 Good afternoon, everyone. This is Representative Carolyn Partridge coming to you from my snowy home in Wyndham, Vermont, and it is February 2, 2021, and we are here to talk about animal welfare and animal shelter in particular. And we're going to start off. And Maddie, you can lead off here and do people know, should we introduce ourselves? I think we've introduced ourselves to some of you, but maybe not everybody. So would that be a good idea? Yeah. Okay. All right, so I'll go around the tiles and I'll start with Rodney. I'm from West snowy home in Williamstown, and I represent Orange One District, Williamstown, Washington, Orange, current first year in Chelsea. Thank you, Rodney. Heather. Hi all. I'm Heather Supernaut. I represent Barnard, Palmford, Equiche, and West Hartford. Thank you, Vicki. Good afternoon. I'm Representative Vicki Strong, and I live in Albany. I'm glad I'm not driving to the State House and home today. It's nice to be with you on Zoom. And I represent Seven Towns in Orleans, Caledonia One. All right, thanks Vicki. Go ahead, Tom. I'm Tom Bach. I represent the Towns of Chester and over Baltimore and part of North Springfield. John. Good afternoon. I can see I have to rename myself. I'm Representative John O'Brien. I represent Royalton and my hometown of Tundridge. Thanks John, Terry. Terry Norris to represent Benson Orwell, Shoreham, and Whiting. And I'm Representative Caroline Partridge. I represent the Towns of Athens, Brookline, Grafton, part of Northwest Minster, all of Rockingham and my hometown of Wyndham. So why don't we get started? Maddie, if you want to say some introductory remarks, that would be great. I have a list of people who are going to go. Graham Unangstruffenach would be next, but if you want to, you know, switch things up, it's okay with me. This is your time. And we have you for about an hour. I want to make sure everybody gets included in the discussion. So, oh, where's Henry? Oh, Henry. Sorry. Thank you, Rodney. All right. I'm easy to forget. No, you're not. Representative Henry Pearl, I represent Danville Peachham and Cabot. All right. I apologize, Henry. I was going around the tiles and they must have switched or something. Anyway, go ahead, Maddie. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Representative Partridge and the committee for having us. I'm Maddie Kempner. I'm the policy director at NOFA Vermont. And I will keep it short because I really want to prioritize hearing from all the farmers who have made time to be here today. Thank you all so much for being here too. I also have chatted with Graham and we would love it if possible for Grant to reserve a few minutes for Graham to testify at the end to wrap up our testimony after the other farmers have spoken. So if that works for you all, that would be great. So just a little bit of background we know, I mean, I know, and I think everyone here on the call knows that the committee worked fairly extensively on this bill last session. And we really appreciate the opportunity today to bring in additional farmer voices whose operations are impacted by the language that was passed last year to share their thoughts on this, on this law. And we, you know, I think we've had one meeting I'll give you some background with many of the farmers but not all the farmers on this call to discuss this language and hear from the farming community about, you know, how this language has has impacted them or how they see it impacting them in the future. And I just want to share that collectively we really want to see language that protects animal health and welfare. That's really important to all the farmers that we have spoken with on this issue. And while supporting progressive management intensive grazing practices. And I will also just share that some of the farmers who are here to testify today have been animal welfare certified in the past, which I just share as a testament to the importance of animal welfare to farmers in Vermont, both those who have been certified and not. And so I will share some language that we have developed in collaboration with many of the farmers here as well as a broader list of folks in the ag community. I can just figure out how to share my screen here give me one second. Okay. You'll see that okay. Okay, excellent. This is some language that we developed collectively many of the folks like I said here on the call today were included in developing this language. And really, it's modeled after the National Organic Program regulations as they relate to adequate shelter for livestock. And as you know the National Organic as you probably know the National Organic Program really emphasizes needing to have animals grazing on pasture for a minimum number of days per season and so as such I think is a good framework to start with when we think about you know what is appropriate for animal health and for animals that are predominantly maintained outdoors. So we have made some adjustments to the existing language and that one of the major things that we have adjusted is to just define adequate shelter, more broadly, versus the two categories that are in the language right now, which define both constructed and natural shelter separately. And this is also up on the committee web page so y'all can dig into it further later I don't want to spend too much time on it. That's one of the main changes that we have suggested here. The other is to really define inclement weather and try to put some more sort of guardrails on, you know, what types of weather warrant livestock of different species, needing to have access to shelter. During, you know, during that weather and during periods of inclement weather specifically versus the language right now, which really indicates that livestock have to have access to adequate natural or built shelter. Essentially at all times to prevent direct exposure to the elements which I think folks, a lot of folks were feeling was excessively broad in that you know the elements could include things like sunshine, or, or rain which aren't necessarily dramatic in their lesser extremes to many livestock species. So that's just a brief overview of the language that we've developed and I will, I will say also that we have had some pretty, pretty significant buy in and agreement on that language across a broad spectrum of folks in that community. We have the farmers here like I said I've waited on that plus folks farm leaders from both the organic and conventional communities within agriculture in Vermont so it's something we would love to see you all take up. And we, yeah, I'll leave that at that. And lastly, I just want to say in making in addition to making recommendations for revision revisions, excuse me to the language. And the folks on this call are seeking clarity and transparency around the existing training adjudication and enforcement processes regarding this law. And we are interested in engaging on that level as well because we know there is a whole apparatus and many folks involved in the sort of enforcement and adjudication parts of this, this issue. So I will leave it there and pass it to the next farmer on the list. Thank you so much. All right, thank you so much Maddie for giving us that introduction, and the farmer on the list that I see. Well I see a great grazing outreach specialist Kimberly Hagan, would you like her to go next, and we'll have Graham at the end. Sure, I think that works great if that works for Kimberly. Yeah, that's fine. So we're with this whole group we, I've been out on a number of calls and then last five years with trying to resolve conflicts between farmers who are grazing their animals outdoors and law enforcement and concerned neighbor, or someone in the community that thinks that they are not grazing or dealing with their animals properly. So it is a great area it's fuzzy. And I think we do need some clarification and I did work with this group I like this language new language, what we've come up with a little bit better. And what's, what's became clear to me is that there are people in our communities that no matter what you put in writing. They're going to find a way to get around that language, if they feel like it's not being dealt with and we tried to do more educational work this past season. So I did some across the fence episodes, just to show people that, you know, animals indeed are much healthier when they are outside. They can tolerate conditions much different than what humans can they are not human beings they're So I was taking more the approach of doing more education than trying to use language or a legal structure to deal with this but I do think there might be a good place for having a team to work with some of these situations because they do get volatile pretty quickly some of them. I also want to point out, and this is something that the committee should be aware of. Sometimes this puts farmers in direct conflict with two different state agencies. We have people who are dealing with neighbors who are telling them that they need to have their animals have some kind of place to get out of either the sun or the rain or the wind or whatever. And yet at the same time, if these farmers try to include small areas of woodland in their pasture areas, just for that very reason for some shade or for wind protection. Sometimes they're in violation of their current use. And I've had some actual farms have been fine for putting livestock in wooded areas so it's just something to be aware of something that I think that might have to be work through in the future. Kimberly, I think what I want to do is hold questions till the end because I want to make sure all the farmers get a chance to speak but who I just have to clarify because if we're going to follow up on this I need to know who imposed these fines. Sorry about that. It's actually the tax department because you're in violation of your current use. So current use either recognizes forest land or ag land. There's no in between. So if you put livestock into your forest land, you're in violation of your forestry current use plan. Very interesting. I know. I think we're going to have Jill Remick and again we can ask her about that. Yeah, thank you. All right. Thank you so much Kimberly really appreciate it. So next person on the list here is Adam Wilson. Adam here. I don't see Adam I think we might have to come back to him if he's able to join later. Yeah, that's fine. Joan, Falcaio, or Falcaio. I'm with Bob Fierrovan. Okay. Okay. And I if I murdered your last name I apologize. I have many pronunciations for that last name. We're here in South hero at health hero farm. And we raise 100% grass fed beef we have a beautiful conserve property with large stretches of open land. We have a lot of grass. They used to be corn crops. And that's why they're so open and it would take us 20 years probably to grow decent shade. We do have some shade around the periphery. My main concern is shade in the summer. We don't have trouble in the winter because of our fortunate circumstance of having a very nice large barn from the previous owner. So the cattle can go in there when they want to now right now they're not inside because it's, it's a mild temperature they don't mind the snow. They we have some woods nearby and they'd rather be in the woods than in the barn, even though they know where the barn is and they often go there to get some tips of water from our frost free tanks there. So we're in there often enough that we know where they like to spend their time. And we also put up some cameras some trail cameras to try to piece this puzzle together. So they like to be outside they're very healthy. We were animal welfare approved. But we, we opted out of the program because they did not allow us to buy in cattle that were not animal welfare approved cattle. They allow that for chickens but not for cattle. So we thought having raised in Vermont was a better label for our product than animal welfare improved, but we still continue the same practices and in the animal welfare approved program. They're just fine with not having shelter at all times. There's no such requirement. Well, they say for extreme weather I mean I'll read to you from the AWA animal welfare approved standards for beef production. Animals who have been properly selected for specific climactic conditions will voluntarily choose to go outdoors and all but the most extreme weather. Frankly we've seen that Joan Joan mentioned today they're out in the snow. In the summertime we have actually set up lanes in the fields for them to go back to the wooded areas in the very hot most the hottest days of the year. And often they just stay in the fields they know that lane is there but they would rather be where the forage is where the water is. They're very hardy we've always whenever we've had audits and when we were animal welfare approved certified, we would get audits every year and the auditors. We learned a lot from them about how to take good care of our animals. But they never mentioned anything about how we manage our grazing practices in the summertime or needed shade for them especially. We do have places, fields where there is a lot of woods and we don't take the woods down. We don't plan on doing that at all. And but again, we have had, for instance, we did do come some contract grazing a couple of years ago, and we had in a different breed of cattle galloways who were bred in Canada. And I'll be honest with you, in the hottest days of the summer, they were uncomfortable because they are bred to have two coats of fur. And so they don't handle the heat as well as our cattle do. And so I think that the animal welfare approved standards about factoring in the genetics of the animals is important. And we feel as though our animals, we've all been, we've been told by many people our animals are very great condition, very healthy, and we see it too. It's rare for us to lose an animal. And the vet usually only comes in twice a year to do pregnancy checks, and then an animal might injure its hoof. And the vet will be called in to look at the physical injury. But other than that, they're extremely healthy. We don't vaccinate. We don't need to do anything because they have very good immune systems and they're somewhat sequestered from threats from the environment. Beef cattle are a lot more robust than dairy cattle are. They're really tough buggers. And when we have had a sick animal, we don't know about it until they're near death. Frankly, that's only been once or twice, but they're very hardy. So it would be a hardship for us to have to have to go out to our huge fields where we roll tumble wheels to define these movable paddocks. It'd be difficult for us to make lanes so that at any time in perfectly good weather, these cattle would have a place to go to the woods or back to the barn where they don't want to be and would not go. So we'd like you to consider the importance of the specific animal and their needs. We think we're treating our animals very well and we look to their behavior to tell us and they're enjoying themselves out there today. So I think that's pretty oh and we have very good high quality bee people see our animals and say whoa a great condition they are. They're very well fed and they enjoy a nice social life. They're heard that has a lot of freedom to move around and behave naturally as animals. On our website we have a video a three minute video of our farm practices and I can send a link to that if you want to see what the tumble wheels look like and what the movable water systems look like that are designed to allow us to have the cattle in the middle of a really large field. Mowing down different parts of the grass. There's other farmers let me let them speak. Thank you very much. Joan and Bob thank you so much for joining us today. This is, this is great and if you would send that those contact links to our wonderful assistant Linda. I'd appreciate it. Great. All right. Next on the list is Nico harster. Nico. Hi. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for inviting us to opine on on this law I'm not entirely sure how that sort of went by the radar screen of the various farming organizations I have a beef operation grass fed and versure Vermont called shy beef I'm also now vice president last three years of the Vermont grass farmers Association. And we typically pay attention to what's sort of on the radar screen just like for Vermont or Nova, and this certainly slipped by our, our radar screen of what were you guys thinking. I think there's a lot of well meaning. There's a lot of intent here. But I see some major flaws in how this was executed and hopefully we have an opportunity here to point some of that out and, you know, get into a discussion about how we can make this a better law for everyone. The animals are treated fairly and appropriately not humanely because they're not humans but appropriate for their species. And, um, and the farmers as well. So there's sort of two, two directions that I would like to go with this the first one is, um, you know, we've, we've gotten together and I don't know if you've seen yet to know fun rural Vermont I don't know I think now you was probably the one who forwarded some proposed changes to to the language of what's described in the bill based already. Basically basing definitions on already established language in federal law or descriptions of, you know, sort of certain conditions that animals are subject to that the USDA and our CS and so forth already use that would be a good starting for us to define what it actually means what we're actually talking about. And, you know, I just want to reiterate I heard sort of something is some of what Kimberly said we are actually our farm is conserved by the Vermont Land Trust we have three and four strand perimeter fence around our entire property which expressively excludes access to trees, as per conservation mandates and, you know, and compliance with our forestry programs or loose use program. So, we have in the meantime to chagrin of the old timers in town who said what are you doing destroying a perfectly good hayfield planted shelter belts and tree islands in our pastures. We have ever bailed on we bail around bail them and do not need to have the same sort of dry hay conditions and that, you know, are required for square bailing small square bales, as, you know, or loose hay. And just, you know, as Bob and John already said, it's, it's going to take it's going to take some time to for these trees to grow and provide these shades, you know, that said, I think, I would say in the last three years we've had maybe, I don't know, a week total where I would have said, Okay, these are temperatures where the cattle are somewhat uncomfortable. You know, good management, good breed selection, good genetics over time will help with that, like having red cattle instead of black cattle so you can have more heat tolerance black hair on cattle is a real downer in hot weather. You know, providing enough access to salt so when they sweat they can replenish their minerals and have an efficient cooling cycle within their body, you know, all those kind of things but, and I think abuses or non sufficient knowledge in those areas is definitely something that this law is trying to encourage. And that sort of is getting me to the second part is saying what actually regulates how this is enforced how do we educate the people who are actually out in the field. How do we prevent nuisance calls and tassel that you know farmers who are plenty busy in summer or in winter, sometimes less so in winter, having to deal with this and you maybe will hear from Adam and a little bit about you know sort of what he's experienced in terms of you know neighbors calling you know the state police or and then having to deal with hours and hours of education not just of the neighbors but the police and you know for something that were perfectly acceptable conditions if there was a qualified actually look into this kind of stuff. And the big question. Why the hell is dairy exempt of this, you know dairy cows as Bob already pointed out, are way more susceptible they're much more fragile creatures, and why are we not regulating them in this you know so if if my beef cattle have to be sheltered. Why do the dairy cattle not have to be sheltered you know it's again, one of those things that you know the holy cow of the dairy industry in a state of Vermont cannot be regulated apparently. Thank you. I think Nico. The reason is that dairy cattle come under different sets of regulation and that may even be more stringent that than what we're dealing with here. So, but we can check that out. Let's move on to Dave Martin, who is the owner of settlement farm. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me. I run about 100 years and I'm getting ready for lambing in March. I'm looking forward to that. I guess I want to acknowledge that most of the public in Vermont knows very little about agriculture. I just don't which is, I understand that and that's okay they have some sort of basic knowledge and they like cute scenes of goat yoga. But that's it. And, you know, I, people drive by on my place on the road, they see something that might concern them. I really think that in order to take care of agriculture for a month, we need to be prepared to deal with those concerns in an upfront way. If somebody calls in a complaint about how animals are taken care of. That's an opportunity to educate the public. And I think agriculture and farmers need to always be prepared to do that. Wishing it wasn't an issue doesn't make it go away. People are going to drive by your operation and see something that concerns them. And we need to, we need to be able to deal with it. Some of the issues I have though is if somebody calls somebody and complains about where my animals are taken care of, do I get to know who made that complaint? Do I get to know the exact details of that complaint? And I don't know. I throw that question out. If somebody drives into my yard and says I'm here investigating a complaint, I want to know who made that complaint. So that's sort of an issue that I throw out. And the other thing that a question I have is what is the nature of complaints that have come in over the past three or four years? How can anybody track that on a statewide basis? What kind of complaints come in? Is there a trend? The only ones I've heard about, I've heard about a dairy farmer a while ago who passed away, his son was supposed to be taken care of the cows, and he did run out of money to feed them and the cows were dying in the stanchions. Then I hear about a couple who had a wide mirage of animals of goats and sheep and cattle and they weren't taken care of them and the house department came in and a lot of them were confiscated. So I've heard a couple horror stories, but I do not have a picture of on a statewide basis over the past couple of years. What kind of complaints come in? I think that would be useful information. I would also like to be sure that if somebody drives in my driveway to do an investigation or whatever it's called, that I have confidence that they know agriculture, that they are comfortable and knowledgeable about what are appropriate standards of care. And then that would reassure me. And I'm also so willing to acknowledge that when you create a law, it cannot address every single issue that's going to come up. That's just not possible. There are always going to be situations that are kind of gray and will need to be addressed. So I do not want to think we're asking folks to create a perfect statute because I don't think there is one. And then another question I have is a lot of times when the legislature creates a statute, a law, so that the law is passed, the governor signs it, oh, that's all good. But usually an agency is responsible for translating that statute into a manual to the guidelines of how to handle and interpret the law. A procedure's manual. Is there something like that exists for this law? And what happens? So if a call comes into anybody, a state police officer, the town service officer, the town clerk, where do they turn to for guidance and how to interpret and implement the law? Is there a manual? That's my question. If not, I'm guessing that there's not a manual that a lot of folks would find a manual helpful. And I think that's my set of my comments. Thank you. Thanks, Dave. So I think eventually I'm going to want to say something here, but I think what I'd like to do is have all of our farmers and those who want to testify testify and then I'll make my remarks. Next up is Amy Braxmire and she was having some trouble with her connection. Amy, if you want to try and testify, I would recommend leaving your video off, or you can try it with it on and see how you do. Give it a try, Amy. Hi, thank you for your time. So, real briefly, I'm a farmer, but I also, a few years ago, about 10 years ago, heavily involved the Spring Hill horse rescue out of Vermont and at that time we had developed an animal cruelty reporting system for the state of Vermont. And it was animal tracks and it allowed every but all the animal control officers throughout the state to go in as well as the state police. It was a great tracking system that we had developed so that any cruelty complaints would be filtered through that system so we could see repeat offenders, you know, and that sort of thing. I think that's really gone by the wayside as our way to track cruelty cases in the state. I know that's something that Dave had just talked about. And, you know, so right now I don't think that there's an agency or anybody that are a way to track those to see, you know, how our repeat offenders are happening. And, you know, that sort of thing. And from my work with the rescue and going on some of these cruelty cases, a lot of the offenders were typically not farmers that were out there to essentially make a profit but it was more backyard farmers you know collected animals and that kind of thing. And I saw a big area and opportunity for education through my work with that program. And that's kind of, you know, where I'm coming from is the animal cruelty and the reporting cases but just like Dave said a lot of the calls that we got were from people who are, you know, general public and on educated about livestock and that sort of thing. And also with my business, mobile goat grazing. It's hard, you know, for me to provide a shelter on these different areas you know my animals, we get moved you know once a week or twice a week to new properties to provide the service of mobile goat grazing and brush clearing. And that sort of thing and it's detrimental to my business to be able to have to establish some sort of adequate shelter for each move that we make, and that sort of thing. So, but I'm happy to answer any other questions that you may have a bit, you know, about my work with the rescue many years ago, and some of the cases David talked about, you know as one of the investigators that went out on these cases and I can provide some feedback. Some of the stuff that I've seen and some of the work that we did but once again that it's gone to the wayside for now. Thanks Amy. Why don't we move on to any hopper that we can skip back to Adam Wilson who I see is here now. And then we'll go to Graham so Annie, why don't you go ahead. Hi everybody. My name is Annie hopper I run scuttle ship farm with my husband we're in Panton in Madison County. We run beef and pastured poultry and lamb and all of our all of our grazing animals are 100% grass fed and we're actually also animal welfare approved for currently animal welfare approved until we get sick of dealing with them because for similar reasons as healthy not always. I don't think always rational and some of their more detailed, like, but in any event, it is the highest like tier of animal welfare third party certification that exists. I think worldwide at least that's what they claim I mean it consistently is referenced as like the strictest protocols like, so we have, you know, been certified with the beginning of our farm. We also we've so we've got about 200 acres 70 of which are on the shores of Lake Champlain. And the other 120 ish are rehabbing cornfields that were just barren wasteland after decades of intensive extractive dairy management just nutrients in everything out take it to the barn it's going to end up in the lagoon anyway. The soil looks like the moon. So I just, I don't know. I'm not going to really comment on language because I feel like this is that's y'all's department you're going to get that better than I am. But I wanted to give you a little bit of context, because I really feel like this rule for as I'm reading it and looking at it it's like, you guys are really going hard on like regulating the trees. But there's a whole forest for missing here. And I just wanted to put that in context, because these dairy cornfields that we're regenerating with our grazing animals right now we're using the livestock as a tool. They are not the center of our farm. You know, and we need to think about like this paradigm of like barn versus pasture based agriculture. I don't manage animals I don't wait on them I don't bring them food I don't do all of this stuff for them I'm using them as an active living tool to regenerate our landscape and produce carbon negative meat in a time when people don't even know that hardly exists. So, I actually see what we're doing as a huge opportunity for the future of Vermont agriculture. I mean, no offense but like, dairy's real, really, really struggling right now. And our top soil is all in the bottom of Lake Champlain, along with so much of our nutrients, and our pastures have been nuked by glyphosate, and it's just like this is what's going to bring it back. And the biggest agriculture is making money in Vermont, it's capitalizing on the Vermont brand. But when you start regulating it's got it you got to have a shade you got to have this you got to have all of this coddled stuff for these animals. They are not the same as these dairy machines sitting with blank stairs tied in a barn. They don't need the same requirements I mean, I mean you guys have heard that like quote right the ship is safe at harbor but that's not what ships are for something like that I mean these animals evolved from grazing herds in the plains. They don't need an umbrella. They just so so much of this stuff is, I think really missing the mark. I mean, if my animals are wasting away because they can't handle the, the climate, or my management I'm not farming I'm losing money. I mean, so this isn't this doesn't really seem to apply to farming it's about animal cruelty. So in any event, just I'm thinking like I really would encourage you guys to think about like the future of Vermont agriculture and what we actually want to encourage. Is it more like sequestration of live livestock into barns to just convert feed into food, or is it going to be pasture based is it going to be, you know, up to speed on the most progressive, like regenerative tools in the grazers toolkit like, for example, when I when I graze we're moving every day. We are animals