 So, to get this started, it's a real pleasure and honor to introduce Kim Asch, the President of the Co-Chairman of the Senate, so welcome. All right, well thank you, committees, and welcome everybody, I'm glad you were able to make it for Part 2, K-2 of Working Lands Day, I know the other one got snowed out. I'll just tell you this is about eight or nine years ago, a committee room just around the corner, there were, I was standing there with four other senators, Bobby was one of them, and Jeannie Lyons, who's still in the Senate, was one, and there were two others, as the legislation that created the Working Lands program was being drafted and finalized, and somewhere on the second floor, there were some House members doing the exact same thing, it was late at night in April, and I don't think we could have imagined then how much success we would have had with the investments we've been making in the Working Lands program. When it was first pitched to us, I feel like it was 2011 or 2012, my years got a little mixed, but when it was first being pitched, people were saying this program promises to make exactly the kinds of investments that double down on what is best about Vermont, a triple bottom line approach of people who take care of our lands, people who want to invest in rural communities, local food, local wood products, and so on, and we kind of took a chance when we first passed that legislation that that would come to fruition, but I think the handouts that you're looking at now show dozens and dozens of investments all throughout the state and communities who need it most, creating jobs, creating economic activity, and I think it really has further exactly the kind of goals that were promised in the beginning, and I'll just say this is because I'm not going to be in the Senate anymore after this year, this is the last time, and I don't know how many of you, I know many of you will be familiar with the show, Leave It to Beaver, all right, so if you remember my favorite character on that show was Eddie Haskell, you know, he was always around, I was like, yeah, Beaver's mom, and so I'm not typically Eddie Haskell that since I'm leaving, I can do it, and I just wanted to acknowledge Paul Costello's role. I don't believe that without Paul's advocacy, we would have created the working lands more and had fun, it wouldn't have been sustained, and it wouldn't have grown over the years, and so many of you will benefit from the work that Paul has done on the advocacy side, but I do just want to especially acknowledge his role. There have been many others, of course, but Paul really was the kind of magnetic north on this one, so I want to thank Paul. And I would like to say that, you know, we're going to miss Tim in the Senate next year, or whoever's there, but if I'm there, I'm going to really miss him. When I, when he was first elected President Pro Tem, he called me into the office and he said, you know, Bobby, he said, maybe out of Chittenden County, but I really care about the other Vermont out there, and I want you to do role development and some forestry issues and things like that to help roll Vermont out. And, you know, I've never forgot that and have appreciated that in all of his support over the last six years while he's been speaker, and hopefully, hopefully, we'll have him as our Lieutenant Governor. But anyways, thanks Tim. Appreciate all your help over the years. So now we'll get right to it, Carolyn. All right, so we're going to be hearing from some folks and Lindsay, you're up first. Good morning, everyone. I'm Lindsay Curley. I'm the Secretary of Commerce and Community Development, and it's truly my honor to be here today to address you on the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative legislative day of the State House. I'm amongst the seventh generation of my family to live on the family farmland in Middle Sex. And some of my most favorite childhood memories are time spent with my cousins working on my grandparents' farm, whether we were gathering sap during sugaring season or stacking haybills in the heat of the summer to prepare for the long winter ahead. I couldn't have known it then, but I look back and I will always value the time that I spent with my family working on the farmland. So like so many Vermonters, the working landscape is part of my heritage and was once my family's sole source of income. Though we no longer farm on the land, I do hold dear what that land has meant to me. I live there still today, and I can't help but wonder if there had been opportunities made possible like those that are offered through the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative, if my family might still be making a living on our farm. The Working Lands Enterprise Initiative encourages economic growth by supporting entrepreneurs in the working lands industries. The initiative brings leaders of agriculture, forestry and commerce together with budding entrepreneurs to encourage innovation through public and private funding sources, including loans and grants. These programs directly impact businesses and service providers by helping to improve the infrastructure and create jobs while protecting Vermont's land. Successful business owners know they must continually make investments in order to grow their business and have to take risks. These programs support businesses through these critical growth stages and help mitigate the risks that must be taken to bring their companies to the next phase. We take pride in the work that we're doing to support and invest in the food, farm and forest industries, and I'm honored to be part of it. Growing and investing in the Working Lands enhances the lives of all Vermonters, and our goal is to remote an active working and vibrant landscape the foundation of Vermont's communities, families, and our economy. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lindsay. Oh, and uh, shall I introduce the next? Sure. Okay, so it's my honor to introduce Secretary Anson Tevitt, Secretary of Agriculture. Thank you very much. Good morning. Good morning. With your permission, I'd like to just introduce a couple people from the agency who really manage this program and are doing a bang-up job where that is Deputy Eastman is here as well, and in the Lin Allen who's a program manager who's put this all together and manages it year-round. So I just want to recognize their leadership in making this program so successful. Well, thank you very much for allowing me to be here today. It's an honor as always, and we appreciate the ongoing support of Working Lands. We're all working extremely hard to try to improve the rural economy of Vermont, and this is an important program to reach that goal. This program makes Vermont more affordable by investing in infrastructure to those small companies. Governor Scott is well behind this program, believes in it, and it has put some dollars, extra dollars, in his budget this year because of his strong endorsement of this program. This program brings the leaders of agriculture, commerce, forestry, and all those that make their living off the land together. We're all leveraging those precious dollars that you folks have to manage to grow the Vermont economy, and we appreciate the ongoing support of this committee and the committees throughout the legislature for this approach. Support for food, farm, and forestry is critical to Vermont's future. You'll hear some personal stories today where companies have had to take a big risk to get their businesses to the next level. These investments by the Working Lands program encourage innovation, and in many cases these companies get to the next level of because of this program. They add jobs, they're creating more products, they're growing their operations, and growing Vermont economy. We all need an active, working, and vibrant landscape, and this program is critical to that success, and that success goes beyond the farms, it's also about the forest. Thank you. Thank you. Always a pleasure to join on Working Lands Day, and Senator Ash referenced that was 2012 or so, the late nights here, down here, upstairs, and I was here then as commissioner, and we were running back and forth upstairs and down, and it really was something, and I think it's appropriate to reflect back and to realize I don't think we all thought there was real promise to this premise, but it's really amazing to see what has come of it, and the people who make it work from our staff, our partners, and importantly the recipients of the green rice, the farm and forest owners of the state, and that's I'm going to be brief, I think we all want to because you want to hear from you should hear from them, grantees, and that their stories are always amazing. I like to say when we make things like world-class food and forest products, furniture, etc, we make Vermont, we make the best of Vermont, and it's this is a working landscape in that it works in an ecological way by scrubbing carbon dioxide, by cleaning water, providing flood resilience, right? It's working whether we're here or not, but it's the, so the landscape works, and this working landscape that we're talking about is the people who work that landscape in a close, careful, intelligent way with all kinds of cool benefits and impact, and it's really worth celebrating, and I want to just thank all of you for continuing to support all of our partners who have helped build it. At the beginning it was an idea and we had to build a grant program and a board and process while also putting money out and trying to quantify impact, and I just think it's a raging success. So I want to also just be quick to thank on our part, as you know there's the three agencies that are to the board, and in the early going I was there and served on the board. A few years ago when we added Deputy Lincoln to our team, Sam was kind enough to take over the day-to-day function as my designee on the board and he's done a fantastic job. So I want to thank Sam and our lead staff, our Essex Caldonia County Forrester, Matt Langlis, and our wood utilization program lead, Paul Frederick, who provides a lot of technical assistance and really do a lot of work on top of their normal jobs. So I really want to thank them a couple of quick notes just to this is about to reflect sort of a nimbleness and I think in adapting to change and continuing opportunities and challenges, the board continues to think about where to go next and how examples being the recent decision to scale up forest impact investments in 19 focused on low grade wood markets as