 Welcome everyone. It's Friday the 27th or almost out of January, which is good. Well, it's never good to lose days, is it? But it's moving along, and it's great to see the sun shining, and we've got some good people to hear from this morning. So welcome, and we'll introduce ourselves. We've got three new members, Gus, and then you'll introduce yourself and our crew, and we'll get started. Morning. Brian Collamore representing the Rutland District. Irene Renner, Chittenden North, including Fairfax. Brian Campion, Benedict Kelly. Rich Westman, well, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Senator. Bobby Starr representing the Orleans County District. So welcome, Gus. Thank you for the record. I'm Bess Selig. I'm the director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And I want to introduce a few folks who are here with me. Pauli Major is our policy director. Some of you may have come across her when she was working for the last four years with Senator Lakey. She joined us this fall, and we're delighted to have her. Also with me is Aces Melia, who is the director of our ag program. And who's Gleason, who some of you have met before, who is the director of the farm and forest viability program, which also oversees the Rural Economic Development Initiative. And I'm not sure we'll get into as much depth as you're going to want to on some subjects today, but I thought the assignment was particularly for new members to give the broad overview of the organization and our general role. Although I've known Senator Campion for a few years, I think it was the first time I've ever had a chance to be in a committee room with you. Maybe finance, maybe finance. Rarely in my hands, in a cave. But we did come across each other in a great event over in Shaftesbury when we opened some houses. So with that, Pauli can help me screen share, because this is not my skill. It's not your computer. It's not my computer. Let's move on to the first slide. Senator Campion is also the chair of education on the senate side. So we did, we worked the two committees quite a lot together on the universal school meals program. He liked that. He enjoyed the ag committee so much. Well, I'm a big fan of the chairs. He wanted to join up with us, so it's pretty nice to have him as a member. Yeah, and I'll say that I have been invited to be with two of you in the institutions committee this afternoon. So some of this may get repetitive, but you're going to enjoy hearing from Stacey and Liz this morning and not this afternoon. So I hope it won't be super repetitive, but let me start with the mission statement. And I need to acknowledge that this mission statement was put together when Senator Starr was representative. Senator Starr and Chair of the House Ag Committee and Senator Westman was also in the other body and was one of the original sponsors. The lead back then on this program was Representative Jean Ann Duffy from Milton. And it was a broad coalition. I think there was something like 28 House members, maybe it was 18 House members and nine Senators because the legislation was introduced in both bodies that supported it. But fundamentally, we are asked to focus on the dual goals of protecting Vermont's agricultural land, forest land, while also providing affordable housing because it's of primary importance, not just by themselves, but to economic vitality and quality of life. And when you go through our presentation, we'll talk a fair amount about how we see our conservation mission as being essential to the economy of the state. And there are some things we define as part of our conservation work like the farm and forest viability program, the ready program that people, Neil Wunderbilt told me we ought to rebrand because we're doing a fair amount of economic development for rural communities. Vermont's also had a long term land use policy that goes back to something from the 1930s called Countryside Commission, which basically said, our land use policy really needs to reflect compact settlement surrounded by a working landscape. And some of you will recall that some years back, the Council on Rural Development did a public opinion survey in Vermont and asked them what their values were. And 97% said the working landscape. That's whether you grew up here or you came here, but that landscape, whether you're getting food from it or recreation, or you view it as important for climate mitigation is why so many of us look to be here. And so the aerial you're looking at here is the North Bennington Shaftsbury line. And I'm not going to show the pictures today, but I often show three pictures of how that community has used our support over three decades. And the very first thing that happened was back in the early 90s Stanley Tools left Shaftsbury. The employer and community group came forth and said, we want you to help us buy a house. And the house they wanted us to help them by was owned at one time by the poet Robert Frost and they turned it into a museum and they wanted there to be a reason for people to come to Shaftsbury. A decade after that, you see the body of water there is Lake Parran and a group of locals had bought a bunch of land around the pond and they didn't want to develop camps all over it. They wanted to turn it into the Lake Parran recreation area and in two different conservation deals, they said, we said, okay, we're going to help you and there is a beautiful recreation area there. And this is about, I would say, a seven minute eight minute walk from the village in North Bennington. They also held out five acres because they knew that the community was going to need housing and it took another 12 years. But Shaftsbury changed its zoning to allow 25 homes on that five acres and apartment complex. The village of North Bennington extended its water line to them and the town of Bennington, its sewer line, in order to have that compact development. And so people of modest means can live in that community. They are just a few minute walk from the Lake Parran recreation area and a short walk into North Bennington, the library, to the elementary school. So that just is an example. We can't be in Shaftsbury every year, but periodically we get to small towns as well as large ones. This is our, just a few things in the Northeast Kingdom about our work and you're looking at Lake Manfromegog and on the left is the old convent and Sacred Heart High School. And after years of trying, the nuns have made a deal with a group called Rural Edge and we'll build 26 apartments in and around the convent this year. And there's room for hundreds more units