moved to a smaller patch of grass on our fields, and sort of like the guys that health hero there with their tumble wheels you know we are out in these big cornfields that's what we got that's what Addison County's got. There aren't trees anymore we got rid of them for dairy. So, this is how we're bringing it back but that involves bringing them into small grazing cells where we cluster their animal impact, spread their manure, and then rest. In order to do that, I can't have shade in every single paddock that they move day today today today, but then again they don't need it. I mean, because as Nico mentioned these are not dairy animals they don't need everything. These guys have like genetic selection to have been pasture based their shaggy cows, my sheep look like Vikings I mean they're. It's there's just so much nuance here and I really feel like we're driving diving too much into the whole of like barn based agriculture. And so I guess that's my that's my biggest rant on this is like, we really need to think about like what the future of Vermont ag is and what we're actually encouraging and what we're going to hamstring with some of this more. I don't know, traditional language in terms of the needs of an animal. Particularly a grazing, grazing herd. I would, before I wrap up I just I would also like to issue a general. I don't know cry for some attention this is not the best use of time or energy for you guys for tax money for any of it. Dairy is being totally exempt. I understand that they have our APs I understand the agency of ag's there. It doesn't matter how many papers you give the Fox if he's still in the hen house the agency of ag promotes and enforces the dairy industry here it's not compatible. So it's like exclude that it's just like well there goes most of our farms in question. I can't see how this is helping anything it's just making more hurdles for the people trying to do things regeneratively and I don't know, continuing to turn a blind eye so that you know our confinement based dairy industry here can continue to turn out cheap food at the market like our, our regional health are hunting waters are fishing waters are recreation our tourism industry and everything else is laid on the altar of cheap food right now. And I just that's your forest and I really don't think these trees need to find. Thank you. All right, why don't we turn to Adam Wilson. Adam go ahead and introduce yourself please. You're muted Adam. So, my name is Adam Wilson from brushbrook Community Farm in Huntington we graze sheep and cows. And I'm sorry for arriving late I'm wondering if there's a specific prompt that would be most helpful for me to respond to or something that would be most helpful in terms of what's already been said for me to add in here. I think there's a specific prompt it would be your concerns about the bill regarding adequate shelter for livestock. Okay, sure. I mean one thing that might be unique about my experiences that like some others here I've been grazing for some some significant time over 20 years now. I've been grazing this these grazing techniques that we call intensive rotational grazing or management intensive grazing and what's changed for me so the animals seem to get healthier and healthier and thrive in the conditions that we asked them to work in which is often outside in the sun in the summer and outdoors in the winter months as well. What changed for me, was that a couple years ago we moved to a new farm where all of our fields are visible from the road and we happen to have a few neighbors who are very impassioned animal rights folks and have picked up the language in this bill to work first with the animal control officer in Huntington who fielded phone calls through the summer months from these specific neighbors and repeatedly told them go talk to him he's a really nice guy. Those are the best cared for sheep in Huntington they're out there every day moving the fence. Go talk to him. Didn't hear from them directly. Actually, the state police felt like they had to respond, because it was their duty, and we've now been through multiple rounds with the state police and generally found the state police to be very thoughtful, and actually interested in learning about the health of the animals and the grazing practices. But what struck me I guess my reason to get involved here and help to push this forward is as someone who's been grazing for 20 years in the state. I have a huge amount of contacts and network. Sam Dixon at children farms someone who's one of the sort of grandfathers of rotational grazing in the state is my started our sheep flock and I have a lot of people to call on and so I wasn't really concerned that our animals were going to be taken away. You know, but there when I'm 20 years ago and I had started. If this same thing had happened to me trying to do the best I could having, you know, apprenticed under people who had been grazing for decades and decades and decades their whole lives. I might have given up and stopped and stop farming. The pressure might have been intense enough and from what I hear from folks at extension and from the state police is that the pressure the animal rights agenda is increasing in its intensity and its pressure on farmers who are grazing in the public view and what what ends up happening is that farmers end up moving to land that's not visible from a busy road and for us. We're a community farm in that all of the food we raise is shared with folks who live within a mile of the farm. We actually give all the food away where we call ourselves a gift economy. Our families are eating the lamb and beef and animals intimately and we have the opportunity to educate about the health of the animals and their interaction with pasture why we asked them to work in the sun alongside us who are out there working in the sun, what that does for soils. And we see it as a huge benefit to us to be we're adjacent to the school where we're grazing on some of the new town forest land the open field portions of the new town forest. We're super integrated with the town but because we're our animals are in the public view every day of the summer and every day of the winter. And we become sort of a lightning rod for this specific impulse to extend. We've decided humans have to one step to these animals. And so it's just it's been an interesting journey and I'm really so incredibly grateful for all the folks who've put time into this to try to do something to improve this language and like a couple people have said, no matter what this, no matter how detailed this log gets it's not for the thousands of micro factors that go into deciding each day where to move the animals, what pastor to put them on which days of the summer to break their rotation pattern to move them into a shade paddock. The breeding the genetics the states state of lactation the historical presence of parasites in various areas of the pasture. There's just no way that that could be legislated. So, I think this language that's being offered is a good first step to make it a little bit better. But really, as others have said it's going to come down to what the response is and I guess in my case the response has generally been thoughtful. And, but it has taken a lot of time. I mean we're talking so many hours on the phone and in meetings, and I've been able to handle that and continue farming but it's not everyone who could so I guess that's that's my hope is to make this better for others who are trying to do the right thing for their animals and their landscapes. Thanks. All right, I think we have Graham left Graham, would you want to go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey folks, I'm sorry to be off video this whole time I've been dealing with little one this is juniper. My name is Graham Unix true for not tonight. I'm a policy director at rural Vermont and I'm also a farmer in at least land and cows Vermont and graze. You know, I think I really just wanted to try to just wrap this up from our perspective working with a number of the farmers is calling with no friend a number of other organizations. You know, Adam and Kimberly and other folks mentioned you know this issue does go well beyond this language that we're suggesting. I do feel like this, this language at least it begins to get it some of the most problematic nature is nature of this law and how we've seen it impact some folks. So again, the general message is that we're taking wording, which implies based on some correspondence I have a pledge counsel and John Bartholomew, which implies the animals need access to shelter at all times or shade at all times and suggest alternative language based on national national organic program standards, which says basically that animals need access to shelter or shade at times of inclement weather. And then we go to define inclement weather, to some extent, based on some some different extreme but as folks have said, there's only so much detail we can get into and hopefully we can see is also brought interest amongst these folks. To work beyond this and to collaborate with, you know, responders to think about what kind of training is appropriate for folks who will be responding and just to understand that you know the legislation cannot adjudicate what needs to happen in the moment and that people are going to walk into all different types of situations on farms. What we're trying to do here is make it such that folks like an atom situation who are in the public view, who are, you know, pasturing animals and particular ways are not disproportionately impacted by a law that's really supposed to be an animal welfare and may not actually be reaching its goal. We just want we do want to make sure that animal welfare is achieved and we empower folks who are responding to those situations to be able to send to those animals and work with folks who are in those situations. I just want to make sure that that progressive grazing techniques and that animal welfare, as we understand it is is also understood and is protected. Folks who talked about sort of the general trend towards confinement versus pasture management and some of the concerns around, you know, public literacy and also spoken to this being an educational opportunity for the public and that there's really an opportunity here to speak to some of that lack of literacy and I think there's a question how we can do that collaboratively together as well. And maybe one of the last things that he wasn't spoken to in which in talking to some folks who work in agroforestry. I spoken to the potential implications of this for for trees that the way the law is currently read where it requires access to shade or shelter so what can happen in an area for example and I have a I have a particular field where if I'm moving from four paddocks without shade, if I were to to lane back to the same tree over and over again for a week that trees root system would potentially take on enough damage to cause long term damage to actually kill that tree in the long term or cause damage to trees and pastures. So there is also concern as folks have suggested that that folks don't something we don't want shade in our pastures or adequate tree support is just that we were not there and it takes time to get there. I know I'm talking to folks in agroforestry community we really love to find more funding as well to support pasture based agroforestry projects and appropriate use of tree crops in pastures as well. And I think, I think that looks largely all I wanted to focus on and thank everyone for for coming to testify and thank the community for for your time today. I'll leave it there for now and happy to respond to questions. Okay, thank you Graham really appreciate it I, I guess I want to start off by saying that you know I've heard it. I've heard this and maybe this isn't accurate but I heard that I've heard that rural Vermont and and no for Vermont were not given this was sort of a surprise and that you all weren't, you didn't have an opportunity to testify. It would be really clear that this bill, which was h 254 was introduced last year, two years ago. And I just looked it up on our on the website and it was introduced on February 15 2019. It was, and I'm really wishing John Bartholomew was here but Terry's here and Terry reported it on the floor. So, maybe you can chime in here but I think it was read a second time, which means it hit the floor on February 26 the last year. So before the pandemic hit. And then it went through the process it went to the Senate on March 10 of last year, and it was it, we went through the process, all you know like during the June session, and was finally approved by the governor on June 23. So it's not like this was a big surprise, or we came out of, you know, nowhere at the 11th hour with this bill. And so I'm, I'm a little perplexed at that. And I want to just touch on a few things that have been said. I mean, doesn't really have anything to do with humans, you know, the application of humans but it means having or showing compassion or benevolence and the example that's used in the dictionary that I'm looking at says regulations ensuring the humane treatment of animals. So, I think that the intent and this is where I really wish john was here. The intent was to make it clear that to actually separate constructed shelter and natural shelter to make it clear that natural shelter was okay. As well. You know there were certain requirements of constructed shelter but that natural shelter be, you know, just a place where animals can go to to get out of this, get out of the sun or out of the rain. And I'm just going to tell you that we, my husband's project I have sheep. My husband has Scottish Highland cattle that are standing up on a field that I can almost see from here, and they have no constructed shelter they have natural shelter. So I understand where you're coming from and if we can improve this. We might be able to you know we could try. But this was not a big surprise. All right, so I see Rodney Graham's hand is up and then Terry and so Rodney you go ahead. I just want to add on to this is. I really believe our biggest intent was trying to protect farmers from the groups that showed up at the farmer with the state police. I mean we're trying to protect. And being that it's required to have shelter doesn't doesn't mean you have to have them in there all the time they just have to have the opportunity to to go somewhere. For example, let's say you had a day where you were you had your animals pastured in an open field. You had 100 degrees and humanities 95%. And the animals are all standing up there pan. You just going to leave in there, or you go to let them go somewhere is where might be more or more cooler. And again, like Carolyn said, we work did a lot of work on this bill. And for a long time over a couple years, with a lot of different stakeholders and so on. And there's no way it could have flew under somebody's radar, you know, it did move fast at the end. And the COVID it sat there in the counter for a couple months and, and but at that point we thought everybody was all stakeholders were happy with it. But again, I mean, 10 out of all this was trying to protect the farmers from these animal rights groups was not to try and make hardship on the farmers. Thanks Rodney. I'll also let you know that I've asked Linda to review the people who testified on this bill over the last two years, so that we can find out who is actually there. Terry you want to go ahead. Sure. I just kind of want to reiterate what Caroline and