well as dairy, just a larger impact model and along the supply chain and also another quick shout-out would be Tuskever Moment. I think it's an interesting they've been significantly providing support over the years of $50,000 I think to date and I just think it's a nice way of reflecting that we have this important working landscape that supports the land and land health economies and we tend to focus on that but remember it's also culture and our way of life and our quality of life and that includes the recreational pursuits of the state and Schiefer-Mott's interest investment in the program is just one reflection of that that's co-benefits that are totally consistent for providing for outdoor recreation as well the big impacts that come down. Lastly just we have a business skills committee chair by Sam Lincoln and working with the ag agency from our sustainable jobs fund and others about to pursue the development and launch of a new platform an online directory a working lands business development directory making it easier to find professionals like service providers has a tool for searching and contact information just to connect people and make it easier so we're excited to launch that new platform today and I think I would then introduce the program manager Lynn Ellen Schwoller to uh to take it from there and explain that. So thank you all appreciate it. Thank you. And I'm actually going to ask one of my colleagues to come up and help me warm the Syria, warm the Syria is another element of what you're talking about. I work for the agency of agriculture and I do marketing and promotions. Good morning again so I'm Lynn Ellen Schwoller and I'm the program manager for the working lands enterprise initiative. Really thrilled to be here today and thank you so much for your continued support of a really impactful and important program for the state. So I really want to give more time to the past grantees so I'm going to be pretty quick here. As Commissioner Sider said this is a platform um that I want to give some kudos to Ellen Taylor she's doing sustainable jobs funds. We've been collaborating on this for the last several months and Lauren is actually we're going to do a little bit of role playing here. Um but first I just want to couple quick points. The tool allows for a search of the contact information of various service providers who have particular expertise a business might be looking for. The directory only contains a listing of nonprofit and public sector organizations that provide these services. There are also many private consultants who also work with working lands businesses. And the directory is not intended to preference any service provider over another but simply make the information available to working lands businesses to then take the next step. And our intention is to continue recruiting providers to join the directory. So Lauren owns a farm and food business and everyone just wants to get their attention to the screen. This is a portal. So she owns a farm and food business. She has seven years of success as a fruit grower and she also produces value added fruit preserves. So she's putting on to value added. She's got five employees. She's landed two. Her brother is a lead trainer and human resources manager which has enabled her to spend time with a bigger picture of operations. She recently went through a successful land transfer with her aunt and now she's actually looking to add goats to the new parcel of land so she just learned cheese making from Kate Turcott. And so she's actually going to click on to dairy as well. Kate suggested that Lauren dust off her existing business plan and start fresh. She is located in Wyndham County. So she's going to click on Wyndham County. She's kind of unsure of what stage of business development she's in. She's had good growth. Is it early? Is it growth? She hovers over the descriptions. She sees the definition and she clicks growth. This is the perfect way to describe her needs. She really enjoys networking and a classroom setting so she's going to choose workshop as her desired approach. Also putting business planning there at the top and then she's going to hit search and if she scrolls down she's going to find that there's actually four programs that match her needs. The website links are there. She can click on to the website and from there she can determine who will be the best match for services for her business. So if you have questions you do have a handout today. It does have my contact information but I do want to shift back to Secretary Tevitz and some awesome conversations with Branties. Thank you so much. Well that's pretty awesome because you know what as we mistake government if we can make it convenient easy for folks and efficient without a lot of phone calls a lot of emails and they can go right to it. I think that will be incredibly helpful for our for our people who are looking to expand their businesses so that's kind of cool. So Branties, so Branties, I don't know what where do you want to come up with? Well most of them hope are in the front. I don't see control and stuff. Right. Do you want to begin? Sure. So come on, what's about me? But you're going to be back to university. Not that I want to. Do you want to get back to work making that wonderful product? Yeah. All right, so be good. Pete, some of you may know Pete. So Pete, introduce yourself and tell us what you do. Hi, my name is Pete Coleman. My company is Vermont Silvi. We make value added pork products predominantly. It's all pork, sausage salami. I know we have a new beef product as well. We started making breast out a lot. The product that hails from Northern Italy comes from the eye around in the back of the cow's leg. Anyway, we started nine years ago selling sausages to farmers markets in Montpelier and Burlington, working out of a room about as big as this, attached to my apartment, and we started selling wholesale and slowly grew and then started working in Vermont Hacking House in Southern Vermont. They started doing all of our raw fabrication. We utilized Maverick Food Hub to develop a line of salami, and a year ago, about now, we broke ground on a project in downtown Barrie, and we took over the old Homer Fitz Building. I don't know if anyone's familiar with it. Ben Bacon, I don't think it's had a successful running business. I mean, just there's been a few people taking rent there, but no one's made it work since I think Mr. Fitz did. Since Homer. Since Homer did. Yeah, I think Homer was the last guy to make a real run at it. I love the space. I'm very happy. We're doing manufacturing in the back. We plan to utilize the front portion as a retail component as kind of a marketing branch. I think we actually do numbers there, too. I think it'll be, I think it'll work. And yeah, guys, it was a recipient of a pretty significant amount of money, and that helped make this happen. You know, I've kind of bootstrapped this from the start. We've never taken on a lot of debt. I'm still the only owner. I'm in more debt now than I've ever been, but it's actually pretty mannered running for where we're at as a company. We're now selling product all the way to Ithaca, New York, Portland, Maine, and we just started getting a couple of counts down. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and even a couple of West Virginia, so we're excited. And this new space allows us to pull up with so much capacity now. So much capacity, which we're really excited about. But I think, you know, speaking to the working lands, you know, it's evidently valuable for me, but I think what's really important is, I mean, I think it's really important for if maintaining this, I don't know, agricultural economy here in Vermont, if that's what you all want to do, then I think as a business owner, I've seen that you got to make investments. It doesn't, like, I mean, whether it's a relationship, whether it's your garden out back, you have to put in time or resources one way or the other. And I think the diversity that this can create and help build is really nice too, because it's not just whatever dairy or just woods, I think there's, it's a spread which is really valuable, because I think I think it's becoming evident to us that we need to create kind of some diversify our, you know, the way we generate revenue in the state, and I think this is a good way to do it. Let's see. Yeah, I think, you know, part of it, if that's your goal, that's what you want to do. I think this is a very, very viable way to get it done. And I, and as a small business owner, this money is crucial. Like, this is, it can be, I don't know, I want to say, maybe it's a type of thing where maybe it's not a make-or-break, but maybe it's a type of thing where all of a sudden you take on an equity partner and you lose some control of that business, or maybe that's the value also I see in it, is that it's just, and that, as of the moment, it's taken more time and more cash than I would have ever imagined. And that's why I think these, just these little, these little injections here and there really change business, or allow us to make these, you know, steps. Like, we're in the matter of being able to produce, you know, like, four or five hundred pounds of slimy or dry cured meats who, and now, you know, we're in a space where we'll be able to hang 45,000 pounds, but actually, you know, we, it'll take a while, but like, we can sell product in there, it's like, we can, we can be a formidable business before we could, and I think these are the little, the help that just, you know, get business owners to go. I'm gonna go for it, here we go. Yeah, so, I don't know, I just thank all of you for the support of what you're doing, and I also think, yeah, it's, you know, I would thank you, if you do want to maintain this viability here out of businesses, I think you gotta invest in it, because I just don't see any way around it, actually, and you can rely on the private sector to do it all on their own, but it's also great to see your partnership. Pete, have you had any challenges sourcing enough work to keep you going? No, we are now having to utilize a lot more out of state. If you want to invest in the pork market in state, I think the viability of it would be a good thing to analyze, but also scaling, you know, the, there's not a large, large size, get their scaled hog farming here. I think one nice part is the consistency in the price point that out of state suppliers provide you with, also will then allow from pork, being able to purchase a lot more from in-state as