 My name is Alicia Laramie and I'm the program manager of New Farms for New Americans and right now we are at one of our two farming locations where we have 10 households who are farming and our other location is we have 60 families farming. New Farms for New Americans is a project of AALV which is a non-profit organization that works with refugees who have been resettled in Chittenden County and the work the AALV is focused on is primarily long-term integration into the Vermont communities. We focus our work on employment, employment training, citizenship applications. We have a lawyer on staff. We do a lot of work with helping people access different kinds of benefits and navigating systems that are in different language in English and which is not the primary language of most of the communities we work with. So we have full-time staff who speak, I think we have at least seven or eight languages that are spoken regularly in the office and clients from all over the world who have been resettled here. So from New Farms for New Americans perspective our focus is really on the communities that we serve and meeting the needs that they have in their new home in Vermont. And so we found out a long time ago almost 20 years ago that farming was an important piece to people's long-term integration and livelihood here in the United States. Farming is a way of life for people. It was many people were subsistence farmers before they arrived in the United States. They want to continue that. They want to continue their agrarian traditions and livelihoods. It brings purpose and meeting. It's a way of getting exercise, a way of eating the foods that are culturally significant and important to them. In addition to regular things that people recognize on dinner plates, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, all of that, but there's a lot of other crops that people are growing that are not really being grown outside of maybe a few other places here in Vermont. And so it's a space and a place that is so much more than food security, which it is a big part of people's lives. People have learned how to grow food here in Vermont and save that food and preserve that food for the winter, which is a fairly dire time for folks. But it's a place where people come to see other members of their community to speak their language. It's a place where they feel home. It's a place where they feel like they have something that is theirs to tend. It's so much more than just a place of food security. I don't know how else to say it, like they come here every day. Yohani, who's farming right now, I've been here 11 years, and every day I come here, he's here from morning till night. And this is the purpose, meaning it helps people with mental health. And yeah, so I don't have to give elevator speeches to the farmers because it's in their blood and they have a whole community of people who out there when people are resettled, oh, do you farm? Oh, you're going to want to register for new farms for new Americans or maybe one of the other community garden spaces. But what's different about ours is we have really large gardens and we recognize that people want and need and can grow on larger tracts of land. So our program is centered on responding to what their needs are. And that's one of the things we've learned over the years is that people need a lot of land. Great. And I think if you touched on it a little bit, but obviously there's a really big value of community here with the farmers being able to speak their language together and just seeing each other, familiar faces, day in, day out here at all hours of the day tending to something that's their own. How do you think that, I know this program's been around I believe 15 years, how over those 15 years has the program grown, but also how has the community grown? Well, refugee resettlement really shifts and changes depending on who the refugees are that are being resettled. And so we've kind of transitioned over the years from one group being a larger demographic to another group. When I first started there were a lot more Bhutanese-Napali. Now we are seeing a lot more of the Congolese community being resettled here in Chittenden County. So there's those kinds of shifts which are natural. There's been a lot of changes in terms of people doing out migration from Vermont. Well people love Vermont and for like the Bhutanese-Napali community it's a very peaceful place. It reminds them of Bhutan. It's very expensive to live here and there are a lot more housing options in other states. And so we see shifts sometimes and people do with outward migration. The program itself it started, you know the program was like a lot of programs, refugee agriculture programs throughout the United States started as a program to help people become self-sufficient through farming and there was a commercial focus to it. And these programs were sponsored by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and sometimes the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the sort of general perception was that if you were farming it was for profit or commercial or if you're farming you would want to learn these things and that these were happening in the rural areas. One of the big shifts that I've seen nationally is that people have started to recognize that there's a lot of food being grown in urban areas and it's not just rural which has been a huge plus for an organization like ours because now we can say yes we are here we exist in an urban area which is often where refugees are resettled they're not resettled in rural areas because employment is a huge part of the resettlement process. So we have people being recognized as farmers in urban areas but also that farming for your household to feed your household is as important as the commercial farming that's happening and so there's been more kinds of grant funding out there that recognized the community garden aspect and community garden has this I think this notion of small hobby sort of plots and that it's a lot of people coming together but this is all the land that people