it's already said that we worked a long time on this bill. We took a lot of testimony and a lot of, you know, back and forth with that. You know, we were, we've heard from I remember the one of the beef farmers from down there ran off. I mean he, he was really concerned about, you know, he wanted to be able to use trees and, you know, for shelter and, you know, but there's going to be animal rights activists, no matter what we do. I mean they are there there. We see them all the time. I mean they're, they're after hunters they're after farmers and, you know, you can't stop them I don't care what kind of a bill but we were trying to at least give the people that enforced the calls. State police, sheriffs or whatever, something to go by to look at that animal and see if they're humanely treated, because you can't expect the sheriff to come by or state police and with no veterinary knowledge or husband tree about animals to decide well is that, you know, beef cattle, maybe a little too thin for a beef cattle. I mean they don't, that's a lot to ask for somebody. So, I guess I'm willing to look at the, the bill again, but I don't, I don't like the implication that we snuck this through. It's because it's not true. I mean we worked a long time on this. Thanks. All right, thank you Terry. Maddie's hand is up and then Rodney and then Nico. Yeah, I just want to respond. I don't really feel like there was an implication made by myself or anybody else that the committee snuck this through. I don't believe that at least. Can people mute please if they're not actually if they haven't been called on. I actually started my testimony by saying that we understand that the committee spent a lot of time on this last year and I think, you know, no Fever month. We take some responsibility for not having, you know, weighed in on this sooner but we also are, we have one person working on policy for our entire organization and just have limited capacity to be in every place at once so to say also that we weren't invited to testify on this bill, which, you know, what have made sense given that we certify over 700 producers in the state who utilize grazing practices, who could have weighed in on this and I think it's also just a an initiative that we have this many farmers that we were that are we're interested in testifying on this bill, given less than a week's notice you know there are a lot of stakeholders in that community who just weren't heard from for whatever reason. And I would love to just focus more on the issues of substance here versus any, you know, implications of blame because I also think that's pretty normal in the course of legislative business to revisit laws that have been passed. Once they have started to be implemented and we learn that improvements are needed so we're not coming to you with you know a moratorium or a in just judgment of the committee's actions we are coming to you in good faith and hopes that we can improve this law, while also understanding like so many have said that it's probably impossible to get it perfect. But that we think we can do better and hope that committee will work with us to do that. Thanks, I have a question for you. Do you work cooperatively with rural Vermont. Here in there. Okay because typically there's somebody from either NOFA or rural Vermont in our committee. And, and, and also typically if people want to testify, they ask and I am generally extremely accommodating to have people testify. So, you know, I'm sorry if you weren't invited. But I think my understanding is that you all work cooperatively I know that there are lobbyists sitting in our, in our committee and you bring up a subject and two minutes later somebody from someplace else in the building shows up, because I think it's really important by that, the lobbyist who's actually sitting there so I, I do want to move forward, but I also think it's really important to kind of correct some of the things that have been said today. And I have heard that we put that we, you know, somehow this happened so quickly and we kind of snuck it in. And people were surprised. I think that if you're paying attention, there shouldn't be any surprise here. So I'm going to go in the list down the list here Rodney Terry's your hand did you just not take it down. Rodney, you're next then Nico then Graham, then John O'Brien. Yeah, I just want to respond to a message of putting chat here. How many representatives of actually past your cattle. My family farms and pasture cattle since 1916. So that helps you out. There's other other members of this committee that have or are past your animal. Yeah, I think that there's maybe only one who and he grew up on a farm. So I think there's only one who hasn't maybe Vicki, I don't know Vicki if you've had animals so maybe Tom and Vicki haven't had animals that they've pastured but the rest of us certainly have. We did when our kids were growing up. There you go. All right, Nico. Thank you. That is very reassuring to hear that there is actual field competence on this committee and that was my impression and what really surprised me and I this is not about blame game or something like that and how much time you spend or what it was, but this is about animal and completely unenforceable law that was passed and I think what we're trying to point out is not that we object to animal standards humane treatment of animals species appropriate emulation of artificial herd movements based on natural and all these kind of things that are wonderful. But what you're encouraging and I think Annie pointed this out and in the chat as well. You're encouraging the 1916. No insult intended here management and we've moved on and in how we manage pastured animals we don't set stock anymore. We have all these three groups and shelter and permanent shelter in every paddock. And if that's, if that's, if we're going back to these old times but that is land abuse, it is carbon wasting. It is detrimental to the water so we what I'm seeing as a farmer here is very conflicting mandates from my conservation easements from my forester and from my land management practices. You know, as we are part of the, you know, our farm is part of the 12 pilot farms and environmental excellence in environmental stewardship in the state of Vermont. And now what this law is telling me is that a good chunk of the management that I'm held responsible for that I feel is really important to do gets thrown out by mandate that is nonsensical does not make sense to the appropriateness of, you know, the appropriate for animals. There. There's just no need to provide shelter at all times. And so what we're trying to do is clarify the language at, you know, at the get go so that it becomes something that even a state trooper and again there's no insult in men here but they're not animal experts and they also happen to be a farmer having grown up on a farm, or know something about that but that's not a job requirement for them. So maybe we need to think about who's actually enforcing this, who are the people who come out to the farm. Are they actually competent to evaluate the situation this is in the crime scene. This is an agricultural setting. So, or, you know, there's no domestic violence or you know this isn't part of a training package for state troopers or, you know, animal welfare in our town. This isn't a stray dog they have to catch and keep overnight. So, I think, I think my frustration here is that that the law is very broadly written there's no clear parameters that I in a farmer can say okay if I don't do this then that happens. And here's who I call. If one of my neighbors makes a nuisance claim. And so it feels like a big amorphous sort of net that got thrown over us to entangle us in all sorts of different barriers. And maybe that's an overly defensive stand but the real issue is also, you know, as I already said, I have so many different other mandates that I follow. I cannot reconcile them. So I think we need to look at all of what farms are subject to in regulation already, and how that can be incorporated in a reasonable practical applicable way that we can actually implement in real life. Thank you. Okay, thanks, Nico. I'm aware of time and I have three hands up so I'm going to go through these hands. And then we're probably going to have to wrap this up and we can revisit in another time. I'm your next and then John O'Brien and then Heather and then we're going to have to call it. Thanks. Yeah, the double. To reiterate what Maddie was saying you know I don't believe that Maddie or myself came to this testimony with any blame or implication that something had been snuck through but I will also reiterate what you said that we all very limited capacity we had. We have me as a part-time policy person who's not full time in the state house we had Caroline and Andrea there last year. Even if they were seeing committee the reality is that we all have different experiences and we read things differently and me as a grazer might look at an animal welfare law in. And finally even find out that hey, you know there's something here that actually might be a problem and then we start with folks. You know, and like Maddie said that's sort of just the process of the legislative process you know folks are going to try to try to improve laws. They're going to have different impacts and we're going to try to respond to them and that's sort of what what our mission here is today and I just want to also respond to the shade versus constructed shelter thing and you know we weren't critiquing that division what we were doing is thinking that the NOP nationally recognized federal, you know, standard does articulate both the possibility of constructed and natural shade, but it also creates doesn't require access to them at all times and I think that's what we're trying to ask you to recognize is just not realistic or in the best interest of animal welfare necessarily that it's like was the situation which I believe representative Graham was describing where it's 100 degrees there's X humidity factor that's exactly when it's on the farmer to say hey, we really need to assure these animals have the protection they need depending on their breed, etc. But, but if it's 65 degrees and cloudy and a neighbor notices they don't have a shelter that's also not a reason for them to be able to be enforced upon for animal welfare abuse and the fact is, if I find some reasonable way of saying it's just not all whether we're seeing an accident or shelter but it's particular times and environmental conditions which mean that they need access to shade and shelter. So that's just the clarity I wanted to bring there and thank you all again. Thank you Graham john why don't you go ahead. Thank you Carolyn. Well, I'm, well, I'm a sophomore on this committee. I thought what is partly missing here today is some context of, as I understand it and Carolyn and Terry and Rodney you could probably improve on on what I'm going to say but I understand that this committee, it deals with animal cruelty, and that there was legislation done in the past on on the sort of pet side of things dogs and cats, and then the issue of we need to update humane standards for livestock so that's where this came from and we all agreed that that body conditioning of body condition of these animals was the most important thing but almost impossible to to legislate. So the next best thing was going to be adequate shelter, and that's where this bill came from. There's also a sister bill we haven't really talked about what didn't what didn't make it through about sort of redefining who an animal control officer is, and, and how they would go and enforce the adequate shelter law. And hopefully that will come back up and I think to work really well together and without that this this whole, this law may seem like it's missing something. I also feel that this is when we were hearing testimony on this bill. It wasn't at all about all of you here today. I mean I think almost any farmer who's who's a member of NOFA or rural Vermont or, or a certified animal welfare certified. These aren't the farmers that ever get in trouble. This was really about, you know, somebody with their backyard horse with a rib showing or, you know, clearly some some animals in a field that it's too hot they can't get, get into shade or it's too cold. And, and they're poorly fed. And that's, that's what we were trying to improve their situation and where the spill came from. So I think if they're unintended consequences like you all feel you're going to get a lot more harassed now then then we can certainly make this legislation better. I mean this this committee we're always trying to make things better so so thank you for coming in. Thanks John and Heather why don't you go ahead. And then we're going to have to end this for for today. I guess I'll just kind of second what Representative O'Brien said as well and I, and I do think that there is space to collectively acknowledge the frustrations that were brought forth today on both sides I think that obviously this is something that farmers are feeling really intensely and I think that what I know being so new to the committee that this was not something that was intentional at all but I think that it would be important for me to know as a new member if this is something that the committee is going to take up again after hearing testimony and that's just where I'd like to refocus it because I think that that is what the issue is at hand here. Okay thanks Heather and we can talk more about that as a committee. And so I think we're going to wrap it up for now on this topic and we're going to turn to Heather Darby. We thank you all for coming. You are welcome to stay on, but I want you to understand that this is going to be an opportunity for Heather Darby to talk about all of the interesting innovative things she's doing in terms of agriculture in her shop so feel free to leave as you want to. And, and I agree, john that was really helpful in because we're not trying to make it harder for farmers, we're trying to actually make it better. So, thank you. All right, Heather you've been so patient you've been here and we appreciate that. Thanks to all the farmers who, who, who joined us today we really appreciate it and, and we will, we will talk about working on this to make it clearer. All right, Heather, go ahead. Hi. And it was fascinating listening to the, the previous conversation as well and it's always helpful to hear everything that's going on and I'm sure everybody just noticed that it's easy to know what's not going on and then watch something through, and then feel totally unprepared, like having no idea that it just happened so I think, you know it just made me realize how easy it is especially on a farm to just have no idea what's happening up here in Montpelier. I mean, and I hear that from dairy farmers all the time and just really trying to, and Linda can attest to this the other day when you were wanting to hear from different farmers and I was like hey, you know you have to make the time to do this. You need to hear from you and you need to have a voice and we can't regret what happened afterwards and just getting involved and I think it's just a, it's good for all of us to understand that it, it's hard to get everybody engaged and I see, you know folks from rural Vermont who I work with all the time and just still not always knowing what's going on. I don't know how to overcome it Carolyn, it just seems like a constant battle. But anyway, well thanks Heather when you know you want when you work on