well, because what I've found in my past, I bought a lot of pigs in Vermont, is that consistency and price point are big hurdles, and even just being able to say, yeah, I need 4,000 pounds of pans. People just go, next year I'll put them in 50 pound boxes and please them over the course of the year, and the scale is not there, and that's a good problem for me, you know, I'm happy to be there finally to have to kind of go, yeah, we used to buy out, you know, three pigs a week and I'd cut them up and I'd do this and that, but we're just not, that model is no longer for us. But I also think it's worthwhile to even say is that, I don't know, I think having more than one pigs is really valuable, but I like the idea of it, but maybe it isn't functional as well. I mean, I don't know, I think you have to look like, well, if these, some of these farms are at like 4,000 pounds a week or something, and we're at 40 for our largest farm, where is the sweet spot where they need to be, where they can be competitive on price and provide the consistency, but maybe until you're at 2,000 or 3,000 pounds a week, maybe it doesn't even make, I don't know, I think it's good to be able to grow your business, utilizing sometimes a more affordable and consistent product, or rely on those who, that's what they've been doing forever, you know. Thanks. How many people do your employees? Currently, not that many, because we do all of our off-advocation at Vermont Packinghouse, so they have 70 employees. I got a bookkeeper, I got a full-time production manager I've got, and a couple people to help me with. I also pay someone in-state to help with out-of-state sales. We keep it pretty lean, but we'll change that, but I don't see us ever having too, too many employees. Currently, the way we're structured. Well, you never know. Who knows? Who knows what could happen? Businesses change. Businesses change, the way you do business change, you know, maybe someday I'll say, hey, you know, we don't need to be working with Vermont Packinghouse anymore, I'm going to start doing all the branding and stuff, etc., etc., build some, you know, much bigger and, you know, maybe a bunch of large-size chain grocery stores around the U.S. start picking up our products, and we'd say, yeah, we have to do that. Ryan has a question. Peter, how did you first hear about the working lens mission? Oh, that's a really good question. I think I've been, I've looked for grants in the past, I think I've also just been in the circle of other food producers, and... Well, you mentioned you're at the Farms Market, so maybe talking to somebody there, and... Yeah, you know, I've been at the Farms Market for probably eight years, but... Probably through Med River, right? Yeah, probably Robin or... I mean, I just know a chunk of the folks in the room as well, and I mean, I grew up in Montpellier, kind of, right around here, so I don't know. I can't even remember. I don't remember trying any moment when it was brought to my attention. Just curious. Thanks. Good. Well, thank you. John and Johnny. Just quickly, I noticed you're the only business who has Vermont in its business name, and so we just gave up yesterday for a very marketing... How does that help you, or add it to your story? I think there's an inherent, like, perceived value associated with the name. I wouldn't say... No, I think people get interested, but I also don't think it's... I think it's valuable. I think we do, like I said, have an inherent perceived quality associated with us, but I... Honestly, when I name the company, I think I literally... I'm really bad at naming things. Shit, here we go. Let's go. I don't think I really... I wasn't like, this is going to be my... Look, all the doors are going to magically open because I got Vermont in front of the board, so let me... To be honest, I kind of don't like my name, but I'm just... I didn't... I mean, your company name or your personal name? My personal name was changed actually when I was eight, so... You could change it again for Vermont? I could. Yeah, you're my student for Vermont. Yeah, I mean, I think there is a value. I think... I wouldn't say people were like, oh, I definitely open my door to you because you had that Vermont name. Yeah, it doesn't... I still have to work to get the sales done. And I think you come on the shelf. That'll never end. That'll never end, but no, I think on the shelf it probably helps a little bit. There's not... I mean, I can't give you a tangible, real... I think it's got value. I don't think it's not to make a great kind of business whatsoever. I would just add, I think this is a great... This is a win story because he started sort of the ag aspect, but now he's gone to a downtown that needs some help. We don't know, which I think is important component. I've turned the facility. It's gorgeous, and then when he gets his retail operation open as well, I think he's going to be supporting some other ag related food businesses. I think it's kind of neat that he's started in the hills, and now he's also helping a downtown, which is important as well. I will chime in on that. I do think actually a lot of these downtown spaces that are 9,000 square feet, where it's like, what do you do with that? It's too small for a box store. It's way too big for a mom and pop, something or other. It doesn't have a ton of parking. What do you do with it? I think these mixed use kind of manufacturing and retail could be a good approach to tackling those, more breaking them up or something, but yeah, those buildings are empty. They've been totally empty for a long time, and I don't think my landlord is pretty excited to have conversations about renting it. I want to go back to the supply, and do you get any Vermont pork right now? We get summer off Oregon, summer off beef. We're working on a whole muscle line, which part of my challenge too is our product lines are made predominantly from two cuts of meat. We're working on developing a whole muscle line, which would incorporate more. So carcass utilization is one of the biggest challenges, and so like I said, if I'm like, I need 4,000 pounds of hands, the farmers like, well, what do I do with the rest? So in part of what we're doing now is developing this program that would incorporate all cuts of the animal, and I think that will allow us to much easier purchase whole animals, which keeps I think the farmers tasks super simple, and then allows us to develop the product line from that. And then we started like all Vermont everything, all Vermont garlic, all Vermont wine, all Vermont pigs. I used to cut them all, and I literally went to the farmer that I was working with, and I showed him the spreadsheet, and I said, do you see where this is going? Like, we're down with both of us in six months or whatever, you know. And so I think longer term, I think what I see is a good portion of out-of-state meat, but help, you know, where we have a better margin and, you know, able to buy. I think we'll have a few product lines that we sell a lot more volume of, and relying on some out-of-state work will really help us make that happen, but then being able to create product lines that we can utilize. And also, just working with farms, I found that buying whole animals keeps their job super simple. You can alleviate that, like, we need your bellies, your hands, and your shoulders, but then you're stuck with the rest, and you know, we're at enough of a volume now where, like, if you're stuck with the rest, it's a lot to get stuck with if you don't have a market for it. So far, my goal would be to develop something that takes that burden off of them and allows us to do it. And I think we can do it. I sometimes wonder if, you know, we have small farms, basically, and some small producers that we're helping kind of get bigger. I wonder if there's a role for us to try to, maybe through working lands and food hubs, and try to do this in different ways, but an aggregator that you could turn to, instead of try to deal with individual farms. That's the other thing I always found challenging is, you know, you buy from two or three super small farms and just the logistics of it, you know, like, I'm, you know, I'm sure I'll play to this meeting. Could you imagine me trying to organize three farms and just get in the pork to land at the slaughter houses and pick up some of this and that? Like, this is not going to happen. I think what I also found too, when you have two really small businesses working together, sometimes it's really challenging, because everyone's still kind of bootstrapping, and everyone's like, one little mistake is like choking feeling on both sides, or as if you're working with really a larger producer and they really help you scale. I think then I can see if once we become a much more formidable company, it'd be easier for me to take on some smaller pork farmers and just be like, just send us what you can. Like just, like, oh, whatever your pigs were off weight this week, we'll just grind them all. Like, I don't know, just, I think then you can absorb those, those challenges of that learning curve, but if both parties are learning at the same time, and you're both making mistakes, I think it's really detrimental to both companies, but if you have, you're working with a really formal company that's consistent and provides a price one where you can make money, then, yeah, that would be kind of my approach. Did anybody shop at Homer Fitts? Remember, they had change, right, that you pay, and the change would go up to a pneumatic tube and then come back to my office and say, yes, yes. You don't even hook up the vacuum lines, but if anybody wants any sign, they've got some signs in the basement, so they're, yeah, I can try to get it back to the family. No, I've got his Eric, right? Eric is like, I don't know what the Eric would mean. Anyway, if you want some signs, come on. I try to get as many of them as the way to the family I could, but... Thank you so much. We're not opposed to out-of-state pork as long as it comes to laundry. Thank you for having me. Some of you know me, some of you don't. I was one of those early pork producers that was working with Pete at the very beginning, and that was challenging, and although it did help grow my business. I have a little bit of a different story for you. My farm began in Middlesex and was a three-acre tiny little farm. I was a teacher at the Rummy Elementary School, and I wanted to find a way to stay home with my kids and do something meaningful, and so I decided that farming was a great idea. Yeah, and it turns out