the base up to near where you wanted [Brian Ralston]: That was a consideration. The stuff that was more topsoil, we put in the shower holes. The stuff like that, sand that went in the deep holes. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: But it and that's just so I think in topographical terms. There's a burnt rock area out of North Faeston. There's Huntington above [Brian Ralston]: Yeah. That's the mountain above my farm. Okay. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: So it's named after the same Yeah. [Brian Ralston]: But nobody in our valley knows that because the trail is on the other side. I do. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: I log up in there. [Brian Ralston]: So Yeah. It's yeah. We're on the west side. You I know. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: By the way, your ag land and the diversity of produce is very impressive. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Thank you, John. [Chair David Durfee]: Representative Branch? [John O'Brien]: So how how would this twenty million fund work as far as you know, say there's a flood. It goes out to farmers fifty percent, you know, of their losses. Send or back to zero. So then it would need another, like, one time to to replenish it, or are there plans for, you know, more like a revolving [Maddie Kepner]: So for for what we're asking for for FY twenty six is twenty million dollars in one time funding to support this need. And then in the bill, there is a calculation that is based on the previous three averaging the previous three years of total losses. That would be the appropriation that would be needed to be put into the fund every year. And ideally that that money then stays in the fund to if it doesn't all get spent down, it rolls over so it can be available still for the following year. Okay. Yep. And then in a year where we have great drying conditions. [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Like, this year. [Maddie Kepner]: Like, this year. This year. We plan to. Yes. [Chair David Durfee]: Alright. Thank you. [Michelle Bos-Lun]: Thank you, Autumn. [Chair David Durfee]: Let's have David come back up. [Speaker 8 ]: And we're limited in time, so I will be as concise as possible. Thank you. Again, David Kaye. You all suffered through my testimony yesterday on grape growing in Vermont, so I will limit some of the grape discussion, but, talk a little bit about how this bill is so important and what it what it does for us specifically as a case point, or a case, study, but, but also just kind of in the greater context of the thing. But we started farming the Boyden Vineyard in twenty twenty. Took that over at least that vineyard. And in September of twenty twenty, had the earliest frost that the low Moiled Valley had seen in thirty years. Never forget talking to David Boyden the morning of September morning of September eighteenth and said, David, it looks like it's getting cold tonight. And he said, David, don't worry about it. The grapes do fine. The frost or the fog comes up off the river usually this time of year. And then I talked to Mark Boyden, and Mark was like, oh, we're getting frost tonight. It's like, but, Mark, it's not supposed he's like, yeah. I know it's not supposed to, but it's gonna. And then we got a hard frost that night, the next night, and the night after that because the river was already pretty cold. So we ended up harvesting all of our grapes, fifteen thousand pounds in seventeen thousand pounds that year in seven days and driving them and processing them all night, every night down in, Vergennes at the facility we were working with there. So that was our first introduction to an unseasonal unseasonable and unexpected frost, and we survived it and made five hundred cases of wine. The years after that, we were a bit more successful in twenty twenty three. We finally got, to some extent, our vineyard under us. This was a new project for us. We were young farmers and, a new project as far as farming grapes, period, despite twenty years of academic knowledge. And in, that year, we had pruned the entire vineyard. One of the challenges of grape growing is you put a bunch of your labor and inputs are in the first part of the season. So basically from January, you prune until April. Then in April, March, April, May, you're putting a lot of your antifungal inputs in, especially if you're organic the way we are. And then you harvest in September, October, and hopefully, you start to see profit from that in six months to a year. So it's a longer game. In April of twenty twenty three, it was eighty five degrees, if you remember, and, it was warmer here than Texas, and everything butted out three to four weeks early. This is our Marquette vine up on the hill on Route fifteen at Boyden. And then March eight or May eighteenth hit, and it was twenty five degrees in the vineyard. And I talked about hybrid varieties yesterday, so I I won't digress too long on that. One of the benefits and one of the reasons we plant hybrids is that secondary budding, frequently occurs. So where Pinot Noir, if they get a frost like this, they're done. And that will they might get twenty percent of the crop back on secondary budding. With hybrid varieties, a secondary or tertiary bud is probably fifty percent to seventy five percent likely. We lost ninety percent to that frost. It was just too cold, and the buds had progressed too far, which is extremely unusual both for our valley and for that for that grape variety. So grapes more to the sort of reason that this bill is so important. Grapes for us, grapes are uninsurable in the state of Vermont. For those with uninsurable crops, we can apply for NAP, which is the national program for uninsurable essentially, uninsurable crops of any variety. They pay fifty percent on the crop value. As I mentioned yesterday, we are a crop a value added crop very much so. So let's say, you know, our vineyard produces what would be a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand dollars in wine. That's probably five to ten thousand dollars of nap payout, which maybe pays for some of our pruning, but nowhere near the whole season. Right? So BGAP was an amazing program, but it only affects it was only helpful for those who