something for two years and you have lots of people in him so we'll pull up the list of folks who who testified and we'll see who was there and, yeah, you know. And it was interesting, you know the hard thing I think again another lesson. You know just listening to all of it is like how do we keep our agricultural community united, instead of not united and I'm not saying that in any given way but I think we hear that a lot whether it's dairy farmers coming in feeling that they're being pushed up against some other farming type or, or, you know strata whatever label strata whatever it might be to, you know some of the folks we heard today feeling the same way about the dairy industry or vegetable farmers feeling like nobody cares about them and, you know how do we there's few farmers left anymore in Vermont. You know whether they're their dairy or vegetable or hemp or hops or whatever everybody's trying to do it's, you know how do we, how do we bring everybody together so that we're, you know the ultimate goal is that we have a healthy vibrant agriculture in our state that produces excellent food and an excellent environment around us and I feel like that's the ultimate goal for all of us. And it's hard to still hear, you know, that and it's on all everywhere, you know. Yeah, and Heather you know one thing I just want to interject here is that I think one of the, one of the things that we're coming up against is the influx of many people this has been going on for years and years. Influx of people who don't understand that it's okay for horses to be out in the field. I know as long as you know like that whole tension. I get those calls to all the time. Yeah, yeah, so anyway, okay, why don't you tell us something else. Yeah, something else. Yeah, yeah, there we go. Yeah, well I was thinking a lot about like what of all the things that we do should I share today so let's not, let's not start with animals. Let's instead focus on a couple other things and then move back to some of the work we're doing in in livestock. So I think everybody knows that, you know, we've been working in hemp now and now since like 2015. And, you know, there's been a lot happening in Vermont as well as all over the country, and really trying to figure out like where do we fit where does Vermont fit in in the world of hemp. And I say the world of hemp I truly mean the world of hemp because, you know, the exciting thing about hemp being legalized is just all the opportunities that it can bring to, you know, new businesses and industries and agricultural production. But when I say the world, it's, it's for everybody. Right. I mean hemp's actually a crop that can be grown pretty much everywhere. So the legalization of growing industrial hemp in the United States means almost every farmer in this country has that same opportunity. So there's nothing, you know, we don't really have any like cutting edge opportunity to grow hemp here just because it grows better here. You know, it's whatever opportunity Vermont or New England decides that we're going to carve out for ourselves. And I think, you know, much like all the other excellent agricultural products we have coming out of Vermont hemp will follow in those lines. And we will need to come up with our niche, the products that have, you know, that Vermont quality with it or ingenuity that we see, you know, such as, you know, darn tough socks or Bernie Mittens or whatever it might be, you know, where will we fit with hemp and I think, you know, we saw the CBD boom come in we were excited about that. I think, you know, all excited that some of us might pay our farms off and just, you know, off an acre, acre of hemp and, you know, we probably could have seen where that was going to head and certainly, you know, there has been quite a bust there. But it's, you know, not something that we should be thinking about giving up on it's just really the start and that's what's exciting. And so through, you know, my program at UVM and now growing number of faculty at UVM starting to work in hemp. You know, I think everybody sees the opportunities that lie in front of us and so we're continuing a lot of our research. We have been holding this industrial hemp conference now this will be its third year. And, you know, I will say it's considered really one of the best in the country. And, and the fact that it's virtual this year, you know, it's hard for all of us but it does give us even a broader audience to draw from. And we have speakers from all across the country and Canada speaking at the conference, people email us because they want to speak at the conference which is kind of rare usually you're begging people to come. It is, you know, it's an excellent conference and part of that is because we really focus on high quality research based information that's really growing. Now that hemp has been grown more in Vermont so here's just the flyer I did send the link to Linda before so if people are interested in attending. You can also attend and then watch everything you know week after the conference because it is virtual. We've been doing a lot of education and outreach and training and again I think we have really gained a lot of. I don't know I guess respect for being, you know, really ahead of the curve and hemp education, and again high quality, bringing in the best researchers that we can this is a program that we're in the middle of right now to train service providers. So not farmers to train, you know, police bankers, fire, fire fighters I mean all kinds of people that need to know about hemp. This is a call from the New York State Drug Enforcement this year, because you know their folks were flying their helicopter over top some hemp and then they rated this hemp field and harvested it all and burned it and you know this was a farmer that was registered as an hemp farmer and this is still happening and what the guy said to me was well it's smell like marijuana, and you know the thing is that it doesn't matter if it's industrial or it actually is recreational marijuana it all smells the same. THC doesn't actually make hemp smell. It's everything else in hemp, you know all the terpenes, the same terpenes that are found in hops are found in hemp they're closely related so when you think about that citrusy or piney scent of beer when people are using hops and beer. You know it's the same thing that's in hemp. So though that you know characteristic smell doesn't come from the fact that it has high THC so there's still a lot for people to learn and understand if we're going to grow this industry. And you know same with on the farming part the lending part all those things. So this program is still going on. And I think I mentioned before we had 170 some odd people register, you know from as far away as Australia, you know Swaziland like all over the place people coming for for good education. So we have a lot to be proud of in Vermont we are definitely leading the way in both research and just education. So we're, you know, my research in general and education is focused on on fiber grain and flower. So flower or not like flower you bake with but this kind of flower the flower bud the inflorescence of the hemp, and you can kind of see all those white. They look like little hairs which they are in a way, excuse me those are all the trichomes on the plant they kind of glisten in there that that's what's full of oil, you know, and so that's where the terpenes are that give it the scent. And that's where this cannabinoids are so the CBD and the CBG and lots of others as well, and, and the THC so it's all really concentrated in this flower in the inflorescence. And that's why there's so much focus on this for CBD, because the concentration and the levels of those cannabinoids are are highest in the female flower. And then, if the female gets pollinated by male pollen just like everything else in biology, you can produce an offspring. So this is what hemp for grain looks like. And so this is a pollinated female plant right here and if you can look kind of closely you can see right here. You can't probably see my pointer but you can see thing to form. And that kind of brown area in there are all the little seeds and the husks are starting to fall off so that's, you know, grain and. Whoa, that's my. And so here's the seed hemp seed, and then here's some we're doing on pressing oil. So we are really. I'm sorry this was pre recorded and now it keeps playing my recording. So here's something that we're really starting to focus on here in Vermont, which is like double cropping and again this, you know this is actually in Europe, where they're combing right here with this like comb, they're combing off the flowers and the leaves to basically bring this to an extraction plant. And then below here is a sickle bar that's cutting down the rest of the fiber and laying that out to be picked up and used for fiber products whether it's maybe hemp Cree or betting for animals. So there's a lot of interest in the double crop opportunities. And that's where we're starting to really focus a lot of our attention. So, lots of exciting things there. We produce good yields of grain and Vermont and here's four years of our grain yields in 2020. We were, we had pretty, we had decent yields they were over 1000 pounds. We just heard a presentation today from a grower this spring growing grain hemp in Manitoba for 20 years and he said his average grain yields are about 1000 pounds. So we're right in line with that we had a bad year and 17. But overall, you know we can get really good grain yields and I think there's some good opportunities here for for local farmers and local businesses to grow the grain and extrude out the oil and use the the meal cake that's left for different purposes as well so lots going on in the world of hemp. So the, I'm sorry about that let me see if I can get my voice to stop. You can see it's got a little recording in there there just delete it. So, you know when we're talking about environmental aspects of hemp. It's not an impact free crop you know there's a lot of interest around this. And you hear this a lot, especially you get hemp efforts to come in the room here all you hear all kinds of things that it's going to do for the environment. Almost every crop that's grown can have minimal impacts on the environment, but every almost every crop that's grown can also have really negative impacts on the environment it's all about how it's managed. And we heard a little bit about that already from the folks that were on before, you know there's good grazing management and there's really bad grazing management. There is really good corn production and there's some that definitely is leading to erosion and runoff. And so it's really about how we develop the way we grow these crops and what we said the standards right from the get go. And so hemp can have really positive impacts on the environment, but it can be really negative as well. So, you know you hear things like hemp doesn't take any fertility. That's not true it uses a lot of nitrogen phosphorus and potassium mostly potassium and nitrogen, just as much as corn if not more. And so, but it can have a low impact, but that's also generally surrounded by hemp that's grown for fiber, not hemp that's grown, you know in these really wide rows like CBD hemp is with plastic and so on and so forth. So it can have a real positive impact on the environment but you can see right here this is a study in 2004 in Europe, it says that that requires good agricultural practice production, which you know we know what that is in Vermont right. So you can see that hemp, you know, has very low levels of many of these, but it's really under a scenario that allows for best management practices. So it can be really good for the environment, as long as this managed properly. So that's one of the things we're really looking at we know Vermont is not going to be like the only crop that farmers can grow on their farm or should be growing on their farm. So we need to get part of a rotation. And I'm sure you've heard this, you know, good farming means that we have good rotations if we're growing annual crops. And so really figuring out where does hemp fit in these rotations what does it grow best following or before, and you know trying to understand is hemp benefiting the rotation. What are their challenges and where does it make the most sense to include it on our farms in Vermont and that's really, you know, the question that we're focused on now. And it does need to be rotated it, you know it can do things like sequester CO2 and put organic matter back into the soil. Again, you're not growing hemp every year that's not good agricultural practice, and it doesn't lead to good outcomes so it's really figuring out where hemp fits. So that's kind of our newest work. I wanted to mention we definitely are still working in hops there's. I feel like we had a lot of interest in hops probably six years ago and now we're, we haven't seen a lot of new farmers coming in to growing hops and in New England, but the ones that are there are growing and trying to figure out how to show that their growth and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but as part of our work in hops and hams and education, we've delved into the virtual reality world, and using VR tools so here's Keith Silva who some of you probably know from across the fence. He's trying out our virtual reality educational that we developed for hops. It's a hop hop VR and you basically go in and you scout the hops using this virtual reality tool so it's a way to learn how to scout and to identify insects and diseases in VR in the wintertime. Hopps aren't growing so that you're prepared and ready to go to the field in the spring. So we are creating another VR tool like this for hemp, and we have two VR tools, one that's in beta right now called we farm, and we farm is a VR tool that we created for ag students that are in high school to learn how to implement best management practices on a virtual reality farm to improve the soil health and protect the water quality. So it puts them into a farm scenario where they can pick practices identify issues and really understand what you know what cover cropping is going to do for the soil health and the water around them so that's that's this is exciting and delving into something obviously I don't have a lot of experience in but trying to create these tools. For the next generation. All right so here's another one of my recorded things. I wanted to talk about cereal rye a little bit. So we hear a lot about winter rye. And one of the things I've been really interested in is, can we add value to the cover crop. So, as I'm sure you're well aware there are so many farms, you know that have are leaving dairy, we speak for various reasons have, or other, you know farming types that are looking for opportunities, you know looking for options. We're interested in expanding grain production cereal grain production in particular in Vermont and all around us, because we do have so many local bakers and distillers and, you know, other food products from granola to dog treats I mean, pretty much everything. All of that grain is sourced from outside of Vermont very little grain is used. That's local in bakeries or distilleries in Vermont and we have an opportunity there we have an interest from those end users and so we're trying to expand. There's a lot of challenges, but winter rye felt like the easiest one to work with because many farms grow winter rye there's 30,000 acres of winter rye grown for cover crop. What if