on the site. And Newport would like some home ownership along with rental housing. So I think over the next decade, we'll probably be three or four projects there. Great. And at least at this point from up there, you can see down at the lake. It's a beautiful spot. And if you've never been up there, you can see the church in the big picture. Well, the building on the left is maybe, yeah, and it's to the left of the church as we're looking at that picture, maybe a minute walk. I mean, it's right in the same basically parking lot and a lot of room. It's a pretty big plot of land that's going to go with school and the sisters where they live. It's really a great project for that spot. And it's sad idle. It's been more than 10 years. And that's a hallmark of our housing workers to take white elephant properties and turn them into usable assets for the community. And, you know, we were at an old school in Senator Collins District. It's kind of turned into housing about a year or so ago. And on the right, what you see is a trail. And that trail is on the Bluffside Farm, which the Vermont Land Trust bought from the Scott family a few years ago. And they thought they'd just flip it to a young farmer. But the more they talked to the community, the more they realized it was a great place for education because it's not far from North Country High School. And they've had students work in there. And then they also recognized that there was a recreation need. And Newport has really struggled before the EB-5 scandal, but since then. And what we ended up helping them do, and we'll talk about this more in the Senate institutions today, is we helped them through our ready program and through a special appropriation that former Senator Flory had arranged to build a bridge that connects this farm to Crowdy Beach and downtown. And then at the other end of the farm is the BB Rail Trail, which goes to the Canadian border and beyond. So while some people would think about this as a recreation project for Newport, it's going to be a way for cyclists to really enjoy the countryside and hopefully for Canadians now that the border's reopened to be bicycling back and forth across the border and into downtown Newport. The trail across the border goes all the way up through to, well I think it goes up towards Sherbrooke. And then it does cut off and go the other way as well as to the eastern part of Quebec. What are those little, I don't know if they're ridges or? It was a river track. So those are ties maybe? It's a beautiful trail now. The bridge is gorgeous. I have a picture before it opened to the public. I was visiting with Senator Starr and Representative Marc Cot. And it was one of those hot days in July where you were just so sure through just standing still. We're looking pretty tired that afternoon. Housing programs. For those of you who are new to us, there's no kind of housing that we don't do. So we've worked with manufactured home communities. We are working on home ownership. Our primary work is in rental housing. Since the pandemic, there's been a focus on helping people move from or unhoused into permanent housing. And we played a major role in that throughout the state. And happy to talk more about that with any of you and your constituents on a different day. There's been a lot of talk and the governor's talked about diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. And one of the ways we have tried to work on that these last couple of years has been to establish a program to improve the quality of farm worker housing around the state. We're working with the Champlain Housing Trust that has a partnership with UVM Extension. And they've approved funding for 21 farm worker housing rehab projects that will house 100 folks and there's more on the way. I do have to say and we'll talk more at the end of this. Our budget may not, the budget proposed by the governor may not allow us to continue that program next year at its current level. But we would very much like to, we think it's really important. Do we get a chance to adjust? We do, near the end of the session. Yeah, yeah. We've worked on all kinds of conservation. I know we are the clean water service provider. We're linking them for Magog area. That was something A&R came and asked us to do an MBDA decline to do it. We're involved in recreational lands. Across the state, in Senator Collamore's district, we were, we had a great celebration of the Jim Jeffords State Forest a few years ago. I know that I was showing a picture of Verde Mountain one year in the other body and Representative Helms said, oh, I shot a deer there once, so I'm not all good about that. And we have other programs. You know, we've worked with, again, in terms of economic development, we've worked with Kingdom Trails on their first several acquisitions. Most of their land has been by permission. And that's a great thing that landowners are willing to let them use it. But it becomes so popular that I think they felt they need to own some of the land themselves because sometimes it gets to be too much for private land. That's really big up in St. Jay, Lyndon, Dirk. They attract thousands of bikers here. Big picture and you'll get our annual report next week. This is what we've done over the last 18 months for the funds that have been provided to us and leverage achieve. And where this pre-pandemic, the homes and apartments number would have been in the 300 unit range. So a lot more activity than usual. We're going to talk today about our development rights program, our farm and forest viability program and the rural economic development initiative to some degree. But we describe our program impacts more and more as being rural community development and downtown revitalization. And a big part of our work is helping young farmers get on their first farm. The picture, by the way, just in terms of serving rural communities is the town of Westford and we help them get a town forest. It's adjacent to their elementary school and for Westford, I think that's quite a turnout. So the community was really excited about that. You had a good turnout. I do want to say, and this goes back to the beginnings of the program and to the overall mission. Senator Westman and I were part of a delegation with the House Ag Committee in 1988 when the program was just a year old. And the American Farmland Trust took us to Massachusetts and Connecticut that had more mature development rights programs at that time. And it was a really instructive trip for me as somebody who didn't come with an ag background, both because I got to spend a day and