 Tom Sabo, before I explain myself, I do want to give a shout out to Jody Kelly. Jody, here's your hand back there. It's possible for making this space come to life once again in our community when we're super, super grateful. The Garage Cultural Center has a signed new book over there. If you want to make sure you're getting updates and notices about all their events, so there's many, many events going on, please sign over there. There's a bunch of other information as well. So again, Tom Sabo, I'm a science teacher monthly at high school. I'm also the sustainability coordinator for the school district. I'm the director of a small educational nonprofit called the Center for Sustainability Systems, or CSS. If you want to get on the mailing list for that, you have to sign over there at the start of the room. The CSS was formed to help support sustainability programming at Montpelier High School. Not limited to, but often focused on food systems, which shows here and one of the panels ever happened. The idea for this series came about when Jody and I met thanks to Theresa Mary-Cawson right here, and she was interested in having more community events up here and also connecting with the schools and with students. At the same time, the board of the CSS was thinking that we shouldn't limit our educational efforts and our engagement efforts to the school. We should reach out to the community a little more. So the timing was perfect, and we came up with this pollinator series. Last week we had our first panel. It was a pollinator crisis panel. This week we have climate change and food security. And on Saturday from nine to three will be the let it be arts and craft fair. Open bookshops, there's gonna be vendors. So please put that in your calendar. It's gonna be a great event. All right, that's my intro. The structure for the evening here, we have a fantastic panel. If you're putting together a panel on climate change and food security, you'd be hard to do much better. We are going to, I'm just saying, get up here. We're gonna deliver that. We're gonna teach you what to raise it up here. And Sarah Joseph, he owns food. So the structure is gonna be each of our panelists are gonna have five minutes to introduce themselves and speak a little bit about their experience in this realm. After that, I'll come back around and have, based on the intros, a targeted question for each of the panelists, maybe for the whole panel. They'll get us about halfway there. So please hold your questions. And at that point we'll take the human aid from the crowd, okay? So the vision of my sequence here is we're gonna start with Joseph Kiefer, where he's gonna talk about food security. And I know, I recognize many faces, I know many of you and many of you are familiar with Joseph's great work. We'll talk about food security over the last few decades of food insecurity in Vermont. And I'll leave you with the present and it's a point we're gonna move forward into this world of climate change. After that, Josh Buckner, Dr. Josh Buckner from UVM is gonna speak about how Vermont farms are already being impacted by climate change and what's being done about that. After that, author, activist Grace Cresciini is gonna talk about organic farming and how that factors in currently and how it can factor in more moving forward. And finally, the kind of Governor David Zeperman, a longtime organic farmer, is gonna talk about his experience as a farmer in the States and of course the legislative side of things. Okay, Joseph, ready? Thank you, Tom, thank you, Jody. Thank you all for turning out tonight. This is like such a big piece of pie on this topic. Oh, a piece of cake that Jody made us. You know, I tend to look at the topic of food security and think it's something very much taken for granted. You know, most people are very lucky and fortunate and our choices are going to the co-op or another store to get our food. But if you're not as lucky, you basically are dealing with food insecurity, which is really where I'd like to focus. You know, and those who experience food insecurity are a growing number of people in our community. I'm on the board of the Montpelier Food Pantry through just basics nonprofit and over the last three years, we've seen a tripling in demand at the food pantry. So we're seeing more families, more elders and more homeless people coming in who have limited, little or no cooking supplies, basically can opener. And so that's part of our experience. I guess I'd like to start my story back in the, when I received my phone call in 1982 from the Community Action Council outreach director Joseph Gange who asked if I'd be part of a community task force on hunger. I, to be honest, was shocked because I didn't see it, didn't know it, didn't think we had a problem on hunger in Vermont in 1982. I said, sure. And they just experienced a 650% increase in demand. And we thought, wow, that's significant. I wonder what caused that. And we started looking around at other community action around the state and we found out there were similar numbers of dramatic increases in demand. Well, of course it was Reaganomics at the time, cut back in federal programs, trickle down economics as you all recall, and what trickles down is very little. So we started organizing the food bank and invited Governor Cunin to start a task force on hunger. And we had six hearings around the state. And I'd say that, you know, when you start looking at food insecurity, you realize it's not just the physical demands on food, it's the emotional, spiritual demands on food that drains the body. And these hearings were painful. They were painful, because one of the quotes out of the hearings was a woman who said, she was essential to non-nutrition aid. When I was growing up in Vermont, it was a different world. I guess we were poor, but we always had food because we kept animals and grew a garden and put up food for the winter. But now a lot of low income families can't do that. They don't have land or the skills or the time or equipment to do it. So, you know, I look at food insecurity, it's defined as the lack of access to enough food to fully meet basic needs at all times due to a lack of financial resources. So here in Vermont, you know, we have high rents, high fuel costs. If you are lower income, I'm also on the board of Highgate Housing in Barrie. And it's a tenant community board. So you pay 30% of your income, whatever that income is. So it's adjusted. It's a HUD supported initiative. And after five years now, and I've learned way too much about housing issues, but I've come to see that it's actually a poverty trap. It's really hard to get out. It's easy to get in, there's a roof, there's, you know, you can get food, you can get by, but if you make too much money with it off and out with a job, you can jeopardize your ability to live there. So we're experiencing these kinds of initiatives around the state. Clearly as we look at, you know, I've come to see and define the challenge of hunger, especially in the early years, it was invisible. It was quiet, it was silent. You didn't see it. It took you a while to learn to identify and be kind of acclimatized to the issues of what hunger meant in our community. Well, now we know a lot more, we know serious impacts on children, educational, nutritional, health, behavior. We know it all, families, working families, we know it all, elders. So we're seeing the serious consequence. You know, here we are in the great state of Vermont. We all live in our various bubbles, I believe. I think one of our bubbles is we're all food secure and that we probably are, but there's a whole slew of us walking the streets every day who aren't and they're getting by, you know, they may look fine, they may be dressed okay, but they're struggling. So it's a really hard world out there for many of our neighbors and our community members. And I think, you know, in a way, I'll conclude my first five minutes, but I think we're stuck. I think we're stuck. I think we've gotten duped into a system where we think that hunger relief is an answer to the problem and it isn't an answer to the problem. It maintains the problem, it manages the problem, but it's not a solution. And as we move into kind of a greater awareness, this