even 5000 acres of that rye went to mature produce seed and fed back into distillers bakeries or malters or cover crop seed, and so really thinking about how to take some of those acres and add more value to the farmer. We've been looking at rye in particular. It does well in Vermont on poor soils wet soils and farmers are used to it now. So it's kind of taking it to that next level. And I'll just highlight one of the projects we're working on this is that border view farm. New members probably haven't seen it or heard of it but it's our research facility up in Alberg. So we're we're trialing winter rye varieties, we're looking at fertility management and harvest timing and then taking those varieties those harvest states and turning those over to bakers and distillers to try to figure out. Is there a particular winter rye variety that if our farmers growing would make a good loaf of bread, or a good bottle of will. So we've been doing a lot of work on that in our lab trying to figure that out. Harvesting, like I said different varieties at different times. And then sending those off, like I said to bakers to the end users and here's Randy George, many of you probably know him from red hand bakery. There's some of the way he's making a rye bread. He's looking at different varieties. Different harvest times to figure out what quality of rye makes good bread. And, you know, it's probably shocking that we don't have the answer to that actually anywhere in the country. But we will we're working on it and it's really very exciting and the farmers obviously are really excited about it. I'm just generating this kind of information just showing you guys a few pictures so here's the bread that they baked with the different varieties. You know the score sheet actually do use a scientific process to go through this and the results. And what we figured out and we bring this back to the farmers and let them know like don't grow. If you grow hazelette makes a better loaf of bread, but you know the falling number which is a quality parameter declines rapidly across the harvest season where dango the bread doesn't taste that is great, but it's more stable in the field. So really trying to figure out varieties and then uses. So, we have a lot of projects like these focused on grain. Like different corn types. It's very exciting, trying again to create different opportunities with the business we have here in Vermont that are really interested in using local product, but can't access it. So, I will go back up. I want to talk about our sensory program I mentioned that to everyone I'm going to go right to here. We started I hired a sensory scientists last September. And my goal for hiring a sensory specialist, who is a person who many of you might like picture as that person that can like, you know, swirl the gold wine and, you know, sniff chocolate, something or other and you think to yourself, yeah, it tastes like a bottle of wine. And, you know, David DeRochiers is a nationally known, a globally known sensory specialist that came into my life really oddly, and, and really at a perfect time where he was, he just lost his job actually at Tufts University, or loss for sure. He closed down the center that he was a part of, and I was working with him on a dairy project and I said, Well, do you want to come to Vermont with me, and he said yes. So now we have a person in Vermont that has this, you know, just the skills and the know how to help us develop really high quality products that are going to be, you know, winners with consumers all over the country really. And it's really, it's really exciting and I'm just going to show you one example of some of the work we're doing with Roy and with milk and another project with cheese. We have a grass fed milk project where Roy's role in this project is to understand the sensory components of grass only milk so this is milk that is only produced from cows that are fed grass pasture legumes stored stored legume or grass but they're not fed any grain. And this was a very quick growing market a year ago until the pandemic hit and now it's it's slowed a little bit, but it's still presented an opportunity for a number of farms in Vermont and beyond. So what we're really doing is figuring out, you know, what factors drive overall liking and consumption. So what is it about milk that consumers like and what's driving consumption and what is high quality milk flavor, and then kind of going backwards from there figuring out what's happening and manufacturing and then what's happening on the farm. And this work, you know, really hasn't been done for grass milk which is a very unique product, very different. We're also combining this with nutrition work that we've been doing at UVM, and we have found that grass fed milk is just like real grass fed milk is superior in nutrition. To the point where we're, you know, at a point where we're going to conduct a clinical study, hopefully we'll get the funding for this, because it's that much, it's that much more nutritious. And this really, you know, who knows it's got a taste good because I think we all know nutrition doesn't always drive our purchasing preferences I just ate a bag of chips you know so they're not very nutritional but I like the taste of them. So there's a lot to this, but really trying to figure out. Can we influence or change management on a farm to change the overall aroma and flavor of the milk. And then in manufacturing are there things that we can adjust as well. And then, you know, on the other end it's like what are these consumers want and one thing I've learned from Roy is consumers say they want one thing, but actually really want something else and so doing the work to study that is really important and he always makes this point, especially with like beer, people will say oh yeah I like a really hoppy beer, but then when you give them a really hoppy beer. It's the one that they choose they like the best. And so he says the same thing with orange juice. He helped develop tropicana orange juice, and he said that consumers said they wanted fresh squeezed orange juice. So when they lined up fresh squeezed orange juice with different levels of orange juice that had been like slightly processed, they didn't pick the fresh squeezed orange juice. And I had tropicana gone with that, because that's what the consumer said they wouldn't be the number one selling orange juice. And so really it's kind of understanding like what our consumer preferences by getting them to taste the one and pick the one they like, and then a trained panel that we have now at UVM because of Roy can say, Okay, this is the ones consumers liked. And the thing about this milk is it has a slightly clover taste to it, and they always like that one. So they liked it, there's not very much after taste, they're going to go back and they're going to keep buying that milk so what gives it that clover taste. So then you start tracking back, you know, is it something in the manufacturing is it something on the farm. And that's what we're doing with grass milk and it's really cool. So here's some data I mean just to show you how different milk can actually taste. This is from across the country, and from different times of the year. So this is grass fed milk purchased off store shelves from the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest, and then also during the spring summer and winter months, and you can just see that, you know winter milk is different than summer milk in terms of its after taste and its overall richness scale. And you know the the spring milk and the winter milk kind of commingle a little bit, and you know certainly might be because they're getting stored feed, right, they're not out on pasture. So it's really trying to figure out like what is it that's creating these differences, and what is the milk that people generally would want to buy, and how do we make that type of dairy product. And so here's East Coast versus West Coast versus Midwest. And of course we have the most data points from the East Coast, but you can see they're also like more scattered, more variation, and you know where the mid Midwest points and even the West points are a little more consistent. So, you know, our farms on the East are really different because of their scale and their housing types and even what kind of forages they have to eat. So we would expect it to be different. But how and is it better, is it richer, you know what what kind of claims can we make for our area. Here we started doing this analysis with the dairy farmers so that they can actually see how their milk tastes and how it's different. And so this somebody didn't just fart here if that's what you're thinking. This is like part of the training, you know you hold your nose, and you bite a gumdrop, and then you undo your nose and then you can like, you know, taste the peppermint. So it's kind of like when Roy always says this, you know, parents always tell their kids hold your nose when you take your medicine. And he said that's the worst thing to do, because the minute they undo their nose and makes the intensity of the taste of the medicine, it's like 100 fold. So don't do that. But all of us at the Enic Dairy Conference last year, trying all these milk samples from different milks from, you know, different, different processors and here I mean you get this, you can see this, you know just different people's reactions to some of the melt so really trying to engage the farmers all the way through the value and so people understand, you know, why management or processing or whatever it is really is going to make a difference. So with Roy, we are doing with this with a variety of other products to so right now we're working on flint corn and different corn and working with some of the tortilla makers in Vermont so All Souls Tortilla and Vermont Tortilla Company. Also working with our Indigenous families as well so we've been working with the Chief Stevens and the Nilhagen-Abenaki tribe as well as the Oneida tribe out in the Midwest so really looking at this way beyond just our farms. We're working on Artisan Cheese now we're just starting that project with the new dairy innovation center. And we're working with Distilled Spirits as I mentioned I mean Roy's been doing a lot of work with Caledonia Spirits to help them put out you know a really not that their product isn't already high quality but they have some new aged products and Roy's helping guiding them with that and then of course we're working on hops and malt as well so you know at some point especially when we get to be in person we'll make sure Roy gets in to talk with you folks and share some of this fun work we're doing just a huge asset to Vermont for sure so I don't know how much more we have time for and I'm sure you have questions so I don't even know what time it is Heather Oh it's quarter to three or so so we have plenty of time I wanted to let you know that I've told you about these hops that grow down on my stone wall We're gonna come get those Yeah you're welcome to try they grow up out of the stone wall I wanted to let you know I made beer last year and it was fantastic It was so great Yeah we've enjoyed it a lot So the interesting, oh go ahead and Caroline No no no you go ahead Well I was gonna say you know we've been collecting these wild hops from around New England now for quite a few years and growing them up and trying to evaluate them and we recently got contacted by Haas Haas which is probably the largest hop broker in the world and somehow they saw that we were collecting this germplasm and they yeah they were like where are you getting this and you know can you share it and so on and so forth and probably not gonna share it but just interesting Yeah that people are really interested in the old old hops they're looking for something new because of the craft brew industry and this sort of demand for something different and I think they've run out of like genetics I think that are interesting to them so they're searching So anyway Yeah interesting Hey are you still doing anything with milkweed? Yeah so we are we've been working so we still have our milkweed trials and plots going up at border view and continuing to yeah work away on production and harvesting The company in Quebec as I think I shared went completely belly up Oh no I didn't know that Yeah and yeah it's been a battle especially for them in Quebec it's been really difficult We have some new opportunities locally I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to really say about it but there's quite a bit of work going on locally to develop the market a bit more so we are still plugging away Mostly well yeah we'll see something happen Yeah so on grass fed Daria had mentioned I'm doing a lot of work in this area because you know there was a huge push and really high pay prices back in 2016-17 and 18 and you know we just had farmers in the organic realm especially just wanting to get rid of grain and start feeding grass only to garner these higher pay prices A lot has changed since then so the pay prices have really leveled out you know from what I understand the demand for grass fed is still really high but just you know the markets in general with just everything going on they've kind of they have been taking on new farms for sure What they're doing though is allowing farms that are already you know in Organic Valley or Maple Hill Creamery to move into grass milk if they have an opening but yeah it's so it's not growing as fast but nonetheless I know this is like a wide interest in our state and so I wanted to share some of the cost of production data and information so people can see a little bit what it costs to produce grass milk and it comes at a pretty significant cost so we've looked at the cost of production on 28 farms in 2019 so it's actually 2018 data and then we've continued to do this so we do have 2019 data and working on 2020 data but it hasn't all been summarized yet and so here's a little bit about the demographics so it's about a 50-50 split between Organic Valley and Maple Hill Creamery, Maple Hills in New York and their grass only everything in Organic Valley people are familiar with them and then locally we also have some farms like Larson's, Butterworks you know they're all grass as well so they were in this study the average herd size is 61 cows but the farms range from 28 all the way up to 200 cows that were not being fed any grain but this is the part I think is really important here is that it takes about six acres per cow and you know I guess if I put this into perspective for you most all of our farms in Vermont are at less than two acres per cow and so it takes a lot more land right to be grass only so for a lot of farms it's not even a possibility you know they just don't have the land base to be able to make that conversion and so even farms that would like to do this they don't have the land or the land around them or the money to buy more land or secure it because it has to be secure it's not like oh I have it this one year and I would say on ash we did a national survey and the national average was about five acres per cow so you know around here it seems about six so it's like triple what we normally see so triple the land base now so you're kind of maybe you're wondering well why well you know if you're feeding grain you have to replace that so you know you're not bringing anything onto the farm necessarily but you got to still feed those cows certain amount of feed every day and so you're replacing grain with forage and it comes at more