a half with people and back then the House had lots of farmers in the House and I could hear their stories and hear about their lives and their struggles. But as we traveled, there were several lessons that the Massachusetts and Connecticut folks talked to us about. One was, don't try to save a farm in every town. Support farm communities. Because when you do that, you're going to support the infrastructure that supports those families as well. And I remember our very last farm in Connecticut and it was basically surrounded by suburbia and lots of traffic. And that message from that follow was just really loud and clear about when you have lots of neighbors, what they want from agriculture is different than when you have a farm community of neighbors and how far it was machinery on the roads and people buzzing by fast and dealing with odors and all that. So a big part of our work has been really to invest in our strongest farming communities and they're now large plots of conservative farmland. We'll talk in a few minutes about the viability program and we are actively and have been for 20 years working on helping people for whom dairy is not the way they're going to make their living in the future. But we are also seeing lots of large farm operators by conserved parcels and it is of great economic value to them to not be paying full development value for land. So I'm going to leave this slide. I just say since you brought it up what I've seen in my area is conserved land, particularly conserved land in flood plain that now is there's a 35 acre piece behind me that went up for sale while the large farmer paid $5,000 an acre. And it's very hard for anybody new to pick into farming with that kind of price, with the price of equipment. And I think from my vantage point the question comes up what do we want of agriculture and how are you thinking about the future going forward around that because agriculture is becoming cornered by those very large producers and that's it and I'm not sure that that's what we want the next generation. I think you're asking exactly the right question and we have been struggling with this over many years. So the first 15 years of the program what we did with our ag easements was to have a right of first refusal and then we introduced beginning around 2000 or 2002 this option to purchase an ag value but as we talked to the farm community back then what they said to us was we don't want you to interfere in sales between farmers. So while we have this option and we've never had to exercise I think that the issue of how do we get the next generation into agriculture has become a harder problem to solve because we've seen big farmers out compete young entrepreneurs for land and they need the land, it's staying in agriculture but it isn't the kind of agriculture that we had 40 years ago where you could have a small operation. When we began this work 100 cows was a pretty large farm. There weren't 1200 cattle farms like that. So we have trust and we have focused a lot on how do we help the next generation get onto farmland. We introduced paying what we call an option to purchase an ag value. I think one of the lessons we've learned over the years is that it's good to conserve even though we might have a 600 acre parcel we might want to conserve it in smaller chunks and I think we're going to need some additional tools that help the young farmers get onto farms. There's a provision in the federal farm bill for the matching funds we use and every dollar we spend on development rights is matched by a federal dollar called buy or protect sell that would allow a group like the Vermont Land Trust to buy the farm, hold it and then resell it. And I think we're going to need going forward more provisions and stronger provisions around affordability. We use a model in our housing work where people share appreciation with the non-profits and they don't fully benefit at full market value when it's time to sell. And I think how we do that and we want to do the sensitivity to the concerns of farmers I can't tell you we've yet to do that out exactly how we ought to do it but we've been involved in lots of farm transfer work to young farmers over the last few years. I don't know if any of you have been at the market at the corner of Route 2 and Route 100 and be in Middlesex but the story there is a young couple and Liz can tell the story better than I so I should say probably a little bit not a lot but we helped them buy their first farm, we helped them buy their second farm we gave them a business plan to open that market and it's a terrific market we're doing great work so we have to focus more of our efforts on how do we get the next generation into agriculture at a price point I think and development rights is once new it won't be the only two way Yeah, it's been a pretty good ride though I mean we've conserved a lot of good agricultural land and now we've got to keep farmers on that land farming Whatever it takes to keep it open and productive For me the crisis is in the small firms Yeah, it kind of hasn't hit the big farms as hard as the little ones but you take a say when it does get there because it will get there you know you start taking a 12 to 2,000 cal herd farm with 3 to 5,000 acres and it's going to go bust I mean we're talking some serious serious money even with the development rights gone to keep that farm so somebody can go in there and buy it but if we can we should keep what we got there and by the end, thank you Gus Any other questions right now for Gus? Okay, Stacy? Yep, thanks Morning Morning, thanks for having us Great to see everyone So Gus did a great job cuing me up to talk with you about our agriculture program My name is Stacy Cevula and I'm the agriculture director at the HCB I've been in that post for about 2 years So I have to say this is the first time I've been in the state house because I was a pandemic hire So I'm just going to start off with kind of a broad brush overview of our program and then go into some more details about some recent projects that we've funded So since we were established back in 1987 we've helped conserve almost 800 farms across the state which is around 171,000 acres so definitely something we're proud of and our partners are proud of but definitely have more work ahead of us In the last year and a half we've helped conserve 24 farms across the state which is around 42 acres and we really can't do this work without our partnerships So we work probably not surprisingly do you really closely with Vermont Land Trust as the biggest land trust in the state and they have