it's pretty challenging, but what we did was we signed up with farm viability, and farm viability took our farm from this tiny little diversified farm. We started the first year, I think we did 20 pigs and 50 chickens, broilers, and 50 turkeys, and it grew to... On that location, we ended, we bought the Vermont slaughterhouse for chickens, the mobile unit, and we started producing inspected chicken, and we did that first year, we did 2,000 broilers. Farm viability helped us write our business plan to be able to actually grow and support ourselves by farming entirely, and we were able to then move to Glover, where we live on a farm that's 188 acres. We grew the farm to, we did 6,000 broilers, we did about 100 hogs a year, we had a herd of 60 beef, and I was like, we're doing everything and we are great. Then, as the farm really grew, I leaned on farm viability a lot and learned how to analyze the enterprises that were making money and the enterprises that were not making money, and I would say that the most important thing that we got out of the farm viability was business planning, because I kind of went into the whole farm with a dream and thought, I can just work. I will just work my way to make this happen, and you can't do that. So, I got divorced. I got divorced, and the farm, I had to make a big decision about what I was going to do with the farm. Was I going to stay farming? Was I going to be able to do this? I have three children, so could I sustain a farm by myself with minimal employees? That's when I went back to farm viability, and Sam helped me a lot. I applied for a working lands grant to scale up my laying hen business. We went from about 1,000 laying hens to 2,800 laying hens. I would not have been able to do that without the working lands. It would not have happened, and I wouldn't have been able to keep my farm, to be able to stay there and raise my kids. We kind of pared down on the other enterprises. I sold the slaughterhouse. Raising chickens and glover broilers is really hard on pasture, so laying hens are hardier. I was able to do that and ran the farm after receiving the grant and building. What the grant did for me was allow me to build large, efficient, mobile chicken houses that could house 500 chickens per house. It allowed me to grow my business. I got to about 1,500 dozen eggs a week. We were selling them all through Vermont and New England. We grew to, we had about eight employees. Farm viability also taught me about payroll and job creation, and all of that stuff that's really imperative, especially in the Northeast Kingdom. I wasn't really aware of the culture of the Northeast Kingdom until I got there. There's amazing farmland and amazing farmers and people who need jobs. We were doing something meaningful. I ended up last year deciding that the work, what my kids needed and what we needed as a family was changing. So I made the decision to transfer my playing head business to two different farms, to Black Dirt Farm and to Patrick's Pastured Poultry there in Rhode Island. Even though I'm not doing it right now anymore, what I have done is helped these other businesses scale up and be profitable and be able to feed their communities and run profitable laying-hand businesses. I loved getting to be a laying-hand egg farmer. It was a lot of work, but we fed a lot of people because some people can't afford to buy a dollar-a-pound pork chop, but they can buy a dozen eggs for five dollars and they know that they're good eggs. The way that my farm went through so many transitions and bumps in the road and now I'm not farming, but my 188 acres is active. Jasper Hill leased all my farmland for the last couple of years that I wasn't using. This year, Youngview Farm, who is a working lands recipient and they are producing cheese, is using my land. Even though my story isn't like, yay, I'm still just turning out eggs, what working lands did was help me scale up and help me keep my farm and teach me about business so that I knew what I needed to do and when I needed to do it. I really think that's most of it. Pretty good story. And now I am the director of marketing at Northeast Kingdom Human Services in Newport and St. John'sbury and it's funny because it's kind of similar. They look a lot like your chickens. No, but farming is about marketing. It's about telling the story. Why is it so important that people should invest in local products? What is the importance there and those skills that I received from farming, learning how to tell the story, learning how to market the products, it's hard. It's hard to get out there and when you get to a larger scale, selling 800 dozen eggs a week was pretty easy. Selling 1600 dozen eggs a week was hard and I had to work really hard and now I'm doing this job that I would not be able to do, which is marketing why it's important to take care of your brain basically and I would never be able to do that job if I hadn't done this job. And one last thing is I'm also helping other farms and foresters in the Northeast Kingdom, right, working lands grants now and helping them with their business planning and none of that would have ever been possible if I hadn't been able to receive the skills that I received from farm viability and the skills I received from having to write my own working lands grant. All of that is still being put to use today and I feel like it's giving me added revenue too because I'm writing grants for other people and hopefully that those grants will help support those foresters and those farmers to keep their land being viable. That's my story. Yeah, thank you. Thank you from Brad Potter. Yes, indeed. Hi everyone, my name is Mike Croyup and I own and operate Blank Page Cafe, which is a small micro business operating at Brad and Butterfarm. I'm here representing not only my business today but also Brad and Butterfarm on behalf of Corey Pierce, who owns Brad and Butterfarm. We're going to make it today and she's on a much needed and well-deserved mini vacation with her family. Firstly, I'd like to express my gratitude to not only this committee but Lin-Ellen and the folks at Working Lands and Sam Smith at the Farm Viability, all of whom provide us with a deep level of inspiration and validation for all of the work that we're doing. Brad and Butterfarm has about 600 acres of land under management located primarily in Shelburne and South Burlington. We're uniquely positioned very close to population density, that being Burlington and Changin County and our primary agricultural product is 100% grass-fed beef, pasture organic pork and vegetable production, organic vegetable production. We also have what we like to call diversified farm operation in that at Brad and Butterfarm there are a number of educational programs happening all with agriculture and land management and sort of the core of that curriculum. We regard ourselves as land stewards first and then operating businesses around that principal almost all the time, secondarily. My cafe is located in the farm store at Brad and Butterfarm. We sell the majority of our product in a retail context in a very small farm store that is located in what was a milking part of a dairy barn and what's really cool about what we're doing is that through my presence and my business at the farm we're able to provide folks who visit the farm with a one-on-one interaction with somebody who's familiar with the farm and its products and can speak to what we're doing and why we regard it as a valuable tool for the community and that we've noticed has really helped increase not only our market share and the immediate community that we serve but also the market share for folks visiting Vermont. This working lands grant we received $20,000 last year for very much needed infrastructure improvements related to a small expansion of our kitchen area within the farm store and the way I think about it is as many of you know operating a small food business or a small food and farming business oftentimes funding infrastructure improvements specifically from ongoing operations can be really difficult and what the working lands grant has enabled us to do is really quantify the inspiration and the creative visioning that is oftentimes part of our long-term strategic planning process and what I mean by that is we oftentimes will have these creative visions for what the farm could and we think should be and it's oftentimes very unclear and we're unsure of how to get from point A to point B and the working lands grant has really helped bridge that gap and has provided us with some some financial support to take meaningful steps in that direction and so that for us has been invaluable and the resources are being specifically dedicated towards these infrastructure improvement projects that will help us create I heard the word capacity being mentioned create the capacity to be able to a reach more people operate our businesses more efficiently and common theme here in common thread is hire more people my business my small micro business has operated with just me and one part-time employee and we're poised in the very near term this year over the next six months to hire two additional employees plus several additional part-time employees both seasonally the farm has about five full-time employees year-round and 15 to 20 seasonally to support various events and just to accommodate the work demands of the season so yeah we we we're tremendously grateful for all of this work we we think soil regeneration ecosystem building and creating a vibrant foothold for our community with regards to not only where food comes from but also a place where folks can feel comfortable being on a farm and spending time at a farm and understanding what happens on production farm we think creating those opportunities for our community members is very important we've seen transformative a fact of creating those opportunities not only for community members who are purchasing our food to customers but also the the next generation through some of our educational programs we see that we see that transformative power manifest in a lot of the kiddos that we work with around you know being working in concert with the land and really appreciating animal production from from an entire supply chain perspective and so for us becoming a little bit more vertically integrated creating opportunities for myself as a micro business to become a wholesale account for the farm will create the sort of necessary impetus for the farm to grow and expand the agriculture operations especially with some recently new recently