 Yeah, welcome to the AG committee meeting. Yeah, you could shut up this. So it's Wednesday, January 11th. We had a short meeting yesterday and wanted to invite the AG folks in early on and see how things are going with the agency and what we need there. There's something we need to help with or deal with as we'll get started on it. So I think we'll run around the room, Brian. Sure, Senator Collin, we're from the Rutland district. And Brian's a vice chair. Senator Irene Renner from Chittenden, North. Senator Brian Campion, Bank and County. I'm Rich Westwood, Senator from Rumaway. And Bobby Starr from Orleans County. And maybe we could do the same in the room. You want to start? Sure, Senator. Morning, Brian Hash, can you see that? Obviously, I am the Agriculture, Climate and Land Use Policy Manager. Good morning, Senators. My name is Stephen Glenn Allen. I'm the Director of the Public Health and Agricultural Resource Management Division. Good morning, Senators. Dave Huber, Deputy Director of the Public Health and Agricultural Resource Management Division. Stephanie Smith also. Same title as Dave Huber. Nice to see you all today. Good morning, everybody. My name is Glen Evans. I'm the Director of the Vermont Ag and Environmental Laboratory. Hi, good morning. I'm Steve H. I'm the Assistant Director for the Division of Water Quality. And hello, I'm Lawrence DiPietro. I'm the Director of Water Quality. Can you see that? Yeah, and we have Diane. Diane Boffel, Director of Administrative Services with the Agency of Agriculture and Administration Division. Yeah, and E.B.? Good morning, to all of our Senators. I'm E.B. Florey. I'm the Food Safety and Consumer Protection Division Director and also serve as our various section chiefs in that division. Yeah. Well, thank all of you for coming this morning. And we'll lead off this morning. The Secretary is away, I believe, this morning at a farm meeting in Franklin County. And so we're going to have, we're going to have him in at the end of the session to let him know how we did. But no, Senator, now we have Senator Welch was having a farm meeting up there and that was good that for Anson to be able to be there. He'll report back to us. I think we've got him scheduled then. Tomorrow? Yeah, tomorrow. Anyways, we may as well get started. Diane, would you like to lead off? Well, Senator Sarr, thank you very much for inviting us. You asked for some specific information on the dairy industry that myself and E.B. Florey will present. So would you like us to leave that to the end and let the other folks give their overview of the agency and we can utilize the last bit of time to go through that specific dairy information you requested for today? Yeah, you want to do that at the end. Give more time for specific questions potentially. Yeah. Okay. So I would, I would encourage the folks in the room to go first and and E.B. Florey and I would would round it out at the end if possible. Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Yeah. Thank you. So any one of you folks want to lead off? Ryan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what what you're doing and how it's going and we'll work our way around the room? Yes, sir. I'm more than happy to. I have provided a brief set of slides with this lemon to share with the committee and I will work to sign on to zoom so I can share the screen up there so you can see it from the email received. Yeah, an update on ecosystem services would be related to the payment for ecosystem services working group that was commissioned in 2019. It has been meeting diligently ever since there was a pause for COVID, but the group got back together in 2021 and has subsequently met 28 times in the previous two years so very active group of members. And I will stall a bit more to share my screen. Let's see if this works. Well, while you're getting ready, they will. Abby Willard, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us what you do. I'd be happy to. Senator star. Good morning, everyone. My name is Abby Willard. I'm the director of the Ag Development Division here at the Agency of Agriculture. Sorry, I can't be there with you in person today. I need to take my mom to a doctor's appointment. So I can share a little bit about the Ag Development Division and then can share some of our accomplishments and vision for the future. If that would be helpful. Yeah, and do you have any particular time crunch or time schedule that you need to watch for. Thank you for that. I can be on for the next hour and then I have to hop off at 10 and then I can come back at 1030 1045. So I'm happy to go early or go late, whatever, whatever suits the committee. Well, maybe we'll, we'll, we'll get through Ryan and then hop back to you and, and then. I'll try to keep it brief there under an hour for a brief update. Great. Everyone, hopefully seeing a brief presentation up there. So pay no free system services working group part of a long series of important discussions in the state. I just wanted to put a brief history here as I see it of some of the stash and Tory kind of precursors and what really created the pds working group, right? But, you know, to go back to at 64 2015, that was the first time a definition of healthy soil was put into statute for agriculture. It's been an important part of, you know, water quality for cleanup efforts. And it was subsequent to that part of the continued discussion on how agriculture can maintain viability as a sector and also work to improve not just water quality, but other ecosystem services. And so there were a series of bills over the next three years trying to define, you know, what is regenerative agriculture, what is regenerative soils, what is regenerative farming. And then ACC 4 2019 and after 83 of 2019 gave us two companion bills, one defining regenerative farming, in part and the other authorizing and setting up the soil conservation practice and payment for ecosystem services working group, which has subsequently received a rename and an additional charge from this committee in particular and then an extension in time for the working group to meet after providing a summary of the work that the group has done. The payment for ecosystem services or ecosystem services valuation was raised by the Farmers Watershed Alliance groups that exist in the State Champlain Valley Farmers Coalition, the Franklin Gray Valley Farmers Watershed Alliance, and the Connecticut River Watershed Farmers Alliance. You'll recall the joint hearing in the big room with the Farmer Watershed Groups to articulate the progress they've made since ACC 4 2015. This was in 2019 so it's been about three years of implementation and how farmers can be hired to provide additional benefit as one framework to look at. You know how farmers manager fields can have bilaterious or positive impacts on the environment and other ecosystem service outcomes. And so this, you know, farmers sit up and said we're ready, we're ready to do more, help set up a program to do this and from that came ACC 83 of 2019, which created the payment for ecosystem services working group. The legislative purpose for the group as charged in the bill was to establish a working group to recommend financial incentives designed to encourage farmers in Vermont to implement agricultural practices that improve soil health. There's that definition again, enhance crop resilience, increase carbon storage and stormwater storage capacity, and reduce agricultural runoff to waters. And, you know, agriculture in my view is a very exciting sector because it is a land use that can both provide food as well as provide those ecosystem service benefits at the same time. And you don't have to sacrifice one for the other provided you're applying the right types of management for the soils and the crops being grown. But that can take a significant amount of, you know, technical experience and specialized equipment, depending on the conservation practice or crop being grown. And so this started that working group process. ACC 83, as I mentioned, was the original genesis. The group met five times during that time period, held some webinars. Their discussion was very rich and there was consensus about this is there's something here, but we need more time to research study and recommend the right framework for Vermont farmers. So with, you know, the group was grateful for the extension, Act 129 and 2020 changed the name, which is, you know, what's the name and name is important, right? The first one was soil conservation practice and came for ecosystem services. Vermont and has a very rich history of paper facts programs, right? Financial assistance to implement cover crop as an example of the 75-90% of cost of milk when you get very effective. This group wanted to take a more holistic look at farming and think about performance outcomes. Think about what are the performance standards we want to set for agriculture and how to incentivize farmers to reach them and provide compensation for when they achieve those standards that exceed a particular threshold or environmental standard. So the name was changed to the paint for ecosystem services and soil health working group as soil health was the focus and the foundation from which these benefits are derived. Looking at soil as a living interface, not just an inner media in which to stir it up at fertilizer and seeds and grow stuff. It's a living organism and has to be stewarded as such. So putting that concept of soil health center and the working group title really set the stage for the conversations that were to come. Also added a number of members, I'll run through this members in a second, and then added a deliverable for a payment for ecosystem services report which is due to the Senate Committee on Agriculture and the House Committee on Agricultural Resiliency and Forestry on Sunday. So we'll make sure to get that in on Friday, but that will be quite a large report because there was a lot of research, but there is a specific recommendation for a program that I will get to. And myself, co-chair and other members and interest parties will be more than happy to come talk about the program recommendation and the plan that we have to implement the particular program. So I'm just going to give a quick preview and try not to take too much time on this because it's a very all-encompassing conversation. We've shared two reports with you. Okay, just takes a second. We've shared two reports, one was an interim report or two interim reports really that focuses on what we've learned and where the group things are going. So those are just here for reference. There are 18 members on the working group representing a multitude of different organizations and interests. The list of the members are presented here and we've had really committed participation throughout this process. So this is a diagram that you'll see in a second that is one that we put up to try to describe what are we talking about when we talk about ecosystem services. We can think about food and fiber as some ecosystem services that are provisioned by land when they're stewarded by humans to cultivate the land to grow food and crops. Depending on how land is managed, you can have numerous different outcomes positive or negative on pollination, air quality, water quality, aesthetic values, nutrient cycling, photosynthesis rates. But there is an ecosystem that is meant to be a broad holistic term to speak about the benefits that can be derived from management of agricultural swings. General Assembly in this community in particular worked to appropriate a total of $1.25 million to this program to deliver payments to farmers for qualified ecosystem services. And so what the working group has endeavored to do is provide a recommendation and a program for how to do that. In total the working group met 33 times since 2019 and that's not counting the steering committee meetings or the sub-pass group meetings that were convened as a part of this group. So it was very active meeting basically every other Tuesday to really dig into a lot of these questions. Also what was utilized or the group identified the need for technical research and University of Vermont and their researchers were hired to explore those topic areas. And they produced seven technical research reports which are available now and will be appended to the report for consideration. That looked at a number of different areas include pricing, measurement, farmer's survey and attitudes towards ecosystem services and payments. So trying to take again a holistic look at the components that we need to be strung together to A, accurately measure and monitor the provisioning of ecosystem services. Making sure it's done so through a program that's efficient and that also meets Vermont farmer goals. And so that's what the technical contractor dug into and provided seven very high quality reports. That's in the report we're going to get next week. Yes, Senator. It is currently available on the website but there will also be part of the appendix. We'll have them all there for your review. And through this working group process we developed six pilot program concepts and analyzed them for a number of different criteria. That's efficiency, benefit that goes to the farmer, cost to minister, anticipated ecosystem service benefits and those six example pilot programs will be also outlined in the final report. And then, you know, through all of that consensus was reached among the membership of the panel for ecosystem services working group to recommend by consensus a program that will enhance an existing federal program called the conservation stewardship program. Okay, I don't think that, okay. So it's enhancement to federal conservation stewardship program. It's going to incentivize farmers to enroll in the program and to accelerate and compensate conservation through the farmer adoption of practice enhancement required for CSP enrollment. The program is going to be a threshold based program and it's going to use the federal conservation assessment ranking tool for the assessment. It's going to pay to plan to get into the program and it's going to provide upfront incentive payments for implementation as part of the program. It's not going to focus on one specific resource concern at this time, but rather it's going to provide farmers flexibility within the confines of that program to address the enhancements and resource concerns that they most need to address. And it's going to provide and continuous improvement is going to be an important part of this program, including an end of first year review to look at how it's working for farmers and must be what the benefit is from the program. So at the end of the five years, it's a five year program. So at the end of the five years, are you going to do soil analysis or all during those five years to see if soil is actually improving and retaining more water and less phosphorus. The measurement component of this program is going to come in in phase three. And so the tool that was selected the cart tool and the research that the agency has done the companion tool are set shows that it is congruent with the state assumptions and monitoring that has happened. And so the big discussion is what is the cost to monitor and measure versus the cost to model and how good is our data at this time to rely on modeling tools to talk about the broader costs. And so even before actually C4 2015, there's been significant, you know, water quality and other conservation modern that's been happening. That gives us good confidence to say, if you're meeting the thresholds in this program, you are improving soil health further research within the cart tool to say exactly how many tons of CO2 are abated across a whole farm, or how many pounds of phosphorus, how many pounds of nitrogen are reduced as part of loss as someone that will come in phase three of the program. But each individual practice that is implemented through CSP will be reported to DEC and part of the state clean water reporting framework. And so those specific practices will be counted as the whole farm assessment that directionally now is congruent with improving water quality and soil health. Those specific outcomes on a whole farm basis will take more time to build that assessment framework. And so what you see on the board is confusing and detailed that this was the output of the yesterday was the last meeting of the ecosystem services working group. And this was the flow chart that was agreed upon for the program and how it's going to operate. What's conceived here is the need for additional technical assistance. It was articulated that there is more need for agrarian professionals and conservation