a wonderful ad program and have spent a lot of years building that program and adapting it to some of the challenges that we talked about earlier around trying to target smaller farms and helping the next generation get on land So we're really proud to be working with them and then also our federal partner the Natural Resources Conservation Service So as Gus mentioned they are typically providing a match 50% of our typical project is being funded with federal dollars which is just phenomenal without that program we wouldn't be able to do this work so very grateful for that and for the great team at the state NRCS office So at this point in Vermont we have protected about 20% of our ad land and a lot of that has really been the cream of the crop, the best crime and statewide important agricultural soils We still definitely have more work to do A couple of things I want to mention I'll talk more about in my next slides but probably not surprising to you also a big part of our work throughout our conservation work but also with our ad projects is focusing on water resource protection So you know with all of the talk about concern about both Laysha Plain and the Formagog and pollution and concern about ag's role and that this is something that we also take really seriously with our projects and as do our partners so with every farm project that has any kind of water resources on it we're making sure that the streams have vegetative buffers if there are wetland areas those are set aside and that agricultural activities can happen there and then another piece of that is also at times restoration projects so often our land trust partners are talking to landowners and connecting them with federal state partners or funders who might be able to help them do restoration work like tree plantings and things like that so it's all holistic and it all connects together and then as Gus has already talked about and we'll talk about more as Liz will as well is that conservation is really a great tool for getting land in the hands of next generation and keeping these farms active and viable can I ask the 20% does that include forest and land too? my understanding yeah I think it's taking into account the whole farm so obviously with most farms there's a sugar bush or other piece of forest land yeah it's a good question alright and I'm a little worried about time so I may and may not get through all the land I don't want to short change Liz so we'll just keep an eye on it and please do ask questions as I go so just wanted to highlight a couple of recent projects that we funded so in the upper left corner Wildstone Farm and Palomal this is a small farm a great example of a really successful productive small farm they are organic veggie operation and one of the oldest or actually the oldest certified organic farm in Bunington known in the community as being great mentors to young farmers coming in and this was a relatively small grant for us and I think also it's nice to see that we funded both smaller farms like this as well as the big operations and the next farm I'll talk about is the set Ted the set and the shot with the this one is hot off the press our board just funded it yesterday it was awarded $733,500 for this 200 acre farm that's in Fairfax it was a conventional dairy up until about 15 years ago and Ted and his wife Chris ended up selling her as it just became too difficult to financially for them to keep going but at this point we're very, very excited this is a common theme too to be able to use the funding from the Bellarites to bring new life into the farm so they have a growing sugaring operation they've got some beef cattle they have ideas for some other diversified enterprises are hoping to bring on to the farm and so they actually another cool part of this project is they are really excited to learn about our farm and forest viability program and I've already called up Liz's team to ask about getting business planning help so that's a common thing when we see where folks learn about our other programs through conservation which is great and then folks on the right Bowmeard farm that they are Hannah and John Boyle and that's one of their little boys they are face up in Fletcher this is another transfer situation where it was a dairy farm owned by the King family for a long time and there was a death in the family and they decided at that point that they needed to sell and ended up transferring the land to this young couple who's doing a diversified operation they were at the time on just 10 acres of land more of like a homesteading operation and running the space and needed active land and so Vermont Land Trust connected them with the King family and now they're running a pasture race pork and chicken operation there it seems like we've had Mrs. Doyle we've brought her in to testify is it her husband does some carpentry work I think he's so dispensing as well we're going to invent something else but he was really tuned in to what they were doing on the farm did a thing up job that's great great to hear like when farmers are advocating for these programs too great and so a few more slides to share so the gray dairy farm is an example of a large commercial operation I believe one of the largest dairy farms in the state up in the northeast kingdom so they at this point are milking about 4,500 cows quite a bit of land in the area and this was an example the farm is there on the right that they recently purchased so that farm was owned by some other state landowners who weren't really using it to its full potential and it came on the market and the grays jumped on it that would be great for them to be able to have such a nice large tract of land and not have to rely as much on lease holdings which is really common too and so the sale of milk rights helped them be able to afford that purchase the other thing that's really neat about this project and I think is indicative of a lot of our ad projects is that there are strong community benefits to this land so this property historically has been used by local folks for recreation, hunting hiking, cross country skiing and so as part of this easement there is public access for recreational purposes and the grays are happy to continue that and have been maintaining those trails Is that located near the home farm or? It's a couple miles to like the southeast of there I believe I haven't been on their home farm so I can't say it was sort of deep but it's not far But they go way up into Essex County through the woods they have their own farm road through and so it's a good big operation Yeah, definitely