conversation has to go on. All around the state, every, you know, on a regular basis, you know, and I know that the sustainable Montpeliers working in this conversation, there's a lot because this is going to be our future. How do we feed ourself with an extreme weather war climate changes and how do we kind of get back to some of the things that we know how to do? Communication, food sharing resources. So I'll pause on that with this piece which I was going to start with, but it was by Dwight Eisenhower, our 34th president. Every gun that is made, every warship launch, every rocket fired signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It's spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the threatening cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. Rackle. All right, goody. So my name's Joshua Faulkner and I worked for University of Vermont and I have a position that's called the Farming and Climate Change Program Coordinator and was created as a result of tropical storm Irene. And a big part of what I do, I do a few things, I teach a lot on campus. I do applied research, but I do a lot of work both one-on-one with farmers and then also traditional extension and outreach with farmer groups and talking about climate change, talking about resilience and not only how it impacts the farm, but how it impacts our surrounding environment. And so I mentioned Irene because when I talk to farmers, that is I think in a farmer's consciousness when you bring up the phrase climate change, a lot of people, farmers immediately go back to that single event and that kind of frames the conversation for where we move afterward. And I think that's a really good place to start when we talk about the effects of climate change on agriculture and the key ones that we see in the data are that we've seen in the Northeast as a whole, we've seen annual precipitation increase by about four inches over the past century. Now, it's very different when you drill down into the climate district specific data and you look at Vermont and you kind of you piece that away from the Northeast. And in the Northeast Kingdom, for example, we've seen increases of nine inches on an annual basis in the last 30 years. So four inches over a hundred years, that's multiple generations on a farm, that's something that can be adapted to nine inches over 30 years, that's within one generation often. And that's a challenge. The other thing we see and is born out in the data is an increase not just in precipitation but in the patterns of precipitation. And I'm sure many of you have been in Vermont for any time, you can anecdotally attest to that that we see more of the extreme events. That's kind of what you see headline events in the Northeast to these extreme events. And we've seen an increase of 70 some percent extreme events over the past 50 years or so where the rest of the country has seen an increase but more on the order of 30% some Pacific Northwest 12%. So this is our headline story in Vermont. In regardless of a farmer's politics, when you go on to a farm, I work with Dairy, I work with Veg, I work with beef, livestock, farms of all stripes. In regardless of where they stand on climate change and if they even want to talk about climate change they'll talk about those extreme events and how much more difficult it is to manage their soils and manage their production system, whatever it may be in the face of those events. And then I think the other really important piece, there's many effects of climate change but the other really important piece to talk about here that rises to the top is that the unpredictability of these conditions is that we may have drought and we may have one of the, we may have one of the wettest maize on record followed by potentially one of the driest jalaes on record that we can have swings on either ends of, into the spectrum in the single year and that's really difficult to manage for if you're a producer and you're used to operating within certain boundaries that you need to, it's not just gonna be a wet year, it's not just gonna be a dry year, you need to be ready for everything that the climate throws at you. So that, I think above and beyond possibly extreme precipitation and more rainfall, it's that wildly uncreditable variability in conditions. The other thing, so doing a lot of work with farms on resilience and trying to not just build farms that we can talk maybe later a little bit about resistance versus resilience but there is a difference and we focus a lot on resilience and that's the ability of a farm to take a climate shock and bounce back. You know, it is not the condition where the farm is not impacted at all, that it has some, it gives a little bit but then it's able to bounce back and that's resilience and that's I think where we want to be with our farm systems. The other thing we're starting to see more and more of now is we've worked on resilience and adaptation with agriculture for quite a while and now the conversations and I think everyone's probably aware of these if you're seeing current news stories is how can agriculture also be part of a solution to climate change and so I think we may talk about that a little bit tonight and how farms can start to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And I think that's a kind of my work in a nutshell and we're at five minutes. Okay, so I'll pass it on to Grace. It's a perfect segue. Perfect segue, yes, thank you. Because my shtick is definitely farming as a solution to climate change and I just, since a lot of people here don't know me, I will mention a little bit about what my background is. I really got most of my education by working for NOFA. I hope I don't have to spell out what that means. NOFA is great, great show. Starting in the mid-70s organizing a farmer's market that's still going in Newport, but what I eventually went back to school got my master's in extension education at UVN and but NOFA was my real education and I'd since then gone on to teach and write and organize and all of that sort of thing and I started teaching at the Institute for Social Ecology back in 1986 thanks to an invitation by this guy at the other end who was needed a co-teacher for the bio-regional agriculture course. So I've taught in various other college settings and most recently at Green Mountain College on the master's in sustainable food systems online program which sadly is now defunct although it's moved on to Prescott College in Arizona where I also taught in social ecology and a lot of people are notorious for my role in creating the National Organic Program. So in the 90s I was recruited by USDA to come write the rules for the law that was passed in 1990 and I have a long background in developing organic certification for NOFA particularly and so that was such a mind-bending experience I was on the staff for five years and I had to the only way that I could really explain everything that was in my mind in the whole process was to write a memoir. So I took me 15 years but I wrote my life story interspersed with a lot of policy stuff about organic and what it really means and all of that sort of stuff and it's called Organic Revolutionary, a memoir of the movement for real food, planetary healing and human liberation. Not very ambitious. And it ended up being self-published. It's now coming out in the third edition from Black Rose Books in Montreal soon. It's overdue. So that's the one minute I hope summary of my background. Lately and in my old age I'm moving out of trying to scrape together a living. Mostly with, most recently I've just been doing a lot of organic inspection work and traveling a lot but I have gotten very involved with the steering committee of the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition and have brought a whole bunch of literature and urge everybody to sign up for the listserv. Anybody can be a member and you get access to all the literature that's out there which is on the high jail. Another one of our steering committee members here. So that involves really spreading the word about the potential for agriculture and not just agriculture but any form of land management to mitigate climate change impacts but also to begin to reverse the impacts of