 Hi, I'm Michelle Senor. I'm an adult program. Welcome to the College Hubbard Library. Very happy to be having the joys and challenges of farming panel here tonight. We're co-sponsored tonight by Role Vermont and by the Hunger Mount Co-op who has provided these refreshments for us. So please get up any time to enjoy it. I have a few other people who are trickling in, so please make yourself comfortable. The bathroom is in the back corner of the room if you need anything. Please let me know. Otherwise, help me in welcoming our panel and our moderator, Ben here. I guess I'll kick it off real quick. We have not rehearsed to see live performance art. Anyway, so I'm going to introduce myself real quick. I'm going to introduce the event a little bit more real quick. I'll let you all introduce yourselves and then we'll just get into it. So nice to have you all here. Thank you for this wonderful intimate gathering. Normally I would ask you to move closer, but I think we've got a small enough room, so you can probably just find right where you are. So my name's Ben Hewitt. I am here in part to help moderate and facilitate this panel, but also to represent Role Vermont. Role Vermont is a small statewide nonprofit that's based here in Montpelier. Is anybody familiar with Role Vermont and our work? What do you feel like maybe you know about Role Vermont? That's so unfair. You have a really awesome logo. Yes, we have a really cool logo. Check it out. So Role Vermont, we've been around for almost 35 years now, and we have, in that course of time, worked pretty consistently, I should say tirelessly, but it sounds too self-aggrandizing, but we have worked very consistently on issues relating to equity, access, and opportunity in the community scale ag spectrum across the state. And we do that through education, you know, outreach, advocacy, so we are very, very present in the state house. It's a big part of what we do, both trying to forward specific legislation that helps to sort of tilt the balance, create a more equitable balance in terms of the regulatory environment, but also serving as a little bit of a watchdog and a conduit between the farming community, our farming constituency, and member constituency, and the legislature, because sometimes those are two worlds that have a hard time interacting or simply just for reasons of time, allocation, resources, simply people don't have time to keep up with what's going on. So we do that. Organizing education and advocacy, those are our primary vectors for our work, and we really feel that Vermont is at its best and strongest when all farmers have an equal right to prosper, and all Vermonters have access to nutrient-dense locally produced food. That's the sort of short elevator bench. So tonight I'm here and joined by three folks who are farming in Vermont, I think to varying degrees, making a full-time living and or a part-time living, farming the land here in Vermont. I know a couple of them. I don't know Missy super well, but I would love it if you would all just give us a quick introduction to yourselves and your farm and sort of where you sort of sit within the Vermont farming spectrum, perhaps, and community. And maybe if you just each want to spend, you know, a minute or two doing that, so I guess we'll go with that. I'm Missy Axelrod. I have Drift Farmstead in Roxbury, which is just 30 minutes south of here. We're home of the Vermont Farming Forest School, which is an educational center. I have been farming for over 20 years since right out of high school, and then I went to college and studied sustainable ag before it was a thing. It was a thing in schools and food systems. Started our college farm, picked out our dining service. That was a big corporation and made it independent, and that kind of led me on my path to continue farming, but then also starting to intertwine education into it and starting to really use the farm as a classroom so that we can help shape our future, starting young future consumers. So we have a small family farm. I grow in about an acre of organic vegetables, a couple high tunnels, one heated greenhouse. We raise livestock for meat. We have Scottish Highlander cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep, and we grow everything for a winter farm share. We don't actually sell anything in the summer because we're small enough that we can use our summer, produce, harvest for educational programming that we have, and save it, store it for the winter. So we do October to February. And the idea behind that is just to have food for when farmer's markets aren't open as much, let us summer CSAs close down, summer gardens are covered in snow at people's homes, and to really use it as an educational tool in supplying food that people don't normally eat, so getting some of the funky vegetables that they might pass by at the farmer's market and hear they're forced to eat it. We include newsletters on how to store it in the house, how to prepare it, different recipes, talk a little bit of some grassroots political farming stuff in our newsletters. We invite people to come and work on the farm to experience what we do every day. So we also do a lot of educational programming. I work in about a dozen schools here in central Vermont doing farm and food education in the classrooms as well as outside at our farm and other farms. And the idea is just to get kids outside and to learn in a different way through experiential learning, connect with the community, and learn about where their food comes from. And I work with NOFA Vermont, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, as a community mentor where I help bring farmers to the plate into the classrooms and to community events and helping to source local foods for different areas throughout the state. My name is Kate Spring, and I run Good Heart Farmstead with my husband, Edge, who's home with our son right now. And we started in 2013. So this is our seventh year running Good Heart, and we now focus mainly on organic vegetables and herbs and we sell a lot of salad greens to local restaurants and otherwise focus mainly on CSA. And our farm mission is to help make local food accessible to low income Vermonters. Mainly right now, the way we do that is working with NOFA Vermont and raising money to provide subsidized shares through the Farm Share Program, which has been really wonderful and every year we are kind of figuring out how to expand on that mission. We started out very diverse with like pigs, chickens, sheep, turkeys, and then over the course of about three to four years, just went to vegetables, which we can talk about later. But yeah, just focusing on what our strengths are and seeing how we can be more like community sufficient rather than self-sufficient has been a really big aspect of how we approach making our farm work. My husband works full time on the farm and I work, I have a seasonal job as well. And that's where I'll... I mean, we can all talk for hours. So yeah, that's us in a nutshell, organic veggies. Oh, we grow about on an acre and a half and focus on no-till vegetable production. My name is Graham E. Thanks to Rupernacht and I live in Plainfield right now. Me and my sweetheart went to home with a housemate and we at least land in Calis. And I'm sort of in a farming transition point in my life so we can get into more of that. But I'll say right now basically I've been farming with a business partner for three or four years and we'd worked together for a bit before that in the realms of... We both had a... We had this grass-fed beef business. We had a edible landscaping slash agroecology consultation business, building gardens, pruning all winter, building mostly perennial woody crops like trees and shrubs. And also I have a background in herbalism so perennial medicinal as well. And we would work with adult education through NOFA and through other venues. And I used to work in youth education at the Roots School for a little bit and then through EarthWalk for Mott. And I'm really curious to hear more about your program because that integration I found there's more opportunities in this area to tracking nature-based skills of that sort than the agricultural sites. I'd love to find some more integration opportunities. And at this point my business partner left for a full-time job last year. We've both been carrying part-time jobs. I think this is sort of the story of a lot of us who are trying to figure out ag is what part of your life is ag and how much your income is that and what part of your life is something else that you're hopefully passionate about and what other passion you have. So I actually worked part-time at Royal Vermont and I have for the past two years another policy