Being in the family college for generations a great family Yeah and then let's see, last but not least the Sats family and this might be a familiar farm to some of you it's actually called the woods market garden and so this farm was owned at one point by a representative Bob Wood Just south of Yeah, so he sold the land to John Sats in the year 2000 so quite a while ago and evidently representative Wood was not a huge proponent of conservation and didn't want to go through that process himself but but he ended up selling the farm to John's this young farmer John Sats who did want to go through conservation and knew that that would help keep the farm more affordable for him and did that with from outland trust initial project we were involved in but then fast forward to now John Sats had acquired some additional land next to the original farm and wanted to conserve this new tract of land so approached BLT about going through that process and actually in this situation it has a sad story the reason that the Sats family in part wanted to go through conservation the second time was to set the farm to be transferred to someone new so John was very ill and ended up passing away and so his wife Courtney wasn't able to keep the farm going and so being able to protect more of the land and also add this farm did not initially have the option to purchase the agricultural value that Gus was talking about and so we were able to purchase retroactively which then brought the purchase price down for the next farmers to come in so definitely a sad story but I think that Courtney Sats feels good knowing the land is going to remain in farming and they've got a young couple coming in who will run a very similar farm operation this farm stand if you're known it's run over at 7 a million cars go by every day and it's very popular so no doubt that they'll get success with that I'm just going to interrupt for a second because some of you do represent quite well and though philosophically he was not a big fan of the government buying development right after the farm was sold I was talking with him one day and I said how are they doing and his reply was I just wish they'd asked me to help before so he was quite delighted with the farm and stayed in production he was always in good heart thank you for that and I go okay so last but not least wanted to just again highlight water quality and how important this is in our agricultural work so here is the language that was added to the beach to be enabling legislation back in let's see 2012 with this purpose related to water quality which really gave us even more more impetus to go out and be able to fund projects that highlight and emphasize water resource protection and so as I already mentioned we are always looking at farms from the perspective of there are waterways we've got to have them buffered their wetland areas are going to be set aside and have special protections in the easement so people being able to work with our partners to do restoration work so I see this as it's a really great opportunity especially when you talk about transferring land from one generation to the next with the easement these kind of water quality protections would not happen any other way so it's a really good tool to be able to facilitate that and then the other thing that we're able to do is connect folks with our water quality grants program through our viability work so Liz will probably talk more about that but we have a grants program for land owners who are implementing different water quality like infrastructure improvements like someone who has newer storage problems and these infrastructure upgrades we can help fund that and it typically gets matched with state and federal funds so I'm happy to I know I zipped right through that I'm happy to answer questions from folks you did too good a job on all questions thank you very much of course from a financial perspective development rights generally are not less than 30 or 40% of the value of the farm these days and often well over 60% so from a financial perspective which the squirrel farmer needs to start does this make a financial sense it's a big help in lowering the cost we're freeing up capital that people use to invest in water quality to invest in expansion to invest in storage and that's a program that's 50% matched so you know we're getting a dollar for a dollar to help and it's a good thing we got that land conserved because we saw what happened during the pandemic with people coming up here buying everything in anything site unseen so no I guess we'll continue to grow something in Vermont and besides houses so thank you very good good morning thanks everyone for having me I'm Liz Lisa and I'm the program director for the farm and forest capability program here at VHCB which also includes our rural economic development initiative which Gus mentioned and I'll touch briefly on later but mostly going to focus on our more ag specific work just wanted to go backwards a little bit to some Stacy's slides because many of the photos on here many of these farmers are folks who have been through both our business planning program or farm transfer planning program with the farm viability and conserving either at the same time either because conservation leads to them realizing they could enroll for business planning or because through their business planning or transfer planning process they realize that the way to make this viable moving forward is conservation so both the Sats family and the folks who are taking over Woods Market Garden we've worked with Wildstone Farm Boneyard Farm these are all farms that we've collaboratively worked on both in the conservation department and in the farm viability work so bumping ahead the farm and forest viability program started its life as the farm viability enhancement program was the initial name is 20 years old so about 15 years into the HCB's tenure we added on this program and the rationale behind that was we've been conserving land we knew we needed conservation as a really important tool to keep farmland open and available but that wasn't solving all of the challenges that farmers were facing there was still a lot to overcome and we knew also that if there wasn't an additional set of supports that many people might not even be able to afford to farm on the land that we have conserved so there's a lot of amazing work going on in Vermont to help support farmers in so many ways and what we added on was a really in-depth high quality business planning program so for farmers and later on about 10 years ago we added forest