Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Just hit the delays for a second. Oh, no, we're good.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: For the record, Gus Seelig, executive director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, here to report today and be accountable for the kind of investments we're making in agriculture and rural communities. As chair just noted, before we went live, are obligated to provide an annual report to the general assembly. You'll have that at the end of the month that will detail, will both give a broad view of all the kinds of activities involved in housing and conservation, but will detail all the investments we've made with funding in prior years. With me is Stacie Sibilia, who has been our Ag Director for the five years, she's now our Associate Director of Conservation overall, and Liz Gleason, who is the Director of our Farm and Forest Liability Program. And they'll do most of the testimony today because they are much closer to the action on the ground, but I'll give you the quick and I hope five minute overview about VHCB in general. As you all know, we have a dual goal mission to do both housing and conservation, but as the statute tells us, we're to do that because all the things we invested on the landscape are of primary importance to economic vitality and quality of life for the state and for the communities you all represent. The first picture was of the Cobb Hill Coat Housing Community in Heartland, and that was what we call a doable project. Some of you may remember the late Danella Meadows who was a professor at WNS, who won a MacArthur Genius Award, and she put together, I think it's a total of 26 homes at one end of the farm and then we bought conservation easements actually on two adjoining farms and they used that revenue to help subsidize two units of affordable housing, including one home for the farmer. We were down that way last summer for our whole staff on the summer outing and visited with a farmer there, it was the same farmer who began with Danella back in the '90s when the community was created and has a great operation. What you're looking at here in Putney is 23 units of affordable housing being built. It's right across from the co op, and what we did was to conserve one acre, which will continue to be community gardens for a large number of people and it's also the place where the farmer's markets happen in Putney all through the summer. So again, ways we think about our dual mission, I'm not showing it today, but a big investment we made was in Downtown Brattleboro when the co op developed its new building, which serves many, many farmers within 100 miles of Brattleboro, and we built housing above them. On the rural economy, and again, I'm gonna be very quick here, and rural communities, I'm sure the chair knows Mighty Food Farms. This is a young woman who had been farming on leased land and panel for about a decade when the use of a conservation easement helped her buy her farm, and fundamentally, what we're here to talk about today is why conservation easements are important and why the support STIPA Ag Viability Program provides to farmers are so important and we'll get into that, but fundamentally lowers the cost of acquisition greatly. Other kinds of rural community investments we're making are in places like the East Catalyst General Store, which has three apartments. We did this under our historic preservation part of our mission. We've done this about half a dozen times around the state with general stores, but we've worked with rural communities on libraries and other community gathering places. The old Grange Building in Morrisville is now a center for the arts that the kids in that community use all the time. Some of you may have just read or heard on public radio about the work of the Vermont Land Trust to help Vermont Adaptive buy a permanent home in Rochester, along with a conservation of, I think, about 150 acres of land, and what Vermont Adaptive does to serve disabled folks, helping them enjoy the outdoors and their services to veterans for free. So big win for conservation, big win for serving veterans and the disabled community, writ large. The last project here is a conservation project that's actually in Downtown Brattleboro, and this was the restoration, this was Sushasamo Sawmill site and restoration of floodplain, and those of you who know Brattleboro would know that the whitestone, David Dean used to call it a pinky little brook, but when it rose up, it did a huge amount of damage, so this and a couple of other conservation projects are actually making communities safer by giving the rivers places to go when we have intense rainstorms.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Representative Bos-

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun]: Yeah, that's my corner of the state. And I guess I'm just wondering,

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: is it just that? Or I mean, I

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun]: guess I heard at one point there was gonna be walking trails or something.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: There will be trails that'll serve as recreation. There's another site in West Brattleboro that's also been restored as flood plain and we're actually bringing back some housing, but none of the housing that was in Can

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: you know what the timeline is from

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: those will be completed? I can find out for you, but I don't know.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Whatever that looks like. There's