director. And this of last year the business transition is such that I've taken over the grazing business and we lease 55 to 70 acres in Calis in the Naples Corner area from one to three different landowners plus the co-housing. And so largely seasonal grazing with the goal of landscape restoration ecological regeneration and nutrient-dense boots in our community. And the seasonal work really allows me to operate with a lower overhead on leased land and I commute about 12 miles a day to move my animals which is actually 25 minutes each way. So it remains that I only have to do that seasonally though I don't have to do that in the wintertime which is great right now. See that's largely where I am at right now running this grass-fed beef business by myself transitioning from having this consultation and beef and education work and figuring out how that all lives when it's just me trying to live out these things I'm still doing some turning and some consultation and garden stuff on the side as well and that's where I'm currently at. Okay I want to ask I guess both Katie and Graham at the moment because you're both ones who have also have off-arm employment and I'm curious would it be your wish and your hope to be farming full-time or do you prefer to have off-arm and you're welcome to answer this too because I know you're also out in the schools and maybe that's relevant to you too I'm just interested to hear if that's like something that you're doing out of necessity and there may not be mutually exclusive maybe it's out of necessity and you would prefer it I'd be curious to hear your reflect on that a little bit Yeah I'm happy to Go for it when I start So for the first number of years our goal was to exclusively run the farm like in that beer only income and we did have a few years well probably like two years where it was our only income and I would say that is Edge's goal and I someone who there's a lot of things that I'm excited about and want to do so for me partly it is financially a financial aspect where you know farming with your partner whether it's your husband or wife or anyone I think the financial being on the same financial page or at least very close to each other is really important and so Edge has a higher tolerance for what I feel like is really uncomfortable can be really uncomfortable so that being said for the last two winters have been working I'm lucky to have a remote job that I really love and work with people that I really love so it started out as like okay I'm just going to do winter work to take some pressure off the winter time and has turned into working with a team of people that I really enjoy so it's become both and also the other work I do I end up learning a lot about business marketing and so it ends up feeding right back into the farm so the two have become really really helpful because after a day of working on the computer I'm really grateful to go outside or just go into the greenhouse in the winter time so yeah I think just to kind of sum that up I think for me I see myself continuing to do other work that feeds into the farm and that also goes to like I want to incorporate some non-farming activities on the farm land so having workshops and educational aspects and writing and artist retreats on the farm and allow people to interact with the land in ways that that's not just farming it's important to us in our overall mission of again connecting people with the land so I see myself continuing on that path while edge and it also allows edge to be full time farming so it works out for us in that way right now and it has evolved over the last seven years so I think my the answer is I don't know I think it depends and it really changes day to day sometimes inside looking at this beautiful 50 something degree day and I wish I had some great farm work to do but I have to do all this paperwork for farming and other stuff as well I think you know I'm still in this transition of thinking about a business partnership to thinking about it's just by myself which is actually a big and sort of complex transition to feel your way through as well as the sort of structure which is actually designed and we so when my business partner and I came together and merged I would do the beef and education work and he had been doing the medical and medicinal nursery and the landscaping work and we both been landscaping together and realizing that's probably not legal for too long we got to figure out how to make this legal because it has a more solid income with it so that could potentially if we joined that in a partnership with some of the production side whether that was the nursery or the beef or other pasture management or whatever we moved into over time then we were hoping there could be some balance of like if production isn't that much of an income source because production agriculture is not an income source generally the services side would be more of a reliable income and the time being sort of landless farmers in the sense of not owning a piece of land was to transition from our part-time non-profit or side work to full-time work together but providing a diversity of things so what that looked like wouldn't necessarily be 100% of our time to go to production agriculture more of the vision was how do we how are we outside all the time how are we accomplishing our goals of doing the land and working with what's being talked about as regenerative agriculture how are we bringing youth and adults and other folks not only to agriculture but also to the land like you're saying Katie in general and those kind of relationships and how can we make that place a place where we live and we don't have to commute to because there's just logistically also that's just so commuting to animals is a very serious challenge at times especially when the weather is not ideal and the construction has to deal with it so our goal had been and I think my goal is ultimately to make my livelihood more from being outside and working in the ways with the land that I think provide really good outcomes ecologically but also for my community and for human health etc but I do, the work I have found myself getting involved in in terms of that reliable income has always been stuff I've been fortunate and something I've been passionate about whether it was working with at the Maple Hill School in Plainfield and co-managing that farm doing that work or working at the root school or working with Keith at EarthWalk or now for the last couple years working at Royal Vermont and I'd say that opportunity really just came also from pursuing a passion like I actually got in trouble with the state through farming for on-farm slaughter practices I was using essentially just distributing meat to too many people which we actually now changed the law this year such that what I was doing could be legal now which is really fantastic and that drew me, Royal Vermont sort of came to my aid and was like sat with me at the table with these intense meetings with the agency to ag and when I was told I was threatening the Vermont brand with what I was doing and other literally told I was threatening the Vermont brand and they invited me sort of into into the work they were doing and asked me if I wanted to join the board and get involved so I was sort of getting more politically involved and getting energized around these issues and so serving on that board and a volunteer capacity for a number of years ultimately helped me recognize my passion for trying to make change at the policy or at the organizing advocacy level so I definitely enjoy the work and I'd love to be outside more Did you want to answer that one also? Sure, Keith it's Andrew Absolutely, I'm sorry No, I don't know if this is a question or one or which one was the one who said you guys had like counters and all that, like knee counts You have knee counts Maybe both of us, I see the highlight So how do you like deal with, so obviously me and some knee cow you've got to kill it eventually to deal with for me but like do you think it would be possible if someone say for example someone like me who's very like, I really like animals and all that sort of stuff I know it's possible to like animals at the same time but like do you think it would really work if it's someone like me who really likes animals who's raising animals for me and killing them Like is there ever a time where it's sort of hard to bring yourself to do I mean obviously I'm not sure if you do it yourself but if you like have like someone else do it for you That's a good question I spiritually struggle with that question all the time animals are part of a system on a farm and we really try to have this holistic closed-loop farm where we have our