acquired land that we plan to work very closely with sam smith on and developing sort of the strategic plan for the direction of how that will integrate under the fold of bread butter farm and we look forward to continuing to work with folks at working lands and this this group to play a play a collaborative role in how the agricultural economy in vermont continues to transform at all and i would add if you ever get a chance and there's a number of places around vermont that have wonderful burger nights in the summer and i know that's part of their operation you know four or five four or five times a year they get together they're sprinkled around vermont and that's part of what i think is important for these operations to remain viable is to invite people onto the farms and i know they have a lot of school children that come as well so absolutely i appreciate it thank you thank you so um before the rules yeah so there you go matthew is here and matthew has got a story and it seems like he just started the other day but he's now like 15 years old about 17 about 17 but he's a mature company now but he can tell a story thank you for having us in i just i'm before i i get up on tangent here i want to appreciate the working lands enterprise board specifically this program i think is a model um and needs to be considered the beginning of something i don't think that the impact i think the impact can really be scaled you know and i understand that's a question of resources but we're in a moment in agriculture in vermont where communities and states that invest are going to thrive and survive and um places that don't are going to wither away and um you know i know there aren't uh endless dollars but i believe that the working landscape is probably the best investment that um that she can make so um andy and i started milking andy's my brother um and i wouldn't be here without him he's back there doing all the hard work um we started um milking cows in 2003 we bought the farm um in 1998 it was an emotional irrational decision we had no idea what we were going to do with it dot com bubble is inflating real estate values and uh we took some time to try and figure out what we needed out of life and uh jasper hill is part of a three pronged approach um to satisfy entrant intrinsic needs meaningful work in a place that we love with people that we love and so the meaningful work part for us um is around um developing the economic mechanisms to support the working landscape uh five uh six years ago now we went through a visioning process um previously it had been like vermont and we've basically shrunk it down to a 15 mile radius of where we are um our goal is to build a market um to build pipeline to that market in which we can put high-value products and suck cash out places where there's plenty of it and redistributed in a way that commodity markets don't or can't or won't and um we started tracking um our expenses um four years ago by zip code and um you know there's a lot of waves of cash that flow in and and most of mostly flow out of our business we're not a wildly profitable uh business we're um you know somewhere in the between four and five percent that return on um our capital is um you know profit is not the purpose profit serves the purpose and the purpose is to build livable communities right um so craft sparing glover greensboro and harbuck is pretty much you know um our natural community and our natural landscape and um we're building all kinds of enterprises and trying and failing um trying again at uh ways where we can create value through value-added businesses we started a value-added port business a couple of years ago so we're also making um drakured uh salamis um this past year we started what we bought oak knoll uh dairy the goats the bottling equipment and the brand and partnered with a couple from california who moved out uh a year ago um this past summer we built the barns and moved the goats up and built a bottling plant and uh they're milking a thousand goats in california um so they're they're plugged into our whole situation in harbuck now on bridgeman hill bridgeman hill farm um and it feels like we're just getting going um we uh make we milk uh cows on two farms and uh 230 cows at andersonville farm in um in glover uh 45 cows on our home farm in greensboro and this morning i think we milked 280 goats at bridgeman and we buy milk from uh two neighbors in greensboro where and we process that milk into cheese in two facilities the vermont pre-venture center where we're being anchor tenant and uh creamery at jasper hill farm we ripened cheese at the sellers at jasper hill at uh in greensboro uh this past year we produced about um 400 tons so around 800 000 pounds of cheese uh from our um ourselves and we ripened about 400 tons of cheese for other producers including the bonn trap farmstead scolton family farm uh landaf creamery and landaf new hampshire cabot um shoving farms um and we're we're full so we've got a couple of big projects on the dashboard the yellow barn accelerator uh business accelerator and hardware which i'm really hopeful it's going to happen uh but that'll be a big leap forward for us so you know our goal really is to uh create some vibrancy where we live right um 15 years ago it wasn't clear that willy's store in greensboro was viable or was going to survive um that schools were going to uh be there when our kids um you know were ready to go to them and um so these are just some of the priorities cheese for us is just the lever that we're yanking on to try and transform uh our community and make it more livable so it starts with a mission and our mission is to be the number one thing to be the standard bear for quality and innovation in the artisan cheese industry because we can't compete on price we're not a low cost producer we have no interest in competing on price our only uh comparative advantage is quality period so that's like a religion for us because it's uh it's the only way that i believe uh vermont an agriculture in vermont is going to be able to survive over the long term because we are not a low cost producer of anything yeah so if we can't focus on quality we're we're we're good um and i got to say one thing and that is that uh it something i've been thinking a lot about lately is that uh pricing drives scale and uh what's happened in the dairy industry specifically over the last few years um is really problematic because equity is transferred from rural communities to urban and suburban populations through pricing mechanisms and what we're left with is balance sheets where there's actual equity that's being transferred um over uh just a few years uh the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been transferred out of rural vermont uh to urban and suburban communities through a pricing mechanism is really problematic i believe that the future for um dairy specifically and the working landscape if we want to keep it is going to be paying farmers for environmental services and um just got back from switzerland and that milk and cheese is a byproduct of um of a farming system there that is really directed towards the conservation of their working landscape and uh between 50 and 60 percent of the farmers income in switzerland comes from uh grazing their cows on alps so anyway if you can't oh and we have a hundred and four employees uh this one yeah so we we started uh we started with my brother andy and i and uh 18 months later our wives uh pursued our careers we would not be with where we are if it wasn't for the sacrifices of the ladies in our life they really got us over the hump and um we're yeah we're it feels like we're grown-ups now don't worry yeah and i'd be happy to answer any questions i'm that microbiology lab oh yes right the whole reason i'm here so in 2013 uh we got a working lands grant for $50,000 we put up a hundred grand and we built a microbiology lab this came on the heels of five years of research that happened inside our business by microbiologists systems biologists at from harvard who used cheese as a model system to understand microbial communication and they basically a cheese is an accessible you know medium it's reproducible and they use the rinds of our cheese to study the microbial ecology to and to look at how microbes communicate all right what the what genes produce what chemicals that make up microbial communication and as part of that process thousands of samples were taken in sequence and we got to understand how the ecology on the rinds of our cheeses works and we basically took hundreds of samples that were collected from our raw milk from our cheese from our environment these are interesting strains of cheese making strains that are indigenous to our farm in our process and we banked them and we're producing now a fully wild indigenous cheese made with microbes that are that are originated within our farming system we're able now we have two full-time microbiologists working in the lab now and we're able I used to describe being a cheese maker as being like god except you're dumb and blind because we're unleashing these universes of life and then like wiping them out and that's basically what cheese is but now I describe it as being like god no longer blind but still dumb because we don't necessarily fully understand exactly what's going on but we can see what's happening in our product now it's really incredible the part of the business plan had been to like try and figure out how to provide services for other producers and we've done some of that although that that part of the business plan never never or at least hasn't taken off yet but it's been a huge driver for quality at Jasper Hill and we're able to do things that even very large cheese companies can't even dream about so thank you for that Crutch, you guys many of us were at your presentation at the dairy summit last year up in jay and it stuck with me particularly this picture you have of the of your store downtown of sort of dilapidated and now refurbished as a way of just the example of what you've been able to bring to the community and there's no question that we're all very proud of your business I think but I'm curious you know up your way too is Lawson's Brewery and we have these these sort of exemplary businesses that are highly dependent on local agriculture and we have to have those sort of as anchors in the sense but I've sort of joke if we're all if local ag is all about cheese and beer you know we're kind of in trouble at some level too because it is about we have to reorient the local in