businesses people could enroll they get matched directly with a really skilled advisor someone who understands the production side who understands the financial side who understands the market side they can kind of bring all those skills together and support farmers and forest businesses to plan for the future since we started 20 years ago we've worked with about 900 businesses we started off working with between 10 to 30 businesses the first couple years at this point in our in-depth program typically enroll 50 to 75 new people in any given year and then we're working with an additional 100 or more either previously engaged and coming back to more for more services or getting a little bit more light-touch work so we're touching hundreds of farmers a year through this program and dozens of dozens of forest products businesses and I guess one thing I'll also say about our program model is that we don't have those advisors on staff at BHCB we contract with a really great network of other organizations and private consultants who have really built a very unique skill set around this farm business planning this we work with the integral sector UVM extension the center for an agricultural economy and hard work land for good which is actually a New England wide organization and several other smaller organizations and each of those have a team of one to sometimes five or six people like at UVM who are farm and forest business advisors who come with a production background which is really meaningful many of them have run their own farms or other kinds of businesses but bring a deep sort of financial and planning skill set and can help businesses make really high quality plants for the future just this past year in our more in-depth work we worked with 154 businesses and combined that represents about 460 jobs and 334.7 million in sales so it's a pretty significant economic footprint per year our general rule of thumb is that in any given year about a third of the clients we're working with are in some way engaged in transfer planning that's just the very beginning stages of saying we know at some point in the next decade or even two decades this is going to happen and we'll start thinking about the pieces to put in place or they're actively closing on selling a farm or business to a new generation it's all across the map we do help a lot of people as part of that business planning program to access financing whether it's grants or loans and really this program is very established the business advisors in their program have really built deep skills and we see pretty significant economic results in addition to improvements in quality of life and ability to take a day off and ability to go to your kids soccer game we see that this past year 71% of clients reported an increase in their sales to their overall gross income and 60% of those clients also increased their net income and this isn't on the slide but last year in 2022 I think we had 13 businesses that when they enrolled actually had negative net incomes they were actively losing money nine of those 13 a year to two years later had gone from negative to positive so we work with people who are doing well and want to improve and we work with people and really needing to get in the black that's a good question does Lisa own her property now I see her up there is that a lease? I believe it's inserved and she owns it that's a great example she was on lease planned for a long time like a decade so when this farm came available it's what we call a farm and access project she applied we work with the development some of the development rights there later on they think of farm so that farm now forever when she sells it what may or may not happen to the land just so I can better there will never be houses built on she sold the development there was an option to purchase at ag value I believe also I'm going to have to double check that no that's helpful though for me to understand a great local example of somebody that was leasing for a long time and Lisa's food is incredible that she grows and it's really expanded over the past 15 years she's a really amazing farmer amazing yeah thank you yeah we work with her on business planning around the same time going through conservation and looking for land so we can really get in deep helping people look for a new parcel where farms are a good fit for them help them put together the financing all that stuff and it helps the people that did on that as well to retire with some money and dignity and in a great young farmer moving on and able to make a living but she loves to do it that's a great story well a couple I'll just quickly touch on another aspect of our program which is making grants Stacey mentioned our water quality grants program that's been funded through the capital bill part of the state's clean water budget we had a long history of making grants directly to farmers we tend to have a little more flexibility with what we're able to fund compared to some other state and federal programs so the point of having a small but mighty water quality grants program at BHCB was to help people fund projects that might not score well at NRCS or agency of ag but we still meet really meaningful or to help people be able to access those more complex funding sources because they need the match so we're working really well together with NRCS and the agency of ag and with people doing other innovative projects to really improve water quality whether it's through infrastructure for manure or better grazing practices and when we've been able to and when there's been enough funding we also run something called implementation grants so for folks who've recently worked in our business advising they identify a list of projects through that process that are vetted and have been sort of decided on and prioritized with their advisor and they can apply to us for funding to implement some of those projects so a lot of the examples I'm going to show later on are people who have been through our planning program and then immediately are able to access a small grant to help roll out a project Adams turkey farm is one of those there in westford this brings me back to my roots for a little bit my grandfather ran a chicken processing plant in the south for years and there's not many around here in Vermont but this is one of them Southern United States not Southern Vermont I forget which states sometimes Southern Vermont is Southern United States well depends on where you're sitting South of here quite a bit but yeah in westford they did business planning business have been around