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Wet Stone Drop feed into the West River, or is that part of the Connecticut? Connecticut. Indirectly. Yeah.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Briefly on housing, because everybody is concerned about housing. You invested a huge amount of one time and ARPA funding in VHCb, and this is what's happened, which is, I think, good track record. Some of you have heard that it costs $600,000 a unit to build housing. Our average investment is $80,000 On a different day, I know we've talked to the chair about talking about farm worker housing. Some of the things we do are relatively inexpensive. It is true that it's hard to build for less than a half $1,000,000 in Vermont today no matter what you're building, But what we do is we make an investment and then we leverage other money, private equity, loans, federal grants, sometimes environmental cleanup funds, historic tax credits to help get the housing built. So we are not spending with state dollars, 5 or $600,000 a unit. We're using your money to leverage other monies to get the housing built.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: I have nothing. Thank you.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: So would this, some of this be like gone to rural Vermont where they've done the work at Sacred Heart High School?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: That's where some of the money is going is up at Sacred Heart right now. So there's one project underway. There's another project. Phase two is coming to our board next week for additional housing.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Toured that in December, and I'm quite proud of what they've done up there.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Rural Edge and Patrick Shattuck have been terrific, and pretty much in every corner of the state, there's somebody doing work like Patrick's. And as you know, the committee may not know, Sacred Heart has been vacant for about thirty years. I was talking to Senator Ingalls, who I think initially was a little bit skeptical about the housing conservation for it, and when he saw that project, he said, Okay, I get it. When the market fails, that's where you guys come in. And that's true at Ben High right now where there's a major redevelopment of another building that had been vacant for thirty years, that's a big part of our work. We also do a fair amount with What a place for

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: retired people that live in a big house, that no longer need a big house, you know, to live and have access to Downtown Newport, and affordable, affordable, affordable, affordable. We're really excited about it, so I'm glad you are too. This is where I'm gonna stop, which is just to say

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: we appreciate this committee's support. Some of you have heard me say, or you may remember me saying, I always love coming in this room because in 1987, our program was invented in the House Ag Committee by Jean Ann Duffy and Bobby Starr. Some of what you're gonna hear today from Liz about the Farm Liability Program and the Rural Economic Development Initiative also were initiatives that we began with Chair Starr. We have a large pipeline for the balance of this year, not enough resources to meet all the need and an equally large pipeline of potential projects next year. And whether it's the arts continuing despite the changes of federal government to bring matching funds into Vermont and Stacy will talk about that for ad conservation in a significant way. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to her. I'm not going anywhere, so if there are more questions for me or you want us back, I'm happy to join you. Thank you, Beth.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Great overview as always. Hello everyone. Good to be here. As Beth said, my name is Stacy Sibula and I'm the Associate Conservation Director and I'm going to take a deeper dive into what we're doing to support farms. So I thought it'd be helpful to lay the landscape a little bit and give some context about where we are today with farmland. And I think maybe this is data that might be familiar to you, because I think you had someone come in recently talking about this amazing report that American Farmland Trust prepared recently. It's called their Farms Under Threat series, and you can look it up for all different states. So what we recently did was work with them to actually ground truth the data. So the original report was based on modeling, predicting with current development trends, how much farmland are we going to lose between 2016 and 2040. And they came up with this 41,200 acres figure, which equates to about 200 farms. So definitely something that we were pretty alarmed about with the modeling. So we asked them to ground truth that and actually see how is it playing out now a couple years later, Where are we at? And what they found out that was very sobering to us was that we've actually already lost 48% of that 41,000 that they are predicting, almost 20,000 acres, and that's based on the 2022 ad census. And what that works out to is we're losing farms at a 65% faster rate than what was forecasted. And I don't know if I have time to go into the theories about why that's happening, but obviously the pandemic is a big factor with that, just all the increasing development we're seeing. And obviously, the flip side of this is we all know we're in a housing crisis and we need more housing development. But what this report found is that a lot of the development that's happening is low density residential. So it's a house at the edge of a field or sometimes in the middle of the field, or it's off on a dirt road and you're not really seeing it. It's not the higher density development. So in that way, it's not really truly tackling the housing crisis, because it's a house here, a house there, and also it's really eating into our farmland. So this is something we're really concerned about. So what are we doing about it? And Gus kind of alluded to some of these things already, and Liz will be talking to you more about the viability program and rural economic development initiatives, so I won't focus on that. So really, the work that I had been working on at BHCB before I moved into this new role was overseeing our farmland conservation program. Really the bread and butter of that work is the purchase of development rights, which I think many of you around the world are probably familiar with, but that's a tool to keep land in farming and in the hands of farmers, but it's stripping away the development rights, which doing that, we're able to give a payment to essentially the farmer through the land conservation organization that we grant fund. I'm a total data nerd, I get excited about this slide. This, I think, is a really good illustration of the power of conservation easements and how they really do increase affordability. So if you see the blue bars, that's indicating the values of farms. This is based on real data, appraisal data that we've had over a five year period between 2020 and 2025. And the blue bars are what the value of the farm would be if it had no development restrictions, if you were going to sell it on the open market. So you can see some pretty high values, 6,000 and more per acre per year. Once the conservation easement is in place, we're seeing reductions of 55 to 60%, 70% in some cases. And across all those years, it's an average about 60% reduction in value, which is huge for new and beginning farmers getting on land, which is a big group of folks that we're working with. It's also a tool for farmers wanting to transfer their land to the next generation and being able to still remain financially whole through the sale of easement. So we're really proud of this tool and have a long track record of seeing it used successfully in Vermont, thanks