you need more acres here's the average milk production and so if you know about like milk production for many farms you know some of our high producing conventional farms are at you know 24,000 I would say you know organic in general it's like 14 to 18,000 and so you can see with grass milk you know we're anywhere from 4,000 up to 14,000 pounds per cow per year and in the average about 9,000 so they're producing less milk need more acres and yeah so you know there are some some real factors there it's not that easy just to switch over so here's a different farm expenses here's the maximum cost cash expense cost on the grass milk farms that we looked at so there's basically $46 a hundred weight and the average was $24 a hundred weight and then the minimum was 12 and this was a this was actually a conventional dairy trying to remember what the there was some different circumstances here but nonetheless you can see that you know farms have to at least on average you know be getting $24 a hundred weight to break even and again these are just cash costs so there's things that are not included in here what I found most interesting from this costs of production work that we did was that the biggest cash expense was purchased feed so if you looked at conventional dairies or organic conventional dairies I guess I don't know what else so we have grass fed organic then we have organic that feed grain and pasture and whatever and then you have conventional dairies that might feed grain might also just be pasture generally their biggest cash expense is purchased feed so it's like regardless of the type of farm we're looking at the biggest cash expenses purchase feed whether it's grain or forage so you know I thought this is really interesting because I think that a lot of people have this perception if I go grass I don't have to buy grain anymore but look at what people are having to buy they're still having to buy feed and at least you know to be honest at least grain has a consistent quality with forage that you're trying to buy you know you're at the whim of the season right if it was a good season or a bad season anyway the the other thing I wanted to note here which I also found a bit frightening was the small amount of money that was spent on seed and fertilizer and and the reason I say that is because on a dairy farm generally that feeds grain you know they're importing nutrients onto their farm so we hear a lot about this you know from an environmental perspective but in this case if they're really feeding mostly homegrown feed and not bringing in concentrates per se they may actually be drawing down pretty drastically the fertility of their fields which might be causing them to actually have to purchase feed so you know I've noticed this a lot on on some of these dairy farms is that they're not fertilizing and as a result their yields are much lower and hence they're buying feed you know whether it's grain or hay or whatever and so just thinking about how do we help people start to fertilize their fields so they're getting more homegrown feed off of those acres and would that reduce the number of acres from six down to four right so I mean there's a lot going on here but I just you know the point being that this isn't a perfect system either and it's certainly creating an opportunity for a number of farms which is that have really excelled and you know we have some grass only farms that have really just figured it out and are producing 60 pounds a cow right where the average per cow for many of these farms is about 14 pounds and so if we have farms that can produce 60 pounds of milk per animal just off from homegrown feed like that's a lesson for everybody not just or farms not just grass only farms but all farms that's where we want to be and so how do we get there because that's a that's huge from viability environmental perspective you know everything how do we get more homegrown forage into our animals and purchase less feed anyway so I just thought I would share share that with you I don't know if anybody has some questions about that but now that's fascinating Heather that you've gotten all that data really amazing committee do you have any questions for Heather on this or anything that she's already spoken about all right Rodney Rodney go ahead I don't really have any questions I just wanted to say it's pretty pretty typical I mean I did grass that for several years before milk company decided they didn't want to milk anymore I didn't want to round the hell again and you know I think I would say it was different that my fertility didn't go down in my fields you had to manage it a little bit different but we were able to keep the fertility up and yeah it took a lot more feed prior to going to grass fed we we were in a position where we sold a lot of feed and so when we when we switched we we had plenty of feed we just weren't able to sell some so this one draw it out the rest of it's pretty well pretty close to what I was experienced yeah yeah it's and again the range of farms is pretty significant you know we have some farms that are producing seven pounds of milk and you're just wondering like how are they staying in business even if they're getting $45 a hundred weight you know so yeah yeah so I think it's you know and I saw this in some of the reports coming out and I do think there's some opportunities here for us especially as we start to connect some of the consumer preference work and really trying to think about the terroir of dairy products in Vermont and what does that mean to consumers and you know really trying to handle on that especially as we're continuing to improve the overall health of our environment around us and people talking about that today and that's happening you know from a lot of different angles not just from pasture but on our corn ground and in our rotation so you know how do we how do we you know help gain some you know I don't know return on that investment from the marketplace and you know that's a question you all heard about from the FWA too one of the things I'm worried about though is the forages and what you know some of the observations I've been making and research as well you know our whole dairy system our livestock system not just dairy many of the folks talking before I mean Vermont is is a grass based ag industry that's most of all the ag acres are in grass very little is in anything else you know even the number of corn acres really is is dwarfed by the number of hay acres you know so how is all of the forage you know what's going to happen to that with climate change and it's already happening and we're feeling it on dairy farms for sure and I'm sure livestock operations as well where we're seeing like these longer periods stretches of dry in the summer I mean last year was was extreme but really the past three years we have seen these like longer durations of dry weather we always have a summer slump but it's getting worse it's getting longer you know Jesse's extreme wet extreme dry diseases less intense winners I mean we're seeing a lot more issues with our perennial forages and you know that has huge impacts on the livestock industry in Vermont as well as the environment you know and so I think this is something we're playing paying close attention to doing a lot of work in I mean here's an example of you know different legumes were working on different varieties looking at persistence over time and you know these were planted as pure stands which isn't normally what we do in Vermont but mostly just trying to understand what legumes are surviving the best these were planted in 2017 so you can see by 2020 really it's the alfalfa shockingly that held on the best over that three four year period where birdsfoot tree foil even the red clover and the white clover in particular just you know have a word dying out from from drought from winter kill from pest pressure and again just these extreme kind of climate variations so how do we combat this this is a huge issue for us here's a picture from this year this down here is alfalfa or no I'm sorry that yeah this is alfalfa but this is impacted by potato leaf hoppers and I know people were calling me all July and August saying that their alfalfa was drought stressed well alfalfa doesn't generally get to drought stressed what was wrong with it is that we had a huge leaf hopper outbreak and we are seeing these more often now and they decimate the alfalfa and the red clover and the white clover and the birdsfoot tree foil and you know this it's huge I mean people didn't get any second cut this year because you know if you drove by some of these fields it looked like a school bus out there it was pretty intense and that's how bad it was actually wiped out a lot more than alpha but this probably was the most visual but up here you can see alfalfa as well and this is a potato leaf hopper resistant variety it's not a GMO it's just hairy it's a hairy alfalfa and the leaf hoppers don't like it but you know the difference between having something to harvest and not having anything to harvest so these are really important you know things we're looking at and just critical critical I mean to the success of livestock operations in our state and everywhere and you know and as a matter of fact I was just awarded a grant last or yeah in September to do a national forage needs assessment because you know it's an area that is so important across the globe and across our country but very little research very little extension very little support in general for forages which just should be shocking to everybody considering how important they are for lots of different ecosystem functions and even you know at UVM Sid Bosworth just retired who I'm sure many of you knew he was our forage specialist then I'm pretty sure they won't be replacing him and even University of Wisconsin Dan under Sander retired I want to say three years ago and they have not replaced their forage specialist in the state of Wisconsin so we're really yeah I mean this is it's not good and so we're just highlighting this here's grass species a wet year versus a dry year and you know you can just see the reduction in productivity and really it's trying to understand which of these species and varieties do the best whether it's wet or dry or normal whatever that is and that's what we're trying to get a handle on because that's what we need to be really growing out in our fields and you know here's this is from this year and during drought conditions and so here's Timothy blue is first cut what we got from first cut and and orange is second cut and so you can see whether it was orchard grass or meadow fescue or Timothy you know there was hardly any second cut except for perennial ryegrass which is not something we grow here very often but you can see whether it was dryer or you know we had some moisture it produced a good amount of yield and so really looking at that here's you know almost five tons of yield off of two cuttings is phenomenal usually that's what we get across the whole season so you know we just we have a lot of work to do here because it's you know it's basically the base of Vermont and it's important work that we have to do so anyway just a little bit on I feel like I feel like I'm taking your college course I know I think it's really fascinating and so cool that you're you're digging into all of these areas that potentially help our farmers going forward especially since we got climate change and drought and you know drought really hit I think in any number of places in the state including mine and you know hay crops are down thank goodness my neighbor did just deliver 100 bales to us typically we'd get through the year with what we make but not this year yeah I know it's I mean in a lot of people were in that situation and of course you know it's not just varieties but you know with this whole conversation around soil health building organic matter you know all those all those things really come into play shoot where's my email coming up you know as we you know are dealing with these weather crises yeah yeah I do I don't know if we have a few more minutes to talk about cover cropping we do we do have a few more minutes and that would be really interesting okay Rodney does have his hand up so maybe that'll run it could speak I just wanted to know last time we were here you were talking about organic matter what what the average was and I don't remember what you said yeah so the average in the state of Vermont is between 5.3 and 5.6% those are two like big databases that are available one one database says 5.3 and the other one says 5.3 and 5.6 so roughly you know about 5% or 5.5% is the average and I think you know there there are fields all around that obviously but you know there's fields a lot higher and then there's fields obviously lower too I don't you know unless I'm on sand in Vermont I don't generally see anything much below 3% but yeah I mean a 5% average is really good and I think I mentioned the national average is about 3% so yeah I had a soil health test soil sample taken there it started on that stewardship program I don't know where what happened to it but so on my crop land I had organic matter 6.8 and the pasture land was 5.8 yeah and I was grass fed so you can keep your land in shape yeah yeah and I you know one of the things so this is the soil health I was talking about thinking from you know this recent work that we did with 30 conventional dairies in Vermont well 29 and one organic farmer that was growing corn as well and part of the pride we're doing a cover cropping project but part of the project was to go out and collect this baseline soil health of the fields and then implement these cover cropping practices and then look to see if we improve the soil health and you know I as I had mentioned before I was like shocked I guess when I got the results back and you know most of the fields were considered optimum or excellent and there was actually only this one field here you know the one dot that was below 60 you know anything above 80 is kind of the best the very healthiest soil and then that 60 to 80 is considered optimum and then when you get below that it's kind of cautionary but you can see we didn't have any like any of those conventional corn fields in red or even in in orange and really not even in yellow so you know I was I guess surprised I you know I took many of the samples myself now all of them and I think I took this sample because I remember thinking yikes I'm glad they're in the project but then even that isn't that bad but you know we have some farmers that are getting in their corn fields these soil health scores that are like approaching 100 you know and so part part of what I wanted to say was I feel like this is really showing the investment of the farms and the state and the legislature and the agency of ag and NRCS and saying okay let's get these cover cropping and no till and and manure management out on these fields and and the farmers have done it and this shows it you know and you know I just it's something to be proud of and you know especially in a time where we're still struggling with water quality probably will continue to to to and you know I felt like here here's the success story for the work that people have been doing and you know it's only 30 fields it's 50 represents 15 actually represents 3000 acres so it's not a small amount of acreage that we're looking at but it's not you know huge either and that's why I was saying like I feel like we need to stop you know and take take this to do a baseline like where are