animals they supply nutrients to our vegetable fields, they mow our grass instead of using tractors and that philosophy is really really important and we do some of our slaughtering on farm for our family and the rest have to go off to USDA inspection for state depending on what we're doing and I can't slit a throat I can't do it like I just won't do it and I keep going back and forth with this like spiritual connection should I not be eating them? I can't actually do the kill so there's something wrong I'm not connected enough to that animal and to that piece but I'll butcher them in fact on Saturday I'll be butchering all day Saturday and Sunday and I don't mind that but that kill piece is something I just can't get past and recently this summer I was sitting around a fire and I was saying to my husband I'm like I think I should be vegetarian again because I cannot do the kill and he said that's okay that's what partnerships are for I'll do the kill and I was like okay alright we're good with that I'm never going to kill an animal at least not yet and I've been raising animals for a long long time and I think it's just a choice you have to make and I just can't take that step forward and if I don't have to I won't if I'm in the woods maybe I will I'm hungry but can I just jump in real quick so I for the reasons I started farming was because I wanted to eat meat again and I had been a vegetarian for like six years and then through a series of like books like animal vegetable miracle and the omnivores dilemma decided okay I want to start eating meat again and for me it was really important to be able to kill to slaughter an animal so I after college started working for the green mountain girls farm I think I was there for me and by the end of by Thanksgiving I did slit a neck just one but I did also but the rest of the time I was like man turkeys are heavy after you're like picking them up all day you know just like hanging upside down swirling around and they calmed down a little bit but but I also feel like that Thanksgiving was the most present I have ever been for eating a meal and I don't slaughter animals all the time I don't raise livestock anymore but like what Missy said what I found through farming is that well just to back up one of the main reasons I stopped eating meat was because of factory farming and I felt like that was just terrible and as I progressed I also found I started to feel like my decision to just like take myself out of that equation was not for me personally as powerful as deciding to become supportive and active and like in a more humane and regenerative system and so so coming to eating meat and slaughter and loving animals and I've definitely been you know attacked you know we do name our livestock or when we had livestock we named them except for the chickens but there's I think just a certain kind of reverence that that to me seems to be required and what I've seen from a lot of livestock farmers and a certain respect that comes to it and I think whether you eat meat or you slaughter meat no matter what agriculture includes some form of death whether you're killing rodents or you're slaughtering livestock and there's like that's just part of it and there's you kind of have to find where you fit in with it but I don't think it's impossible I think it's actually the best livestock farmers are people who love their animals so I mean I can't resist I think you both had great answers too but I think the hardest thing I do over is put my animals on a trailer and I think that's also one of the hardest part parts of a little bit of betrayal in that process of sending them to a facility to have their lives taken which is one of the reasons I got in trouble with this state but you know there are so there are so it's hard I do love my animals and it works my house makes to kill just 30 chickens for our own freezer it's the other day and it's probably just the hardest day every year but it's like I can't speak for you the choices you'll make I also had a long period of time I was a vegetarian and vegan and played with those different food choices and as it came more into my own understanding of how agriculture and ecology and you know food sovereignty and people being able to not depend on the chemical industry for inputs to your systems really depends on livestock in a lot of ways so that's sort of part of the transition that got me to thinking and exploring more about that and really make that choice to get into eating meat with the intention of taking those lives myself and trying to take that responsibility and feel more into that I want to follow up a little bit on something you just mentioned Graham which was that you know that sort of sense of betrayal in having to load your animals onto this trailer which I sort of from your tail I'm understanding a little bit that you do primarily to abide by a regulatory particular regulatory environment and so it leads me to a broader question for all of you which is in what ways well first of all you know what would you want people to understand I guess about the intersection of sort of politics and policy and agriculture you know what one thing I guess would you want the most to understand because there's probably a lot you could want them to understand but also in what ways do politics and policy impact your operation and how you run your operation for better or worse in your opinion I think policy comes into play in some ways in important ways so that you know your food is safe but from my standpoint knowing your farmer is number one and that making connections with your farmer knowing how your food's grown and processed is really for most more important than state regulations federal regulations and I would love for small farms to be look at as small farms and not have the same regulations as these huge corporation farms where you do want to know that it's coming from California that it's followed certain procedures but to be able to process animals on farm to be able to have work trade or interns and to be able to have that community base on farms and not have to have workman's comp which costs tons of money and payroll and that's what's hurting farms and I think that political piece looking at the big farm all the way down to the little farm they're two different worlds and that there needs to be different regulations for small farms both with workers employees and policies for how you grow your food and how your safety and has up and everything is I think that's something that's really important especially for Vermont but for anywhere where people are wanting to know their farms and to be able to make it profitable for small farms with all the politics and policies do you have anything on that? I'm just trying to think what is one thing I'm trying to narrow this down it's a big question the intersection of politics and the question also of policy and regulation what is included in politics but I think if there's one thing that I think is important for folks to know maybe aren't in the farm world there's a real feeling especially amongst a lot of the conventional farming community and the dairy community that regulations have, the regulatory environment has asked a lot of them over the years and brought them to where they are now in terms of the systems they have on their farms the infrastructure that's there that there's a history of policy and industry pressure that brought them to where they are now whether it's the creation of liquid manure as a substance whether it's the implementation of concrete floors or bulk milk tanks and how that affected which types of farms could or couldn't exist historically so there's a policy effects our working landscape and what we see around us right now the farms that exist and don't aren't a result of just good farmers and bad farmers they're a result of policy to a great extent in industry and how those things interact I think that's really important to know especially when we do recognize things like ag is contributing substantially to the water quality issue but there's a history to this and as much as folks don't want to be contributing to water quality issues as well for the most part I think it's when there's new regulations consisting being proposed or put in place some of them make sense but some of them also there can be resistance because folks say hey a lot of regulations have come in the past that brought us to where we are now what's your assurance that me spending this much more on my operation is going to create the outcome we want as opposed to bring us to another unexpected outcome that said how do they impact our operation you know there's a balance I think between as you said the scale appropriate use