professionals to work with farmers to help support them to apply and enroll in the conservation stewardship program. And so that is what's one part of the proposal is to fund that effort. And then there is within the CSP program an acknowledgement that the planning that you need to do is significant before you can even get into the program. And so similar to the state's pay for phosphorus program or pay for performance program providing a planning incentive payment. So when you complete planning you are there is an incentive for doing so. And there's a explicit offering because the standards in this program are such where not every farm will qualify for CSP. And so if you go through the planning process and let's say your farm needs to implement some cover crop or do some more proper rotations or work on that for a couple years. There's an offering for programs whether it's through NRCS the state programs or other technical financial assistance programs to support them to come up to the standards so that they can then enroll in the conservation stewardship program. The next part is once they're accepted they have to come up with a conservation plan to plan out five years management rotation. That's a long time on farms that can get really complicated. And so as an enhancement to or an incentive to do this work the program proposes to provide both a contract incentive payment for doing that planning and getting into contracting as well as to provide an upfront practice incentive payment. You may have to implement practices or you do have to implement practices across your farm not just in the cropland to be eligible for CSP. And so this can provide some upfront funding support to implement those practices. In addition NRCS also has program payments so that is the bulk of the payment is going to come from the federal side in their conservation stewardship program. This like many state programs is working to kind of fill the gaps that have been identified from on farmers and how we can leverage that existing federal dollars and provide an incentive payment for to get farmers into the program. So as I mentioned this what's been discussed is a phase program rollout what we just looked at was phase one. Big part of the charge as well as the goals of the working group are to next look at specific resource concern categories. So digging more into soil health digging into biodiversity questions digging into explicit water quality considerations. That is an area that there are potential grants available and the state or other partners can apply for to bring in additional funding to support emphasis and reward for meeting particular resource concerns that are quantified within this. Go ahead. I've got to check out at 930 for me so I'm just curious do we have when I think about schools in terms of education policy committee I always think. All right. This percentage of schools things are going well. These are the schools we really need to focus on do we have a sense of the number of farms or percentage of farms that you feel are sort of moving in this good direction already with soils. And you know you have a sense of you know farms that you know really we need to sort of help them focus on them. Is that sort of how you approach some of this stuff sometimes just help me as a member. Yeah. Absolutely. So we do have all sides of the spectrum that have shared comics about this. I've been doing this all along. I don't have to do anything more. Yeah. Why am I never eligible for programs because you got to have a problem to fix it is a common refrain. And so acknowledging that there are those stewards those farmer stewards that have been doing this all along. And there are those that for example are are doing good work or many standards but can do more. And so the CSP program is a good fit for those that have gone through the process of doing the regulatory compliance side right meaning the meeting T tolerable soil loss. You know compliant with crop rotation and management standards. Those are the type of things I would expect from a farm to be able to be eligible for CSP. And then of course you have the non-compliant farms which still need to do even baseline work to get into compliance with the environmental standards that Vermont has set. And so that's that's the specific breakdown. You'll get a presentation on kind of water quality compliance rates. And so I think that would be a good place to direct that question specifically about what does compliance look like and what we're doing. But to just kind of set the stage across Vermont's access for 2015 we've gone from less than 10% cover crop adoption rates to 48% last fiscal year across all programs. And so that's a monumental improvement in conservation which is reflective of the investments that the state put into our quality work as well as federal partners and all the programs. So it's definitely on a very steep upward trajectory in my viewpoint. And this is an attempt to aid provide recognition and compensation for those farms that have always been doing well. And also to incent you know that next level of conservation stewardship. And then phase three will be more specific performance outcomes around specific Vermont environmental conditions. And then there's my contact. Apologize for maybe taking a bit more. That's the brief update. There's a lot more to think into. Well, when we after we get that report we'll have you back and drill down deeper and go from there. Great. And I'll make sure there's a lot of members of the working group also that like to be very interested to share their perspectives. Yep. And I mean. And when is the public? Well, if Linda invites you can you invite them if some of them want to come in. I'd be happy to share that. Yeah. Because what we'll probably do is it sounds like we might want to set a couple of hours aside for the full report. At least in. And so that would be good. Yep. So Abby. Thanks, Ryan. Would you like to go on next. Yeah, I'd be happy to. I'd love to share a little bit about the development division with the committee. So again, good morning all, Abby Willard from the agency of agriculture. And I'm the director of our AG development division. The AG development division is one of the visions at the agency of agriculture. We are 21 staff division so relatively small with a non regulatory focus. But our agenda is to support Vermont's agriculture and food systems through a variety of ways. So we do a lot of grant making. We do marketing of Vermont products and Vermont businesses. Strategic collaboration with lots of partners, a fair bit of strategic planning thinking about the future of agriculture, and then connect businesses and partner organizations along the supply chain to critical resources. To funding or technical assistance or business planning. So many of you are, are well aware and very familiar with the work of the AG development division, but for, but for new committee members. That's sort of our overarching agenda. The division really looks at opportunities for expanding markets. So helping businesses find new market opportunities for their products, whether that's within Vermont, or throughout the country or even internationally. We also have a partnership with the food export program that helps get Vermont products to different countries and different cultures that are looking for our dairy, our maple, our value added and specialty products. We also are really looking for how businesses can grow or diversify and aim to become more viable. So it's become really clear to us and about that agricultural community in Vermont, and I think speaks to the growth of the AG development division over the last decade is this really close connection between economic viability of our communities and the health and viability of our agricultural economy. And businesses are changing and shifting and diversifying both what they produce and where they market their product and are really desperately in need of more support and more, more resources. We are known for bringing lots of federal funds into the state, both either to the agency of agriculture or support businesses as they apply for federal resources. Our division is organized into four sections. So the first being the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative, which is one of our signature programs. We've had in fiscal, excuse me, in fiscal year 22. The Working Lands program made a significant growth in its allocation so over $5 million last fiscal year and over $3 million in fiscal year 23. So historically we've had a relatively small but steady base allocation of under a million dollars somewhere around 595,000. And it's been wonderful to see that signature program that has such an impact on Working Lands so both AG and forestry businesses see a real boost in its allocation of both base funds and access to ARPA dollars. So that's one of our divisions or one of our division sections. The other is focusing on marketing and exports. So that's where we have programs that support our fares and our field days, as well as the Vermont building at eastern states which we call the big E down in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and the marketing and promotion of Vermont products and Vermont businesses across the country and internationally. So that's where our agritourism work occurs out of, which has become a far growing industry in the last couple of years and really recognized as one of the most rapidly growing areas of tourism in Vermont, which is agritourism. So these authentic experiences on farms and connected with farms and farming. We now have a market development program or excuse me section, which has a variety of programs including our farm to school and early childhood programming, which is getting kids out onto farms and local food into the classroom and to the curriculum. As well as we receive a block grant of federal funds called the specialty crop block grant program that's managed out of that section so that's really investing in our produce industry so fruits and vegetables, as well as maple and honey and Christmas trees so some of those specialty crops that are not our typical commodities. We also manage out of a few of those sections, some federal resources. So one is around marketing. Another is around support to the maple industry through USDA called Acer. Acer would be a relatively new program, which is called the local food purchase assistance program which is helping marginalized farmers sell their product to at risk and marginalized populations within the state so very exciting new federal resources coming from USDA. That's managed development section. As well as some federal funds that are focused on increasing the amount of local food served in schools. And a Northern borders regional commission program that's providing infrastructure investment support to our food pups. So looking at that supply chain and how do we aggregate product. Regionally from within Vermont and make sure that that product is making it out across the Northeast to retail and grocery and other wholesale accounts. And then lastly, go ahead, finish up having one last section area that I wanted to focus on. And it's a big one. And a really special kind of opportunity for the Ag Development Division and the Agency of Agriculture is the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center. So this was established a few years ago and it's an 11 state region managed out of the Agency of Agriculture here in Vermont. And we've had almost $39 million awarded to this center for projects that will extend through 2026 and support of the dairy industry. So those are sort of like the major program areas that the Ag Development Division is responsible for and Senator Starr I heard you so I want to take a pause if there was a question that you had. Yeah, I was going to ask. One of these divisions do you deal with the amount of food that goes from farm to the schools for the food lunch program. And are we, is there something that we're missing there with having the food centrally located geographically around the state and then dispersed from say a food hub to the schools. Is there a distribution system that that's set up or is there a food system that needs set up needs to be set up or It's a great question Senator Starr. I, we've been working on what we call farm to institution, which has been getting local food to K through 12 schools to colleges and universities into our healthcare systems and into our correctional facilities for 10 plus years. And we see a lot of nice when I say we I would say the agency of agriculture but also many partners have been working on this initiative and see a lot of potential in growing the amount of local food served in our institutions. And there are still many barriers and it depends upon the institution to know what it is so in schools it might be that we're only feeding seasonally so they're they're not open and and feeding kids typically throughout the summer in colleges it may be they are not doing year round, but the volume has been difficult for farms to to accommodate in correctional facilities it's primarily been a price point and as it has been in actually the K through 12 school systems also, but I would say the support of resources and state programs that have helped to make help overcome some of those barriers have been around price support so making it more feasible financially for schools and other institutions to purchase local food. There's also been a significant investment in the infrastructure of food hubs, which are working with the for profit distribution community to get that food to schools and I feel like that's working. Really well and we have a lot of that infrastructure established in the Northeast Kingdom down in Brattleboro and Shannon County and Central Vermont. So it feels like a lot of those historical barriers around distribution and kind of relationship building have been overcome in the in the most in most cases, I think we still struggle with paying a fair price to the farmer and having it be affordable to the institution that's then trying to you know process that food and turn it into food at a really low price point for their their population. I continue to think that this is an area of our food system that we're probably always going to have to make some investment in some subsidy in, especially if we believe in the value of feeding our kids and our, and our other at risk folks and their living in a hospital or a long term care facility or incarcerated. I think it's going to be something that we have to make a conscious decision that it's both good for our ag economy to have that market but also really good for those populations to have access to healthy nutritious local food. So there's other partners that we work with and staff within the ag development division that that that kind of live and breathe our farm to institution work which I'd love to have them share with you a little bit more. We'll have a farm to school impact report ready in the next month that would be more than happy and intend to share with this committee to share some of the accomplishments and and really creative visioning work that's happening in that sector so maybe we can continue that conversation in greater detail in the coming weeks. I think, you know, that's an issue that I believe the committee is quite interested in working on and then trying to find ways to work with the industry and the agency and promoting our home grown products. So that you know for a few reasons you know there's a supply chain problem getting stuff or showed up last year and you know we've got we have young people that want to get into producing you know food for our own people. So I think that you know once they we get going and the committee would like to hear from you and and others in regards to what we might be able to do to enhance that happening. I think there's it's a really thinking about serving our local markets has a really feel good component and it also when we talk with producers, they want to feed their community they I mean they want to be a viable business and they want to find markets outside of Vermont, but oftentimes they want to have a connection to their community whether that's their school, or their food shelves or their the colleges in their their county, and really feel like they're, they're making a contribution they they spend so much time and energy growing and producing food be able to then feed their neighbors and feed their community is really really important to them. And we do that in a variety of ways you know we have farmers markets and farms and lots of direct to consumer opportunities and that's where farm to institution or farm to school