for 30 years they've never really done a lot of deep planning for the future we helped them improve their record keeping and separate out their personal and business finances and then they got a grant to help add some value added products including pet food which is actually a pretty interesting market Tyler Riggs LSF forest products up in Fletcher did business planning with us many years ago and then re-enrolled he wanted to sort of double to triple his production he makes I think mostly pine and hemlock boards and also works really closely with timber framers so we work with all different kinds of forest products businesses from loggers to small mills to woodworkers and processors who are processing much a little product a couple other quick stories very far up in west fields they have a young son they're an example of someone who started planning really early to think about well we're not ready to retire yet but we actually want to think about this before we have to retire tomorrow which is how most people usually operate and so they started to put the pieces in place whether their son wants to take over he's in his early 20s now or whether they want to sell it to someone else it is conserved the law Mike was page boy here quite a few years to come and heading again down south but staying in Vermont evening song farm we've worked with them over many different years to grow to get through the pandemic their business planner John Miller from NOPA who was in here the other day testifying on organic dairy really helped them through some tough times as they were trying to pivot during the pandemic they had young children it was just a really challenging time so and as you've seen this is a lot of different kinds of farms there hasn't been a dairy yet we work with a lot of dairies but we work with a lot of other kinds of businesses to all kinds of scales from quite small to some of the larger businesses and we do really believe in this program that a diverse set of farms of all scales and types and sizes is really where we need to go as a state I'm just going to skim through the rest of these really quickly this is another example of a farm transfer to conserve farm we've been working with a younger generation Jenna, Baird and Jacob to buy the farm from their parents from Jenna's parents just highlighting the organic dairy issue going on right now as you all heard on Wednesday there's really quite a crisis in organic dairy and we've recently over the past couple years worked with about 38 organic dairies 26 of whom were farmers transitioning from Horizon to another market including the Lins here in Walden just might be losing battery but I don't know if we can get through the next couple minutes during 2021 and 20 late 2020 to 2021 we launched actually a new entirely separate wing of our program to support folks through COVID and we actually worked with an additional 600 farm, food and forest businesses through that really short term super quick needs based kind of emergency response work all different kinds of businesses and the Rural Economic Development Initiative which was created about five years ago in this wonderful building is designed to help small communities and working lands and outdoor recreation enterprises access complex funding sources we do this all the time on our farm and forest business planning program now we do it both with farm and forest businesses and also all different kinds of small communities the Arlington Common Wellness Center community based wellness center with all different kinds of businesses and community spaces so far we've used about a little over $500,000 in state funding to help communities access over $10 million in grants so it's a small wing of our program but very has a really high impact on these small communities mostly under $5,000 these are a couple of value added producer grants which is a really complicated USDA grant that we've helped farms get a sweet round and run them up people and then just really quickly I want to highlight the major growth that we've seen over last year and this year was directly due to increased state investment in this program historically about FY 18 through 21 we were typically working with 100 to 180 businesses a year and that would cost us this is in our overall program budget specifically for business planning putting out between $600 $750,000 in contracts every year last year we put at $1.3 million to business advisors to be on the ground with businesses and that's going to impact both last year and moving into this year 318 farm and forest businesses so really major growth and we really appreciate that support and same with REDI over doubling the number of community supported a year I'm just going to interrupt for one second to say two things, one is the picture there is exactly I think the kind of situation when Senator Westman was speaking to the young couple getting on the land getting business support but the other thing I need to say is that last year in Senator Westman's other committee our base funding was brought up much closer to what some of you know as the property transfer tax level this year's proposal reduced that back where we were three years ago if that were to happen our overall funding is fine because there's one type of money but if that were to happen we could not maintain the growth in either the REDI program or the farm viability program that we've experienced so back a few years prior funding was just reminding me though we put our funds in it didn't work we swapped it out and put general fund back well no you and the other body both under the year before we put you've given us both ARPA funding and one time general funds but last year what you specifically did I think Senator Kitchell talked about this the other day was under the property transfer tax law we should get about 27 or 28 million we were getting 11 and a half last year you increased that to a little over 20 the governor's budget brings it back to that 11 and a half million dollar level and gives us 10 million in one time funding for housing so all I'm saying to you is I get that but we did give ARPA money that was difficult for you to deal with you have more flexibility yes you did absolutely but I think that was primarily at that level things not on what I call the conservation community development just saying for these programs to maintain the current level of activity we can't do it if we go back to that prior level of funding and I think this is the kind of work that speaks very specifically to your concern that we work more with small farms and work on getting