have access to it's this is these these communities are slightly different in that they want larger tracts of land if they can this is not hobby this is not to supplement this is the produce coming in for their family and they will be able to save for they'll buy three freezers and save all of their tomatoes or all of their African eggplant and for the entire year so it's community garden I think sometimes has this quaint element to it and what we're seeing here is not this is these are people working hard every single day many families going working full-time jobs eight-hour jobs and then coming here and spending an additional six hours at our at the farm to grow food for their family for the for the whole year so those are some of the shifts and changes we've seen both nationally and then sort of locally great and so earlier in July Vermont had some really bad flooding some of the worst they'd seen in years and as a result of that flooding which was just rainfall that you know these farms were underwater and I think in the weak sense you know the Vermont has had a lot of you know community coming together community help rebuilding and I think there's been you know especially you know Montpelier was completely flooded a lot of focus has been there but I think a lot of people aren't talking about farms like this where it's just you know a lot all this rebuilding that has to happen and people aren't you know people recognize you know oh yeah some of the farms are underwater and they're going to rebuild but it's not a temporary thing it's not oh you know just replant the crops right that's it for the season for some of these crops they're done and this will also impact years to come so I think part of you know why we're chatting is you know to bring awareness to these other farming programs that have been impacted that aren't being talked about as much compared to maybe some of the farms that it's people's hobbies or passion project you know they go and they sell at the farmer's market on the weekend and it's their thing and you know they're raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to help support themselves because they have just more you know I don't know community you know they have different platform I guess and so people really aren't talking about other farms like this that have been impacted where you know people are back out here and trying to rebuild and you know I mean you can still see where you know the water was so can you talk a little bit about that first I would say that if you lose a loved one whether you're a commercial farmer a community gardener or a gardener with new farms for new Americans we're not comparing the pain that someone nobody's pain is more than anyone else's pain and that everyone's experiencing this in the ways that they come to farming and so there's no comparison it's mostly just recognizing that there are differences and you know for a program like ours and for the 170 community gardener gardeners who are here with Burlington area community gardens which is just down the road from which is also on this land you know no these those people are not being talked about either but there is community at those the area the community gardens there is there are Vermont garden network provides education every week there's there's a lot of good things happening on this land outside of the commercial farming as well but it's not I don't mean or ever want it to be considered that's a comparison just differences in how we come to this land and for us we are not a commercial program or farm so we don't have access to some of the the federal funding that will be out there that is just the way it is so and and that's important to understand because it does change how we recover but we also are grant funded for the program piece of it to help us exist to help us be on this land to provide the infrastructure for the irrigation to provide all of the supports that need to happen behind the scenes for a program and that's so we haven't put in like an investment into our commercial farm the way some of the other farms but what has been invested is farmers individual their individual inputs which is both financial they've they've gone out they've bought starts at the you know starts for their plants they have been supporting the local economy in all of these other ways by buying fences buying compost buying seeds buying tools those things have been lost for 75 households people have had to go you know they see their their money just like their money was taken away by the floods all of that time not to say their time and energy which is also incredibly important so we rely on you know I'm some of the private donations that have been coming in and the foundation money and some grants our hope is to put that money back in the hands of the farmers to say rebuild here are some resources for you to rebuild your farms to get back to where you were and and we can't replace the the crops that were lost but we can help people have hope for next season one of our farms currently is completely devastated and that's where we have 60 of our households are this is our other site where people are able to access the floods they were just hit differently they're on different lands and yeah so these the farmers here are able to start coming back these 10 households that said a lot of the work that we've been doing post flood is first on safety people safety and if you it's hard to imagine when you speak and read and understand English it's hard to imagine what what it means to understand the research that's out there I mean I was just sitting on a meeting with the remote agency of agriculture and a bunch of the UVM faculty who and extension faculty who are helping us navigate these guidelines and people still have questions and people who have been doing this for 30 years still have questions people who have been through more than one flood here still have questions and now we're trying to take that information and say how can we help our farmers understand in the languages we're currently making educational videos in five different