climate change. And it's not just about carbon, it's also about the water cycle and the extreme hydrological events that Josh is talking about really are a function of the destruction of ecosystems that has been going on since the Industrial Revolution really but accelerating rapidly. So through building healthy soils and there's a set of soil health principles that anybody can begin to follow and the importance of regulating the water cycle as well as the carbon storage and it's all part of the same system. It's all mediated by the biology and the miracle of photosynthesis that can turn sunlight and carbon dioxide from the air into food. Really that's where all of our food comes from. So organic agriculture really is about soil to begin with and the dispersal of biosides in the environment, the dispersal of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer which results in the off-gassing of nitrous oxide which is 310 times as potent greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide are all part and parcel of what organic agriculture addresses. And at this point, now that we can actually count the number of organic farms and their productivity, we have more information about the fact that, yeah, if you compare the carbon footprint and the greenhouse impact of organic systems with conventional or other systems it always come out better. Whether it's on water quality, biodiversity and biodiversity is key to all of this and as well as carbon sequestration as well as nutrition and nutrient density. And by the way, there is also information coming out that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually causes crops. It may help them grow faster but in the process of growing faster their nutritional content is low. And that's been... That's right. Yes. So I'm gonna make one last, I have one last point to make here. So the idea of biodiversity it also extends to social systems and this is very much part and parcel of the Institute for Social Ecology which I've also remained part of ever since in 1986. And the real thing about the solution to food insecurity is really what we would call food sovereignty which is local control of over food producing resources. More people on the land having more control over their food supply. And the thing that I'm most interested in pursuing in my elder years here is really setting up systems to enable sharing of the land with people who have not had access to land. Refugees and we're gonna have some refugees and climate refugees and as well as political refugees and it's all connected of course. And that we really need to make way and to accommodate and to welcome the people who are going to be leaving wherever they are now and get them settled on the land and that's going to be as much a solution or to our food security issues as anything else that we could do. I'll stop there. All right, so David Zuckerman, I'm co-owner of Full Moon Farm with my spouse Rachel and I'm also the lieutenant governor and given the dress of the crowd I'm glad I chose to go with the farmer outfit not the suit which is a daily conundrum for me. But to bring it back to this more serious topic at hand I first want to recognize as I've been more and more people are trying to do that this meeting as we talk about land and soil and our climate is being held on unceded territory of that natural people and we have to continue to remind ourselves and awaken ourselves to that reality and actually as I was listening to some of the statistics coming our way I was really reflecting in my own mind about how what we are learning through the scientific world of dissection these people have known for thousands of years and lived on our land in a way that would not have caused these kinds of impacts and lived the sustainable life that I think many of us would aspire to live and few, including myself, do not, few achieve, I do not achieve it myself but it's also not a perfect history either. There were differences of opinion across different native people, indigenous peoples and strife and challenge and other issues as well but from a climate and land and soil management perspective they didn't manage the land, they lived with it. Our farm raises about 15 to 20 acres of vegetables each year about 750 to 1200 meat birds each year pasture moved twice a day across our cover crops on our vegetable soils raised 20 to 30 hogs of slaughter and sold about 80 piglets and we currently have about 75,000 pounds of food and storage, this is the time of year when I can shout out big numbers like that but to put that in perspective, that's enough food to feed all the people in the county I live in one half pound of food for one day and we're a bigger farm, we're one of the top 5% vegetable diversified farms in the state so we're talking about food security not only on the individual basis of health and access to food of any kind much less healthy food that is a huge issue we're all trying to struggle to deal with but realistically, even those of us that are more comfortable and buy local food and buy organic food and everything else we're still far, far, far cry from creating a system that is truly locally sustainable so keep that in mind with respect to climate crisis last year it rained in the spring and then stopped raining where I live and we ended the season about 35,000 pounds of food short this year, April and May and into June was wet and cold every day, you all know that we lost thousands of pounds of food from our cucumbers that all dampened off luckily for us, the rest of the season was almost as perfect as it could get but some rain almost every week but some of those rains are definitely more intense I mean, there's no doubt that you don't get the all day gentle rain that is what the soil and the plants can work with you're getting these downpours and obviously the Halloween storm is just another reminder of that but it's not the only one and the other thing I would say is wind we are getting much, much stronger winds and that isn't just blowing down power lines but it's blowing row cover off crops plastic off greenhouses, trees onto buildings and greenhouses, it's blowing over crops and the thing that I think it's doing more that people don't realize is it's blowing in pests and diseases earlier in the season that as an organic producer we used to get our crops healthy and big enough that as certain pests arrived the crops were big enough to thwart that impact and it's getting harder and harder to thwart some of those and some diseases don't have organic gravities as sweet midge being one that's changing the landscape for broccoli in any case I had a lot more to say I've got about 30 seconds left that's why I'm using this roof device but I remember in the state house hearing from some farmers a few years back some dairy farmers they were saying hey if it's warmer in our seasons longer we'll get a fourth kind of hay they were seeing it as an opportunity and before everyone and I saw a few heads shake, no or kind of scoff farmers are trying to make a living and being able to maybe produce more and squeak out a living that's slightly more respectable by today's standards from an economic perspective I think it's important to recognize that that's seen as a potential benefit now I would hazard to ask most of those folks with the first cut that was a disaster from the wetness which is usually one of your most voluminous cuts to the fall grain corn that they didn't harvest because it's that's in the lowest flattest best soils that got flooded with the Halloween rain maybe they're rethinking some of that and I would guess our doctor over there would know some of that better than I but it's I guess I'll wrap by just saying this is a huge and complex problem and I think that one of the challenges we have to face and I'm going to go back to Joseph Keeper's comments earlier about Reaganomics we've been living under trickle down economics since the 80s it was not just under Reagan it's been under every presidential administration and most state administrations that rich people need to have lower and lower taxes and somehow that's going to create an economy that's going to build it up for all of us and I would say that's all been completely the opposite however, those of us