people into ownership and deal with that crisis as well as working with small rural communities that have a lot of needs and don't have staff to go do the work so that was the point I wanted to make that Senator Kitchell talks quite often when we're talking about ag stuff and DHCB all that ready program has worked over the years and the ready program for you folks is we set that up and gave Gus a little bit of money and in the first year I think kind of what we gave him a couple of them or something and doing good things getting while bringing money into the state that was last set on the table of a lot of federal agencies and I noticed on the slide it's grown quite a bit and we would be happy to take it up another notch I have had a conversation given the governor's proposal of the budget with the agency of the administration about administering a sub grant for that help to rural communities work governor wants to do and they're quite open to that so maybe we'll get it made up some other way but not in our base budget so that's our concern is that we don't love it's nice to know what you're going to have from one year to the next this one time stuff that could go away well we know it's all going to ratchet down there's no question we do have a large pipeline of opportunities in front of us in both housing and conservation more than you will be able to fund no matter how generous you choose to be and this really reflects I think often the work of your constituents so Senator Westman can tell you that it took ten years to turn Green River Reservoir from an idea into a state park with lots of local folks really working on it Paul Hannon and I met with Morrisville Water and Light when he was the Forest and Parks Commissioner around 1990 1989 and we didn't get a deal done for another decade but if you want to find a beautiful place to spend the summer's day there's no better place so lots of future opportunity I know you're at time and I guess I just want to say since we've turned 35 years and three of us have been around all that time this slide just tells you what has been done over those 35 years what's that still in on the far left the gorgeous building is the Putnam Block in Bennington and when we had the ground break the upper floors have been vacant since the 1970s this is right at the corner of 2009 did you recognize that? I noticed he said the most beautiful place to spend the afternoon of their life for me I'd rather be on the water than upstairs it's made a big difference it's making a big difference and the fellow who's the head of the Bennington Bank spoke at the groundbreaking and he said this is a project there's no economic sense in the world that made all the community sense in the world to not have this hulking structure in the middle of downtown but I think it does make economic sense because you know it has brought back reasons for people to swing downtown stop, have a cup of coffee spend some money it's bringing more feet on the ground if you will that's helping other businesses it wouldn't cash flow by itself I think that was his point and just I just want to note on the far right is the Chapit family dairy which when I met Rich Chapit around in the early 90s he was buying his first farm and when he built his first barn it was in the middle of a recession in the early 90s and it was actually the largest construction project in Orleans County that year and he is now among the large farmers in Vermont he used these programs to get to that place to be a large farmer who employs quite a number of people and what's really great about that farm he's got about 5,000 acres that are all contiguous so he isn't traveling 20 miles and off the farm to get the feed it's now it was well planned out but BHCB in the land trust everybody has worked very well and Rich is very happy with the help they've received and the very smallest part of our work we see in the middle 81 historic buildings restored for community use and there's a picture of the Paulette Library but Senator Westman is familiar with the old range in Morrisville that's now a great center for the arts that kids enjoy working in every day so if you have a community that has such a building where they're trying to figure out what to do with it that's exactly the sort of thing that we provide some funding for and that the ready program assists and then the big picture number I just want to tell you when the founders of this work first came to Senator Starr and Senator Westman 35 years ago they said we're going to leverage public funds and they didn't know how I mean we had dreams but you've invested about $400 million in this program over 35 years and your constituents have raised another two more than $2 billion now from philanthropic funds from community fundraising from federal funds, from private investment to make all this work happen across the state so thank you very much I know we're at time we're happy to come back and give you more detail on the ready program and the farm viability program and when you have a concern Senator Westman, Senator Starr just gave me a referral from the town of Wellington this morning where we think we can be helpful if I'm not at the building if Holly is please let us know and if neither of us are here make our phone right please we appreciate your time this morning and my goss is in your almost homes I have but it's you know it's been good I don't know if we ever had a bad year we had hard years we had hard debates we had various times when we first began this program and Senator Westman will know this we had skepticism in the farm community about whether this was a good idea or not representative Wood wasn't the only person who was unsure that selling development rights would ever be a good thing for the ag community so we actually yesterday our board met yesterday and a lot of people helped us in the early years we had an ag advisory committee as Mike Claudette who some of you know yesterday with him and his brother Tom to buy development rights in order for John a fellow named John Lucas to buy one of their parcels and he's a first generation dairy farmer getting into the business so anyway he was a great help well he's up to good work and we appreciate it you know if we never be an assistant we'll call you know you call us too if we have an issue you're around enough so we will stay in touch thank you all very much thank you it's great we got a couple of young institutions keep on going thank you good to see you thank you all thank you very much oh oh you've got there should be your momentary the battle we could take apart okay