and that goes for slaughter facilities too like depending on how I'm not going to want to do slaughter 10 to 20 cattle on my farm every year that would be a lot for us to take on without having a more substantial facility ourselves so it's really helpful to have those types of facilities and I think there's actually been some really positive impacts in terms of policy on my farm in the last couple years in terms of opportunity and I think Vermont Farmers actually had more opportunity with a lot of folks across the country and other states I went to the Snatchley Young Farmers Coalition gathering in DC last year and just heard a lot of folks asking about the programs here hearing a lot about the programs here the fact that we even have Ag easements in the land trust is significant so we do have a lot of positive things from current use to Ag easements in the land trust who also just this year something that really is going to benefit me is this new federal practices program it's a program that's federal it's across all states and each state offers money for different conservation practices so per acre payments for cover cropping on larger commodity farms but now they're doing per acre payments for intensive grazing management and for me that's like okay I got a thousand extra bucks in my pocket in the year that actually makes a big difference because that might actually be my margin and you know I think there's room to see more improvement there so there's ups and downs and we have the power to affect it too do you want to answer a different question or are you going to answer that? I feel like like the things as a vegetable farmer things that have affected us are things like the food safety modernization act or FISMA which for us we're small enough that we don't fall underneath that but that did um prompt the state to create a state what or not the state the Vermont Vege and Berry Association started a program called CAPS which is basically the state level for smaller farms so it's a community accredited produce safety program and I feel like that has been great just because it's prompted us to put all of our practices into writing just like it didn't really make us change anything but in terms of vegetable growing that's been a big aspect for you know what you can put on it even affects like the levels of compost or manure what you can put on the soil and that also has to do with like runoff and water quality issues but in terms of things that have been harder for us definitely like employees we've often we're kind of at this place where we've seen that if we wanted to like jump up and wanted for us to both be full time year round we know what that could look like but it would really require employees and we have had one summer I think maybe two summers no just one where we had employees and one employee and the cost for one employee and workers comp is really hard to take on so we're out of I think there's a lot of farms in Vermont and more so more and more farmers who are doing small intensive growing so you're seeing like one to five acre vegetable farms and I think that is a trend one because you can grow a lot of food on a small acreage with intensive techniques but also you know it's really expensive to buy land so it can be easier to start a smaller farm but all the regulations around employees versus interns or volunteers it's it's hard to manage that at the size we're at so that's where that's where we are kind of catch I could like to ask two more questions and then I would like to open it up and make sure we leave plenty of room if folks have other questions and if they don't I can just keep going because I'm endlessly wanting to ask questions but so the two questions I'm going to ask and I'm going to ask them at the same time for a second efficiency right I'm going to give you each the opportunity to answer so those two questions are the first is how do you understand your value to your community beyond the food you produce and how would you describe that and I would also like you to once you've done that I would like you to describe one moment from the past week in your farming life that is particularly meaningful for whatever reason either because it was so awful or it was so transcendent and amazing or anywhere in between whatever you go first okay I'll go first so the value we offer our community so we are based in Worcester so just about 10 miles from here and we so as I said like one of our core mission is to help make local food more accessible and so one of the one of the ways we do that is by raising doing fund raising so we'll have like pizza nights usually that's our biggest one we'll do pizza nights and then other small fundraisers but what but beyond like helping make food accessible my favorite part of the farm is seeing our CSA members come each week and there is a visible change from when they open their car door to when they get to the farm stand and part of it is like we have a very beautiful view of the Worcester range so when you come up have you been there? I know where it is I can imagine what that is so I'm going to pull everyone if you've been up there but it's really hard to even capture it in a photo but if you want to see photos they're on our website which is goodheartfarmstead.com but there is such there's like sometimes it's a sense of relief or just like I can see people just sort of like shed their days and they just look out at the mountains and come and get their food and there's conversations that happen and we have some people who have been with us in our CSA for like the full seven years and other people who just have started with us and every time people come to the farm they just remark on how beautiful it is and I was having a conversation with a CSA member a few weeks ago about beauty and just how beauty is a really essential aspect of our life and of our experience and I think I've said before like it can sound a little like well you can decide what it sounds like but I've said before that one of the reasons I farm is for beauty and I think that in the midst of all the things happening in the world it's really easy to feel overwhelmed and to feel depressed and to feel like there's nothing you can do and when I'm out in the field or when I'm just like taking a break from my computer job there's the ability for the farm and for being out on the land to like wake you up and help you be connected and connected to the soil, connected to all the really good things that are happening in life and I think beauty is actually a really essential aspect of what we offer and which is like we give people free pick your own flowers all summer and it's like my favorite thing to see people come back with bouquets and just it's like it just is a visible shift from like the rest of their days and I think that to me is like a way of giving people the ability to come and connect to the land that feeds their souls as well as their bodies is just really important and to me that doesn't really that can be interpreted however you need to connect with the land but I think that we're really missing that in our day to day life and it's really important for people to have some sort of physical connection with the soil and so let's see then a moment yeah so this was a little bit more than a week ago but we were planting garlic and we were finishing up the garlic it was a day that I was working my other job but I went out at the end and just finished planting garlic with my son who's six and my husband and and just the light the sun was setting and to be able to do that as a family it's just really wonderful I don't really have any specific hopes for what my son will do when he grows up I just hope that he always has a connection and relationship with the land and so that was probably one of my favorite moments in the past can I add one more thing it was just a note that I that I can't remember someone was saying something that made me think of this and one of the things I think too that we offer the community is that we're taking care of this land that probably otherwise would have just become a residential home but one of the things we try to do or one of the things that our organic certifier mentioned that we were having a conversation about is matching your soil with your market and I thought that was such a once you put it like that I feel like it's a really important aspect in terms of like if you're thinking about growing whether it's like livestock or crops everything all the success of your farm or your soil and for us we're on this slope we've been building soil for seven years but it still comes down to like well you know we're just not at a place where broccoli is very successful but we can do all