that are more comfortable have to recognize even if we're in the middle area of comfort that the number of things that we think we need versus what we really need and want is something we really have to discuss because without a better system of economic reward for everyone and being valued in their society whether it's farmers, janitors, folks who are picking up garbage on the street as long as we have this kind of economic disparity and people are working 50 and 60 hours a week still having to go to the food shelf to get food not even having the time in their day to come to a meeting like tonight to talk about these issues because they're simply struggling to hand off the keys to their spouse for the one car they've got so their spouse can work second or third shift while they're struggling to put a Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa birthday holiday gift out one gift for their kid and pay their electric bill they don't have the time to be having this conversation much less being able to make the decision to buy recycled toilet paper much less the rev car and put solar panels on their home and if those of us who are comfortable enough to be able to consider being a little bit less comfortable to make sure we have a just economic society that's going to be part of what leads us to a just ecological society So a couple of quick questions and then one harder question that will probably segue us into a larger Q&A Josh, you mentioned the extreme events which everyone is dealing with right now on that surround weather and the water David mentioned pests blowing in more than you'd seen in the years before and last week we had a pollinator crisis panel where there were researchers here talking about the extinction of bumblebees which are such important pollinators How much are you seeing about in the farms around Vermont to your work? How much of a problem are insects whether it's a change of range with pests or the loss of native pollinators? Sure, I'm not an entomologist I'll just preface this with that So I can cite one example that is I think a good example and before I do that let me say that there's a tremendous amount of debate in the scientific community right now about whether climate change causes these pests or if climate change just creates conditions that are more hospitable to the pests and other vectors that are driving those pests upward into New England But the one I think good shining example at least in the veg and small fruit world is spotted wing drosophila and there's some good work from Cornell and this is a fruit fly if you're not familiar with it that attacks soft fruits like blueberries and raspberries and it just, I don't know David, do you raise small fruits? I don't, but I have friends who do and it's talking a lot on the veg and berries It's nasty, I mean just, the fruit looks good but then when you touch the fruit it's mush it's just, it can't be salvaged and Cornell estimates that it will do $8 million worth of damage per year just to the New York State fruit industry and we don't have a study like that in Vermont but these small fruits are really important for some of our diversified farms or smaller farms and so this is one that we're really concerned about the apple community is also very concerned about some other diseases and talking about wind as a vector fire blight is driven by wind and so that's a concern as we see how winds, those are two examples that I would like to cite. Great, thank you. Okay, super quick question. David, which is harder, farming or politics? It's not as quick as you think, but I will say the two, I actually, they each have helped me with the other in that in both instances, success is usually not achieved suddenly. It takes lots of investment of time and energy. A lot of times you can work for an extended period of time on something and not know that you're gonna get the result in the end and that often you have to plan for a lot of options as you're going through the course of the season which are definition of season you wanna use and that a sudden event can radically alter the outcome. We could say that with the work many people did on different measures around what gun ownership or control or prevention, violence prevention measures many people have worked on for decades and one threat and we had a massive change in Vermont without law. It could go the other way where you work for 14 years and pass along GMO labeling and two years later in Washington with $120 million of lobbying it could be ripped up and thrown away. So your work can be rewarded and destroyed at the drop of a hat and in both of them you need the patience and fortitude to just keep going. Good answers. I got a lot of questions. I imagine you have some questions as well. So I'm gonna try to pick one and maybe merge a couple here. I'm gonna come right to it. I'll correct you all a little bit about this. We wanna jump right to this. When you think about climate change and you think about food security access has been the issue in the developed world certainly in the United States of Vermont. Availability may also become a concern for extreme weather events, et cetera. When you look at it from a climate justice like a just transition angle and David you brought another important point that farmers need to make a living too. So the price is important. One other set of data out there that you see conflicting reports about is the crop yield gap. Can we grow enough food organically to feed our population? There was a study out in last month, October that got a lot of press in nature. Very prestigious, the most prestigious journal was on PBS News. As good as an outlet. So talking about a study in the UK and that the UK were to convert 100% to organic agriculture it would increase greenhouse gas emissions 21% because they have to convert more land and they'd have to rely a lot on imports. Now that's study pivots and we spoke a little bit about this. That's study pivots on this yield gap. So to the whole panel, take it as you will. This is the last question for we'll turn to the crowd. Can organic ag and I think when we're talking about organic ag now we're gonna be talking about regenerative ag, right? Which one of its, some of the techniques. Pretty much the same thing. Okay, okay. And that maybe would be discussed a little more later, we need to stop admitting as much that we also need to draw down. Can regenerative organic agriculture grow enough food for our population? We can start with Vermont, David, we can then go nationally, we can go globally. Who would like to take the first crack? Mindful that we're gonna share this answer and then we're gonna bring the audience into it. Well, I would say the answer is yes, but it would also require all of us as consumers to be mindful of our consumption. And I mean that partly in value, because about 30% of the food that ends up on a plate in this country ends up in the trash, but also in what types of food and how much of them you consume. I produce meats, I'm not a vegan, but I also grew up eating meat two or almost three times a day and I think that's excessive relative to a balanced ecological footprint. So I think it's a combination of production and consumption. And then I would just add to that that the longer we farm organically, the more we rebuild the soil's capacity to produce in the kinds of yields that completely compete with conventional large input agriculture. Okay, well, I'll try to be short because I know it's okay because I've spent a lot of time on this very question and I certainly saw that article in that study from Nature and have been keyed into many rebuttals to that story. And the basic thing is that certainly in terms of greenhouse gases, they did not assess any of the things such as the carbon footprint of all of the agrochemicals that are used in other kinds of agriculture. They did not assess the greenhouse gas mitigation of not dispersing synthetic nitrates in the environment and a few other things like that. So essentially, and then they were positing the expanded area of land needed to grow the same amount of food based on a bunch of trials on experiment stations that compare what it might be considered organic by neglect sorts of plots compared with the