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: to

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: supportive legislature. And Gus mentioned that the federal government too has been a huge supporter of this program through the NRCS ASAP AL program, matches all of our funds.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Doctor. Linsen?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Sure, Stacy, you can go back to that. I'm proud of the fact that you can take land on our primus ag land and take that bull bar but I can from my experience, it doesn't drop it down to $26.50 an acre. It is still trading at 4 and $5,000 an acre. So we're not on those those fields of the great those big fields that would agree agronomic value, the primate Yeah,

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: those are going for higher, you're right. And

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: you're not plunging the firm's net worth down with the sale and development rights. I think

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: we're talking about two slightly different things, so I think these numbers reflect what somebody who is entering is getting paid when a farm is coming up in a deal we're involved in.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: Right, I think now the set

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: of conservation. But you are correct that the best farmland, even with a conservation easement, is now selling at over 4,000 acre and that's a good thing for people's bottom lines, but it's also when a conserved farm comes up for sale, then it poses a difficulty for the entry, which I think we need to work on and we are thinking about ways to still help bring the cost down for new farmers. For the next generation of farmers. So I agree with you, we're not trying to, I think these numbers are reflecting at the time of conservation how much were the appraisers here telling us the answer.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And it depends on location, location and

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Right, and whether you've got lots of farms are 40% forested, so there's a mix of what the per acre value is, you're just buying best pine fields, you're going be paying more.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yes. Good points.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Representative Lipsky. Thank you. Is green represents an average value, fair market value.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: For that year with the number of transactions we have, which is also not a huge dataset. We're maybe talking 20 projects a year or something like that. But what really matters, or is

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: a large impact for keeping farms farming, is the current use valuation, which is significantly lower, even though they've been raised over several years. Right. It allows a farmer to hold on to whether it's conserved or not, that's a significantly lower number.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah, and we know we have a tremendous number of acres in current use, is sort of, I mean I don't want to call it conservation because it's not permanent, but it's sort of a de facto form of conservation that helps people be able to keep the land because they can afford the taxes, so it's a good point. Anything else, or?

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: One more. What

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: happens when

[Unidentified Committee Member]: a farm that's conserved goes out of business and there's not really a good fit for the next generation of farmers to come in. Yesterday, this Tebow farm right in the middle of Colchester, the farmer came in and said it was conserved, it's obviously huge development pressures there. But say, know, they have to sell out, and then the best you can do is have vegetable gardener, houses comes in and says we can do 50 acres here, but not 600 or whatever.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Do you see a lot of that?