these other crops really well and I know just like this panel and you being the moderator like I feel like soil should just be really highlighted as like the number one thing that any of us have on whether you're gardening or farming so just wanted to slide that in there I think there's a lot of explicit values that we can offer and I think at least at this point where I'm at clearly some of the ambitions around the farm and off the farm have taken a backseat to sort of business transition I also actually tore my meniscus this last winter and it was based on crutches for six months so like there's a lot of transition in my life in terms of how I'm realizing this value in the community what I'm able to give but I think what I'd focus on the purpose of this which I think is important to conversations happening more broadly in the farming community right now is the we can talk about it as enhanced landscape function you know as growing soil as Katie said as hopefully growing models and opportunities for people to see different ways of managing landscapes and really growing biodiversity when you're growing soil you're growing the capacity of that soil to hold water and to filter water from contaminants you're slowing down rainfall you're you're creating more nutrient dense food biologically active soil which can cycle nutrients and other things from the atmosphere and the soil all the more efficiently and I think at scale we can see this you know in a community like we're right above Curtis pond in the watershed there so we're on Robinson Hill Road and there's about 50 acres on very steep hillside part of it on you know a little more undulating hillside there so we're around a pretty serious body of water folks using for swimming all summer long there's certainly like wetlands and forests at the bottom that can help to filter water coming off the pasture but I actually imagine that this pasture is filtering water far more effectively than the forest around it and I hope that that continues to be the case we know we can grow soil at a much faster rate using the grazing techniques we're doing on this land then hopefully forest can grow soil and what I really hope in terms of maximizing that is just is trying to figure out how we can how we can do this because I think what's really holding landscape managers from farmers to your backyards from really improving is of course there's educational stuff but it's really like it's the economic side there's no explicit valuation of any of the sort of growing soil of improving water quality there's sort of carrots and sticks and there's do this practice or do this practice in a certain way so I'm hopeful that we can figure out ways of actually some folks are talking about is hiring farmers to essentially grow infrastructure where can we hire someone to build a bridge hire us to come and not just grow food but you can hire, I begin paid for growing soil and creating these certain services so I'm hopeful that those values will be both quantified and publicized and recognized and we can sort of bring that experience as well so I hope that's a community that I'm a service I'm providing to the community as well as the food that comes from it and that's just specifically from the farming I guess and the practices in terms of meaningful moments I just sent all my animals to slaughter over the last couple weeks so in the last two cow-calf pairs over to a place they over winter so it was also my and you're grazing on a new pasture as well so there's been a lot of sort of meaningful moments of watching my life in this landscape and the business and the animals all in transition at the same time just watching the year close and this combination of a couple days of you want me to get to a moment I'm sort of leaving you still what's the moment you know it's really, it's a hard one I have this one cow who I've had for five years she was, my plan was never to keep animals over winter simply because I don't have the infrastructure it's not financially sound but as an old farmer's always warned you don't fall in love with cows but you know I had a cow that came to me bred she was a half-herd she came bred so when it came to that slaughter we weren't going to send a bred half-herd to slaughter so we kept her and she capped out over winter and she happened to get bred again that winter where I over wintered her and this cycle has happened again and again and she's the sweetest count at this point there's a keeper around because she calms the herd, she leads the herd she knows me, she knows it all so be on the financial side which we're all forced to think about so much there's all these other assets in the relationship itself so at the end of this year I just sort of you know she's this one trusted sort of it's like me and her and my new farm dog and you know but she I had to say goodbye to her and I brought her back to the farm where she over winters and I feel like she's never super excited to go back there you know it's totally different to be moving every single day to fresh green grass or multiple times a day to fresh green grass and it's just sort of putting a place where you're just eating hey I'm this big open exposed landscape so it's just that moment of seeing her for the last time and I'd seen her every day you know multiple times a day for however many months and just saying goodbye to her and her calf and just you know wishing her the best and seeing that look in there you know you can't see an animal for a while here close to just like a human you're close to and it's just the expression is what's expressed it's what you're meaning it's just sort of a bittersweet moment I'll leave it there well I think my I'll start with my aha well it started out as a negative aha of our fence being down and animals out everywhere for like two days trying to figure out walking the fence over and over again and finally we realized it was down and I was like animals why do I have animals and then I kind of went back a week and I was remembering a time when I had a group of first and second graders at the farm all day for the first time with this group and the teacher was really scared to have them there because she was afraid of their intense behavior problems and just that I'll have seeing them so grounded and so engaged these are the kids that are bouncing off the walls like needed we almost need a one and one each of them and they're just they're just who they need to be connected to the ground the soil and that kind of brought me back to value to the community I always said I would be a big production farmer and somehow I kept myself not from being a big production farmer because I am too antsy I need to do lots of things at once and I couldn't just do one row for days and it brought me back to why I have this community farm why I bring kids of all ages including adults who are kids on farms to the farm and to bring them back to that soil and to be grounded and figure out where their roots really are from and where good food comes from and what it takes for that food to get to their plate and I think that education piece is what we really value and sharing with our community thank you does anyone have any questions comments so you're going to ask me so many questions no you're going to ask one so I've got two questions that are completely unrelated is that okay? yeah okay well the first one is that I was reading about when I'm sort of like looking you know when I was sort of like writing down like jotting down a basic idea of what I would because I'm interested in going to farming later so first off is is it possible to get into farming directly after college because I was talking with my dad where he said probably more advisable he said it's probably more advisable at least for you to have like another job and sort of build farming off as a side and then gradually those two overlap is it possible if you do it right to get into farming as a full-time job right after college or is it usually better if you pick another job go from there and then sort of build like farming off on the side and then they eventually overlap so I my first job after college was on a farm and I didn't know I wanted to have a farm I just wanted to I thought I was just going to have like a summer job and I think that it really depends on what your vision is and what you want to do and what your resources are and I have a friend who went to I think two years of school and then dropped out and started his own farm and he eventually started working for you know now he runs another farm that's not his but that experience of running his own business led him to where he is now and and I've heard of people who have no experience at all and they're just