terms of food right we can't we're not going to sit here in 20 years and import tomatoes from California if we're successful I think that the climate's not going to let us do that I believe yeah and so I wonder if you can it's sort of at odds or or how does it complement the statement that I totally agree with where you've said you know we have to be about quality because I'm going to compete on price and how do we fit that with the fact that a third of the monitors are struggling in poverty so I would love her help I mean that's where maybe it's not just today but I'm sure you've thought of some of these dynamics I think so you're you're talking about like the cost of like the products that we're producing and I kind of been like high value high cost yeah not necessarily accessible and it has to fit in our in a strong ag economy but but it also can't be what we're all shooting for I don't think so my my response to that because we've been criticized really openly by some don't hear me say that because okay because you know that we couldn't survive making cheap food right cheap food is part of the problem absolutely you know with agriculture yeah our goal is to pay people enough within our community so they can afford to consume the products that we produce and and and we do that we you know when we started our business the median income in Greensboro was just over $18,000 a year this is like household income yeah all right and we just went through a housing survey as part of that we got some demographic information and in the last 10 years we've gone from about 20,000 to 36,000 and our median income is around 45,000 inside our business that's for an employee so that's how that's how we're going about trying to address that particular question and it's not something one business can solve but it's part of I saw some incredible things in Switzerland and I hope I can kind of talk to you about telling what the farmers drive for vehicles so the average farm size 24 cows okay BMWs in in the driveway and the the value that society there places on being able to walk in the alps okay and the identity that's an inherent and is and originates with the working landscape there is something that Swiss people are willing to pay for yeah okay and how do you make what we live in is a trickle up economy where resources are trickling up to a thousand people and they're trickling out of our communities right we're trying to reverse that by trickling trickling it back in to our community and spreading it around and that's that works but you're right it doesn't it doesn't work for everybody and I think that the challenge is going to be to change the fundamentals of farm income in Vermont if you want to conserve the working landscape and make sure that you know people in rural communities are getting paid just so I'm clear I don't think it's on your business I think as policymakers we have to figure out how we're able to balance the high-end high performers that are having clearly an awesome impact on our economy and you know the need to frankly produce more of our own food and make sure people in the market do you attract many visitors to the hard work area we have no place within our company where a consumer a civilian can interface with our brand it's we we consider ourselves to be exporters and we see a need to build some kind of place where people can can come and have an experience but I think that's going to be in the that's in the five to ten year plan Terry kind of stand up I remember at the dairy summit we were talking about the housing shortage I wondered if you had any solution to that or because of the conserve property so part of the challenge in Greensboro is around wastewater infrastructure and zoning right so we got 10 acre zoning and then we've got Greensboro Bend where there's a very depreciated housing stock and I use the word depreciated in the most polite sense of the word and it's impossible to see how we can get where we're you know had to revitalize the housing stock there without wastewater infrastructure because of the river and flood zone issues and so we worked with Paul who is a personal hero in the town of Greensboro on a community visioning project and one of the things that came out of there were four four things that came out of that but wastewater infrastructure was the number one thing because it is the linchpin to try and solve some of the housing issues I think we're going to lose our school we've had in the past four years we've had over 20 families with children moved to our community and with children and zero of them live in Greensboro because there's nowhere to live right and so we're we're working on it I hope it's not too late for a late view elementary school that's a one in the bend notes it's the elementary school is in the village of Greensboro but it draws standard and most of the kids are that's a pretty nice school it is but our numbers dropped under 50 this year so it's it's a problem and it it's not because there aren't young people with children around there's just nowhere for them to live in our town they live in Crassbury Glover and Vicki? I was just going to ask because I think we're Terry in that side, thank you. Is that a federal milk inspector then to see a white one? Yeah, we're on their list. One problem that we have that we we as state policymakers you talked about walking through the Elks and one issue we've run into this winter is Kingdom Trails which is a little bit east of Newport they're in danger of losing some of their trails because they may have to put some of their private landowners the trails through Act 250 and you know it makes no sense we should be adding to these trails and welcoming the people with the money bring it up and we can keep absolutely agree on Greensboro and Crassbury Outdoor Center Highland Trail systems I believe that's the future of that's going to be an important component of the future of the economy of where we are in our yeah in your section so we're working away at that tell your stories all right uh good morning thanks so much for glad to move beyond the field in the forest and I have suddenly a trick question for you this is a table it's chairs it's game pieces it's wainscotting it's windows it's many many products it's also a nice piece of maple and it also doesn't know state boundaries this grows in upstate New York from out in New Hampshire Maine and beyond that and so when we think about the forest and we think about the working landscape my organization's perspective it is beyond this state but I thought I had to compete with food samples so I brought this around it's a nice piece of wood not too many teeth marks so uh northern forest centers a 22 year old organization working across four states in the northern forest from as I said from upstate New York across the out of rondacks and from out in New Hampshire and two-thirds of northern Maine our focus is really on the on the forest economy how to create viable jobs within wood products manufacturing wood heat and outdoor recreation all those are incredible values that produce jobs and create vibrant communities if we do it right over the last three years we've been a benefit a beneficiary of the working land service provider grant and we've provided in turn a number of services to wood products companies across the state over just the last two years our partnership with the woodworks council and a direct grant to ourselves has resulted in our delivery of services to 14 companies that employ over 550 people have 128 million dollars in gross sales and utilize 21 and a half million board feet so when you want to talk about scale and impact these are a collection of 14 companies that in aggregate are using quite a bit of labor producing a lot of value and using a lot of wood from the region three different quick stories I want to share with you and how we provide our services number one and some of you may know Ken Ganya from Ganya lumber down in downstate near about Pittsburgh outside of Rutland yeah Pittsburgh thank you we helped him secure we love funding from you all for his power transition this past year from diesel fuel the three phase power of the grid that was huge in his transformation when greening his company but also setting up a more sustainable path from a financial perspective so he could look long term at succession planning and maintaining that mail in his production in the state second is us providing direct technical assistance to companies like Vermont down in the wild written lumber and fairly and built by Newport up in Newport we've helped with lean manufacturing principles business planning financing management coaching and these are all of larger employers we on the service provider side with some of your direction by staff or what coordinate as to the viability program on the smaller micro enterprise side as we move up we've been really filling the niche with some of the larger larger businesses one of the things we've done this last year was actually to convene CEOs together and we're calling to know in the force board form some of you all know that if you're working as an individual business and entrepreneurs a lonely endeavor and when you get together with others you can trade a lot of trade secrets if you will coach each other mentor each other but we have eight different companies that participated apple ash engineer flooring up in your neighborhood uh timber homes from mott mott hillier new england woodcraft down in brandon treehouse hardwoods and milk shop in south burlington andrew pierce bowls in heartland linden furniture in linden and built by newport up in Newport we're entering entering the second year of this program and what we're finding is that each of these companies are not only getting assistance from our staff and our coaches but getting a lot of assistance from each other's they're building business connections peer-to-peer and they're looking at things like erp systems they're that's an enterprise resource planning system a peer-to-peer advice basically save one company a hundred fifty thousand dollars i'm not buying the wrong product seems like a pretty good savings to me um we're also in a couple other areas that i think are really critical when we think about the overall health and vitality the wood products sector in the forest economy as some as you know that piece of board comes out of not a square log but a round piece of wood right a log on the edges are pallet wood on any other edges are are uh uh bark in the middle are chips all those go on to other value-added products