supercharged, chemicalized high input sorts of plots. So essentially this was a piece of propaganda that was put out there and it really doesn't have that much validity to it. So that's the first thing. But the other, the piece about how we can feed the world, well, we shouldn't try to feed the world. The world should be allowed to feed itself from its own land, from the people having the ability to feed themselves in their own communities from their own land. It's certainly not, there is no purity around this, but essentially the idea that we need huge tracks of land to feed the teeming populations in the cities is the current state of affairs. It's true, but what we need to do is to radically restructure our economics political and food systems as a consequence. And that's really what the just transition demands. I'll stop there. Good answer. I'll just add that from where I sit, I think that the one thing we have to remember is that our land grant university system, our industry agricultural stakeholders have not put the level of investment in research into organic systems that we have into conventional systems. And there's a lot of room for improvement for new tools, better tools, harnessing the use of technology and some people falling both sides of the fence on that one. But I think that it's right for a research and to improve the efficiency of these systems and maintain the values that we feel strongly about in organic agriculture. Great question. Back in 2007, 0809, another governor's task force on hunger. So I witnessed these. One of the recommendations was for town food plants. And sometimes the danger of these task forces is that nothing really follows through. Great ideas, great press, everyone reads about it, gets concerned about the problem and then kind of goes to sleep. So Farm to Plate, which I work on the food access group just this year created a nice little town planning food access booklet suggesting that in fact, we start thinking differently about what we do within our own town and start looking at our agricultural lands and preserving our agricultural lands that we could start really planning out how do we think about food production in a town-wide level? How do we use our schools for food processing? How do we use different areas that we already have for storage? So I think it's gonna take imagination creativity just to go back a little on history. Back to 1917, Montpelier was called a city of gardens. So for the war effort, we geared up and militarized and everybody was growing food, kids of all ages. So I think at this point, this is a conversation we have all the time within the Farm to Plate community, can we aid, can we learn how to feed ourselves again? Can we equip all of our kids from preschool on to elders with this, you know, and part of it being maybe some kind of a youth service quarter that everyone's growing food everywhere? And we think differently where we live. So we're seeing food scapes everywhere. And I was showing, and once in a minute ago, way back in 1988, six graders created a food policy for the city of Montpelier. You know, again, we need to be thinking so radically different about this transition. We can't wait, it has to be, you know, but that's the kind of question that prompts this kind of thinking. It's like, well, we don't do that. We haven't done that. We have to start thinking like that and acting like that and engaging everybody in the community to think differently about how we live and where we live. So I think it's doable, you know, but I think it's gonna really mean we've gotta put ourself, we have to be bold. We have to be imaginative and we have to really gear up to say, well, how do we do it? What's our five year plan? And then after five years, okay, how do we do it? Let's get going for the next five years. And we just offer a quote. Just read a report on a recent democratic candidates debate in Iowa, which quoted our Senator Bernie saying, if we are really serious about fighting climate change, all of agriculture should be organic. All right, a couple of ground rules for the questions. We don't have, you know, we have about 35 minutes or so and we have a great audience here. So pick your question carefully. I will call on you. Please indicate which panelist or whether the question's going through the whole panel. Okay, and once again, we're gonna go for the three before me policy of once you ask your question and the other question pops right in your head. Wait for three more people to ask a question before you go for it. We have good policies in Vermont. Yeah, you like that, that's a good one. All right, yes. Okay, whole panel. When I was here 10 years ago, post peak oil solutions was talking about a plan to get the bigger farmers who were aging to be having small little plots of land for younger farmers. Did anything ever happen with that? I did. Never heard of it. I mean, I think there's been some land share ideas out there, but I don't know how, if they've been implemented. There has been some through the Vermont Land Trust in particular, getting tenant farmers or I don't, anyway, I have some friends in Barnard Fable Farm in particular and they've also created a collective. So there, and in the Northeast Kingdom, John Ramsey has also been helping folks find land and have transitions. It might not be, anyway. There's examples. There may be examples, but I would say probably that four-clan is far more the other way around. There's been far more consolidation, particularly in the dairy industry, where it's fewer people living larger than civil land, rather than more smaller agricultural operations. Awesome. Dan? All right, this is both, I guess, picking up on what Joseph had to say and hitting the David because it becomes politics. Yes, it's obvious that there has been a lot of ideas about what we ought to do. I remember going, following you with a camera one time when you were trying to feed people in the housing project you worked with and there was a whole cultural resistance to trying turkey burritos. I mean, it was a point where it said, okay, how do we then listen to what it goes to David? How do we begin to get the public sector to support for the kind of education, organization, and we'll call it subsidy that's necessary so that some of these kind of models of what can happen become both encouraged and visible because what we have is sort of this bifurcation of people like you who are the farmers, okay? But everybody else is sort of like, well, I have a garden, I grow a couple tomatoes maybe or not, but there's not this sense that we all own the challenge of the food system. Is there anything that the state can do to help in encouraging a different addressing of that problem? Want to start? I think that was you, David. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think there's a few things. We actually already are doing a lot more than most states. That's not to say we've done enough. But if you look at farm to plate, farm to school, you know, there are, I think one of the things we have to be very careful of, you obviously had an experience with Joseph in a housing situation that had economic struggles. I think it's really important that we not jump to conclusions based on class with respect to people's interest in food supplies and healthy food. When I look at the old North End in Burlington, there are gardens showing up in green strips, gardens on old lots that had been abandoned and they're incredible community centers in moments of all kinds of neighbors coming together to tend them to some of them were just free food for who needs food. But the community works on that food together on that production. So I think the first piece is to evaluate our own perceptions and misperceptions. And we have to do it constantly. We'll never break down all of the stereotypes that we each have towards others. But I think it's example by policy, like farm to plate, farm to school. I was thinking when you, when Joseph was putting out these plans and these visions and so forth, the state could supply free seed to anybody who has the land to grow food. Now that then gets into a whole nother issue around who has access to land and who doesn't. And that's a whole nother wealth question and discussion, but