like I'm going to go for this and they figure it out and it's really hard but if you like you know anything that's worthwhile is just going to have a lot of challenges I worked on four different farms before we started Good Heart and I feel like the best for me experiential learning is really helpful and seeing different different types of operations different sizes it all really helped us figure out what we wanted to do and even once you start your farm will change over the years anyway but you can get a job on a farm and be farming full time while being paid and working and getting that experience to then bring to your own operation if that's what you're wanting to do so that's I always think it's good to get experience from other farmers and it's a really good way to learn I second that lots of experience and then my other question is sort of going back I remember someone who may have been talking about like sort of like sort of like permitting stuff and all that I think it was something long permitting or something like that was it maybe it's some regulations regulations that sort of was sorry and I was reading about when I was looking into figuring out what it's like I wanted to do and it always come up that I always wanted to get into ostriches don't ask, I think ostriches are really neat and I heard there had many kinds of livestock or poultry so I'm like cool but and I was reading about them and I read something about like a dangerous animals permit or something like that because like and then I read a little more into it and then I realized that it's cool to have a giant feather reptile that defends all that literally no other predator can defeat and gives you giant eggs it's not cool to have a giant feather reptile that can kill you with a single kick you know what I mean so and it's also definitely not cool to have a giant feather reptile and then law enforcement is in there like alright hand it over so it's just like I heard about it dangerous I don't know if that's exactly what it was called dangerous animal permit something along those lines exotic maybe there is exotic animal permitting for people that raise things that aren't natural to the area and I think wild animals too fall in the exotic animal category like rehabilitated wild animals maybe sometimes I might have to give up my cheetah but you know I do know who was farming emu apple cheek and they have probably very similar eggs they're like this big people are doing emu oil similar creatures yeah we use are a lot more friendly that's nice too funny movements your other question I think yeah whenever it works between before college in between sessions at college after school I went to my first full-time internship like two days after I graduated I also not have a typical college thing I was in and out of school for a long time left farming came back to farming so it can look different for everybody and I started my farm my senior year while being in school of college some of you might depend on a little bit of what you were talking about Katie in terms of edges sort of threshold you know your personal threshold what's your threshold vulnerability and financial instability frankly yeah some people are just much more comfortable living yeah economically marginalized conditions yeah when Edge and I met we both were working for this like non-profit educational farm our housing was provided he was an employee so he like was paid a little bit more than me I was I don't know what I was but I got a second and and that was like that felt so different once we bought land had a child like started business the different responsibilities add different thresholds but I think the other thing to know too is like I'm not sure if you're wanting to like start your own business but there's um there was a study done a few years ago that showed that no matter what business you're in like people who kept a day job or even a part time job or like 33 or 34 percent more likely to still be building their business to still have their business after like three or five years so there's definitely like an aspect of flexibility and and just room to grow without being like having a lot of pressure so this might be a good moment for you grandma to share the average annual income oh gosh thousand dollars is it worth I think the expected annual income is negative $1400 this year and that'll be an improvement from last year but of course you know these are average numbers across and you know the farm means you can claim at least $2000 of gross income so it can be from a pretty small scale to also very large scale with large debt ratios etc I think you do bring up the one important thing that I just thought would unless I lost track of it it's just that farming especially when you're bringing to your own business one of the reasons I think it's so helpful to work on other farms is because not only do you have to learn the science and art of growing whatever you want to grow you also have to learn how to run a business and you have a lot of roles from marketing to accounting to just distribution to fundraising sometimes to all kinds of relationships with people you're leasing land from or who are your clients so there's a lot of skills to learn that you might not anticipate being there at first I know that that's one of the toughest parts for me is just managing all of that I want to be farming but the business side is really tough too and we all have different skills there's a lot of good support services NOFA Vermont has new farmer support there's holistic farm management is it only for women to do that I don't know if there's a men's one overall there's like a national organization that offers a lot of great support for business development for farms especially in Vermont for most beginning farmers and folks who have been in it I know you had your hand up earlier so I have two different questions I'll just start you were mentioning how beautifully your farm was stirred and all of you were welcoming to the public and everything do you have trails there for people at all that come in the various types of the year we don't have not right now but we have the way we've done it is sort of if someone is not a CSA member we just have a set time during CSA pickup is the best time to come visit and then there's a lot of trails beyond our property but I couldn't say they're not necessarily like they do connect with the callous trails I could walk to where you are but for our farm it's something that I would love to incorporate a little bit more of so thank you for the reminder we were talking about the soil and the infrastructure and how it would be great to have all that information being collected and I'm kind of like surprised that maybe that isn't happening and I remember hearing about something a few years ago at the Gund Institute at UTM and I thought that they were kind of collecting information on resources all over the world seems like that would be something right here in Vermont that they would be interested in doing but I don't know I don't know about the particular Gund Initiative but I've been talking to a lot of those folks about this concept of paying folks for producing ecosystem services and I think that there has been a lot of tracking done of changes in soil quality soil quality, water quality and different things over time I think there's more questioning at this point in trying to associate practices with outcomes in that respect and I think there's more questioning at this point in the farming community and more broadly about the types of measurements and models we're using how accurate they are what we need to be measuring and accounting for and what that translates to in times of outcomes and are we going to be prescriptive and say we want to say you need to get to this outcome however you do it within human health etc means that's what we want to see so there certainly is testing but there's a larger conversation right now around like a lot of testing is like through new shape management plans on larger farms through soil tests that folks do on smaller farms usually about the top six inches of a soil core takes a sample from like if it was a room like this we'd take a bunch of samples and there's a lot more questioning about what do we know just from that top six inches what else can we know how accurate is it but it sounds like you have other stuff to say I think you're maybe referring to and I don't know a lot about it I've read it a while ago but they're starting to measure carbon sequestering and looking at the value in soil versus solar or wind and how there can be a payback for that with farmers they're starting to test with some larger farms but I don't know much about it but I know I've heard it's in the works which is really interesting I had a question for Kate you mentioned kind of the concept of community sufficiency versus self sufficiency and I think a lot about the cooperative economies especially like in rural areas are there specific strategies that you're finding or practices that you do and for the other farms too that is a really good question so for us it started out as like we had this vision of having a full diet CSA and so that would have also included like honey and maple syrup and grains along with meat and vegetables and being that it was like two of us and one we at the time also had someone who was living and working on the farm and I had a baby so it was just like not it was just too much to do for all of us and I just started realizing like just starting to think more in the community mindset looking around at the time we were trading vegetables for raw milk with Rogers Farmstead and we started just looking around at like who else around us was producing things that we had originally intended to produce so like Graham is right down the road and well you weren't at the time but now you are and we have a neighbor who sells who raises sheep and neighbors who raise who grow mushrooms and maple syrup so at different times what we've done is worked with those people to like offer an add-on to CSA members we've sold we've kind of just been like a conduit for lamb or maple syrup or mushrooms and that way we can offer a wider variety without us having to do all the work it does come with the work of just like managing those things but and it isn't like something that we really advertise outright it changes depending on the season and depending on like what those other producers have at the time but it works out really well so when people have something extra we just like add it in our CSA email and say we have this and then we can either take orders or just bring it to the pickup and I think overall just what that's helped us do in our approach is again start focusing on like what are we doing really well what can we so how can we maximize what we're doing well in and get rid of the things that are just losses and so one of like we tried growing sweet potatoes one year and it was just a total flop and so now we just purchase sweet potatoes from another farmer and it's actually more it makes more financial sense for us to do that and to try to grow sweet potatoes and we still get some more sweet potatoes so we're always like very clear and like they came from this farm but I think too just the more we do that in general I feel like it could send out some ripple effects just how we can create systems where we're not necessarily in competition but more like combining what we're all doing and work together so I like the term community sufficiency too because it used to be long time ago that everybody was self sufficient and now the world has changed and not everybody is able to so as a community you can take your self sufficiency and share it with everybody else and kind of that homestead method in terms of with more families that's the way to look at it too Did you still have a question? I do I have a question for Missy so your story about your first and second graders really resonated with me and I'm guessing over a year's time you see hundreds if not thousands of kids I'm interested in as you look at those kids what percentage do you think would benefit by flipping their learning experience meaning the predominant time is on the land and the add on is the reading and math teacher it's my new mission in life I think everybody is a different type of learner not one is the same and our model of education is the one size fits all and that doesn't work and I think in the demographics that I work in which are pretty pretty pretty high socioeconomic needs a lot of trauma written kids and I would say probably 75% no maybe 50% of those kids really need a different learning style different learning experience working with their hands and learning through their hands and when I see those kids and that was just one example I see it a lot where the teachers are in awe every time that they're outside and we're not just going on a field trip they are embedding their curriculum their standards that they have to learn in the classroom or embedding that into the outdoor classroom and then bring it back to the inside classroom and I mean I know that those kids that have a different learning style if they had it every day would thrive unbelievably and it's my mission to help change schools that way it's a very ambitious one but yeah any other questions I have one more thing it's maybe not so much a question but a little I don't know I'd just like to get your input on something I've been thinking about a lot and one of the things I'm noticing tonight is on this panel we do not have represented a sort of more I guess a little bit traditional larger scale a dairy operator many of you I think know the dairy industry and Ron is in crisis and has been for a really long time and then we're seeing a very rapid shift in the number of dairies and also therefore in the landscape as it sort of a lot of them moves out of farming or other farms some consolidate become even larger and I guess I'm curious it's something I've been thinking about a lot myself because I am as susceptible to anyone nostalgic I guess and not really wanting to see the landscape change and our communities change because it does have a huge ripple effect in our communities I think even some of these farms that utilize practices that may be are questionable in some cases because of the generally because they're compelled to be for economic reasons but I guess I'm curious how do I want to phrase this you know are we sometimes being a victim of our own nostalgia you know in what ways do you how do you interpret the sort of changing culture of agriculture in Vermont and that shift which I think you know the three of you actually are really represent in a lot of ways I think in very positive ways and yet I still personally I guess this is a really selfish question but I still personally like you know just like want to cling to this like you know these like big open landscapes of cows grazing and I don't know that wasn't a very good question it's actually a really important question because it's changing fast and I don't know if we can make a statewide collaborative effort to really help but we are and we're trying to preserve this landscape and what does that mean and I think putting value in our food and we have that value in our food then we'll have that value in our landscape but if farmers are going to continue to struggle and make their negative $1,500 a year which most of us don't mind because it's a lifestyle choice but I think if farmers could get paid a little wage by by having that fair value on food then our farms would be there more and I think farmers have to really be creative and think of what is up and coming in today with being able to buy our food on Amazon and go to Costco how do we how are we creative in our market and how do we make sure we can feed everybody no matter what their socioeconomic background is and when we have all that infrastructure there then our farms will continue to be there and dairy is a big part of it I mean we need dairy farms yeah so Edge and I lived and worked on Appalachique Farm for two years before before starting Good Heart and at that time we were yeah so at that time Appalachique we were milking like 50 cows and we went there specifically because we were interested in dairy and drank a lot of milk and we found that personally like that scale milking 50 cows was not very fulfilling to us we loved being out moving cows on pasture but we didn't love the milking part well at least with that many cows and I know that they're no longer doing dairy and they also felt that economic aspect of dairy and and so it's interesting kind of taking it from like we went from like okay we had this bed like really mostly a veggie background went to Appalachique got like this grazing and dairy background and to hear John who was one of the owners just talk about grass and cow it was like being in farm church like he just like oh my gosh if you want to talk to someone about pastures like he's awesome and even just seeing him with the cows because there's they respond to different people differently but he also is just like this cow whisperer which would just be like this they'd all just like go and so it was this really amazing thing and so it's interesting thinking about you know seeing people who are so like have the ecological part of it down so well and um and yet that specific size seems to be the size that's disappearing