we actually at right now like what what is what's going on here you know what else can this person do and I think you know just a frustration on the farmer side and and other people like oh we're doing all these things what are we even accomplishing and you know the nice thing about this is we also have all the yield data with it and management data so we can actually show like is you know is it's this healthy soil producing higher yields on this farm to you know all these things were assuming good to health results in you know is it but anyway you know we're talking about sequestering carbon and things like that and I feel like we can keep forging ahead I mean obviously it's doing doing some good the direction we're heading but it sure would be nice to sort of stop and not stop but just at least measure where we're at so that we know when we've hit the next milestone you know gives us something to celebrate for one thing but you know there's been a lot of investment put into all of this and people keep thinking there's no return but it's clearly shows that there is so anyway that's why I keep saying we really need to do this baseline assessment and just like not just on dairy not just on corn just kind of figure out where we're at so that we can really make those next strides forward I mean this is super exciting I mean to me this was like wow okay maybe we have done something here they're all this time but so that was one thing I wanted to share that's fantastic Heather yeah it's really it's exciting so yeah and then the other thing I mean there's so much we are just here's the you know the injector that I talked about the other day you know the agency of ag and agency of natural resources both have invested in this grassland injector up in Lake Carmine and even you know given the pandemic we were able to get it rolling this year and you know we covered almost 600 acres you know we're planning to double that hopefully next year and you know just keep working on trying to figure out the cost benefits to using it how have you been coming you were going to talk about cover cropping and I that sort of triggered in my mind that piece of equipment that you were trying to develop that was sort of a roller oh yeah yeah how's that going good actually so funny we have so many farmers that have really adopted that practice you know the roller crimper so because farmers are so into cover cropping now you know the termination end so planting them getting them in the ground but then the next spring having to manage them can be really cumbersome for people especially you know a couple years ago we had that really really wet weather people weren't able to get their corn in it was crazy and a few farmers went in and roll down their winter rye it created like floating mat almost and they were able to get their corn planted and so it's a really being used on farms to manage and it's cover cropped so we're trying to expand that adoption but there's there's things have to be figured out so yeah we are continuing to pack away at that this is a new project that we're working on called solar corridors and you can see here there's a pretty big like gap between these rows of corn this is like 90 I think there's 90 inches most corns planted 30 inches with the rows are 30 inches apart so we're we've started to expand the distance between the rows of corn to plant cover crops in that area so here's 60 inches between rows of corn and you can see the cover crop that's established in there so we've talked a lot about inner seeding in the past and trying to get cover crops growing in the corn and it's really difficult and so we're trying to figure out better ways to do that and one way that we've been looking at is increasing the distance between the corn rows and it works it works really well so here's another picture of it right here here's the 60 inches between the corn rows and you see the cover crops and here's 30 inches between the corn rows here's another photo here's 60 inches to the left and 30 inches to the right so the farmers were really interested in this it basically means taking out one row of your planter essentially or every other row and we we did put this out on some farms we got great cover crops ridiculously good here's a picture of that or a data slide so 30 inch cover crop biomass compared to 60 inch so a lot more cover crop growing covering the ground which is great but here's a corn yields so here's 30 inch corn this was this year so we had 20 about 24 tons and then in the 60 inch row we had 18 so it's not terrible but that's a pretty hard sell as you can imagine last year in 2019 we only saw a two ton yield decline on the farms that we worked with at scale they saw three ton yield decline so you know is the benefit of the cover crop being better established going to outweigh that yield depression that is yet to be seen and so what I'm working on now is getting a forage crop planted in between the corn rows and seeing if that will provide the additional value that a farmer might need to make this system work and this is some work that was done in Wisconsin where they're planning establishing alfalfa in the final corn year and having some success with it they weren't using wide corn rows but anyway so the farmers are excited to try this out and we just got a grant to do that so that's cool how do they then actually harvest that well so the corn is just chopped off like normal like above no so it would just well six inches you know some corn would be chopped usually at the second note so you kind of see that thick part in the corn it's usually the second second one up so you know it's six to eight inches above the ground so you are getting some of this alfalfa but really the goal here is that next year when this field would be rotating into alfalfa it would already be established gotcha and ready to harvest so what what a farmer gains is an established and a forage that they don't have to wait an entire year kind of out of production and away to establish that feed so a lot of interest here so we'll see what we can do yeah that's really neat cool all right all right we we are almost out of time but but I could listen to you all day so was there something else you wanted I don't see any hands up did you want to cover well just these last two points again this is biological activity in the soil and just showing the value of stacking practices which is what farmers are doing versus using one practice so here down here on this end of the scale so this again it's a measure about soil biological activity there's no manure in this system this is conventional tillage with no manure and no cover crops so that's way at the end of the scale and so this is no till with no manure and no cover crops so you kind of get a little gain here in biological activity by not tilling so then if you have conventional tillage with no manure but you add in a cover crop you get a little gain in biological activity but then you can see as you continue to sort of a add manure to the system and then B start to put cover crops into the system you really get a big boost in biological activity and you can see conventional tillage with manure and a winter right cover crop produces very similar at least with this metric biological activity respiration we're measuring breathing as a no till system so you know I think part of my point was these practices utilized together are going to give us our biggest bang for the buck but I feel like there's other ways you know it doesn't just have to be no till and because I know a lot of farmers aren't ready for that yeah or just doesn't fit so we can achieve healthy soils with using the practices together especially in a rotation and here's perennial forage so you can see you know that's kind of the highest and then this is just a different measurement this is aggregate stability so you know this is poor aggregate stability so that's continuous corn no manure no cover crop you can see what it looks like and then as you add in practices even even and I say even just just adding rotation so just adding hay into the rotation with the corn even without manure even without a cover crop you know you improve the quality of the soil and then when you start adding no tillage and cover crop to a rotation with hey you can see that the quality of the soil the physical properties can be just as good as perennial forage so you know what this you know my point being is that this perspective that corn is evil you know I heard it a few times and then it's leading to all this terrible degradation you know certainly there are still fields out there that need improvement and I would say the same for any of the ag systems in place whether they're you know they're corn their veg their grazing their fields that need some help but then we have these other examples that show hey we can achieve some of the best soil quality with corn and a rotation with these best practices and we don't have to lose in the corn years we can we can maintain or maybe even improve by having those rotations and I've said this before but you know here's some of the data to back it up that clearly you know we are just we're pushing we're making great strides so anyway fantastic Heather well thank you so much are there any last little questions from the committee Vicki I noticed your hand up quite a while ago and I'm glad you put your hand it back up well thank you I just was curious Heather you always give us a good reality check on everything instead of myth or rumor we're hearing some great stuff my question is about the grass fed milk with all the testing and with Roy who can help with the sensory aspect of milk is grass fed milk you said it's more nutritious but does it tend to be more favorable in flavor for those who are testing it overall yeah so we have not got to the consumer liking part yet Vicki because of the pandemic but so I'm I'm now a trained sensory instrument and so I'm one of the the trained tasters and I can tell you that the milk it's incredible how different it tastes whether it's coming off from a farm or off the store shelf and so it's clear that there are improvements that can be made on both sides so we have tried milk right off the store shelf that I would never put in my mouth again and then a week later we'll you know do another panel and by the same product from the same processor and it would it'll taste totally different so I do and then same on the dairy farms we tasted milk coming right off the farm it was pasteurized because we can't we're not allowed to taste unpasteurized milk but there is milk that you'll taste it at first it doesn't taste like much but three minutes later it tastes like you just ate out of the gutter so I mean it's but you know on the same hand we there are other farms where you know it's sweet it's aromatic you know there's just all so it's it's really different so we know that there's improvements that can be made in processing and in management but now it's figuring out which of those products to the consumers like I like a little Barney in my milk apparently I didn't know that until I became a trained taster but I like a slight Barney after taste and that's good Barney there's good and bad Barney and so I'm wondering like will consumers like a little bit of that Barney it's like I don't know how to describe it but it's it's not bad Barney it's good Barney and then you can taste the sweetness of the forages as well so if somebody is feeding I can always tell when somebody's feeding a sweet fermented feed because you can pick it up in the milk and then you can we have picked up taste that you could tell somebody probably had feed that wasn't so good hadn't fermented properly so anyway yeah but we will find out once we can do a consumer testing again hopefully soon. Alright thanks Heather and John O'Brien has his hand up oh Vicki did you want to do a follow up. No no I just wanted to say thank you to her thanks go ahead John. Thanks Heather for coming in. I want to ask about 50 questions but I'll just keep it to two that aren't really connected. One I just wondered if the dairy industry has explored just to do something different with milk like a 4% milk or you know like you're talking about the taste of milk so even you know milk like you're saying Barney like if milk tasted like Rowan we might drink a lot more of it or you know I guess the PI count is at the bacteria and if Vermont is explored saying having the cleanest milk in the country I'm not sure we're you know set up for that but we might ultimately sell a lot more too and given our you know the best management practices we might be ahead of it where everybody else is yeah so that that was one and then the other was I thought of this when I was tedding last summer was is there anything like a reverse round baler where we take old round bales that aren't used which you see a lot of add some say manure inputs and essentially you know spray them on fields oh yeah create soil faster so that would be something that you'd like to work on yeah that's interesting yeah no you know it is true that you know we see the biggest organic matter gains on farms that are still using solid manure you know it's not hey per se but definitely usually has a lot of betting in it and we do see you know on those farms we do see those organic matter levels up around 8% so there definitely is something to what you're saying for sure yeah on the milk on the milk side yeah well I'm with you I feel like especially with the new dairy innovation center Laura and I will be talking again really starting to brainstorm I think exactly what you're talking about especially now that we have someone like Roy that can really dive into not just you know the sensory side of it but the consumer side and consumer liking you know he spent he you know he's actually close to retirement he spent his whole career in industry almost you know creating products like Jack Daniels Tropicana orange juice I mean really like you know industry favorites Heinz ketchup you know and we don't necessarily want industry favorites but we want to sell the best product like a Vermont product that you know Roy always says the reason Jack Daniels is the number one selling whiskey is because it really doesn't have much after taste which is against what most whiskey drinkers would want but that makes people want to go back and take another drink so so you know it's just really and I know it sounds like deceptive almost but in a way it's like those are the kind of products we want to create that people just want to come back for them for them and more of them regardless of of why in a way right so it's really like digging in and he always says like in India he's done a lot of work there and he said you know moms in India don't care how good it tastes as long as it's healthy but moms in in the United States you know they're happy that it's nutritious but it has to taste good too. And so just like you know really understanding what it is that is driving people's purchases. An environment may not be be the thing right we think it some of us make purchases that way but a lot of people really don't but it adds value. So anyway. Heather thanks so much. This is always you always inspire me it's always exciting to hear you give us your report and it's so great to see your your son he's getting so big. You can tell I've got him in front of the TV. Yes he's eight now. Oh my gosh time sure flies. Well listen thank you so much really. And thanks everybody. Yeah. Oh my gosh I really appreciate your time. Thank you. All right we'll see you. Bye. Bye bye.