probably not for me to continue on too long. Well, I would just add that, you know, one of the things that we are working with, I mean, there's a, there's the climate caucus from the legislature that's been going around having hearings. And they have been hearing from us in the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition and there's also a payment for ecosystem services working group that we've been involved with. And that involves essentially doing what they, what they now do in Europe, which is they provide payments subsidies to farmers for the ecosystem services that they provide such as clean water, durable landscape, and in fact, transitioning to organic. And that's one of the reasons why the land in organic production in Europe is in the double digits and here it's still 1%. And you could add carbon sequestration, you could add habitat diversity, there's a lot of, all of the above, yeah. I'll just take a quick shot as far as addressing a lack of housing to a lack of food and food access. I see it as a failure of government. It's policy, it's intentional policy. I think we've created a permanent, we have a systemic issue around poverty and we've created the conditions that maintain poverty in this country. So it's got to be policy and intentional policy that changes systems. So to your question, Dan, you know, it was in the 90s that a bunch of us spent a lot of time in the State House and we created Rozo's Law named after Rosemary McLaughlin and she was a legislator who helped with the farm to school. It became one of the first farm to school laws in the country with money that the State Legislature put out so we could have grants for planning and grants for implementation. We now have 80% of our schools in Vermont who have farm to school programs. So we're kind of leading the country, which is a way of trying to give every child a shot at learning where food comes from and how to grow it and how to cook with it and how to eat it. So I think if we, you know, just down the street here, if we mobilize and we're strategic on whatever efforts it was, we could be working policy in that legislature. We haven't, the Lieutenant Governor happens to be right around here. We could be knocking on his door and, but I mean, I think there's things we can do that we haven't been doing and that could influence and help to shape policy for the future. I wonder who was chair of AgVac then. That's good. Okay, Liam? So I think looming ahead is 2020 and there's a lot of things that could be addressed, obviously, because there is not coming presidential election to address that elephant in the room. And if there is one thing that could be addressed purely for 2020, even though there shouldn't be, because there's a lot of things that need to be addressed, in my opinion, what stands out is either like bringing down the cost of fossil fuels and really closing the gap on the real estate industry and making sure that it has the lower income range in mind, or it would be just kind of making sure that these farms that can save species that are going close to extinction from doing so investing twice as much into Vermont farms, which like, I'm gonna go with you, David's up for me just because you talk to a lot of people and you have influence in this area. More than anybody here, I can think of. Which one of those two that stand out in my mind, do you think? Would it be? Just as a fun hypothesis question. Well, I think the reality is that I'm gonna not quite answer your question, but it is not gonna be a silver bullet approach. I think there's a lot of critically important things and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that our policy makers can actually walk, chew, go and rub their bellies all at the same time. We normally see through the media that this one thing is the only thing that we're talking about and we can talk about something that's pretty prevalent in the national news with today's announcement. When in reality, we need to actually pressure the media to talk about all the other things that are also happening regularly in the political arenas and it isn't all focused on one topic. But I would actually say, as I started my opening with, I think that one of the fastest ways to mitigate our climate crisis is actually through universal healthcare and local wages. And that will fundamentally shift the sort of time and space continuum for people to be able to see a surrounding world other than just trying to struggle to survive. And if people are struggling to survive, it will continue to be, what's happening next week is a secondary issue too, what's happening in the next hour for a lot of people. Jail? I have two questions. I already have both of them in my mind. I don't know what that one is. My first question is about getting more local food in schools, in districts where the residents have lower income. Because with the Farmer School Project, a lot of schools are able to raise the money by having fundraisers with parents who get that by those local foods. And for districts where the parents don't have a lot of money, they can't raise that money. And I worked in the kitchen, in the school, in my district. And it was really hard as an organic farmer to feed kids commodity food that comes in a can that's also leaching toxins. And I know Dexter Randall introduced a bill a long time ago to try and get schools to have more local foods. And I'm wondering if we can, I don't know, the state could look at that again or what we can do. I mean, it would be income for farmers. It would be better for our children, especially if it's organic, it'd be better for our climate. I know Anthony Polina said that there was some commerce issues, interstate commerce issues with that legislation, but my second question is, how can we get more farmers into the climate movement? This is probably for you, Josh. I'm a farmer, I'm also a climate justice advocate. So I think it's important that we get farmers into this movement. And I don't know if you're hearing more farmers talk about it, like the conventional dairy farmers talking about climate change and if they're noticing it, and how can we bring them out to talk about this? Sure, so I've seen things, I've been in this position for six and a half, almost seven years now. And in that seven years, I've really seen things change. That the first couple of years that one had to use quite a bit of tact when we're doing climate change, outreach and education and technical assistance and talk about all crazy weather and it's not the way it used to be. But now, even at our biggest in-state conventional agricultural meetings and conferences, climate changes on the agenda, people are talking, not everyone, not everyone, but it is very much part of that common conversation amongst conventional growers. And I do think that things like the payment for ecosystem services working group and the farmer coalitions joining forces and supporting and then being engaged in that conversation has really kind of brought that terminology in that conversation about climate and just it's proliferated throughout the farming community because of those conversations. Partly because of there may be opportunity for another revenue source, but partly because the coalitions are behind and engaged in this conversation. Uncle foods and schools? Well, I mean, I think fundamentally so much of this comes down to money and just fun facts that are not so fun. Vermont is the poorest New England state. We are the one receiving state from Washington, all five other New England states plus New York from Jersey send money to DC. We, I'm an advocate of progressive taxation that wealthier people could pay more. If wealthier people paid more, we still would not have enough money for our mental health crisis or unjust criminal or prison system that right now there's a 200 person meeting in Burlington that I'm not at. And I think you all know the topic. There's a housing shortage crisis. We're weatherizing 3,000 homes a year, 2,000 homes instead of 10,000 homes a year. And we have 100 fires to put out with one fire hose. And as it comes down to money, and that's not necessarily what everyone wants to hear. There's a lot of restrictions on school food, subsidy, policy, buying of