it's like you now have like micro dairies or like really big dairies and that mid-sized farm is like really hard to make work um but on the other but on like the land use aspect like these big swaths of open land that are so beautiful um they're also like so our farm is we have about 15 acres on a hillside that used to be hundreds of acres in one farm and that has slowly kind of broken down into smaller chunks that's pretty we're the only farm on that hillside now and um I think that if we want to keep land open as wonderful as like the current use laws are compared to other states we need to think about how are we going to accommodate smaller farms now because right now like we're keeping that land open um but we don't well we qualify financially for current use but um the amount that it would cut off is so negligible um because our main farm building we also live in so we'd have to like move out of the building that is our wash and pack shed and our office and our dry storage and curing in order to like really have any meaningful tax um relief and so to me like when I look at the future of farming like in Vermont and keeping land open and in use um it has to start to incorporate smaller parcels of land so if we can go from I was talking to someone um from Massachusetts I think and the current use there is like 10 acres which is it's a different landscape um so how can we look at that and say okay we might actually have just a lot of micro dairies and we still need land for those we still need hay you know and how can we make sure that we still have hay and it's not all CBD you know um or all solar um I don't have an answer but those are things that are really important to yeah start talking more about balance mm-hmm yeah yeah and how do we want the how do we want so the other thing too like Justin Wooster it's a pretty good example there's an old dairy farm that had been for sale for like a million dollars for about five at least five or six years and when the owner passed away it went up for auction for like six hundred thousand dollars and all of that land that was I think they may have paid some of it but it's now a CBD farm which is great because it's keeping it in some sort of agricultural use but no farmer could afford that land and the buildings needed a lot of work like the person who was able to purchase it was someone who is is coming at it from a different agricultural use which is going to become more and more important in our state but no dairy farmer would have been able to purchase that so and then there's other parcels that are hay but one may very well turn all into solar which is also very important so it's like what are the balance what kind of balance do we want because all of them are important and useful in our communities and where does it yeah where do they all fit that's such a huge question in the topic you know I think it's one thing to think I would bring forward is just connecting this thing you're drawing this picture of a transforming ag in Vermont over time and sort of this this crisis in the farm economy in particular in particular the dairy economy and I think it's important for us if we're going to make change on this to really try to recognize that this isn't just ag transforming in Vermont this is socioeconomic transformation globally and that has a drastic ecological and climatological implications so that consolidation and concentration in industries have been across sectors and across the world and it's not just dairy in Vermont it's dairy in all the states and the scales that are at this point finding a niche to survive are the micro like 50 to 100 cattle mostly organic some conventional and then the micro side which is smaller processors producing specialty products or raw milk in some cases and then the larger scales you're seeing like a drawing down the middle and stretching in the either end and there's a lot I think is not so much about ag but really about power and about economy and we really need to show some solidarity with other oppressed folks globally in the landless worker movements and farmers across the world but also just with people of in the working class across this country and across the state and mutually educate one another about the issues we're all having ag is certainly an outlier in some respects but that's that nostalgia I hear a lot about this open land and maintaining it open what I try to bring to those policy conversations when I hear that and also just community conversations is I don't think our old farming systems at least in our culture really have that much of a good ecological legacy the sheep farming in Vermont led to ecological catastrophe with economic catastrophe too and again that's an example of economy driving our practices in our relationship to landscape with disastrous consequences but it's really about functional equitable working landscapes and to me that means most of the pastures are going to have trees not forests but they're going to be trees integrated into those landscapes as alley crops where you can have hay growing between trees at 200 feet apart you have animals grazing between them you might have more cooperative economic relationships with your neighbors and hopefully more with the state and other interests and you know there's that there's this weird balance in Vermont right now where 6500 plus small diversified farms and growing 700 and fewer dairies and shrinking but 90% of the land agriculture manages in dairy so there's an equity issue there related to land access and how land is apportioned I think we also have to explore the financial situations of the people who are actually holding that land because they're often like land rich and totally cash poor and that brings up that question of what the hell happens when things crash beyond consolidation what consolidation can handle in little Vermont or when you look at the industry projections in dairy and you see they're talking about 19,000 to 25,000 cattle dairies being the normal in 10 to 20 years and you've got to ask those farmers in Vermont right now if they're still growing do you think there's going to be farms that size of Vermont that can compete with others that said I think we're also really well positioned we have water resources like in terms of climate change in terms of access to functional landscapes and biological capital natural capital in our community capital I think and you know in terms of dairy and where your question went like Vermont is not going to stop growing grass and trees well that's like what grows well here and rocks and so dairy is a really natural fit here I think it's just a question about what are the economic forces that shape it because you could have I grew up in East Montpelier like it's a landscape of 20 to 5 to 20 100 acre parcels some old fields some in farming and we could have community managers going through you know the commons of sort depending on what kind of economic system is supporting so you know there's there's the global things that are really challenging and scary and then there's the local things we have a lot of capital to and so it's such a nice no closing it out thank you all before we maybe give a final round of applause and gratitude to our panel I do want to take this opportunity to just make one small gentle pitch for this organization that I represent and like Graham works for and I know Katie has served on the board and we are a member based organization we have a really really modest budget of just a little over $200,000 a year we'd like to think that we work way beyond that budget in terms of getting stuff done but you know a lot of the work that we're doing I mean Graham I think really summed up really kind of nicely in his closing remarks there that is sort of where we operate in that sphere of trying to sort of thread the needle and you know figure out how do we move forward in the state that is so bountiful and has so much opportunity and so challenged often by economic forces way beyond our control and other issues of equity and justice too so I do have a membership envelope here for you if you're so inclined if all you would like to do is give us a great member we throw great parties we give away full of stickers to everybody who comes to make a great again a perfect time of year to put that on your car your hand turned to season this one says farmer to healthcare providers this one says healthy soils, healthy humans so please come on up even if you don't give me money or your email address you're welcome to take a sticker or two so thank you guys so much thank you all for coming to the library thank you to the woman orca your name is again Christine thank you to Christine for being here with us tonight