is one step removed because there's often a distributor, or an aggregator in the mix to get the product to the to the final. Yeah, Caroline. Thank you for the record Caroline born with rule of Vermont. Hi Abby. Happy New Year. I have two questions for you. I'm just bumping against that introductory statement that the development section is non regulatory in its focus for benefit of the committee. I'm wondering is that the direction of your division that's kind of set by the by the governor. I know you are also active in the farm to play policy team that's seeking to make policy recommendations to the state. That's that's I guess one avenue where regulation is also being discussed but also just internally I wonder who's assessing the functionality of existing programs. I'm just knowing that many of the programs the agencies administering when they're sort of supporting market development they are a piece of regulation and surely there's shortfalls that farmers flag with those and just wondering what's the internal process in place to kind of do those assessments or audits and make regulatory recommendations to this body and how to develop and improve them with but also beyond market based solutions. Yeah, Caroline interesting question and actually really great. An important role that I think the agency of agriculture plays as a whole I wouldn't say just the development division. The reference to the development division being non regulatory. A further explanation of that would be that we do not have as a division any statutory responsibilities to regulate or be responsible for compliance of any sectors within the community. And that is different than than many of the programs within the agency of agriculture. As an agency and across all of our divisions were really well known and respected as professionals that work with the industry both to seek compliance and enforcement but also development and opportunity and change and adjustment there's a lot of technical assistance that happens across our agency. And I think that, you know, EB and and Ryan and Nina and other folks in the room I think can really speak to a lot of in Laura who they see is on the on the virtual meeting can speak to a lot of that technical assistance that our programs provide. So specifically to your question in the development division. We do spend a fair amount of time thinking about policy adjustment thinking about new program opportunities. So listening information from our industry to learn where they're struggling where they're finding success where they are hoping for more resources and assistance. We do that in a variety of ways we've done that in surveys so we do an annual where we're just beginning to have our second annual survey of the meat slaughter and processing community that are both the federally and state inspected slaughter and processing facilities to understand what their challenges are what they're hiring and vacancy challenges are and where resources could be valuable to them around their infrastructure. So with our, our public health and resource management division, a hemp industry survey to get a sense of what is the hemp industry experiencing right now in the needs of policy or program development or resource support. And that's one strategy of just sort of doing it reach out to the industry in the form of a survey. And I think it's very much diligently with the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. Two years ago during the pandemic and creating the ag and food system strategic plan. And I believe that this committee will have an opportunity hopefully in the coming. I think on Friday even to hear from Ellen and Jake about the ag and food system strategic plan and you'll hear about the 1500 different Vermonters that were part of that plan and all the effort that was put into thinking about the future of ag commissions for enhancing the viability of agriculture in our food system. That looks at policy recommendations and our agency was a kind of a hand in glove partner with the SJF as they engaged and led that process. They engaged the future of ag commission through executive order two years ago and that 12 member commission spends significant amount of time so they need at least 12 times a year and address and learn and think and strategize around what are some opportunities and programs and policy and investments for the future of agriculture. So they submitted a report to the governor's office this past November and the previous November. So the 2021 plan submission is public and available on our website and I'm happy to share it and use it as a, as a, you know, kind of a talking points for where we found opportunity in the in the ad community, and hopefully, you know, following the budget address. I suspect that that report from November of 2022 will also be released with a kind of like a further enhanced set of recommendations that came out of that commission's work. So, again, engaging in these public processes and partnerships are other ways that we're looking at policy and new program investment opportunities. Thanks. Thank you, Abby. Diane, did you want to add something. I think Abby covered it really well. Thank you Senator I was just going to pretty much echo what she said but I think the other aspect of our regulations that we've been interacting with the legislature as well as organizations outside of state government to our regulations but they do open up markets within state and out of state meet inspection dairy inspection if you're passing that inspection, you can market your products anywhere, anywhere. And so it's not, you know, so that those are important aspects as well for those who want to market within state but also out of state or internationally. The regulations that we have and that we have been our regulatory aspects also open markets within and beyond state borders and also beyond our international borders. So those are important as well for four folks who want to market at that scale. Any other, anything else, Abby, that you want to add at this point or are you all set. I think I'm all set. I would just actually need to guess to additional points I just to give a con some context. The Ag Development Division last fiscal year awarded over $10.4 million in grants and contracts through about a dozen different programs to our ag community. So just to give you a sense of the amount of money that's both coming into Vermont and that this year, you know, this body the legislature has been involved in bringing resources to our ag community has been really appreciated when I looked at the Future of Ag Commission kind of action plan from last year. I think there was over three and a half million new dollars that came to the agency of agriculture and the Ag Development Division, and then an additional five plus million that came in the work that that Ryan patch spoke of so payment services and climate smart. So that's a significant amount of resources that we keep pumping into the ag economy. And yet still, you know, I just want to acknowledge that we see businesses struggle to be viable. We see people continue to be hungry. And we still have, you know, conflict and concern around how our natural resources are being managed and how neighbors are perceiving the farmers in their community so well I think we all work hard at both supporting businesses, building community understanding and appreciation for agriculture, the work, the work continues and I and I don't think, I don't think we're done yet. At the end of this week, you'll have two reports that that I have been a part of and I think there's probably others coming from the agency. So one would be kind of an initiative led by the Natural Resources Board, looking at accessory on farm business and that to 50 opportunities for the ag community. So some really strong recommendations there around how we can support businesses as they diversify and look for new opportunities to kind of retain more of that consumer dollar for the benefit of their business. And then the second would be actually that resulted out of a conversation that happened in this committee last year, Senator Starr was around new and aspiring farmer resources. And so we worked with the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, and did a pretty a pretty lengthy stakeholder engagement process to put together some new and beginning farmer support suggestions for this committee. And as well as we've created a new farmer resource page at the Agency of Agriculture. So we'll share all those resources with you once you get the report by Friday. It may make sense to come in and speak to those, those opportunities very specifically. Yeah. Well, I look forward to having a group in and and go through that report and see, you know, what what the next step is on our part to help you folks move that forward. Any other questions for Abby from. Also, no. Thank you, Abby. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Nice to see you all. So who would like to go now? Yeah. Thank you, Senator. My name is Stephen Cornell. The, as I said before, the director for the Public Health and Agriculture Research Agency. I'm new because the agency in the state moved here in July from Florida. After moving here was I was working at private agency at the time was contacted about this position. You know, the care some of you all may know carries a year. He was the director. He's one actually contacted me and today this position is coming up and applied was selected. So you're very happy to be you took care his place. Yes. Trying to take his place. I have never going to be able to take care of his place. In fact, we still talk carry all the time. But my background just for context. I'm an analogist specializing in integrated best management and agricultural best management structural best management. Work in private industry and came back to environmental faith studies and the structural best management industry but also was with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Service Services for about 30 years. We've been a strict program, very similar programs, fertilizer program, the seed program, the feed program, the best side program, the structural best management, the ski program. Yeah. So got a lot of similar experiences. This division and just to, you know, for the new members and just put it context again. This division is a small division with 19 full time employees and seven seasonal. But we're responsible for 13 statutes and all the associated rules in program areas. Feed seed fertilizer, pesticides, best management activities, mosquito control, a carry a carry industry. We also the public health portion of the division revolves around the mosquito control activities. But also we have a program to survey for arbo viruses. Both transmitted and arbo viruses is for our heart point more viruses and other diseases. And that's for basquitos and ticks. We have a certain amount of mosquito surveillance program. That's the seasonal part. One thing I forgot to mention in our list of responsibilities is the nursery industry and the plant production industry for landscaping. That's a big part of it and becoming a more important part of what we do. And as part of that, we also have a role in monitoring for invasive species, insects, diseases and weeds. So we've got a big role in that. And I might do deputy directors here with me because like I said, I'm new, I'm still on the upper part of the learning career here. And so I'm glad they're here and they can talk about individual, you know, their parts of their program and more detail, which I'll do in a minute. But the one thing I wanted to mention for the committee is the activities of the agricultural innovation board, which was an important committee that was established in 2021 and started their work in 2022. The board has met six times in 2022. We just submitted the annual report on Monday to the legislature. We are working toward, there are 13 members that are appointed by the secretary. We have a soil scientist, we have farmers, we have a certified crop consultant, we have a dairy industry representative. We have a university of Vermont extension. What we're working toward now as dictated by the legislature is we have to produce a set of recommendations for best management practices for seeds that are treated, treated seeds but not seeds that are treated with neonicotin, which is always one of the big concerns. And then we have a further chart in March of 2024 to provide a set of recommendations for the neonicotinoin treatment seeds. So we're working toward that. Yeah, we've already had some inquiries into our pollinators and how that's going and is that part of the report? Well, it's part of the committee's jurisdiction. Not just the committee but also our division, because we need to be a period management. And we have an environmental survey program that we're looking at in various aspects of that. But as an animologist, my graduate work involved pollinators, so I'm very interested in that whole area. And we have some resources we can devote to that. Seems like last year, the year before. Last year we did some work on that. And once we get rolling, we'll plug in some time to go over the report that's committee. Because we revamped that whole committee, if I remember right, to get it more balanced, I guess I might say. And there seems to be still some questions from our friends in the Senate. Yeah, it's about protecting our pollinators and making sure that we're doing what we can to. Yeah, and it's something we think about all the time and we're looking at. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Danny Huber, Deputy Director. He'll talk about his part for me. Sure. Good morning, members of the Senate Ag. Good morning. My name is Dave Huber, Deputy Director of Public Health and Agricultural Resource Management Division, as Steve was just mentioning. Last time I was in this room was walking in Senate Education through the daycare unionization bill back as Legislative Council back in 2013. So it's kind of interesting to be back in this room. I haven't been before you to testify, so I just want to introduce myself and a little bit of my background as well. As Steve just did, I used to prosecute cases with the Maryland Attorney General's Office Environmental Crimes Unit. Did defense work at a small boutique for some environmental cases. Worked over at Legislative Council, had worked over at the Department of Labor in Vermont. And then for the past seven years have been with the Agency of Agriculture, working with folks here before you. The first six of those years was with a cheap policy enforcement officer doing enforcement work for water quality and for the farm division. So if you have any questions about any sort of enforcement work, don't hesitate to ask. And in fact, that's going to be the bulk of what I would be touching upon today is some enforcement work for the farm division. Additionally, just for your awareness, there's a training group called NEAP, the Northeast Environmental Enforcement Project. I'm vice chair of their board of directors. It helps to set the training protocols for member organizations which span from Ohio to Maine down to West Virginia. We're included, Vermont Agency of National Resources is also a member, and we have been since 2016. Additionally, there's a group called the Association of Structural Pest Control Regulatory Officials. I'm a member of two of their committees. The first is Integrated Pest Management, which is acronymized as IPM. But I'll spell it out, Integrated Pest Management in Schools Committee, as well as their Inspector Training Committee, which helps to train inspectors from all 50 states. So there is a good finger on the pulse of training from the Agency of Agriculture as it relates to pesticide regulatory officials across all 50 states and even more within our Ohio to the Northeast quarter of Ohio to Maine down to West Virginia. Additionally, there's another group called the Pesticide Regulatory Education Program that's PREP. They work with EPA and with them I also am on a planning committee which helps to set all the trainings for this current 2023 year for pesticide regulatory officials. So the Agency of Agriculture tries to help out as much as we can with our expertise on pesticides and how we can help train others to the same. And either of you Dave's get in on the, I believe Elkhart just had a meeting and they postponed action on the railroad using certain pesticides for their tracks, was it that one? Not at Elkhart. Elkhart we have, right now we have the pesticide regulations in 91 regs. Those are going through Elkhart currently and we're scheduled to be back in attendance on January 19th. Yeah, so. You know, the railway permits for our railroads and the Agency of Transportation is something that we administer. And Paul, you know, we put restrictions on the materials they can be used. I'm not aware of another hearing on that but we can find, we'll certainly look into that. It seems as though I read something, you know, they spray the tracks so that the glass doesn't, and it seems like they ran into a snag. Well, certainly looking into that, definitely. We just asked, actually had it. Maybe A&R that was questioning some parts of it. Okay, we'll definitely look into that. Yeah, sure, thank you. Because they like, A&R likes bullying in on ag stuff as much as they can. Yeah, we'll definitely look into that. So are there other questions for either Dave or David? I'd like to go into a little more detail if you like. Yeah, I know not Stephanie, but you want to come next. Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to. I'm just going to provide some updates. Just general information about the programs that I manage within the Public Health and Agricultural Resource Management Division. So I manage the individuals that do feed seed and fertilizer product registration. And that is a primarily consumer protection program to ensure that what's on a label of one of those products is met through testing. So broadly that's what it is. For feed alone, the agency registers over 10,000 products. And those feed products include commercial feeds, pet feeds, pet treats, dosage form, animal health products. But it's a wide variety of products that the agency registers. Again, also fertilizer, which includes soil amendments, plant amendments, plant biostimulants, and fertilizer products. And we do testing, we take samples. So the field agents that Dave manages go out into the field, take samples of these products. And then we take them to the Vermont Ag Environmental Lab. It's a situation between the people in which the chain moves. And they get tested to ensure that they meet those label requirements. And so that's one program that I'm responsible for. There's the Food Residual Program. We turned in our annual report on Friday, maybe of last week. The Food Residual Program is enabled under Chapter 218 and Title 6. And it enables farms to import food residuals, which include both food waste, post-consumer food waste, Greek consumer food waste, and food processing waste onto farms for them to compost and build soil. We... Thanks for the question regarding this while she's chatting. Happy to think of the question. So I remember this came up a little bit with some constituents around their chicken farm, the food residuals. Did that ever get resolved? Do you remember that situation? Yeah, so this is a new program, and that integrates into the program that the agency has. So if you are importing 2000 cubic yards or less of these food residuals onto your farm and you manage a certain amount of chickens, or if you use a primary, compost that material and use it primarily on your farm, then it is considered quote-unquote farming. Okay. And that is part of the definition, integrated with the definition of farming within the RAPs. Thank you, certainly. Yes. So, yes. And so we are... We haven't gone through making yet for this program. We're still taking in information. So in the middle of 2022, we hired a new individual to help us do this work, and thankfully that was part of 2022 budget. So we have that individual. We have... We know approximately 15 farms that engage in this process of varying scales. The agency has participated in two outreach events with the Composting Association of Vermont to talk about what our standards might be and to engage with those that are engaged in this practice and to learn information from them. We've done five site visits to make sure that what we're doing when we go through the rulemaking process, that we're not adopting unreasonable standards that can't be met on farms that are currently engaged in this practice. So we're taking in a lot of information, and it's going really well. And we're actually submitting a proposal for a conference coming up in May. So we continue to engage with constituents. I managed the HEMP program, but we are transitioning away. I want to mention that Abby said that we did a market survey, studying that survey is out. We sent it to all of our HEMP participants in 2022 to gather information about gaps and challenges that those individuals might see in the HEMP market in the state of Vermont. The state of Vermont has, from the growing perspective, has turned over this program to the United States Department of Agriculture. And if an individual in the state of Vermont wishes to grow HEMP in 2023, they must register with USDA to do so. So the cannabis board is not going to do HEMP? This is, I'm not going to get into what the cannabis control board is or isn't doing. I'll let them speak to that. But what I can say is that if an individual wants to grow a federally compliant crop that can cross state boundaries, they must be registered with the federal government to do so. What about, and there's a couple of people that want to build two different manufacturing facilities for HEMP, one in St. Jay and one down lower? As long as they buy HEMP or our primers that want to grow HEMP, take it there, who do they deal with, Vermont or the feds? So if an individual wants to grow HEMP for fiber, they would register with USDA. But the manufacturing business does not have to register with USDA. But the growers would have to register with USDA to grow fiber HEMP indeed. And what is the reason for that? Well, so there's some benefits that farmers will see. They don't have to pay a registration fee to the agency. It's a free registration at this point in time. They obviously have other costs that they'll have to endure buying seed, getting equipment, labor, so on and so forth. It is a three-year registration with the United States Department of Agriculture. They will be able to use for their potency test to determine whether or not that crop is compliant. They can use a lab anywhere located in the United States. They don't have to use any labs located in the state of Vermont. So there's some benefits there. And there are some states that, well, never mind, that's no longer an issue that aside. But we turned over our program to USDA. And we've done a tremendous amount of outreach to all of our growers to make sure they're aware of it. Currently, the state of Vermont has three growers that are registered with USDA. We've had meetings. We brought USDA to the state of Vermont. We met in Cornwall and it was a warm November night, I think. I mean, we, in this building, spent a lot of time setting that program up. And I not kind of fell on its ears. We had a lot more growers than we had processing and facilities to handle it. But if they get going on the fiber, I mean, I can't see where that would be any different crop than growing oats or barley or wheat or, you know, it's just one more crop that would be available to utilize our land. That's a true statement. But the growers that are in business, they were all in agreement with letting the feds take that over? We did not hear any complaints. The standards are the same, whether the state of Vermont was administering the standards for an application requirement where USDA was. And certainly, because there's no cost currently to register with USDA, that is we were charging between 25 for a personal grower through $3,000 for an indoor over 500 square feet of growing. So that's a cost savings to some extent. And again, the registrations for three years, it's not an annual registration. So if someone was growing over 5,000 or 500 square feet for three years, that would be $9,000 to register with us, whereas with USDA, there's no cost. At this time, I can't speak for what many years. And I think we all thought at the time that it was going to be a real thriving business and there was going to be some money to be made. And we sort of set it up, these registration fees to cover the cost of having the inspections done and the testing done and all that. But anyways. I want to say, though, that it is a thriving industry in the state of Vermont. We have many, many, many growers that are making money in this business. And we have the fiber processor located in St. Jay and I think Barak. Barak or something of that sense. They're interested in expanding their market. They had a fiber grower that grew six acres for them last year who intends on growing 50 acres for them this year. So I think there's still tremendous opportunity. We have lots of successful businesses. The fact that the agency is getting out of administering this program should not be a reflection on the industry itself in the state of Vermont. Yep. Anything else? The nursery program that Steve mentioned. I'm not going to go into that again. We manage nurseries and we ensure that the basic pests don't get traded. And then the pesticide certification and training program as well as pesticide registration. We do that as well within the division. And yeah, so the pesticide certification training program. We ensure that individuals that are using I think restricted use pesticides are properly trained to ensure that misapplications don't happen. And there's 11 categories. I'm looking to my fellow colleagues here. 11 categories. For instance, tree, forest, pesticide spraying. We ensure that the people that are doing those activities, potentially for spongy moth, that they are certainly educated in order to make those applications and don't put the public health and safety at risk as well as those food industries that apply for rodents. And that again protects public health and safety in those applications. And so we ensure they're educated to ensure that rodents aren't in the industry or in commercial businesses. Thank you. One question. Is there a pesticide rule that's happening right now? Are you adding about it? Do you know anything about that? Can you just, as a new member, can you just tell me a little bit, Steve? Yeah, you'll have to take that up. And as a side of that, anytime anybody has any questions about anything personally, please reach out to us. So it is in the process. So we have a rule that Dave worked very hard on for quite a while. And it's at the end stage now. January 19th. Any details you want, we'd be glad to go as much depth as you want. I appreciate that. Thank you. In the AAPA areas, they do have pollinators. So, Stephanie, you mentioned the fertilizer and feed testing. How is that all working out? Are you finding most of the samples to be accurate? So, that's why we do testing. My understanding for the, hold on a second, I have numbers here. For fertilized samples in 2022, 95 were collected. 336 chemical analyses were done for nitrogen available, phosphorus, potash, and numerous secondary nutrients, such as calcium, magnesium, sulfur, so on and so forth. And 26 of those fertilizer products failed. So that's, you know, that's 27% for fertilizer. They failed because they didn't have to write ingredients in the bag or they failed because of some of the ingredients were wrong. They failed to meet the label claim, the guarantee on the fertilizer product. Wow. That's not a very good score, about 72% or 3%. Yeah, 27. And the process is, we do send out, if there's a penalty that meets a certain threshold, we send out letters to the provider of the fertilizer, and they have to pay a certain amount of money to the farmer to make them hold for the deficiency. So that's for the fertilizer. And on the feed, 177 samples were taken in 2022, 910 chemical analyses were run. By the Vermont Ag Lab, Ag and Environmental Lab. And those, they're looking at protein, fat, fiber, moisture, and secondary nutrients. And then 20 of those failed, 64 passed, and 67 were within tolerance. So there's a tolerance piece there. And then there's, we have, 26 are still in progress. So we still have some samples. And then 22 that failed. 20 that failed. 20. Yep. There's a lot there. Potentially on protein, potentially on fat, and potentially on fiber. It's not, yeah. So it's, it's incremental. Maybe then, I'm not too on the spot, but I'm sorry. No, no. Yeah, so fail at least one of those parameters. One of those parameters. We got that in writing. Well, you do a report. We do a report. I would be happy to show that. Yeah, a link to the report. I don't know how long the report is. It would be, if there's a synopsis to the report, that would be nice. Yes. We have the executive summary, and then we have all the analysis. We could get the executive summary. Great. See, both, both of those issues are products are very expensive. And so it's important to keep those standards. Matt. Yeah, I have a question. Yeah. Thank you, Senator. Again, for the record, Caroline Gordon with move on. Stephanie. Just back on on farm composting of food residuals. We have a meeting on August 4th, 1, 2021 from 2021. And section eight, a spelled out that the agency shall file a final proposal of the rules on a before January 1st of this year. I was briefly looking over the Friday report. And I was, I think I was missing kind of an outlook of when we might see that filing for the rule. So we, so we perspectively have not put in a perspective of we continue to be more sure and learn and eliminate adjustments. So we have not produced a final copy of the rule as of yet. It's still in a draft form. And we're working closely with our, with the Water Quality Division as well in that conversation. So yeah. We've been working with poultry farmers for many years on this issue and we've submitted draft rules early last year. And we all hopefully understand that any kind of market development for this innovative act practice is stalled in promotion until the rule can be adopted. So we would like to see this move rather sooner than later so we don't lose another summer and getting the word out. Yeah, is that something working on this? So we work very closely with the Composting Association of Vermont and they have drafted guidance and we've reviewed that guidance and generally we would see because this is a farming activity all the setbacks associated with surface water and groundwater and composting on bedrock. All those standards that currently exist in the RIPs would be the guidance that we would provide to any person engaging in this activity because it's considered farming. So we do have that information and that's clear and I'll let Laura interrupt me if it's... Yeah, and I just carried Laura to each of our agencies. Caroline, what were you referencing the dates? We don't have a date in Section 8A. In Act 41, Section 8A, that has not been adopted in the Chapter 218, as I can see online. Right, yes. But it's in the Act that passed. That's a true statement, yes. That it was to be adopted by and we have not had that date. Correct. So that's something you're working on? We're working on and again we're working with the folks that are engaged in this activity. We are providing guidance both through the Composting Association of Vermont and then also we reference the RIPs, the required agricultural practices. So while we don't have rules in place, we're working towards more rules and we want to make sure that they're not unreasonable for the activities because people are engaged in this already and have been well before the passage back 41. So we want to make sure that whatever we adopt meets the needs for environmental safety and compliance as well as addressing nuisances but also takes into consideration those farmers that are doing this work and so we've begun to do that work by reaching out and doing site visits. So we're active. I'll save it. We are in there. We're talking to people. Yeah. So thank you. I know the last couple of years things have been crazy to try to get done and meet and with the pandemic and everything. But overall the Composting situation is working quite well for the small farms. We have approximately 15 farms that are engaged in this activity. At least four of them have actual certifications from the Agency of Natural Resource. So they have standards built into that certification. And then we also, we have a list of smaller farms that are engaged in the activity and a majority of them are actually composting and they're not selling it to the marketplace. They're just building soil on their own farms. Yeah. And they're fairly small, but yeah. We're out there. We're talking to them and we're gathering information and hopefully it will address their challenges and assist in their development. Yeah. So anything else, Stephanie? No? Thank you. I think probably before we start our next witness committee which should take a little break maybe. Sure. Ten minutes. Great. And, you know, if you want to get up, walk around or whatever. So we'll come back 25 hours first. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. You're going to want to be a witness. You ready to go out and play? Wonderful. Yeah. No, thank you for your time, Senators. So I have a couple of just two short slides here. I just wanted to share my screen here for a moment. So thanks again for your time today. So I just wanted to give a very brief introduction to the Vermont Agriculture Environmental Laboratory. So you can understand what happens in that space and a little bit about our activities. So we occupy a facility that's on the Vermont Tech campus in Randolph Center. So we're fortunate to have a building that's relatively newly commissioned back in 2019 that provides fairly state-of-the-art testing capabilities. So when you think about the Vermont Ag and Environmental Laboratory, there's really kind of two ways to look at that. On one hand, you can focus on the analytical lab. That's our testing capabilities, the stuff that we can do and generate data on that informs a whole host of projects, both from the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, as well as the Agency of Natural Resources, as well as the building itself. So the laboratory space itself, which is not only home to the variety of analytical testing labs, but also home to a number of very important programs and many of which have been represented in the room here, as well as folks from the Agency of Natural Resources, looking at the Department of Environmental, excuse me, at the DEC, as well as fish health, also are home to weights and measures, so the folks who do all the pump calibrations and maple syrup hydrometers and everything in between. So it's a very collaborative space. It's a very engaging space to be in, and as long as our steam is functioning, we're able to do a lot of good work. So just a little bit about the lab and some of the activities that have been specific to the analytical spaces. So we run over 30,000 analytical tests a year. We have a staff of 14 full-time employees and we're approved with over 100 different testing methods. And so we have a really broad spectrum of testing capabilities, and in each case, we strive to provide quality data. So I'm very proud of the systems in place at the lab that are for quality assurance purposes, meaning that the work that goes into developing the testing methodology to actually running the test and then recording it out is very defensible. So it's robust, it's reliable, so that that data can form a good action. We're a nationally accredited lab. We participate in a number of processes internally and externally that keep us in good stand. So some of the different testing activities that we do on a day-to-day basis at the lab include work with milk and dairy products. So this is everything from product quality as well as consumer safety. So looking at antibiotics, looking at bacteria, looking at pasteurization, looking at milk fat content, so a wide array of parameters. Again, from a quality or a safety standpoint. Cyanotoxins, I'm sure some of you have heard about blue-green algae and the impacts that can have on the state from a drinking water perspective as well as recreational waters. So this past year, the lab took on responsibilities for testing for the toxins that those algae produce and it's likely that we'll grow that testing capability here in the coming season. As Stephanie had mentioned before, we do a number of feed seed and fertilizer testing. So again, from a label-guarantee perspective, making sure that what's in the package is what they say is in the package. So we report those out from the samples. We also take pet food analysis. So any manufacturer who's going to sell pet food in the state goes through a similar label-guarantee process. Again, making sure that it's a quality product and that what's on the label the consumer can rely on that. From a pesticide standpoint, we're very actively engaged with Steve and his team. We participate in two key areas with pesticides. One is our routine analysis. And so these are brought about through specific projects, whether it's neonicotoid or its glyphosate, but looking at some of the ripple effects, looking at how those are being utilized and where those products are going. We also get heavily involved if there's any misuse investigations. So in the case of a complaint that comes to the agency, we respond, we provide a chain of custody process for the samples so that we have defensible data to either inform that the complaint is valid or to invalidate it. So that's where we get involved. We have tens of thousands of water quality samples that we receive. So firstly, any of Vermont's lakes and streams and other bodies of water, we're doing data analyses to inform whether there's phosphorus runoff, other types of nutrients, metals, bacteria, presence or absence of pesticides. So really, again, trying to monitor and inform for keeping our bodies of water safe. And then from the air quality standpoint, we're involved with an EPA testing process that evaluates air quality in all the states and so for the Vermont state component. We accept those samples and evaluate those for air toxics and heavy metals. Of course, please just say we have some very good air. Where do those samples come from? So there's air quality. Who collects them? It's a great question. So we work with the collection partner, Jenny Bershling, in the agency of natural resources. So they do the collections through the mandated processes. There's designated sites throughout the state. Oh, there are designated... Correct. So basically it's year round. It's on, I think it's a 12-day schedule. So every 12 days we get a sample in. And so they can get a very accurate picture of quality over time. Is there a certain time of year that we have better air quality than others or do you know that? Senator, that's a great question. I wish I could tell you that off the top of my head. I don't without looking at the data. And typically in this case, this would be data that were the intermediary. So we would generate the quality data. We give the report to the collector, in this case, Jenny. And then she's able to analyze that and determine how we're doing in terms of our air quality. Yeah. It seems like in that, like this morning, we were really cold and fresh. It seemed like the air was pretty darn good. Brian? Thanks, Senator. Do you test for DEC? What's your relationship there? Do they ask you guys to test things or these things that you're all sort of testing like for A and R? What's that sort of relationship, I guess? So Senator, that's a great question. So the lab has run through the agency of agriculture, food and markets. But in collaboration with the agency of natural resources, the DEC is a part of it. So we strive to serve both needs of both agencies. So are you the lab for the state, for example, the PCDs? You're the lab that we're going to. And I guess my other question, we just, Senator Starr, a few of us were up at UVM visiting some folks. How do you work with UVM in terms of testing and that kind of thing? Do you do much with UVM? So Senator, that's a great question. So there's two areas in which we get involved. From a testing standpoint, UVM right now is handling a lot of the soil testing for agriculture quality. For you? Well, it's not through us directly. It's more for the monitors. So we just, that's kind of their area of expertise. And their capacity is developed there for that. Okay. So they handle that part of it. The other area where we engage has been with collaboration with researchers and faculty members there. So for instance, there's some work potentially for this common season with neonicotoids and how they might move through the soil. And so we're collaborating with a faculty member there at UVM to potentially get some of that testing. Thank you. They've done soil tests. Through the extension and it's just stayed there. We had a great tour and a lot of it was focused on ag stuff. It's just incredible what some of the students are producing. This committee had a great tour last year of the testing lab. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I see Diane has a question. Mr. Chair. I didn't see you up there in the corner. I know I'm stuck in the corner. I can't help it. But thank you, Senator. To elaborate on Glenn's answer around the laboratory and our interactions with A&R, agency and natural resources and the Department of Environmental Conservation. When the lab came together was to be built in statute. It states will have a, an MOU and a lab governance board. And so that governance board is made up of members from the agency of agriculture and the agency of natural resources. Secretary Moore and Secretary Tibbets are both involved and alternate as, as chairing that governance board. So there's a lot of interaction and a lot of discussion. Glenn is in the middle of a strategic planning of where trying to figure out what's next, you know, these things keep coming up of PFAS and what's coming and what does a lab need to prepare for. So having representatives from both agriculture and the agency of natural resources on a governance board, you know, helping to what's next, if we can tell, I mean, things pop up, but a lot of interaction. The lab was the last to be rebuilt after tropical storm Irene. It was washed out in Waterbury. And the first floor was the agency of agriculture. And the second floor was the agency of natural resources in that old lab. So it was a legislative decision to combine the two and to have this manner of governance so that it would be a strong interaction of what we're doing and where we're going. So we're, we're still working with the agency of natural resources. They do so many tests that getting the information out that, you know, the lab, the lab, their lab can do testing and bringing some of those tests that had been sent out in house, et cetera. So still a work in progress, but a lot of interaction there and a very good, a very strong partnership and working hard together to make sure we do as many tests at this laboratory as possible. And, you know, sending it out of the, you know, using an outside lab, the, the state lab has to be, you know, we can undercut an outside lab. So, you know, making sure we cover our costs, but not, you know, making, we're not, we're not a for-profit lab. So it's a, it's a very good partnership and work hard together and, and really, I think that's important to put out there that how much the interaction is going on. Yeah. Thanks, Diane. Go ahead. Thank you, Senator. So, and then just to summarize, and thank you again, Diana, I appreciate your additional history there. But just to summarize a few of the new areas that we're actively engaged in right now. I think one was already mentioned with PCBs and air. So we are the state lab to do that testing specifically to meet the requirement that Vermont State Schools air quality is tested for the presence or absence of PCBs. So we're actively involved working with, with ANR on that process. And then as I know, you've probably heard PFAS is often in the news as a potential contaminant that can be in water, soil and food. And so having the capacity at the state level to again test for that presence at a very low level, we're talking parts per billion is important. And so we've, thanks to some investments that were made in the last legislative cycle, we've invested in instrumentation and staffing that will enable us to jumpstart that process and have that capacity hopefully this year. So that hasn't started yet? Yeah. So we have testing. So thank you for the question, Senator. So at this point, we have the instrument necessary and we have a person who will be joining our team at the end of January. How to lead our PFAS testing program. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the PCBs are testing us. I don't know if the standards are changed or what has happened, but we have town and community after community that is finding themselves in a position where they got to vacate a building or make plans to leave like a schoolhouse and that cost is terrific. You know, I made a comment. I don't know, somewhere is that J.P. Spearier just sold. And you know, there's three big hotels. There's a water park that costs millions, an ice house for skating, a golf course, countless lifts and gone to all who said, and that's all for $77 million. And we hear, well, I think Fairfax was the latest one. They're voting on a $37 million renovation plan. Burlington High School, they need $177 million to replace their high school because of PCBs. So it's, you know, it's really costing a lot of money to correct problems that went on 20 years ago. Yeah, Irene. Fairfax is in my district. They just voted yesterday to pass the bond from that renovation. And just to be clear, it is not related to PCBs. It's strictly about classroom expansion. They did tests for PCBs. The results came out just in the last couple of weeks. And they aren't below the threshold. So that's one school district that's not dealing with PCBs. But yes, they are spending a lot of money to renovate that school for other reasons. Mostly just, it's a smaller place. They have too much family up there that's getting converted. That's one of my issues. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. One of the reasons I want to be on this from you. Yeah. Well, hopefully we can keep what we have going. Yes. But Burlington, indeed. Yeah, that's all PCB related events. Yeah. My modeling, what? Can we mandate it to testing last year? Yes. Yes. They're not the only ones. Thank you. So anything else going? No. Well, thank you for your time, Senators. I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming up. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to go back to the cannabis issue. And I probably should have asked the question earlier. Who tests that? And from what I understood, if you're strictly raising or growing it for fiber, you now can have to register with USDA. I think I heard that this morning. How about if someone's growing it for both? Because there's a THC threshold. So who decides kind of helping to understand that whole scenario, if you would? Sure. Thank you for the question. So I'm probably not the best person to answer it, but I'll attempt to answer it anyway. Well, I was just asking about the testing. So from the testing component, I think, so we have the cannabis control board. Right. And they're in their infancy. So they're trying to establish what the testing protocol would look like. So they have an array of tests from everything from heavy metals to the THC level, the modency to the bacteria, the molds. And so they're developing what that process would look like. And then our lab potentially may get involved to serve some of those testing needs. But it's a question of having the capacity to do that at this point. So we don't test at the moment. We send it out out of state. So at this point, we did do testing this past season, but specifically with hemp. And this was strictly from the trust and verify approach. So we have a hemp sample. Is it truly hemp or has the THC level gone to a point that it's cannabis? So we did do that testing within our organic section. Again, I think the challenge has been internally while we'd love to grow our testing capacities to meet that need. But right now, we've prioritized work with the PCB and air testing and the PFAS testing. And in terms of the chemical need, these have all originated from our organic section. So it's really an active growth area in terms of the testing needs. OK, thank you. Sure. Any other questions for Glenn? So thank you, Glenn. Thank you for your time. If you need to leave. I appreciate it. Hopefully, maybe this year or next, we'll get down and visit the lab in college and we'll stop and see you. We'd love to see that. Great. Thank you. Yep. So we're almost here. Staying the best for last. Well, we still got Diane. I just put you as co-op. So try again and see if that works. All right, well, let's move forward. And so I want to invite and welcome you to introduce Nina Gage here. I for the record am Laura DiPietro. I'm the director of water quality and I've been doing this for a while. Now me being a decade. But Nina, it's new. So I'll let you just introduce yourself to us. Hi. Hi. Nice to meet you all. Same here. My name is Nina Gage. I grew up in Brooklyn County, Brandon, Vermont. My folks are still there. And I studied at University of Vermont in Bachelor of Environmental Science and Environmental Studies from Grudensee School of Environment and Natural Resources. A lot of my backdrop in school was around