had damage following the flooding in twenty twenty three, and our frost preceded that flooding. So orchards and vineyards were just left holding the bag, unfortunately, in twenty twenty three. I was fortunate that by the time we ran out of the wine that we had made in previous years, I was able to take on other sources of income. We closed our tasting room. We let all of our staff go at that point, and now we're hoping to kind of progress. I think the reason that this fund well, this would have kept us from taking on other forms of income and sort of limping by. Other farms are not so fortunate and certainly would not survive this kind of devastation. I think one of the main points about the fund and one of the reasons that it's so important, and we were just chatting with house appropriations or chatting with members there, there's a lot of demands on finances right now. But I think we're all farmers in here, and you know pretty well that right now, a lot a lot of the funds are going into new development and growth in the sector. And I think that we all know that just buying a new tractor is not the solution when you've got a bunch of great tractors that are just dying because of flooding, frost, all of these various, environmental challenges. And so having a fund that exists, before the damage occurs and as a resource, would be a huge, way to save small farms in Vermont rather than waiting for everything to be declared a disaster and then hoping that funds come along and then hoping that those funds are distributed with enough time to save the farms, which, thankfully, we still had wine in the barn. Otherwise, our business would have we would have been, dropping our lease and moving on to other forms of income, other than the ones we already do. So, I think it's it's wildly important, and I think now is the time. So, thank you for your time. Really appreciate you listening. [Chair David Durfee]: You're making the trip twice in two days, twenty four hours. [Maddie Kepner]: Mister Mark, how does David join? [Chair David Durfee]: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So [Speaker 8 ]: this is the vineyard, unfortunately. Yeah, I try not to look at them too closely. It's a little rough when you spend months pruning. And then, this was two weeks after the frost, and we went out hoping for secondary buds. And this is what the vines looked like. You saw the the greenery on the previous, previous vines. So that's, and that's what the buds look like after you in in vineyards, you kinda hang out for two weeks. You don't let the crushing defeat settle in if you can avoid it, and you kind of hope that you're gonna get some secondary buds, but that's most of what we found in the vineyard after two to three weeks. Question. That lower section, the previous Mhmm. That is that on the floodplain? Yeah. So the silver lining to twenty twenty three that's really a dark one was that that vineyard flooded up four rows. The Lamoille's down behind those trees. Yeah. That's the Boyden cornfield that was totally destroyed in the flooding, and it rained every other year. Anyone who had grapes hanging in twenty twenty three fought fungal disease with everything they had and had a really unbelievably difficult year. [Leland Morgan]: Just really safe high water wise. [Speaker 8 ]: Yeah. We didn't have huge amounts of water damage. We also didn't have any grapes to worry about. So [Leland Morgan]: Yeah. David, you know something about [John O'Brien]: wine growing in France. And so what happens when they get frost like this in Burgundy? Those do they have There's [Speaker 8 ]: a bit more infrastructure for, to prevent frost because they've been doing it for two thousand years in Burgundy. So, and a lot of those farms have resilience built in after making wine for a decade. So there's still wine hopefully in the cellar, but there's a lot of ways to mitigate frost as far as either moving air in Bordeaux where money isn't an issue. They have all of the helicopters in France during the spring season. And at dawn, they all go into the air and circulate the air to keep frost from settling, which is surreal. In Oregon, we what's that? Yep. We try I called every aviation school in Vermont trying to get a helicopter. David Boyden used to fly helicopters, so he used to actually take kids up. And in Canada, we talked a little bit about Canada yesterday, where your if your farm is flat enough and you have enough acreage in one place, they actually invest in wind machines, which can circulate the air. They use chocolates in Burgundy, which are essentially little pots to burn fuel and essentially create as much smoke and warm air to keep the air circulating as well. Also extremely expensive. [Chair David Durfee]: Committee has heard this already and maybe some of you have too that there's, apparently, large, hot and set I shouldn't even say this. Federal money, federal funding that is heading our way, meaning Vermont's way, dollar amount TBD, but to retroactively. So looking back to calendar year twenty three and twenty four, provide some assistance for not just flood flooding disasters, but other weather related disasters. So I say that, not wanting to add any false hopes, but we've heard it in committee, reconfirmed it with the secretary, a week and a half ago or so. And, he thought there might be an announcement coming up in their four weeks more definitive. Yep. Some hope. Some positive news perhaps. Yeah. I don't plant any seeds yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is this is all in this is current. So the conversations happening in Washington, in in Vermont because of the conversations happening in Washington We're part of that discussion. Anyway, thank you for coming in and, sharing with us. [Speaker 8 ]: Hi, Regent. Sure. [Maddie Kepner]: And we're happy to come back and give a more detailed introduction to the bill. And once it's been introduced, [Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: that would be helpful to you all. [Chair David Durfee]: About that. Yeah. Good. Alright. Thank you. Thank you.

Play Clip Play Full Video Pause

SmartTranscript of House Agriculture – 2025-02-13 – 1:00PM

This is useful for seeing what happened at the meeting without wading through the whole transcript: