Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: All right, well, I think we're all set. So why don't we go ahead and get started? We're happy to have the agency in this morning to go over the information that they've collected, both through a survey and probably anecdotally about the impact of the of the drought that we all know about and heard a little bit about in November. Welcome.

[Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Well, good morning. For the record, Anson Tebbetts, secretary agriculture food and markets. Welcome to welcome to a new year. It's an honor to be here to update you on a couple of issues. And before that, I wanna let you know that on the sidelines here helping us out and is Abby Willard, is our agriculture development director, our operations director, Nicole Dubuque, and our general counsel, Steve Collier, is here as well to help fill in the blanks and give some more details on my remarks. So I wanna begin with just one of the ask was about federal funding and also the drought survey we did. So I'll begin quickly with federal funding, and there's not a lot of detail or information on that right now, but a couple of issues just to keep on your radar. The Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center, or we call it DBIC, the round seven funds have not been released by USDA. So it's a federal program, and they we manage that program for the Northeast. Typically, we have expected to receive those funds by October '25. So in October, we should have received that round round seven. While this delay does not, impact staffing or the operations of the center, we cannot make new awards until the round seven round seven funding is available. As a result, there's no new funding opportunities to announce, from, you know, dairy farm improvement program, our modernization grant applications, are happening. We are still managing things that are already going through the pipeline and whether it's just the new programs, we have not been able to announce and get people, rolling on on them. We've communicated this to our delegation, governor's office, also USDA secretary, Rawlins, and all the DBICs nationwide have been in contact with their congressional delegations regarding this delay. That's how we see it as as a delay. And there are other centers around the country. So there's one in California, there's one in Wisconsin, and there's one in Tennessee, and there's one in Vermont, and we manage, the Northeast, which is essentially all of New England, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. The other pocket, which isn't under directly of us, but does have impact on some of our producers and farmers, is the USDA's rural developments energy for America program or or what we call it, REAP, also remains on hold. USDA has not announced the availability of f y twenty six funding for that particular program. And now that program provides agriculture producers and small businesses for renewable energy systems and energy efficiency improvements. Agriculture producers may also apply for loans for new energy efficient equipment and systems used in production and processing. And you may recall that many Vermont maple producers have relied on this program for energy efficient sugar house upgrades and new equipment. Lots going on in the sugar house as far as when it's related to energy these days. So we'll continue like we're doing with the other program to communicate with our federal partners and all of our elected officials to gain some clarity on the status of these programs. Over the last years over the last year, we've sort of there's been a lot of programs that sort of put in pin on park, and sometimes they're released. And these are the two that we're keeping our eye on, particularly the dairy innovation center that we would like so we

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: can get going on the next round of grants to our farmers and producers. Secretary, what's the normal funding cycle? So the fund we would have where the funding would have been released in October. When normally would that have been dispersed? When would be it you announcing?

[Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I may turn to Abby Willard here, but I think it's an annual it's an because they're on a fiscal year. They're on a October to October program. And we did during the December big debate over the budget, we did receive they did release some funding for the centers during that exercise. So that was a relief. But this latest one, they just you know, it was appropriated from congress, I should say, but it has not been released from that. So it's an annual it's an annual exercise, and usually, we should know by October.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Just wondering how far behind so it's three months now, three months. But when the funding is released, will

[Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: you be able to move? Yeah, I think the plan of the center is they know what the need is and what the programs that they want to fund already. So it's just a matter of allowing farmers to apply for those, but we can't we can't send out the, you know, the the here's the grant. This is what's eligible, and they become very competitive. So it's just kinda putting everything on hold. So we're just you know, we've had conversations with USDA, written letters, delegation is aware of it, and the other centers are impacted as well. So it's not just the Northeast. It's, you know, everyone that you know, in the Midwest with Wisconsin, you know, the California, the West, and also South with Tennessee. So we'll keep that moving along. But just something for you all to be aware of. And it could you know, I could go back today, and it could be announced that they released the funds. It's one of those. It just comes and goes. It's kind of an something we're, you know, dealing with kind of on a daily basis. So if things are put on hold, they evaluate them, start again, and then go from there. Maybe I can turn to drought now. So well aware of what happened, you know, late spring through the summer to the fall. Extremely dry, many Vermonters, those that really were making their living from the land. Some producers had to haul water, some had to drill wells, and contend with reduced crop yields. So to understand the better scope of the problem, the agency asked farmers and producers to report their losses through a drought survey. The survey closed last month, and now we have some results to share with you. Some highlights, we received 200 responses across the 14 counties. 79,000 acres were impacted, and the estimated losses exceeded 15,900,000 through the survey. And notably, 50% of the respondents said that this was the worst drought they've ever have experienced, and I think that is quite accurate from the field visits that I did that I did this summer and fall and people talking with that. And if it's appropriate, mister chair, I wanted to maybe turn the chair over to Abby Willard, who's our development director. And she's been managing some of the information and some of the detail related to the survey, and and she can give you a better scope of maybe where some of the real trouble spots were. It was statewide, but there's some areas that were impacted more and and the producers, and it was across the board, whether you were in dairy, whether in fruits and vegetables, even some maple producers were were impacted by it. So if I it's appropriate, I'll let Abby she's got

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: some slides to share with you as well.

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Good morning.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Good morning. For

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: the record, Abby Willard, Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. Really quickly on the Dairy Business Innovation Center, just a tiny bit more context. So the round seven funding is 3,450,000.00, which is the same amount of money in the round six, round of funding that the center received. And we're right now in the process of reviewing the final round of round six grants around dairy modernization and innovation. Of the 3,450,000.00 that was intended in round seven, about 2 to 2 and a quarter million would go out in grants that could start in the intended to start on 10/01/2025. So I think the first RFP would have typically gone out in November, December. So yes, we're a little bit behind. I think the team is able to launch it as soon as the dollars are released, sort of all the different funding opportunities and the plan is in place. It's really truly, at this point, a messaging to the dairy community that there are no additional funding opportunities because we don't have the round $7 in place. So that's just a bit of a bleak message to be sending out to the dairy producers and processors that have become so reliant upon the Dairy Innovation Center funding at the time. So we're really anxious to see round seven funds released.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: That's not just Vermont, that $2.2.45.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: That would be across the Northeast Region. Region. Yep. And that would probably be I haven't looked at the plan that Laura Ginsburg and the team put together, but it's probably six or seven different funding opportunities modeled after the various rounds that have been successful in the previous routes of funding. Okay, so on to the drought, I'm gonna do a quick screen share here that shows some preliminary results. So we are not fully prepared to share all of the results of this survey simply because our report's not ready yet. But because you asked us to come in, we wanted to share a little bit of the results that we do have. So as secretary Tebbetts mentioned, the survey that the agency launched was on October 17, and then it closed just about two months later on December 15. And let's see here. Drive this thing. So what you'll see today in this preliminary results presentation is a lot of data taken from the survey responses and put into Power BI, which is a tool to be able to manipulate data responses and look at different trends and pull out different themes. So that's the piece that we're currently working on with, I think the holidays and a bunch of illness. Things are probably a few weeks away from both the data being posted on our website and a report being finalized and then made available to you. So we'd be happy to come back, share that final report and make sure that you're aware of the kind of like dataset that's available on our website. But we can go through a lot of the aggregate results. So as Secretary Tebbitt said, we received 200 survey responses. That's about in line with the responses that we saw from the 'twenty three and the 'twenty four flood surveys. So again, about kind of where we had, I wouldn't say wanted to be, but kind of like gives us a representation across the state. There were responses from 110 towns and from every county. I think there was, you know, the fewest number of responses in Essex County, but we did end up seeing over the two months, each county representative survey responses. Consistently, we talked a couple months or maybe a month ago about some of the preliminary results at that time before the survey had closed. And it's remained consistent that the distribution of responses are about 25% from the dairy industry, 25% from the produce and horticulture community, 25% from livestock, and then the remaining 25% from diversified operations, maple and crop producers. The trend continued that about a majority of gross majority, 78% of survey responses came in from small farms. We'll look in a future slide here in a minute that shows kind of the financial impacts being a little bit more distributed to the larger farms than to the smaller farms. But a majority of the volume of impact came from and responses came from small farms. The map on the right hand side shows the density of responses. So number of responses. So greatest number of responses came from Addison, Rutland and Orleans Counties. There's again, a map later on that shows the impact in dollar amount per community and per county. Majority of respondents to this survey were not certified organic, which was just another data point that we were continuing to collect. We tried to have some similarity between the questions that we asked and flood surveys in 'twenty three and 'twenty four, and then the drought of 'twenty five. Obviously they're different natural weather events, but we tried to sort of capture some of the same data so we could have some comparison across natural disasters when we're looking. There's not actually a whole lot that I'm gonna talk about from this slide other than 64% of respondents do not have crop or livestock stock insurance, which again is really consistent with what we saw during the flood. We were curious if in the last couple of years, saw a lot of producers that might be impacted by these natural disasters go out and acquire insurance, and that was not the case. So you can see the question that says, did you have enrollment and insurance within the last three years? And 68% of respondents said no, but 22% of respondents said they did. Another kind of data point that's also different from the flooding was most drought survey respondents have not reported their drought impacts to another organization, which was very different than what we saw in the flooding. There was a lot of communication about telling those businesses that were impacted to report to two eleven or reach out to FSA or reach out to other support systems. And many of the drought respondents, I think it was 30, what was the majority said that they had, know, a few had reached out to a few organizations, but mostly either people didn't answer the question or communicated with their neighbors, as opposed to like reporting their losses to an organization or reaching out to a community organization. So just a little bit different response by producers. Presenter and grant.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Abby, how does livestock in terms of work? Is it your animal or is it, Oh, I don't have any forages, so I have to sell them.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I can't really speak to the insurance piece. I mean, there's the indemnity program if you actually were to have lost livestock as a result of not being able to feed them or they were lost in the natural disaster. In the case of drought, I think most of the livestock impacts that would be relevant would be lack of feed to be able to carry them through the growing season or be able to feed them through