social science work. So I'm very interested in the behavioral aspects of our work in terms of changing the culture of what farms are doing in Vermont. I've been working for the water quality division for the past six years behind the scenes. So I am both nervous and excited to be here with you today. But I look forward to assisting you with your needs throughout the session and in collaboration with Laura. So thank you for having us today, an opportunity to introduce a little bit about our programs. Yeah. So, all right. So I know we've gone through this a lot in other committees, but certainly give you a high level of sort of what we do and then as the session goes on we expect we'll come in for specifics of what you need. But generally, what the agency of agriculture does in water quality, because that's what we're doing obviously in our division, is we deal with non-point source. And so there is, the way they set up is DEC does the point source work. And they are required to have us do the non-point source work. And there's an MOU and we work together and collaborate in that space. And so, we have the majority of inspectors, we have the grant programs, we have all of the work to do the water quality agricultural efforts. And when we find something that is so significant that it might be a point source, we have to send that over to DEC. And so we have a process with that. And we can explain more over time as that comes up with their questions. But that's generally what we do. So we do education and outreach. And that is put to our partners. So the clean water budget is the majority of our budget. And we take that money and then we move it to partners. So folks like UVM that you went to visit and conservation districts, they take those funds and they run programs. So for instance, like the UVM will, we've outsourced the customer newer applicator. So every farmer who hires a customer applying a new one on their farm, they should be doing it by the rules. And farmers also have to get education as well. There's a requirement for that. So they run those programs to have these opportunities so that people can access them. But of course we do our own education and outreach as we need to about our programs and practices. We inspect and enforce on farms and this is the majority of work that we do. We actually we have two office locations and I know a lot of folks are remote. We do have our Williston office is near the, is it resourced? It used to be goodwill. But it's right behind there and it's actually the USDA office there. So there's a nice collaboration with Farm Service Agency and the natural resource conservation service. But that is where our staff are located that do all of this regulatory work and also our engineering technical work is there in that office. So there's a lot of folks that basically move the money, right? So we go and visit farms so we broke farms down into categories and the large farms have for us they have an individual permit so we have a little more scrutiny on them and we visit them a lot more often. So we visit them every year. And this is all in statute that we have to do this. The medium farms we visit them every three years. And then the certified farm farms that's a relatively new category came out of the act at 64 of 2015 which is basically anybody with 50 or more cows, if you think about it in the dairy world. So we inspect them every seven years. But of course any one of these farms the moment we step on their farm and if they have any issues, we don't disappear for one year or three years or seven years. They become part of our regular cycle until it gets resolved and then they go back into that cycle as necessary. So we do a lot more visits and we'll show you some data about all of this but that's predominantly what we do. Is that my neighbor out there? It might be, yeah. Right down the road in the south. Yeah, so we inspect production areas, we inspect the fields we walk around every single thing in the production area like a silage bunk or a manure storage. We walk every ditch as far as we can walk. So we spend a lot of time getting a lot of miles. It's the one service we offer. We allow people of budget to buy boots because we don't have anything more valuable than a good pair of boots when you have to spend your entire day outside walking for very many miles. So and then these technical financial assistance programs, the kind of things that they do, these are just photographic examples which oh good, you don't see what I see. Using on the left that's a cover crop and so we have a lot of money that comes into the agency and farmers do a lot too. We'll show you the data about that to help plant that and then the two middle pictures here, grazing is another area that has increasingly been, it's always been something Vermont has done right, but as far as the cost share programs, we've been trying more and more to develop a space there and I will tell you admittedly, the agency that doesn't have a staff position who is a grazing specialist right, UVM extension generally does that work. We help them for instance have a position so that they can go and do this work. So we move the money to make sure that people have watering tubs or fencing, laneways, etc. But that is one space where there is a gap out there in terms of the capacity to serve us. So that's the organic, a lot of organic. It's more than organic. I mean all heifers are generally on pasture if they can be on a farm at some level so there's a lot of farms still have absolutely a component of that. Have you done testing on fields where the animals are out pasturing and farms that combine their animals. Do the soil tests run any different the cows are out there punching little bits, making little marks in the soil to retain water near and all that. Is there any difference in what happens to soil between? I'm not going to be able to answer your question holistically because it depends on every farm. But if you were to grab a research paper that described what each farm was like then I think you could respond to that. And Heather Darby is definitely a great one to ask. She has been taking a lot more soil health tests. They take soil health tests as a regulatory requirement. So we don't do any soil testing. We require it by the farms but they're only required to get nutrient analysis. So they're not required to get soil health or water capacity, organic matter. We're going to have to maybe start doing more soil testing if we're going to produce tapers supporting what Ryan is doing. And that effort is doing that. And so again, there's a number of tests that have been done in the state and generally what they found is Vermont actually does really well because we are a manure based state. Midwest they're not manure based agriculture and in Vermont we are which as a resource into the soil it actually creates good organic matter and water retention. But defining whether pasture or regular hayland or cropland or the pasture, right? Stocking density and all those other things. So it all depends. Yeah, I don't know because I live on the farm I grew up on and remembering you know when we used to do the hay and then you would pasture or you would let the fields grow up in the cows and they would make little holes in our earth with their feed huffs and then you would have rain and you know they would poop in them fields and the rain water and everything else would run down through and get when those hook prints and it just seemed like the hay and the next year would be good but now if you don't fertilize those fields because the cows are gone and there's no cows in there punching little holes in the soil to let the water in with you know you still get some but it's different and I don't know that's just you know visually seeing things and wondering about things again UBM might be able to answer your question a little better than I can because they look at that type of data and have analyzed it pretty extensively maybe conservation districts do they do anything like that they're usually partnered with UBM so I think UBM would be a good source to go to and the picture on the right is our capital equipment assistance program so we have been given money we do around a million dollars to help farmers buy equipment that does a next level innovation into the farm field so that's injection that's an example yeah see that that leads back to the marks in them you know in this one that rate goes down through and makes little scratches in the soil so this specific equipment is called a grassland shallow slot manure injector produced by the Netherlands where this technology come from it injects manure shallowly below the soil surface it's specifically designed for hay and forage based fields typically if you're injecting on a hay or grass field you're going to see pretty substantial impact to your hay crop so hence a lot of farmers for a long time were really resistant to it this technology has created a pathway for hay fields where we in Vermont a very large majority of our agricultural fields are in perennial systems in grass or hay so it's provided a new opportunity we've developed a few of these systems across the state to support farms both through individual farmer agreements as well as cooperative and sort of extension or conservation district supported shared equipment has that been running long enough to determine if you get a better crop off a field that this injector system has gone through then say a mechanical regular mechanical manure spreaders gone through I don't know the details of the comparison studies but I know that we supported UVM Extension a couple years ago to look at some of the impact unfortunately the years of study were impacted during the drought year so some of the initial results were you know not ideal just considering the drought conditions of the season and that was work that Kirsten Workman had taken on she was in the left-hand position at UVM so I have to check in with them on where things landed in terms of research but it's still pretty new it's a new technology but folks are excited about yeah okay so and then we also have our biggest program as far as the amount of budget dedicated towards it is what we call our BMP best management practice and so these are just before and after examples this is the capital infrastructure going in on farms and production areas so concrete and whatnot but you know we don't buy barns as an example but we may help create a barn yard to control runoff and then have that directed into a manure storage so that way then it can be appropriately land applied to a nutrient management plant or in the lower one you know help a lane way more animals because they're going in and out for milking every day multiple times a day that impact can really build up and so trying to help make it reinforced so they can come through and scrape it and manage the material and we have engineers that help design that work we also work with NRCS which is the federal partner and we have shared engineers as well so we will work to create our you know, use each of our budgets to be able to make sure we get this work done so those are gravel packs or those lanes they're concrete in this particular that's like for a barn yard or a feeding area well this is clearly near the barn much more heavier used area they're probably going to stand there and aggregate before they go in to milking but you're correct if we were out you know moving them out to pasture for instance they would likely be more of a gravel base we wouldn't we don't put concrete highways for animals to get up to pasture and everything we do is you know at least cost best practice so yeah that's kind of a muddy place there that before you come create it and get us a great drainage and get the you know so the roof water doesn't any longer come through there it can be drained outside of it so it doesn't get wasted so it can make more volume of waste we want to try and reduce the volume of waste that we have to manage so this part I'm really really excited because I think the event has done an amazing amount of work of the last couple of years we've come to you and we've reported things over time there's always those questions of what are you doing with our resources and how are farmers doing in terms of implementing things and you know we can give you paper reports but they're just not as fun to be on and so this is an interactive space where this is the first time it's being shown to anyone so you are getting yeah you are the first opportunity to see this we've been able to take all this data with new staff and resources that we've had over these last couple of years we've been hiring some really intelligent folks which has been great because they've got all these skills and capabilities to retool how we manage our data and put it into this website that you can interact so we were able to go back in time too and look at a little bit of data we haven't gone all the way back in time but at least since you know mostly Act 64 and looking at what has happened since then the other thing is as far as you know trying to share this data we share a lot of this data with DEC so that was also part of why we had to put a lot of this data together and then we realized we could build this additional tool so one of the things Nina does with her whole team is make sure that we get all of our data gathered each year do the quality assurance on it and then send it over to DEC and then DEC has separate reporting mechanisms to do the whole clean water effort right so what we're showing you today is just Ag and it's put into the way of looking at it that for us makes the most sense so I will go ahead and let you drive for a little bit you have to take control of it I wonder if it'll I wonder if we're since we're presenting no don't fail us now so as Laura mentioned we we have invested a pretty considerable amount of time and energy to build what I like to think of is our foundational measurements and metrics some of these are developed in collaboration with the Department of Environmental Conservation through their Clean Water Initiative program because they're used across sectors and some are crucial for us in terms of strategizing better ways to approach a region of the state or a specific practice that you know we're not seeing a level of implementation that we'd like to see at the same time I truly believe that data should drive our decision making so we're really excited to show you a little bit about this again it's a sneak-feet preview our official report will be published on the website for Sunday that's our annual report on technical and financial assistance in our programs we are apologize in advance for the acronyms but just let you know that the initial page of this has a reference point for our assistance programs as well as key terms that might be utilized throughout this report if you get confused between programs if you select the center of the screen it provides table contents we have about 12 or 13 individual pages the second page is instructions so this is a quick reference if you're unsure how to click through but basically the idea is to provide the people with access to the data in terms of understanding the trends that we see across the state so it's got you go back way back to 16 so in some cases we have data in place since Act 64 came about 2015 that was sort of the impetus to begin some of these tracking systems the first pages are both tactical basin maps and county base maps gives you the ability to filter through to look at investments adjacent to a figure it means that that figure is based on data so in this case I'll filter for 2022 and you can just see the rate of both investment acreage or conservation practices and associated phosphorus reductions from those conservation practices it just has a general point of information the state at this point in time can estimate phosphorus reductions in the Lake Shimplain and Lake Memphermake are watersheds only is that 12,857 kilograms kilograms of phosphorus reduced as a result of agricultural conservation practices on the landscape also on Sundays the clean water investment report will be doing to be able to see the comparison of how agriculture is performing in terms of the other sectors but in the past few years agriculture has come in around 95% of the total estimated phosphorus reductions occurring in the state of Vermont you mean we're doing whatever is being done we're doing agriculture is an incredibly cost effective mechanism of reducing phosphorus runoff so those colors on your maps like up up near what's like Swanton Franklin County is that a heavy phosphorus area that where maybe more has been extracted thank you center