so we see wood heat as a way for to support the uh state to achieve its climate goals but also to help support low-grade wood markets that are vastly critical to local civil functional practices you all know that but it's like weeding carrots out of the garden can't just take the best ones the other ones do not produce long-term and sequestering carbure carbon keeping uh water clean and so on other piece i want to mention is uh mass timber construction wood insulation new advances of wood we and our partners in in main new hampshire vermont the vermont sustainable job fun and others and in new york are really looking at this regional wood basket of 26 million acres how can we really provide value added jobs and products how that to serve the nearly 100 million people within a day's drive so defensive forest stewardship obviously go well beyond just wood products manufacturing and the companies that i've shared with you it does go into the recreation economy and i also want to say that because of our ability to look across four states i would compliment you all on just saying that the working man's enterprise board is unique and it's northern new england neighbors particularly of new hampshire and main there is nothing like this that exists and i'd say that state policy showing that and and providing funding is a clear commitment to the working lands you all know this other states look enviable at you all to be able to get that legislative done thanks to paul thanks to many others so i congratulate you on that and appreciate the partnership happy to take questions no appreciate your working with belton new forward and accolation for great outfits what about columbia do you do anything with them we have not the scale they worked out is kind of beyond us a bit you know and they're working more in that larger commodity spaces i mean as agriculture you know the same as inwood products you work on commodity side stuff and you're in a whole different you know ball game if you will do you ever co-partner with um like uh generating facilities where the mill could use a dry kiln and in where you get heat say from a wood fire generator they could build kilns there to dry wood or sat absolutely the co-location of facilities like that to use efficient use of waste heat electric generation on site is absolutely we need to go to in the future to stabilize those energy costs most of the examples that i can site up top of my head are in main right now but i'd say that as we work and get closer into some of these different companies particularly some of the saw mills in the state here there is ample opportunity for increasing efficiencies and looking at that cost control that is really that the very little margins of these companies so we we're in the process uh chris's other committees of relicensing like ligate and they have a tremendous amount of heat uh that could be utilized for kilns or some other process uh greenhouses uh absolutely and it would be great to to you know co-locate well i i couldn't agree more i just take a moment here because i think one of the challenges that we face when we talk about wood heat uh compared to biomass electric generation is those are very distinctive energy efficiencies as you know and very different carbon calculations an independent study we we commissioned talked about 50 percent better on greenhouse gas emissions from wood heat compared to fossil fuels we don't have that same benefit on the electric generation side so the more we can capture that way seem crazy as efficiencies is both a business benefit but also a climate benefit so we have talked to some of the folks at brighgate on our are trying to figure out where we can be helpful oh ricky had a question i'm sorry i just didn't hear where you live Rob you're helping the northeast team and it sounds like you're not working in a large radius of places but where are you based well it's a it's a it's a it's kind of a secret i sneaked over the canadian river on my way here i'm actually living in exile i grew up down up down an end over a marshill road and uh so i'm i'm actually our headquarters in concord via staff people scattered across our broad region and uh our wood products provider actually lives up in st johnsbury but this is not this is almost as good as looking at a powerpoint but this is our map of a region 26 million acres so people say where do i work and i say it's in a it's in the car but we've got a great staff and a great sense of a group of partners so we extend as well as we can across the region and i find that my two-hour drive here is probably similar to some folks coming from front of our or down south that's right so yeah we travel a lot but it's that regional perspective we find it's really helpful to connect the the states beyond their borders that's great thank you yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you yeah senator toadson you don't mind i seem to want to make a quick note of the time you're respectful i know someone's coming in for heaven we have sam smith here we have a rural center when colo from central and enterprise did not come over why it's might be here yeah this week or two it's going to be great and then um if i don't have time to read the from corporate nickels from remont wildwoods i will set up electronically um but we certainly do we'd like to hear from um definitely comes from sam lincoln additionally thank you great morning morning it's nice to be back here again speaking to you folks uh so i'm sam smith i work for the intervail center uh and i'm the director of agricultural services there i also do a lot i my office is also my car because we work statewide and um so we we provide business planning services uh through funding from the working lands enterprise board and also through the vermont farm enforced viability program to about a hundred farms a year farm businesses um we provide those services from concept to exit so i primarily spend a lot of time doing transfer succession planning right now and um i'd like to thank all of you sort of for your vision and for all of us for the vision around this program and the support that it provides not only for organizations like ours to do this type of work but also to the numerous farms that have been the recipient recipients of these grant funds um you know this is sort of i was just said that we're looked at as a model and when i go out i just got back from the national farm viability conference in minnesota which was partially put on by our farm viability team and we're looked at as a model nationally for the type of initiatives that we have going on in the state and this is one of those initiatives people are really envious of us and um and so i just want to acknowledge that um i could talk about you know we have had a huge number of contacts with the we left funding in terms of our organization but also the farms that i work with um when i talked about that spectrum of farms that we work with um when i first started the interval which was probably seven or eight years ago we had a farm viability contract that allowed us to work with 20 farms a year um and that contract was limited to working with those farms they had to be in a certain stage of business and they the the planning process takes two years in that program so it's relatively intensive um and we received some working lands funds back um in a partner grant with a couple other organizations i think in 2015 or 2016 that allowed us to start to leverage funds to provide services to the sort of concept or newer beginning farmers that um we we actually do a lot of work with now so if we look at our current sort of hundred farmers a year i would say probably 60 of those are in the like concept and startup phase and those are not farms that we work through farm viability funding with so we've received uh several working land service provider grants over the last three or four years and they're they've been for a relatively small percentage of our budget but they allow us to work with these farms in really distinct uh short engagements that allow us to do we call it coaching but basically get them started off on the right foot so we help vet their concepts before they get into business or in that early stage of business yeah and then instill some values in terms of business management um we have a portion of the funds is set aside for technical assistance so we can hire consultants to come in the probably the biggest one with this group is we try to get them into quick books so that they have good financial data moving forward because i think all of you know that our agricultural sector is changing and the far a lot of entrepreneurs you heard from today they are business people first farmers second and that's what we're really trying to instill as we move away from the commodity markets our our farm business owners have to have a whole new skill set of skills so i just wanted to share a couple stories uh well one in particular i two farms that came up as i was sort of looking through the list of the farms we've worked through in terms of the working lands funds and one of them is uh one of them was a working lands grant recipient and that's the bear roots farm and uh they're currently in williams town but they just opened up the roots market um which is in middle sex if you haven't been there i think this is the future senator piercing you ask that question about how do we get food into the hands of people with uh lower incomes or how do we make food that's accessible for our local populations and i've been working with a number of farms uh in the past year or so that have really decided that they're going to commit to the direct local market and that is a good example of a farm that really has they bought a retail space and they outfitted it and it's a year round operation and they're providing vegetables year round and they're at a relatively accessible price point so i think that that's sort of the future of where we're heading they've received the working lands grant we provided them with business planning support and they're i think they're really poised to be successful you know they bought two farms in the state so far and that's all been in the span i worked with them right when they moved here in 2013 right so and then the other farm is old road farm um and they're in grandville and i look back and they were one of our original working lands coaching clients back in 2017 we sat down with them and did a little bit of business planning taught them how to do a cash flow and they're in the they're now poised to