food. Most people maybe don't know this. I think most people on this panel probably do that the majority of the food in our schools that's subsidized from the federal government as a food program through the Department of Defense. Primary comes out of that same 1930s and 40s war food effort that was all put into the Department of Defense and it still remains there. So some of that's federal policy shift, which goes back to this gentleman's topic of the 2020 election and who's president. But even then, if that's not on their radar and that ain't gonna change, there's not a lot of good presidents and that hasn't changed because of the scale of issues to deal with. I'm working with the Montpelier Tree Board to create food forests in Montpelier. And my question goes to soil because in town, we don't have the, it's not easy anywhere to be organic and regenerative. I mean, it takes space and time and knowledge and resources, but in town, we have tiny properties where people don't really get that a mode on is not maybe the best way to grow food. So this may be just a pondering question just to throw it out into the world in this room, but our tree board is looking for help with how to improve the soil inside Montpelier so that our neighborhood streets can become food forests where we have, and we've done this on St. Paul Street, we planted 23 trees of which 18 were nuts or fruit or berries and getting the people on the street to agree to share the produce with whoever walks down the street. So we did that, but the soil's not great and we need to improve the soil. So if we're gonna spread this to other streets in Montpelier, how can we go about, how can we capture the imagination of our residents to bring regenerative soil practices to each household? I guess it's really what I'm thinking. I have one word for you. Compote. Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. And we also happen to have where in the final stages, supposedly of implementing Act 148, which is means that food scraps cannot go into the landfills from anywhere. And I've also been working with Cat Buxton on the farm composting task force, trying to find farmers who will be able to accept food scraps. And of course, here in Montpelier, we've got the wonderful Carl Hammer, but there's also an issue on the policy level, which maybe we can talk about, which is the problem that some of the most effective farm-based composting operations are being threatened with having to get expensive permits from A&R because of, does that, yes. Because they let the chickens forage in the food scraps, and so there's this whole mess that has to do with the division of labor between an agency of ag and A&R and the water quality restrictions that we certainly need to be concerned about the water quality, but not at the expense of not being able to recycle and having the farms be put out business, basically, in the composting business. So to the extent that people can get energized to support the local compost production and closing the loop with the food scraps and getting that nutrient, all those nutrients that people have been throwing out back on the land and in particular to improve the soil in the urban food state, well, there you go. Like, that is the way it goes. That was a good word, Comfort. Yeah, Jesus. I don't know if the young lady sitting next to you would want to ponder with you, because we were chatting earlier about this exact thing, minus the food forest, but... Do you mean that distinguished woman? That distinguished woman. Isn't it possible that you and I have been pondering? We have. We've been pondering together. Oh, I didn't know you were pondering together. It's okay. It's okay. I should have been. No, no, no, it's okay. We haven't said it out loud to a lot of people. I have, since the time we put it out, I might as well, if it's okay with you, Mr. Moderator. Wasn't there. Yeah. I have a couple of questions. Maybe my head just goes to solutions. What can we do? What are the things? What are our options? So, just thinking about mobiliar, I want to know how many acres would it take to feed mobiliar? I don't know if that's a reasonable question. I'm just like dipping my toes in this. What's that? Population? So, 7,500. I would love to know how many, and we were surrounded by farms, how many acres does mobiliar need to be surrounded by to sustainably feed ourselves? Think it out loud. I was just talking today with Tom about the possibility of what if we had a competition in mobiliar for the best food pollinator knot lawn, food pollinator knot lawn, food pollinator yard. 500 buck award in the middle of July. Payload judge is gonna come to your house, check out your food pollinator yard that's knot lawn. I don't know, I'm just a brainstorming here. Another possibility, what if we had city-wide trash recycling and compost? There are a lot of people here who don't have access to composting in their backyards. So, what are they gonna do? They gotta hire a service. What if the same mobiliar had collection points or trucks that could do curbside? I don't know. There's a lot of questions about whether that's feasible, but. You were talking about a vermiculture before. Yeah, but then what is the prospect of, and I'm gonna follow this into a question. What if we were to take that compost because it would be substantial? And there's one hypothesis is that there's not sufficient facilities in such Vermont to handle that volume of compost. I don't know, I'd be interested in that. But then, if there's not, what's your opinion on possibly pyrolyzing that organic material? And where does biochar potentially fit into that picture? Is this a good thing? Does it complicate things? Is it, in your view, arguably carbon negative from a long-cycle carbon perspective? Sorry, that's a lot of questions. But there's a lot of quite vibrant discussion on the Vermont Healthy Soil Coalition, which I recommend that you get on. Really, it's a really good discussion list. And a few people who are avid proponents of biochar who are always bringing up the facts and figures behind all of these things from heating plants, central heating, discontinuing using pyrolysis as the heat source, to all of the carbon drawdown benefits, et cetera. And there's still a lot of nuance in that question to be sure. But there certainly could be more small-scale, compost facilities, more very regional, localized facilities that fall under the radar of the ANR rules so that they wouldn't have to go through the permitting process and could really supply much more localized communities. So that's really sort of the way that we've been trying to orient more people can compost. And I know that Joseph was also involved in the Master Composer program. And there could be very small neighborhood composting facility where people can bring in their food scraps and somebody would have a little mini enterprise. All right, we have 10 minutes here. Jody is not kicking us out. There's amazing treats back there. Conversations are going to continue. I know there's folks with biochar interests which will connect with Anne. Hand her your hands up a while and then gel them right in front of you. Your question still exists? Yeah, thanks much. You guys are awesome. It's so awesome to see all of you out there rocking it. Dana, I think you're talking point about the consumers being kind of responsible for driving organic markets. It's like from the last decade, I don't think that we just talked about promoting this poor state. And it's not consumers responsibility to be able to for that premium product that will shift the market. And I know you know that. I'm really interested what Joseph said about trying to get a lot of people involved in food production. I think that we've got to, how do we get away from this market-based solution conversation? I know Kat Voxen, somebody just mentioned Kat. She said a couple of months ago, we're talking, she's like, we've got to get away from the idea that there's going to be money, right? And it's true, there's not going to be money. You don't need to put 100 fires of one fire hose. We don't like that fire hose, right? How do we figure out how to get a bunch of people involved in food production, gender agriculture, in this state without that money