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: the winter, which we could have a claim on.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: And I don't actually know how that pertains to livestock insurance.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Yeah. I think you talked about, I mean, with flooding, this certainly crop losses, but I never really thought about people carrying livestock insurance except for something like me, like having coyote losses or something like that. Not through a drought natural disaster.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. We'll have to bring in other expertise to really answer that question, I think, for you. Okay, so then this map here shows the distribution of the $15,800,000 in loss. So majority of that loss is what was claimed as Oops, I'm sorry. Is it blocking your view? Yes, it is. Okay. There's the cost of the production loss, which was just about 10,800,000.0. And then there was the coping costs, which was sort of like costs incurred throughout the drought season, throughout the growing season that businesses had to expend, which was just over $5,000,000 And then the sum of the total impacted acres was just over 79,000 acres. This map is showing where the most reported losses were made by respondents. So you can see there's a little isolation there in Cabot, there was a $2,000,000 claim, dollars 2,000,000 in claims in the town of Cabot, and then also over in Addison County. So this map showing both Addison, Rutland, and a fair amount of Orleans County having the largest economic impact claims from respondents. Once this is on our website, this is a really, that's part of the power and the benefit of Power BI is you're actually able to manipulate the data and sort of search for different bits of information. So you could search and just say, where were the primary dairy operations that had claims? And you could flick that over on the left hand side and the map would represent that as well as the chart on the right by county and by top responding towns, or you could search by farm size or again, we have the insurance question if you wanted to know.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: But the public can do all that?

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Any user could do that. Yes. Representative Lipsky.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Spanish chairman.

[Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Mollie, the deputy.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Abby. Do

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: have a sister, Molly. The

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: density of loss of capital. Yeah. And I don't observe a lot of cropland or raising land. It's like a corporate loss. It's attributed to the town of

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: No. So these would have been individual so in the town of Cabot, there were five responses from agricultural businesses that reported collective losses of over $2,000,000. Right. No.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. I

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: believe again, I don't want to get into kind of like individual operations, but this also includes maple industry losses, not just ag crops as you might typically think of field crops and And orchard crops. Yeah, orchards, horticulture, equine and maple. Representative, thank you. How is maple calculated? So we'll talk about that in a minute. I think the way that this survey is set up is that this is self reported by producers, what they anticipate their estimated losses would be, or identifying what their coping costs were during the growing season. So we recognize these are estimated claims, self reported and estimated claims. I think the maple industry impact is still to be determined. I think the drought was very concerning to the maple industry, to the Christmas tree industry, both kind of data captured here of the fact that their perennial crops could be impacted long term as opposed to just a field season's worth of crops lost. So I think we still have a sugaring season ahead of us to be able to see what the cumulative results will be and impacts will be. And I think there were some maple operations that took a really heavy extreme estimation of what their losses might be. And we'll show that in a minute when we break down the average estimated losses by industry, the maple is the highest currently based on our data responses so far.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Representative Nelson. Thank you, chairman. Yeah. The the the Christmas tree and the tree farmers

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Mhmm. Anything

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: they put in in springtime, they lost. That's that's an incredible amount of of dollars there. Do you suppose part of the reporting to the feds was because of the government shutdown? At the same time, you're all having your reporting. They were out of business sign was in the door.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: As to why

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Maybe we didn't speak so much. I mean, some farmers were in August before the shutdown were talking to the feds then saying we have a problem. Mhmm. And talking to the head of FSA in the state of Vermont, she let me know that they now had, you know, drought disasters in all 14 counties then. So, you know, I I don't see any great relief from this drought until they declare it a disaster and being that it was Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. Cornmeal basis right now is a dollar a lot. $6 cornmeal right now being sold in Maine because the basis where it's four quarter or whatever on the board out in Iowa because there's no cornmeal to pull from New York State dead. So the devastation to conventional dairy farmers is our loss of grain production in our forage, our loss of energy. So it's forcing us to purchase additional cornmeal. And I know where a lot of that $1,700,000 is going in Orleans County.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. I I think those are great points that you're making, representative Nelson. I think when we look at some of the additional data here, it'll show the supplemental feed purchases adding an incredible cost and loss to the industry. And I think the uniqueness of this being a region wide drought event as opposed to an isolated flood that may have affected, you know, had dramatic effects on particular communities and towns. The fact that there's not a feed supply available across most of the Northeast is concerning. And I think that's being it's fueling the feed shortages stories that we're still hearing from producers that are worried about the ability to feed their livestock through the remainder of the winter. But I also think there was a little bit of a difference in the response that happened as a Vermont community. When the floods happened, there was such devastation and it was so visible and it affected, you know, downtowns and individuals and businesses alike, including the ag community, the drought's a little bit more isolated in its impact on food production. And so I think we just didn't see as much of the same kind of like advocating and support for report your losses. This has a benefit to your neighbor if you report them. FEMA wasn't involved obviously in this drought situation as they were in the flood circumstances. So there are many similarities to the kind of this cumulative effect that the ag community is feeling upon multiple consecutive years of natural disasters. But there's also some, I think, notable differences between what happened in the 2025 growing season and what we experienced as an industry in 'twenty three and 'twenty four. Yeah, I guess I'm just curious with the survey going out, is the goal just to gather information or is there some kind of ability to give relief to the farmers? I mean, this point, is that second part possible as well or not? The intent behind our survey. So the reason we didn't release the survey until October was intentional. It was to allow for as much of the growing season and even into the harvest season for businesses to be able to have as accurate a representation of what they believe their estimated losses might be. So the timing was strategic. And then the concept of a survey to have one statewide data set to be able to show the collective and cumulative impact, but also to be able to share those numbers for federal funds, for state funds, for other of So we don't have funds now. We do not. Right. But I think having the data to be able to show the effect has been valuable in the past. We've used this similar data that was collected in 'twenty three and 'twenty four surveys to make the case for declarations and for the need for resources. Sharing information like this could also be useful with the moving forward, the s 60 legislation in terms of climate resilience. Sure. Hopefully, appropriations is aware of this kind of issues.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative O'Brien, just quickly, Abby, does FEMA cover droughts?

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I don't know, I don't think they do, yeah.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, I've never heard of

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: them, but I know that just from coverage, have experts for hurricanes or floods or tornadoes, but I never heard of them.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I think, and this is again, getting way outside my area of expertise, but FEMA is more for individual losses, not for businesses. And so FEMA would be involved in if your home was destroyed, but not if your barn was lost or your livestock was impacted. So I think the same is true around drought effects. I don't know if FEMA would be involved if the drought meant that your well went dry. I actually don't know as an individual homeowner, but it doesn't benefit businesses regardless. I hope that's accurate. Okay. Moving to the next slide. So this starts to show what the cumulative financial impact. So about 50% of respondents, so 99 respondents to the survey said that they need financial assistance. And that is sort of like the most resounding kind of ongoing need that businesses expressed as a result of the 2025 growing season and drought. About 50% of respondents anticipated reaching a negative cash flow at some point in the next year. Again, not as dire, again, if we were comparing and contrasting to the flood responses, people felt that they lost everything in a flood and they were likely anticipating negative cash flow within three to six months. That was like a majority of responses from the flood. There were though, eight businesses that listed closing their business as a potential option. So I don't know if you all saw the Sabre and Dairy Farm story on the local news that sort of spoke about actually selling their cows and closing their dairy business. That's the only dairy that we're, or farm that we're aware of that has closed, other survey respondents said that that was a consideration for them. Yeah,

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: sure.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: You can see on the sidebar, so the average financial loss of a respondent was just under $80,000 The maximum claim was $2,000,000 And this was actually, I think, from a maple operation that anticipated significant loss to their maple business long term, as well as coping costs to recover. If you look at that top chart, that's where you can see And again, at this point, I don't know if we would consider it an outlier, but this is part of the data scrubbing that we still need to do when we talk about the average estimated income loss and costs incurred by farm type. Maple is currently showing the highest. But again, as I mentioned, there was one producer that estimated $2,000,000 in losses.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Abby, mark is so hard. So I believe you're promoting

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: From Procter and Maple, mhmm.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: UBM Extension research. Did he weigh in, or did you get any testimony or feedback from any of those

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: On the impact on the maple industry?

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Extraordinary numbers compared to crop and dairy. Having spent my life in forests observing different infestations, droughts, sphere of it just seems like an extraordinary impact. And I don't know the technical or scientific data that would back that up.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. I think that's why I preface this is all still in the preliminary data stage that we have not met with the different industry groups to sort of field test kind of what the survey response data is saying. We know that that maple data is due to at least insignificant nature one response from a producer.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: A defoliation. We've had plenty of those. You see it in the quality of the wood. It lasts forever. I didn't see a lot of defoliation.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I think that's good. Right. Yeah.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: We've had Mark in, and I'm sure that we'll have a chance to hear from him again this year. The agency has maple specialists as well, I think. Mhmm. Yep. So maybe we can also have that conversation. Interesting, guess the estimate here, whether it's one or, was it just one you said? In this case, yeah. It's an estimate, and in March, we'll know more, I suppose.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, I think we really have to wait and see what the sugaring season produces, literally, to determine what the kind of at least near term impact on the maple industry was. First run will be

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Friday. Okay. Well, you will in in Orleans County, but I got it.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: That also though, I mean, they estimating generational type damage potentially from the drought, not just what's gonna

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, I think a little bit of what representative Lipsky is saying is like, the trees are stressed in the drought in the growing season, might that have a production and sap producing impact for multiple years or maybe even for the life of that tree. So I think there was some of that kind of estimation that was happening by some of the maple industry producers that responded to this survey. Yeah. The last thing I'll just say around financial health. So there's a variety of different ways to kind of like read that data. So 74 producers described their financial health at the time of completing the survey as moderate, meaning that they felt very vulnerable to another natural disaster event. But sixty eight percent of the respondents claimed that their financial situation was at least vulnerable to another event or worse. So they either characterized it as moderate or severe, poor or critical, critical being the future of their operation is uncertain. And that was where 10 producers responded that way. So whether or not the sugaring season is going to be successful in 2026, we don't know yet, but there are certainly many agricultural operations that responded to the survey that were feeling the financial hardship of the drought, especially on the heels of two. And we'll talk about that in a minute, too. There's some data points around how many of our survey respondents were impacted by multiple consecutive or recent natural disaster events, and it's many. It's the majority of the respondents. So again, I don't know, again, what all the final data is that we'll include on our web page and in our final report, but some of the important things that we wanted to share was what did respondents identify as their most detrimental impacts? And those have remained consistent from the start. And we shared this with you when we had partial data responses. So it's lower crop yields for market, loss of crops for feed, and then insufficient pasture for forage. So some of the stories that we heard, and maybe you've heard similarly, was that there were lost crops in the field and that resulted in obviously a reduction in gross income for many producers. Corn ears were smaller, other crops didn't germinate, or if they didn't have sufficient irrigation in the field, producers lost full crops in the field. There were claims in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of estimated income loss as a result of the drought season by some producers. And then there was this ongoing messaging around the loss of crops for market or as a feed source resulting in, operations taking out loans and businesses being concerned about their ability to service that debt, particularly given the milk prices going into this winter. So there's sort of this like long term stress and strain that businesses are also anticipating. The reduced yields were concerning, especially as we were going into winter and anticipating having inadequate feed supply for the winter season. So that was a result of, you know, we had a really wet spring. So first cuts were really late, and then it got really hot and dry. And so then second cuts sometimes didn't happen. Second and third cuts were too dry to occur for many producers. As Representative Nelson spoke to the purchase feed options are also really expensive and then difficult to even be able to access, you know, dry feed across the Northeast. So we talked to producers that were buying it out of Minnesota and Wisconsin and hoping that they were actually even going to be able to access that feed and then be able to pay that price.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Ted Nelson? Ted, did I hear correctly we've lifted the restriction on organic farmers for a short period of time so they can still feed their livestock and not lose their status?

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, so that's the third piece I was gonna speak to, which is the insufficient forage supply. Vermont organic farmers were working with the national organic standards to be able to have a dispensation if there was a declaration declared of drought, that you could have a smaller percentage of your dry matter intake per season as a result of pasturing your animals from grazing. I think it'd be good to have the VOF or NOFA team come in and talk about the status of that. But that was a concern that there were many producers that felt like they weren't able to kind of pasture and have as much dry matter intake consumed as they should for their Well,

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: it's not just pasture.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Okay. There there are

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: some farms that just couldn't grow their forage period

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Mhmm.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Or enough forage period, and I don't know where they're gonna find organic Source. Yeah. Source Okay. To feed their animals.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Mhmm.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: So it's it's of concern with to some of our farmers. You know, I you know, my favorite organic farm, and I shouldn't have a favorite, but I do out there on route to getting up the hill. Were they were blessed with the sprinkles when the rest of us weren't.

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Mhmm.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Then I realized they had a hay for sale, and they would like to have that opportunity because in the drought, on the flood years, they had to purchase feed, so there's a chance for them to gain back up, but I just, I didn't know I'd heard that, and I didn't know if that was true, I understand, you know, what you're saying about the pasture, but is someone approached the national so they can buy percentage of conventional feed to get them through the next season?

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. And I again, I I I don't know enough to be able to speak to the nuances of that other than that when we spoke with VOF during the growing season, excuse me, their recommendation was producers can submit a claim for an alteration of their feeding plan and that those would be considered. And so I think those were considered and addressed as they were submitted. I think the piece that they were working on and maybe are still working on is like a collective dispensation for a change in the face of a drought condition to be able to have different dry matter requirements being able to be provided by pasture. And potentially, I don't know the answer of if it also is, could it be substituted with conventional feed? It's a good question that don't know.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Other general, Brian, just a quick follow-up.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Did that happen also during the two years of floods?

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: That's a good question. I don't remember. I don't know.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Organic question.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, they couldn't get on their pastures because they were too wet or they were flooded, I don't recall. Ages all wiped out. Yeah. Think the difference, if I were to guess, is that we didn't have flooding across the entire Northeast. I mean, there were numerous floods that happened across the region, but it was not as ubiquitous a weather event as the drought was. Yeah. You could purchase it from some other county or some other state

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: like that. Yeah.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: If you're down on the Big River and it flooded the Winooski. Thank you, Jed.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: He's gesturing that way.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. Know, I Sorry. You know, you know, and you lost your your hay crop or a portion of it, but you get up, you know, up into Moncton very high and dry. They had actually because of the moisture, once yeah. Quality may have been not been that great, but they had a bumper crop of grass. Yeah. You know?

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: And there was more money available too to make up for the losses.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Well, not yet. We haven't seen that money yet, have we, secretary Debuts? We promised it.

[Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Well, we can give you an update on it. We always got an update

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: on it. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. I'll try to speed up here. The questions are welcome. So this chart on the right, again, is where we have this ability to manipulate the data through this Power BI option. So you can look at the drought comparison by farm size or by primary business type. And so you can see that, I think it was on average, 59% of survey respondents said this was the worst drought they'd ever experienced. But then if you break that out, there's some variation between farm size. So 70% of large farm operations or LFOs said this was the worst drought they'd ever experienced versus 58% of medium farm operations and 62% of small farm operations claimed that. Going down to the one below and looking at the drought comparison by business type, sixty eight percent of our diversified operations said this was the worst drought they had ever experienced versus 63%. So this is a little bit more consistent, 63% of dairy producers, 56% of livestock and crop and maple, and then 54% of produce operations made that claim. So again, you can get a sense that of those differences, I guess. So the two areas that we also focus questioning on the survey on was around drought water impacts and then feed impacts. So we've talked about some of those. Many wells and other irrigation sources either ran low or ran dry during the 2025 season. We heard from businesses that for the first time in a farm's one hundred year history, they lost water access via their wells and springs. Businesses responded short term in a variety of ways. Some producers were able to haul water. Some producers had to pay to have water provided. Other businesses were seeking alternative sources on the farm. Some businesses were looking at drilling wells. There was a variety of, you know, immediate or short term responses that businesses considered to address their lack of water or limited water. What we learned and what we heard was that, and as you would expect, those kind of like water hauling

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: and

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: responses was time consuming, was expensive, and like a really unsustainable solution for their farms. So when we talk about what are some of the needs that businesses have, one of the greatest needs is like, we need to have more water sources. So whether that means more alternative sources or we need to receive some grant funds to drill a well or we need to acquire land that has different water access, whatever it might be. But that was one of farms kind of like most critical longer term reactions and responses to the drought. Because of the lack of feed and maybe somewhat due to the loss of water sources, many livestock operations chose to cull animals or sell animals. And they did that because they did the cost of feed supplementation was too much or they didn't feel that they had a sufficient supply of homegrown food, a feed to be able to feed them through the winter. Oftentimes, the stories that we heard was that those animals were sold at a lower price because they were sold sort of like off cycles. They weren't sold at the most opportune time for them to get the highest return for their animal. In some cases, might have been part of their business plan to sort of sell off young stock or harvest animals at the time that they did. But in other cases, that wasn't their intended business plan. And this has the potential to have some longer term revenue implications that either their herd is now smaller or they made some big business decisions to reduce the number of animals that they'll feel the implications of that in the future.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: In Tunbridge, our fire department ran into trouble when the first branch got so low. They dropped all their water from the first branch of the White River, and they wanted to dig into the river to access, because it has to be, I think, four feet deep or something like that, down to a foot or something. And then BEC said, no, you can't mess with the river. So do you know anecdotally or have data that Vermont farmers also wanted to have access to, say, flowing water to make up for loss of wells and springs? Was there a I

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: don't know. Yeah. I don't know how many requests came in for similar type of stream alteration. I don't know.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Or even access, because I know you have to keep records now of where you're getting Of

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: your irrigation sources. Yeah. And we don't have that data either.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I don't know.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay, just a few more here. This slide speaks to kind of like more of the longer term implications and changes that businesses might make as a result of their experience during the drought season of 2025. So again, acknowledging that 100 producers, about 50% of survey respondents said they just needed financial assistance to be able to cover that income loss that they experienced. Other producers were talking about, you know, what if the surface water levels don't recover and the impacts that that'll have on next growing season? So like, what if they're not able to irrigate or if they're, you know, well and spring levels don't return to the sufficient levels that they need them to be able to use them as reliable water sources next season. The grazing situation where things were really dry, they didn't have stockpiled feed as they typically might, and then maybe even in certain circumstances overgrazed their pastures, there's concern about like what might be the implications on their pasture ground for next season. A lot of desire to invest in irrigation sources. So again, we had examples of businesses that lost crops in the field because they didn't have irrigation or they couldn't irrigate to the extent that they needed to or for the duration that they needed to. Again, the desire to drill new wells and access new water sources. So those were kind of the water long term desires and changes being proposed by businesses. Thinking about how they could participate in soil conservation building practices. So how could they be more resourceful in the way that they're managing their ground to be able to hold more water moisture in the soil? In some cases that might be planting different drought tolerant species. So whether that's your perennial vegetation or even annual crop varieties. And then we continue to hear and see just the toil and emotional mental health impact on businesses to have had, to have gone through the drought in '25, as well as in some cases, experienced the severe weather of '24 and or '23. And then I think we talked about the fact that there's some of these long lasting implications for the maple industry, for the sugar makers and for some perennial crops that we don't yet know that will kind of have that data in the future still. This last piece that I wanted to talk about was, I think we all heard that at different times, Vermont was one of the worst impacted states in The United States for drought, which is really surprising to be above some of our most impacted above some of our Southwestern states at different times during the growing season. This data here talks about that 75% of respondents were impacted by previous major weather events, and only 25% of respondents were impacted by one other weather event, which means that a majority were impacted by two or more previous weather events prior to the 2025 season. I think that just sort of continues to be part of that collective cumulative effect that we are seeing and feeling nervous for the industry. And that's the data that we have.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I'll just observe before I take a couple more questions. Lots of data here, wow.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, so that's why it's taking us a little bit to sort sort through this. And so that's why you're seeing it as a preliminary data set. It's not been all sorted and it's de duplicated, so at least we know that these are 200 unique responses. But actually, what are the most valuable data sets and the stories that we want to tell? We're still in the process of reviewing them.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Representative Douglass. I want to thank I just I wanna thank the agency for getting out ahead of this. I wanna thank publicly WCAX, Calvin Cutler, Sophia Thomas for getting out and making the story known, and senator Peter Welch for jumping right into it. And and really, we we had to tell our story, and thank you to all of you in helping us get the word out, because this this is a,

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: you know,

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: big deal. It really, really, really, really is. It more so far reaching agriculturally than the floods were.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: How do you feel about the response? The

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: number of responses

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: or Maybe

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: you had an expectation going in that it would be great to have this many. Do you And I guess I'm wondering, obviously it's not a scientific sample, but do you feel that the distribution is helpful nevertheless?

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I think it's aligned with the number of responses of agricultural producers that we heard from in the 'twenty three and 'twenty four floods as well. So that feels like a volume that feels comparable, given the severity of the events. The fact that we had respondents from every county, knowing that we knew based on national data that we had drought conditions in every county also felt kind of like reassuring. Distribution of size, distribution of primary business type kind of give us an indication that we didn't just meet the produce and horticulture industry or just the Christmas tree community, but instead reached all ag sectors. So I think, again, it's difficult to know because we don't have like the full set of like who all had any impacts, but it does feel as though we heard from a variety of different businesses across the state of all different sizes.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Do you have a question? Yeah, just quickly, at the agency or UVM Extension or the conservation districts, can there be some follow-up research on what type of crops, because we talked about some of healthy soil and we know from like Heather Surprenant and others that Vermont has some of the most healthy soil in the country. And so it'd be really interesting to know if that work over this last generation in a lot of ways made the effects of the drought much less than they would have been. Because we have great soil now and certain crops, I would think tillage would have been worse in a lot

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: of ways than Cover crop help. Know, the organic matter.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: I mean the opportunity now that we've had this, was you can't even do it in a lab, right?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: The problem was the drought hit deer and pollination on corn.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: And let's see.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah. To previous question about the data and your comfort with the 200 respondents. Mhmm. To put that into percentage, how many agricultural producers do we have in the state, or did we have in

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: It's the, like, eternal question. So we don't have a documentation of all ag producers in Vermont. We use the ag census survey data that says we have between 6,507 producers that report to the NASS survey data. So that's sort of the best number we have, but we at the agency of agriculture do not have a registration of all farms.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Okay. That's all farms, but how about dairy farms for

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Well, we know we have about 500 that ship milk, so we do have some of those numbers.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I noticed at least on one slide, it indicated that some of the respondents said they weren't farms.

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, so that's an example of part of that data we have not looked through to know, because the survey was intended to be completed by businesses that are growing or raising crops or livestock, not for personal family use, but actually for sale. So I don't know if they were a horse operation that didn't think of themselves as a farm. That's where we asked equine to report is under the other category. But we'd have to look at those individual responses to make sure that all of those are equine and not an organization that applied, for example. So that's part of that data cleaning that we still have to do.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: And I think that point is we've had, like, lesion planning conditions. We got a 120 respond. Well, there's 27,000 in county, so you're really proud of that getting under 27. I think it's not, you know, it's

[Abby Willard, Director of Agricultural Development, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Not enough.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Not an eighth of a percent. So I think your point maybe did pretty well in response.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: So thank you very much, Ebony. And we, Nicole, were you gonna share some, did I hear?

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, I didn't know if we still have time. I think the rest of our folks are going to send it, but I'm happy to stay in the desk so you know if you want me to.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah, we can run, yes, it's longer here, and thank you both, if you need to go downstairs, thank you very much. Thanks, Derek. Yeah, thank you.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Thank you, Abby. Welcome.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Mr. Mollie. Yeah. Some of us

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: are too slight y and carried this wave. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the Nuske River too. So That's how I know.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Nicole. And I I don't know whether you know first of all, Representative Bartholomew, who is new to the committee.

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: We may have met, I'm not sure.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: New to the committee and the vice chair role, but has been on the committee in the past, in fact, for a long time. So he has more experience than any of us, actually, in this committee. And then I should have mentioned also, when the secretary was here, that Representative Nelson has been elevated to the ranking member. Yes.

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I did hear that. Congratulations. Thank you. So for the record, Nicole Dubuque, I'm the chief operating officer for the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. And for you, representative, I took over Diane Botfeld's position when she retired. So I know that you all wanted to hear about where we're at with the block grant from USDA and then also S-sixty. Do you have a preference on where I start?

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Whatever you've got.

[Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. So

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I'm going to jump into S-sixty because I know that's been going on for quite some time, it'll be back this session. So jumping right to the point here, I think the agency is in a challenging place with the bill. We very much understand the need. And I acted as the co chair on the Ag Recovery Task Force, where a farm relief fund was very much on the table as something a lot of the members wanted. And so I'll say that we'll also just name kind of the elephant in the room that we don't have a budget yet. We haven't seen the governor's budget yet. And we do have some concerns logistically about implementing the relief fund as it's laid out in the current bill that I'd love to just kind of read through for you. So one, creating and running a board requires a tremendous amount of administrative work. And the board does its work in public and is subject to open meeting laws. So given the sensitivity of the information before the bar board, which will be farmers' financial information, that is a concern to us with that being disclosed because most of the work essentially would then be done in executive session. So that's where it's a little concerning for us as we'd have this public board that would essentially have to do most of their work in executive session. Since the board's task is to fund farms and forestry operations after a disaster, it does not have a broader mission that would not involve discussing private financial losses. We understand that many farm groups are interested in the board and want a wanna have a voice, and and we think that they should and understand that perspective. But perhaps instead of creating a public board, we wonder if we could create a farm group consultation requirement where there's this consultative group that provides feedback on how the program is run and what constitutes a disaster and things like that, rather than being the folks who actually review the applications, if that makes sense. So we also think it important to evaluate whether a response should be triggered by a single farm forestry event, like a barn fire, for example, or whether there should be a disaster declaration by the president, governor, USDA, or even potentially the secretary of the agency through assessment of specific criteria. Under the existing language, I think it would be difficult to deny coverage for any damage caused by any weather event. This may mean that the fund, you know, never has sufficient funds to kind of pay for everybody that needs it at the time or to effectively respond during a broad based emergency. If you wanna cover single farm events, perhaps that process could be further simplified with a smaller cap and a farm could get quick access to limited funds designed more to get a farm back on its feet than to broadly cover damages. Also, the scope of coverage is also critical. And in the current language, the scope broadly covers losses and expenses. The broad coverage adds substantial complexity and many layers to determining actual damages. On the farming side of the equation, we believe crop damage is the most significant existing gap that is most in need of coverage. Given the likelihood of limited funds, perhaps crop damage should be compensated before any other damages are even considered. That's just a, you know, suggestion. Or perhaps the scope of losses and or expenses should be narrowed so farms, forestry operations have a better understanding of their risks and can better assess their ongoing insurance needs. So that's, first, maybe prioritizing the most significant gaps. Also, while we recognize that public records exemptions may not be popular, we believe applicants' personal business information is not in the public's interest and should be protected. So this kind of goes back to the public meeting law of just making sure that we're either in executive session or we have a different way to evaluate those applications that doesn't put private financial information out there to the public. But we do say the public has a right to know about any payments made, and that would continue. It's just kind of like their, you know, proprietary business information that we wanna keep safe. We very much wanna focus on simplicity and equity, which are both challenging goals when considering each individual farm or forestry operation and the overall impacts to all operations. So as comp contemplated in the current language, we'll likely never have enough money during a widespread emergency. And as a result, we are uncomfortable with processing applications within fifteen days or in order of receipt as the most devastated farms or forestry operations may not be able to quickly apply and may accordingly be left out. So that's kind of another conundrum that we've reached when we're reading the current language is when do we close the applications? Is it first come, first served? Because that doesn't necessarily mean that the neediest person is going to get help. So we've considered two things. One is creating tiers of maximum payments based on some level of farm size and creating an application period so we understand all damages and can apply some form of equity quotient before issuing any payments. So we could envision something like a maximum payment based on farm size. We've, you know, done this in other programs where we've used water quality farm sizes for animal operations and gross revenue tiers for other operations. We don't necessarily prefer using farm revenue because, again, trying to protect personal financial information. But I think there are ways that we could do it and create tiers. Another thing to just note is that we have successfully diverted resources in recent years. Think BGAP. We've been able to well, you all have been able to divert resources to allow us to have a state run program. And in the agency, we've deployed staff from their current scope of work to BGAP where we could so that we could do that without new staff. But if we were to have an ongoing program or an ongoing fund that we would be responsible for also overseeing the board, I think administrative expenses are important for our agency. There's a lot of resources needed to create applications, talk with applicants, review applications, manage the required level of proof, follow-up with applicants, issue payments, all under intense time pressure, given the outstanding need. And just throwing a plug for the agency that we are at a point where over the last five years, our budget has doubled, but our business office has not grown at all. And I will take questions, but this is a good segue to say, and we're about to get another 31,000,000, which will triple our budget from a federal block grant.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. Tell tell us more about the give us an update on the 31. I've got my eye on the clock. Sorry, I'm talking here too just because I know we're running a little bit late. I'll just say we don't have possession of that 60 as everybody knows. And it's good to hear those thoughts and updates. I think maybe we should hold off on any discussion of that under the circumstances. But if you want to segue into So the the $30.31 1,000,000 million has become the new shorthand for what we used to used to say the eight state grant, which gave seven states. And we first heard about it a year ago and it's been, Well, tell us where it is.

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. I'll keep the tempo up. I'm trying to So the $31,700,000 we refer to it as the two twenty block grant. It was $220,000,000 total that was in the continuing resolution of December 2024 that went to all of New England, Hawaii, and Alaska, so eight states. At this point, we had been told that Vermont could have $31,700,000 of the $220,000,000. And that would be for disaster recovery for any weather event that happened in Vermont in 2023 or twenty twenty four calendar years. Right now, I meet with all of the New England states weekly. And we've kind of been talking to each other about how each of us are doing in the grant process. So there was a change that happened right before the government shut down, like the week of, where we had been under the impression that we were going to execute a grant agreement for the funds, and then we would have access to the administrative portion of the funds, which would allow us to create a work plan and hire a subcontractor if needed to do that and create an IT platform, all of that. The week before, we were told that, in fact, that was not the case. And because of other block grants that had had issues with FSA without having the work plan first, that they were going to kind of change the game, so to speak, and all of the eight states would have to submit a work plan at the same time of the grant to get it executed. And so that's what we've been trying to work on is get our work plan in order and still keep it broad enough that actual implementation of the program will have stakeholder feedback. But without access to the administrative funds, we're not able to kind of get the IT pieces going or the marketing going or anything like that yet for building the program, so to speak. So that's what we're working on. I'm hoping that we're close to the finish line. I will just say none of the eight states have an executed agreement at this point. We're not behind.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: And I know you said earlier that you're relatively new to the role. In your experience or understanding, has there ever been a situation where money that was appropriated twelve months ago still hasn't reached The States?

[Nicole Dubuque, Chief Operating Officer, Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: From USDA specifically, like, I've been in this role for three years, I've not seen this happen before. I have in my previous role in human services seen things take some time to get work plan approval. But yeah, this is taking quite a bit of time.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I know you want to be careful with how you word things. It's outrageous. I think we should just say it. This is relief, or I'm sorry, this is flood relief and other weather related relief from 2024, 2023, even a long time ago for our farmers.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: That's all right. When we get a bad milk check, they put the suicide prevention hotline number in it, And that takes care of everything, chairman Durfee.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: You should Thank you, Nicole. And I think maybe we'll ask you to come back in a few weeks and get another update. And hopefully, it'll be hopefully, something will happen in the meantime positively. Why don't we just take two or three minutes to stretch out a little bit, let's keep it to that. We'll have another break again before lunch, but we do have Ellen here waiting, so don't go far. We can go off live.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: David, thank you for screaming.