purchase a property that really and when we talk about our rural community and our rural economy the small farms that will be the hub of employment and the sort of community culture that we need in our rural towns those farms have to be anchored by these really strong business people who have a vision to provide a product that that can be sold direct or to regional markets that can provide a living wage for them and their employees so um once again i'd like to say thank you for doing this and providing the guidance and um and thank you in all this for letting me speak today and uh i'm happy to answer any questions i've always loved to come back and talk to you about farm viability and business planning any questions well thank you thank you my name is jeta mandel abramson um i was a beneficiary i guess of um the working lands enterprise grant center for women and entrepreneurship um it's a wonderful business class i got to take thanks to you all um really benefited me as i had no business experience before um taking this class and writing the business plan had been excruciatingly difficult for me um i got to take this class and it was great so um my husband and i are a startup saffron farm in newberry vermont and um we focus on regenerative agricultural practices um in order to you know preserve our planet um sequester carbon build soil for our saffron and um we we're small at the moment this will be our first um well this is our expansion year i guess we'll be planting our first acre this summer which is very exciting um we have a 10-year plan to expand into nine acres total on our farm in newberry um we will be uh introducing a small ruminator herd probably of sheeps and goats um in order to build soil and sequester carbon um on our property and uh we'd like to eventually sort of move into the agro tourism industry a little bit uh building cabins to host cooking classes as well as regenerative agriculture classes on our property and um eventually we'll have if everything goes according to plan which it will we'll have about 30 to 40 employees on our property um seasonally of course as saffron is harvested and processed once a year so we'll have about um two months out of the year we'll where we will be hosting about 30 to 40 seasonal employees so um we are in the stage currently of finding funding for our project um and as i mentioned that business class that um you folks afforded us was um integral in in the ability for us to to build our our business plan and um and be able to find funding for our project so sort of where we're at so you you live in berry newberry newberry yep yeah they're a good farming country indeed yes especially for saffron takes a lot of a lot of little progesses to make yeah it's between 150 and 200 flowers per gram so 28.3 grams per ounce that's correct that is correct on a diet that's possible yeah yeah and uvm's doing a lot of research with saffron so and especially crop block grants have been supported that the conference coming up and that's right yes yes yeah we've been in close contact with the folks uh at uvm for several years and we've been experimenting on our property for the last two um so we're we're quite confident in our in the next step forward cool so well thanks thanks oh going further since we've been down here with this what is the the processing because hamster running a lot of processing problems um and marketing challenges ahead for saffron even if you can grow great saffron yeah so our marketing uh techniques are we're we're going to be selling our product primarily in bulk um so wholesale uh we will reserve a few ounces uh to sell retail um to local clientele farmers markets and um we've been quite successful actually selling by the quarter gram and gram thus far um with the product that we've grown so far um but we plan on bringing we're going to be actually this coming month we'll be bringing samples down to a variety of farm to table restaurants um in vermont but also out of state boston new york city um to clients who have uh expressed interest already in in purchasing bulk saffron from us um so our marketing strategy is more or less uh going door to door uh face to face samples um and then non-binding contracts so for purchase for next year um and then hopefully these clients will also be able to grow with us um as we will be scaling up we should have about five pounds this coming year um and then of course by the time we have nine acres we'll have considerably more than that so um we are hoping to have clients that are able to scale up with us luckily um there are a lot of farm to table restaurants in vermont which is wonderful so we have quite a few clients already who are um hoping to purchase saffron from us uh which is wonderful and um i'm sorry what was the second part of your question processing oh yeah processing so in our fourth year we plan on expanding into two more acres so we'll have three acres harvesting three acres in our fourth year growing season um and then two acres per year after that so in our fifth year we will um we will actually be building a processing plant and drying facility on our property um which will take significant resources but i'm sure that when the time comes we will have that all worked out maybe maybe with a grant for you so or at least by the front door to the place yeah thank you so thank you thank you good luck thank you morning morning thank you for uh spending time it's time here today with this group the working lands in vermont are going through a period of extreme transition uh with our our global economy changing uh rewarding the lowest cost producer and as it was put earlier that vermont's not a low cost producer of anything historically for generations centuries vermont's working lands uh businesses our farms and forest businesses have produced commodities that they plugged into a pipeline where they were at value added and and were turned into consumer goods elsewhere and there's this great transition as we see that that model is not uh always going to work for various sectors of vermont's uh rural economy and the working lands initiative uh supported by you created by you and the executive branch of the government um is the hub uh i can't state anywhere near as well as the many people you've heard sit here today the the hurdles they've overcome the challenges they face the expectations for how they manage their businesses with how they engage with the environment how they manage employees all these these great transitions that these businesses are facing as they maintain the vistas the working lands the environment that we have and your support for that is uh uh greatly important and as well as the funding that you put into these businesses as well as the policy considerations that all of you have in front of you and your committees that that affect these these business owners across the state so we're we're very proud of the work that's going on here collaboratively and um we uh um you know the many things with the targeted focus with the private sector business owners that are on this board we are as commissioner steiner said earlier or uh adapting and being as nimble as possible to change and address this we've made a lot of changes in the last few years to the the ways that the money is spent and where it's focused to help create opportunities for people to uh successfully navigate this transition in the economy the rural economy um in just a few days the working lands enterprise board is going to announce funding for 26 businesses for grants putting out some of the 1.6 million dollars that you all provided in funding and um I know that again in the last few years some of these businesses um there's there's hope on the horizon for the way that this money is being spent that some of these businesses that were traditional commodity producers that they're uh stopping those commodities before they leave the state and adding value to them and through the grants uh that will be funded by this board or the the business planning processes that are funded by this board um and uh there you know this this sector employs 80 nearly 80 000 people and it's growing um and it's just such an important part of our our culture these are salt of the earth people that work the land and they're our neighbors and our select board members our business owners in our towns and and uh it's a way of life that we want to sustain very much so um so I again thank you very much for for all your work this is this between the board the legislature and the private sector members here this is really the hub of that transition and uh pleased to work with you all on that and thank you for your attention to it yeah and Sam liked uh thank you and in the other commissioners and secretaries for all the work on trying to trying and achieving getting a competent workers compensation rates down so our small farmers and small producers can afford to have employees and and pay it a somewhat reasonable rate uh it's really 30 to 40 percent I believe reduction has been that's very good well I'm pleased thank you for that and I'm pleased to always say that there was a great team that worked on it and others that deserve a lot of credit yeah um and I'm pleased to say that after all of the work on it not only that we're now competitive with New York and New Hampshire a place we weren't four years ago when they started and um that is due to just the natural reduction and the injuries and claims that have happened on businesses but also the work of the department of financial regulation but I consider it foundational uh when I talk about this that the workers comp issue in the forest economy um is foundational to how do we go to uh uh parents and say how do we have your daughter or son working and we're gonna in the most dangerous occupation in the country if we're not going to train them properly and cover them uh with the insurance that's required by law it's foundational to growing that sector of the economy and I'm hopeful that all of our to get our work together on that will be again transformative as we look at employing more people um in in that sector yep thanks Sam thanks everybody just one final thought I know there's some board members here and I just want to I think it's important we recognize they spend countless hours evaluating the applications making really difficult decisions uh and I think a few of me or some of the board members could stand and just say hi yeah they uh they they spend so much time on it thank you very much yeah thank you everybody this has been one of your thoughts