incentive? This conversation about like, how are we going to curate these ideas and enshrine them on our front yards and like, all of that. We've got to get involved in like really large scale, cooperative agriculture, stewardship for the commons in ways that our economy has no resemblance of right now. How do we start making the sacrifices and building those vehicles to cooperatively reorganize our food economy statewide? If we had food sovereignty in the state of Vermont, that would be leadership on a regional and national scale, not laundering our carbon footprint for, as many people as we're in the neighborhood in Brooklyn, I used to live in. That's not leadership, right? How do we get that food sovereignty that our gender going on on a scale appropriate for our population without that money incentive? I'd love to hear from you. And you're out. Well, I'll just, you know, I'm a big believer in education and I think our schools are perfect demonstration sites for any of these initiatives. That's for a farm school has really done well in our state but it's got a long ways to go and it's the curriculum side has the long ways to go. But that's a, you know, again, I think impacting our department of education, putting pressure there. We already see that there's schools who aren't buying local Vermont foods. That is something there is a statewide farm to school network that doesn't exist that is looking at these conversations but, you know, we just, it's going to take more imagination. It's going to take small scale examples to kind of flourish around. I don't think we're coming with a state plan that we're going to have to do small regional examples. Edible Montillier will be the great example that will lead the way here. Food forest, compost systems, you know. I would add, you know, in agreement, you know, big government is not going to solve this problem, right, but local organizing is. And some people have the time or the energy or the fortitude to be organizers. I'll continue to go back to the fact that if someone's struggling and working 60 hours a week to meet their basic needs, it's hard to be an organizer if you're in that situation and it's hard to have time to de-organize by others if you're in that situation. So, I think it's a beautiful thing to have the imagination and foresight of thinking about as a society that is not structured the way we are structured. But I think it's admittedly, and I love you, but I think it's a bit utopic to think we're going to get there suddenly unless there is just this massive transformation which we may be in right now. I mean, we are in an interesting, very disruptive time and in a disruptive time, I think there is great opportunity. But it's going to take organizing. So, I'm going to use that as a quick moment to say if everyone's signed up for my newsletter, I'm going to pass this around. But it doesn't have to be my newsletter. I actually share a lot of information from a lot of other organizations through this newsletter and could even do things in certain communities if certain leaders in certain communities wanted to maybe have scholarly play a list and use it to organize in their town for the right reasons. I would potentially do something like that, say, in certain towns or cities, maybe, with mayors that are visionary. So, I believe in grassroots movement, but I don't necessarily want to be dismissive of the mega-agricultural industry that we live with in this country. So, the question of the panel is, to your knowledge, what is the leading agricultural industry that is advocating best practice around climate change challenges? You are the active industry? Oh. So, there was a fantastic article about just that question, Politico, this week, and it was about Farm Bureau, American Farm Bureau organizations and similar type industry groups coming together and discussing how large-scale ag is going to participate in the climate movement and how their attitude towards that movement has changed significantly over the past several years. And I don't think there is an answer yet, but they're starting to talk about that. And I do a low-organic agriculture, but I think in Vermont, we have to engage this type of agricultural, conventional agriculture. They farm 80,000 acres of cropland, and that's if we're going to have an impact, we have to engage that acreage. So, I think that's a really important question. And I would add, you know, the Farm Bureau has almost as many members in Tennessee and some of the southern states as our whole state population, but I was out of the Lieutenant Governor meeting last spring, and 70% of Nebraska practically was under water. And when the states, the quote, breadbasket states like Nebraska and basically anywhere along them, Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers continue to flood the way they are with these, you know, extreme rain events, farmers or business people, unfortunately, still working within the U.S. currency model, and they're seeing these events have these catastrophic consequences. So, I think that's why some of those discussions happen, I'm sure. And there is definitely a fairly large, I mean, they're really beginning to talk about cover crops and things like that in the conventional ag sense. So, you know, and there are people out there like this guy, Gabe Brown, who's a large producer out in North Dakota. And who is kind of the poster boy for regenerative agriculture, talking to conventional peers about what he's doing. And so, that's getting a lot of attention in the press as well, but, you know, there's also, and I just want to warn about the greenwash, but there's also been a lot of interest in sustainability and all of that kind of thing amongst the conventional ag community and the usual suspects touting their sustainable footprint or whatever. And it just, the model of industrialized agriculture really is not compatible with sustainability. Just, so you can have large scale, then you can have large scale done right. And General Mills is converting, I don't know, like 30,000 acres in the Dakotas and to regenerative practices and going about it right. But that's not all, not necessarily the way that some of these folks who are touting, say, GMO crops with herbicide used to burn down the cover crops, that's still killing the soil and still contributing to climate change. So, I'll just make that caution that you know. Folks, it's 8.30 and I do want to respect the time limits here and our presenters have a ways to drive in some cases. I want to just make a couple announcements, though. There are things to sign up for. David Zuckerman's newsletter is right there, CSS, my nonprofit that supports this event here and some more heads hopefully coming around in the work of Montpelier High School. That sign up is over there. I signed Blurma, I forgot Blurma. Well, I'll just sign everything. There's some more information, a bunch of information and some things to sign. I need to sign over there as well. So, make the rounds doing vats. Of course, there's treats in the back. Dan Jones from Sustainable Montpelier is doing work in this area, is interested in doing work. Mary-Anne Watson is launching a prize, a campaign where you can win 500 bucks this summer. I live in Worcester, but I'll rip up my lawn. There you go. I just want to thank Jody again, not just for tonight in this series. I do thank you for that. We're making this space available and you really are pretty much at least tied for the busiest women I know and I know a lot of busy women, people in general. So thank you. I want to thank our panelists who are also among the busiest people. It's got right here, oh my God. Thank you. Congratulations. And certainly none of this happens. We think about what can be done as a community. We think of what can be done, these overwhelming issues. And sometimes you step out on a little bit of a limb thinking, okay, let's host some panels. Let's get a discussion. And this is this small state, this even smaller community. There's other things to do. And there's the darkness at 4.25. And sometimes it starts getting off your couch, getting away from your wood stove, getting out of your house, and all of you did that. So thank you to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.