for your question it's a great question in general the maps on this report are going to you're going to see a higher concentration at a darker color so typically you know we have a lot of reductions that need to happen in both of the Siscoy South Lake Otter Creek Basin so you're going to see a pretty significant investment and general work in those areas I'm going to breeze through this as best I can and just let you know that the goal is that this will be at your fingertips if you need to look at information in the future in general since fiscal 16 our division has supported about 41 million dollars in investment in fiscal 22 we had about 12.2 million in investment one of the points I'll just bring up so it's fiscal 16 when this data tracking system was put in place about 40% of our total project cost has been in the form of match so our programs play a pretty crucial role in leveraging federal funding to San Ramon for projects to happen and what that means is a farmer may not have the funding to support the whole project so the NRCS natural resource conservation service the BSEA environmental quality incentives program will provide sort of the majority of the funding for a project in the state will come in and assist so that we can get that project in the ground otherwise the farmers are sort of faced to walk away from the project because they can't move forward cost wise so I would play a very crucial role in terms of bringing in additional projects to Vermont additional federal funding in terms of actual conservation practices being implemented on the ground cover profit is one of our largest sort of conservation practices and assisting farmers to both increase their adoption rate and improve their implementation you'll see sort of a little bit of a dip in fiscal 22 practices and associated cross-refections and that part of that is just you have to understand that at the end of the fiscal year on June 30th we still have a variety of active projects happening and reporting processes happening so next year you'll see that number increase slightly when we're able to capture the data and then we'll see if we can get additional mapping associated with all these programs and then you can see the data before it's brought into our reporting processes so what are all of the colors there over on the site so we can track what the different colors mean thank you senator great question if you hover over any aspect of this interactive data report it will provide you with both the sort of topic area and associated metric with it we have over 1,000 acres of cover crop supported through our programs it's about 40% of all practice acreage that we have been supporting through state funded programs another important caveat to acreage and cluster reductions is that we are looking in this graphic at state supported efforts the federal government the United States Department of Agriculture Environmental Quality Incentives Program and generally programs under the they contribute significantly to conservation in Vermont and those metrics are not incorporated into this report this is solely state funded aspects so Laura mentioned in the beginning that our education outreach to the agricultural community is a key piece of our work sometimes that's in the form of an event it's a workshop at a local farm that can invite neighbors to come and see a best management practice or system how that works so they can have the opportunity to ask questions and potentially implement a similar practice on their own farms and sometimes an event might be a stakeholder meeting to pull people together and get input on a new program we also support visits to farms again as folks may know a lot of farms tend to live in rural areas they may not be as connected to things that are happening so our ability to be on farms is really crucial to connect farmers with state federal programs and resources and or knowledge about regulations that may be applying to them this includes both technical visits provided by UDM Extension under recording programs as well as our staff on farms I'll have Laura speak a little bit about this but we also have some data on production areas inspected for farms so the partnership and the way that we get this data at some level to their frustration I'm sure but in order to give the money to people we ask them to report this stuff back to us right and so it's a requirement in the granting and we've set up these ways that they can electronically get this information to us so that we can get it into this method but I think they're all in the first couple years it was probably tougher to adapt and change the other thing we have that helps get some of the data out we talked about it years ago and it's just it's continued to flourish which is great we have the only I'm pretty sure we're the only state in the United States of America that has a partnership database where multiple agricultural entities all work within that database and we started building it with the USDA and fortunately USDA has privacy and challenges right so they were hopeful the time when Vicky drew was the state conservationist said they could make it work but lawyers had other thoughts about it so they can't participate they can look at it but they can't put their data in it but still the same conservation district's UVM anyone we give a grant that's in this you know between all the partnership to say you will respect how this data is managed and you will put it in and we also have created barriers where like folks like myself because I'm a regulator right like I look at everything and I'm thinking regulation I can't access it right I can't add it and get aggregate data but I can't so what's going on on Senator Campion's farm you know like I can't do that you mean it won't show you I don't have login access there's actual controls in the data so that my access cannot get me there right you could tell me Matt's question you could tell me how many farms were fined last year well it doesn't have that kind of data in it it's all partner type data that they did with them so it's a way in a mechanism to be able to say if you imagine a bunch of non-regulatory folks working with farms out there UVM, conservation districts they could look up a farm and say well who was there last what were they working with them on who should I see this problem here it looks like this other person's already been working with them on that I'm going to give them a call because I think they need help just like getting that next piece of paper and process and getting into the program etc so it's a way to just connect people to help make sure everything just keeps moving in the direction so it's really for work on the ground and conservation planning we have a separate database which we are in the process of building which is where I can answer all those questions that you have about how many enforcement actions and who and whatever and that data is it could be very specific you could ask about a specific farm we do have a policy internally where we said not until the farmer gets the enforcement action do we like to share that because we like them to know first but once it's been mailed certified mail then it's a public record that we're happy to share so I just want to understand the process I think this is pretty innovative it's only the non-regulatory entities that have the login is that what you're saying we have different access logins so like I have a I'll just call it a regulator login and other folks like UDM Extension have a full access login but the farmer I don't want to speak for the farmer because I don't know I assume if I were a farmer I might feel a little better about knowing that you can't see some stuff that's the plan it's about building comfort and again it really did intentionally build it to get USDA because we knew USDA we are not allowed to share that data period if we ever get it and so we knew there were federal requirements and so we built it for that and the new lawyer will have a different vision but that is the focus as well is that people can talk to farmers and say it's okay like I see you have a problem I'm glad you called me we can help you and we can get you to get a solution in place I would think it would tend to make it more legitimate and accurate too and we can have data to talk about what's going on out there how many people are accessing them what type of programs do they need that kind of thing see we've had reports in the past that a lot of farmers will call conservation districts to go in and try to oversee the whole operation to see where they're in compliance not and they try to get fixed up before war gets here and so that they don't get into trouble but you can go you can have an inspector not necessarily the farmer be in trouble right well if there's nothing wrong aren't they given a certain length of time to try to get things back up to order so that when you go back in 60 days or 90 days or whatever it is that they are in compliance so there's different levels of enforcement we generally in statute it says if agency of ag finds somebody has a problem we have to tell them what their problem is so the first method most typically is a corrective action letter which you get 30 days to respond back to us and say what you're going to do and it's basically we approve you know sometimes there's an interim plan sometimes there's a long term plan but we say yep that might work or we say no try again send us another letter please but that process is meant to there's no penalties associated with it and it's meant to create a compliance schedule and get the process done so it is a lighter weight level of enforcement so it starts there but then if they don't do whatever they said or they don't respond or whatever then it can move up and the next step is typically a penalty from there this page is our enforcement page and it sort of gives you an understanding if we didn't break it out by the type of enforcement action majority of our actions are corrective action letters notices of violations are more and more common and admittedly they're probably more and more common on the medium and the larger farms because we've already been regulating them for so much longer doing inspections that if you've been noticed about something once we have seven years that if you have to have that problem come up again that means you'll probably go to notice of violations so there's sort of a seven year limitation on coming back into understanding so you can see our enforcement actions have gone up over time I think a great part of that is the capacity right we when we first started doing water work we didn't have resources and you know really act 64 of 2015 gave us some capacity to be able to do this work and so you can see after 2016 the workload has significantly been able to not only do more inspections but you know it's just this idea like there's more cops on the road you tend to well sometimes I guess it tends to everybody slows down but you end up potentially getting caught more like getting caught so like where your graph goes up to 80 87, 82, 101 those are enforcement actions which is encompassing of all the types of actions if you if you went back and I bet you went back and checked no see most of that's on dairy products I presume and if you went back and checked you know prices that's when they were probably getting $15, $16, $100 weight and they had no money I mean I don't know if that's true but it would bear looking at because those years in there you know we have like five really bad years and I bet I bet in these years we had about four inspectors right and these years we have about 11 so we doubled capacity so you had a lot more inspectors so they could drill down we visit a lot more farms and what we also started doing in this space so in this group in the prior years if I were to jump up to the graph up here this bar chart sorry I'm on the wrong page let me take you to production areas inspected this data doesn't go back because this is coming from our new database that really we just haven't had the capacity to go back in time and key in all the old data this will be a going forward and as we can get to it we'll get information going backwards but what we used to do based on having four people right and trying to regulate all these farms was we couldn't get to every facility each year so an individual permitted farm for instance like a large farm might have nine facilities that they have animals at or manure storage at once we got the capacity and staff we changed all the protocols and said go everywhere and do everything right and so that's one thing where if you look at this top chart here the orange is an example is large farms so our acronyms are certified small farm, large farm medium farm not RAP or farms that are lower than what the RAPs regulate and then small farms are very small farms that are regulated by us but don't have to certify with us so but you see how big of an area we have in terms of the amount so this is like when we look at a production area again it's the infrastructure typically is what this is looking at so there's more infrastructure sites that we're going to on large farms versus these other size farms so you know while there may only be and I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head I want to say like 39 large farms like there's well over well I guess we'll just give you the total that year we inspected 113 facilities right so between medium and large no just large so while we may not have that many it appears certified or I'm sorry I'm permitted farms they're actually multiple farms associated with individual permits and you can see this is the actual acreage so a production area in the size of it right so as the farm is bigger in size typically the production area is also for footage acreage bigger you can see large farms of the sections we do that the majority of the area that we walk and look at is the area of a large farm so I can't remember why I was taking you there the little the one on top is the small farms the blue those are the small farms yeah so basically acreage either no no and yeah we wanted to show the compliance one so what we also track is just how how compliant are these things right so one of the things we have to do for TML tracking is trying to figure out how to quantify we do all these inspections what are we finding right and so if you look at this this bottom chart here percent compliance by fiscal year reported so this is each year this is the blue is and the orange is not compliant and you know it's like admittedly but there is an increase in compliance going on which is good in the if you this is breaks it down up here by farm size you know certified small farms are the most compliant but one thing to be noted about this is caveat data again like if they're compliant when we visit them we may not be back there for seven years so in the interim we may not know if they've changed things they're no longer compliant to where like the large farms again we're there every year so this is you know this is a lot more intense data to say that sixty nine percent are compliant so while the data shows that certified small farms appear to be more compliant the data behind it isn't as rigorous likely as the large farms because of the volume of the inspection so I just want to so it's thirty percent roughly since and I may be misreading this since twenty nineteen to twenty two compliant they're not compliant so I imagine are these repeat offenders sort of you know what are you seeing there or is it gosh you're not compliant and you're just popping up tell me a little bit more about the data I don't know if I could like pare down the data specifically but I'll just tell you our process right so this is a sense of we inspected X number of farms how many did we have like clean bill health yeah that's the blue box that's the blue box so the ones that we didn't have a clean bill help those the ones where we assess it and you know majority of the time it gets referred to enforcement and is dealt with enforcement every once in a while we will do a programmatic follow up and say well you know you were you were missing a soil test right like yes you fall in that category but the reality is is one little thing you know it's just like a small thing like we may not enforce on you on we might just what we we call it as programmatic follow-ups and so we schedule those contract those and make sure that someone follows up and that they're compliant if they're not at that point then they would get referred over to enforcement so the the important thing to look at there though I think is that you've got seventy percent of the large farms that's large farms