languages to help people understand that not all crops are affected the same we are not FDA we do not have to abide by FDA regulations because we're not selling our food but that doesn't mean that those things are not important to us I mean food safety is food safety and so we want people to be informed and have knowledge and if we're not here to help people understand what's salvageable what you can do what's absolutely off limits then who is nobody and yet there's an incredible amount of food if every farmer here harvests is 500 pounds of food at least 750 pounds per plat every household that's 750 pounds of produce that they need to understand what they can eat and what they can't eat and so we've gone into just like we've had to quickly reframe and transition some of our education which we do a lot of anyway to be all focused on flood recovery and flood safety and human safety human consumption of of flood exposed crops so well some farms because of FDA regulations and their commercial sales have to eliminate all the crops we have a little more flexibility but we are not in any way you know putting safety as on the back burner like that is also incredibly important to what we communicate but people have the power to with education empower themselves and but we have to be there to help them do that looking to the future how do you think the community can come together and support each other and you know help rebuild or just help spread awareness education what do you kind of see the next steps forward well i would say that a lot of the families are not unfamiliar with floods if you're a farmer you know you've been through floods before i think you know some of the reflection that i'm doing now is it i don't even know how many days it's been or i feel like maybe we're 10 days out 12 i don't even know but having like little glimmers of reflection some of what i've been thinking about is we're dealing with climate change we're dealing with we're dealing with the humanitarian crisis on this scale i mean humanitarian not just for refugees but for like the people throughout vermont and the country but if we're going to look at it on a micro scale like this is kind of what the world is talking about out there that is somewhere else but now here and we need to be talking about climate change and climate resiliency and for our farm focusing on climate change and climate resiliency is really important because how can we adapt our growing to to respond to climate change how can we be thinking about more resilient seeds and that's a big part i didn't mention this before but like a big part of what happens here is these seeds are all saved year to year everyone saves their seeds to so that you know some seeds because you can't go out and buy them and some seeds because why would you go out and buy seeds if you could save them they're free when you save them yourself it's just obvious so talking about crop varieties that are more resilient to climate change we're also really interested in conservation practices on a farm scale that will respond to flooding what could we be doing differently here that helps our our land not be so prone to floods now flooding can be really good if you don't have a lot of contaminants upstream it can also be very harmful um traditionally historically these are the best places to to be so how can we be here but also be doing plantings and that help our farms survive so i think as a community our next as we move into the next three years we're going to be thinking a lot about climate resiliency um in light of this flood and this isn't the first time this program has experienced flooding like everyone else Irene you know set the precedent for for this how we navigate this whole situation and um but now that it's happened twice unless in like basically a 10-year time frame we need to be doing more in partnership with conservation services natural resource conservation services with you know conservation programs organizations that say we're here to help help you you know navigate this and make your strong farmer farmer stronger hi you honey how about it how about it yeah it's a lot of work he here is again to do more work because he's putting up his fence again which he does by hand not by his fences he lost his whole fence was over there after the floods um and now he's rebuilding his fence by hand for the second time this season and it's a lot of work so um yeah and you know you honey's been farming with us for 15 years and he rides his bike down here every single day here all day so much admiration for him to keep coming back i don't i don't know how he does it yeah i think lastly uh you know is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to you know talk a little bit more about i just wanted to add that i feel like it's we're so grateful for what the community locally and at large has done for this farm um that people know that we're here recognize us um see see us um and that um you know we've just been overwhelmed with all kinds of uh anonymous and donations businesses and it's all it's been a really emotional experience for me for the farmers both in terms of the support we've received but also for um just you know just the whole experience of navigating what to do when you see your investments washed away and and for refugees i feel like this is not unfamiliar trying times are not unfamiliar for people uh you know some of our communities have lived in refugee camps for 18 years and my heart and thoughts go out to what it must have been like to live in a situation in which people experienced food security and how much of this experience now reminds them of moments where they experienced food insecurity in a refugee camp where you don't feel in control of your your life and the farm gives people control of that a little bit and um so with the support of these donations and communities we were able to invest back in the farmers and just so thankful for that well thank you for meeting with us and for being here um we're here at the new farms for new americans at the intervail uh and you're watching time eating tv