you're showing that are in compliance and thirty percent are so so but if you look at the acreage in the number of animals if you back up to the slide before that's where the majority of the land is in the cows are and so if you took a percentage of of the total acreage and the percentage of the total animals those numbers might be a lot a lot higher that are in compliance and I mean you can look to see the little see the the where the numbers are you can see the enforcement actions by year too you know the majority of actions you know on medium farms actually interestingly enough because those farms in my opinion this is just a personal opinion based on what I've seen but the large farms have figured out how to use the programs invested in things they are buying more smaller farms and so they are they get those farms pretty quickly up to speed like they they know the system they know the drill with us and they they are generally responsive the medium farms they sort of have been in this category where I think if you look at the financials they're more stressed than any other group and so the ability they're caught in the net all the time it's either you you get bigger you go out and if you look at some of the data that's the group that we've lost the most of is the medium farms and so you know the compliance on those is a little more challenge is a little more nuanced in terms of trying to get to that end goal and often times a lot of the actions that we end up taking they are associated with them not paying the annual certification fee right so if you like in some years you know we'll have 30-40 of them that didn't pay and so it's like those go we send notices but like so that kind of stuff falls into this data as well so it may not always be about a water quality issue as much as you know essentially they owe us money for an annual fee so we could tease that stuff out more but that I think is why the medium farm category comes up more into these spaces yeah I mean it'd be helpful to tease it out at some point and maybe the report itself you know somebody said to me a third of our hospitals weren't compliant you know we'd all be panicked we'd all say hey you know let's get this fix this situation a third of our school you know so it would be helpful to better maybe understand what's happening there sorry we just lost internet I'm presumably lost internet but anyways we don't have to go through it more in terms of that but yeah we still got to get EB and Diane on the first three minutes yeah I was saying come back another day we lost internet in year one last week also so I'll just say a couple more things if you don't mind if I can do it without internet so I just want to show you that so thank you for taking time and checking it out and you can poke around more now I'm very excited that you're excited about it yeah thank you for doing that but some hot spots are areas that have been kind of going on since the last time we were here at this building waste importation on farms has been a really big discussion in our space right because there's the universal recycling laws so no more food scraps can go to the landfill but there's still this challenge of you know what is a clean food scrap what is a good thing to bring on to a farm and so what we have right now currently is the authority to regulate based on nutrients not based on trash right and so we've been trying to have conversations or about PFOS right imports what we want to make sure and what we don't have the space to do this outwardly but is that we keep our farm clean and that where we grow our food is healthy and safe so that's a space where we've been working a lot with DEC and trying to navigate and understand it but it's certainly a very much increasing pressure on farms because there's no place to take that stuff you know it can be recycled there's absolutely clean ways that can be recycled and put onto farms but there's been a DECAC committee that got set up last year which you may remember from bills and you know that is a big part of the conversation certainly is there's a lot of plastic that goes into that initial stuff that's not so separate I mean our biggest issue is cleaning it right well they essentially offer and grind it and then try and separate the flows but there is still a plastic contamination rate and as we know unfortunately a lot of our food does already have PFAS in it from some of the packaging that is put into it I know there's a efforts to try and reduce that but it's tough and so we're just trying to make sure that farms don't become the recipient of our society's ways such that then some future we don't have the space to grow food there are other states that have dealt with this had a bus so they're how are they handling it or better management of it yeah I mean this is a topic and more and more you're seeing it in the headlines I just actually went to visit Maine and talk with their agency of agriculture over there they have gotten ahead of us on PFAS and managing it in that space but as far as de-packaging they're not aware of it right but Massachusetts has a lot more de-packaging in New York does as well and they've raised concerns that they haven't necessarily figured out again a solution California as well of how to deal with it because we make a lot of waste we're really good at that as humans and trying to process it and manage it and to reduce that landfill in fact it's at all it's all about and so there is no silver bullet at this point that anyone has identified that landfills take that quite plastic I mean can you take it to the landfill well so like if you have food in a package that you had a huge batch like a truckload of a batch of something it didn't fill all the way it's a little off-spec you've got the wrong ice cream in the wrong container whatever whatever happened instead of manually opening and separating all that food from the container packaging this is the technology that is available and has been used is just to sort of smash it and hope that whatever the product will go out last year in Chittenden County they've got a deep pack there's one in Vermont and so that stimulated a lot of the conversation of just and UVM's doing research on how much plastic gets into that just to try and understand what this is because it's tough isn't it it is so that's one again it's a pressure that's been coming to us we've been trying to keep a focus on narrowing it to a few farms versus having it be a lot of farms and we don't have the authority to regulate plastics or PFOS or contaminants like that we have the nitrogen phosphorus and potassium and how much storage volume of a farm I think instead of working like some other committees work in this building I would want to have an alternative in place to require farmers to switch to before you know just saying okay as of 2025 there's no more quite plastic snowballs going to be seen in Vermont we better have an alternative figured out what they can use in the place of the plastic because we know that it's going to lay in wherever they dump it and the landfills or wherever it's going to be there forever it will take a lot of years for it to whatever happens to it and Keanna is doing some research too because some of this can get the plastics can actually go into the plants as far as if they're micro enough so we're going to learn as much as we can but that's a space that it's been quite a year learning lots about that and the other thing is farm determinations what is a farm we never actually even had a process to do this you know we just do farming everybody's farming and now you've got actually 50 ask lots of questions I've got 25 chickens in my farm alright what has started to happen is so we said that and I'll do respect I mean this in the nicest way but like back there we're no longer in the RAPs because municipalities can't regularly farming as it is defined in the RAPs in the RAPs we said you know what but back there farms have taken a lot of our energy and we know we have to do this big water stuff so we carved that out but what's starting to happen is municipalities are making regulations to tell people they can't have chickens so everybody's coming to us saying help me how do I figure out how to keep my chickens I love them and so there's this interesting balance going on in that space between towns trying to figure out what to do with it at 250 charging farms some of this like the universal recycling law like how much imports are you taking if you take too many imports you're no longer a farm and so we're just constantly getting farm parted at this point with MI farming I need to know this so that I can deal with X, Y or Z and so it's been just constant and it was something we never envisioned was going to be as rampant as it is but it's consumed an enormous amount of our capacity in the last year so and then there's just one more thing just to end on a more positive note in 2020 our team received a $7 million reward from USDA to offer a new program called Vermont Paper Performance Program this is an innovative program that uses environmental modeling to look at field by field phosphorus losses on farms and provide performance based payments for farm farms so we are one year into that program over the course of four years about $5 million additional federal funding will be available for Vermont farms that meet certain stewardship thresholds above and beyond what's required for regulatory purposes but we're very excited about that program it is the first time farms have the ability to see on their own operation their field by field losses as well as to compare that to state water quality goals so a new tool in our conservation toolbox so like Ryan mentioned this morning he's doing whole ecosystem services right? this is literally looking at how much phosphorus did you reduce on your farm so it's an alternative to pay for the pounds of production of phosphorus now do you check quite a bit for fertilizer because I've heard a lot of farmers buy very little phosphorus anymore they have their soil tests to go by so they go by that and that's what they try to buy thank you for the prompt the really awesome part about this program is that we are utilizing geospatial information so it's looking at specific soil type your entry data such as your soil tests for that field which gets updated regularly you're looking at the manure test values manure application rates on each individual field what crop and potential crop field and nutrient uptake so it's on a field by field basis looking at all the data that farms do right through their land management comparing that to the actual soil type the actual location of that field and providing the farmer with a sense of where they can target their conservation efforts to have the most impact so where can they spend more money on a field to have the best impact in terms of reducing phosphorus runoff so if they're still using a little bit of fertilizer and it identifies they don't need it and then they can reduce it and get a payment for it this will show it to them I was over at Wright's Shepherds I don't know this summer sometime and he showed me the letter from his agronomist and a lot of his field he does manure injection and broad spraying and some of his fields he was at most a lot of them he could cut his commercial fertilizer in half buying it could cut it in half because he's doing this up to date he's just one of many big farmers that can afford to do that kind of stuff as a farmer mentioned to me last week at a meeting we've been studying and looking at data from cows for a decade, two decades and now we're really in the space where we can look at that level of information about individual fields and areas within fields that are causing a concern or contributing in a beneficial way to see the other thing a lot of the phosphorus comes in through feeds feed well of course it goes through the animal the feed does and what comes out the other end has got a lot of phosphorus in it so I don't know who's keeping track of that or not keeping track of that but it's something somebody's going to have to pay attention to it well on the regulatory side it's kept track of by the family and the manure to produce it there are some initiatives called whole farm nutrient balance which is looking at grain imports first crop uptake first phosphorus from your manure basically to look at the overall balance that's coming in and going off the farms is a pretty new initiative but it's led by UVM Extension so Heather's been studying feed and diets and trying to work with people to really assess it for a couple of years it's a space that it's difficult there's not really that many financial resources we try and provide financial resources but it's really time intensive to work with the farmer to gather that information and do it but she's been doing it and I don't know hey Diane are you and Evie we kept you on our morning haven't gotten to you is there and we're running out of time is there another day that you we have the 7th coming tomorrow morning 9 to 10 30 is there could you guys come back tomorrow morning with the secretary I'm sure we Senator we'd be glad to work with Linda to see if we can fit that in I can't speak to Evie's schedule but we'll figure it out and that also Laura Ginsberg was coming in so it'd be all dairy three folks on dairy and you know well I mean sorry but we're running out of time we should have started earlier I guess but anyways I'll have Linda get in contact with you thank you very much so Laura what what somebody analyze you know we keep hearing well there's a lot of this phosphorus is coming in through the the feed that farmers are commercial feed that they're buying what what does phosphorus what part of the feed does the phosphorus produce you know it's a fundamental building block of everything right we all have phosphorus in it and it's necessary to grow so it's within the feed so it's just part of the weed or part of the oats or part of the corn good did you add something on that Diane yeah you're going back into my old degree in animal science you know it was ruminant nutrition so I know this stuff but yeah it's in all the feed because it plants take it up so it's going to be in the grain but what they've really been looking at is the plant package so they vitamins and minerals for the cows and so in the past it was thought you needed a lot of phosphorus in that vitamin and mineral pack to make sure the cows reproductive system worked well but now they're figuring out they can you know shrink that back to almost zero because it's in the plants and so that was that's been a lot of the focus of research is how do you reduce this mineral pack you know the vitamin mineral pack to the animals so it doesn't really need phosphorus in it and it took a lot of convincing you know when you chain make a change like that you've got to convince everybody that it's not going to have any impact on the cows so it's been over time and they're really moving toward that of reducing that phosphorus but you know if grain comes from somewhere else and they don't have the same environmental requirements that we do then they're not really working to reduce their phosphorus in the grain that they grow so that level to come down when we can't control what happens on farms you know outside of Vermont but it has been that vitamin and mineral package been the thing they've been focusing on in the past to reduce that phosphorus well I think you folks have got a pretty well-rounded team over there to manage and look after the best interests of our Vermont agriculture and you know that seems to be you know it is it's really important and you have some younger folks coming along that of course are interested or they wouldn't be there in the first place and it's good to see that you've got a pretty darn good handle on things that's just too bad that more people couldn't sit through a meeting like this morning and publicize it more because a lot of times we get bad raps we aren't doing it right not doing enough and it should have been done you know ten years ago but anyways it was really a great morning and certainly thank you very much it's great to finally have resources because I got beat up doing this job saying everything we're doing is wrong when I had very few resources to do the job so as you can see what can happen when you put resources to it well hopefully we'll get enough money to continue working so thank you and thank you all for coming and pass that on to the others Diane we really appreciate their time and we'll try to catch up with you and EV tomorrow with the big guns we'll do yeah well thank you for being with us both of you so we'll adjourn the meeting and