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah, I mean, certainly that happens over time because especially with older easements and generational changes, etcetera. We do have something built into many of our easements starting around the year 2000, we started adding what's called the option to purchase an agricultural value into the conservation easements. Basically what that does is ensure that if the property is going to change hands, that it has to be sold to someone who's a farmer or a family member. There's sort of a caveat if you wanna transfer your kids, you could do that. But what that does is ensures that the land is gonna stay in production. If the landowners in this situation where they're like, well, we have this farm that doesn't have a strong market for it, they often will end up working with, many of these farms are the Vermont Land Trust and they have a farmland access program, which is excellent. And they have a huge list of seekers of people all across the country looking to farm here. And often they'll do that, give that support to the landowners trying to help them to market property and they won't even have people in their lists who want it. So there's that kind of personal attention that goes into these projects. And then we really try when we do projects, especially now that we've learned so much in thirty plus years of doing this, is making them as flexible as possible so that some of our farms, many of our farms have the ability to split them into two if it's a large acreage so that you're not stuck with, oh my gosh, nobody, no one wants to farm at 600 acres. Okay, well, it's more feasible to have two three hundred acre farms or two fifty acre farms, so we constantly are trying to look at how can we be more adaptable to sort of future proof the situation.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: I could add to your question, I'd say two things. One is that at least as the Vermont Land Trust reports to us, almost all the land is in production at some level that has been conserved. Yeah. It was well over 95% the last time they reported. That may mean it's just getting But I think you're pointing to a different issue because we didn't know as much when we began. This was all a great experiment. So one of the things the legislature considered that we didn't get to the end of about a decade ago was a process other than going to court to amend easements and it got through the Senate and then it stalled in the house with a lot of concerns about it. So we have older easements on large parcels where subdivision is not open and we probably need a process at some point in the future that will allow us to say, okay, well, the current needs of a community is not for 600 acres to all the under one ownership in Colchester and how can we amend that easement and allow for subdivision because at the time we considered it, it was like a great victory of a big concern in 600 acres and now we're in a different economy. Farms are either getting bigger or they're getting smaller in Vermont right now and in the middle is really hard. So I would just say it's something we need to, we're not proposing that today but it's something we all need

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: to think about is how we create more flexibility. So are you talking creating flexibility so that a community can have the opportunity to grow in a responsible manner as is that what you're referring to? I'm

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: not saying we want to get rid of the easements at all, think that would be a non starter for lots of people, but I am saying that if in a particular circumstance if 300 to 200 acre farm was made more sense than one six hundred acre farm could we allow that to happen with some kind of public process that detected the original investment?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I understand, but I worry a lot. I never had a problem sleeping at night till I got in this building. That's the truth. So what I worry about, in Newport you can serve the Scott Scott Bluff land. Yeah. Which is great. I don't think it's being utilized to its true potential. Those are great soils and they're in the best growing climate in New Orleans town. And there should be if if Nelson Farms doesn't have a chance to farm it wide open, there should be a robust gardening opportunity down there because Heather Heather's super not ought to be there with that little barn milking 20 cows and having gardens. It it would grow bok choy or something. I don't know. Grows up my can't grow at my house up on Pine Hill at 900 feet, but down there in the lake, it's just a great agronomic soils and it's a walking path with two acres of garden at best and that bothered me, but no what I'm thinking is like Ireland and Derby Line, you familiar with Derby, Derby Line at all?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: A little bit, and we have

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: those phenomenal fields and those phenomenal soils and we're looking at putting it in the land trust and, but it'll absolutely kill development in those areas. Now there's not terrific pressure today, but say, you know, like, Lindenville, they've got all this opportunity in Lindenville for growth, and they need housing. And if we if that happens in Derby, how could the town of Derby with the VHCB and the land trust and say, we need 10 acres for high density housing. And could that money then go, you know, at market value to the farmer, but the rest of it at development value go back to VHCb to use towards housing or use towards other conservation interests for conserving farmland in another place?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: I'm gonna say two different things. One is if we've conserved land and a community decides that there's a really important other use to that in agriculture, they do have the power of condemnation. I know we hate using condemnation a lot, but public body, whether you need a school, a hospital, or more housing, have that power. The second thing I'd say is whenever we conserve land, we always ask the town, I ask the applicant, is this consistent with the town plan and is it consistent with the regional plan or not? We've had several circumstances where community has come to us and said, we want you to conserve the land, but this 10 acres adjacent to the village, leave that out of the field. We are also open when somebody comes to us and they say, I want to save out building lots for family members or we did a deal with Sam Byrne, who some of you may know because he was ledge counsel here for a long time, where he, their farm when we conserved it, they held out enough land to build, I think it was about a 15 or 20 unit sublimation to habitat for humanity, built a couple of the homes and the rest of them went market. So we say to landowners this is a big decision and you may not want to conserve the whole parcel because it's appropriate for the property.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I understand we just did it, we're almost ready to close on the deal in Albany and we just sliced out two or three acres because the town may wanna move a road or and and or we may wanna sell couple lots there, but sometimes I wonder if almost a long term lease, know, there's a different

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: I understand what you're saying. We're open to talking about that. I think if we were valuing a lease for the long term, the other problem would be that it will provide less compensation. Absolutely. So it's a trade, those things are trade offs, but those are things that certainly

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: can be talked about. A twenty year debt.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: I'm gonna redirect us to

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: that. Just

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: because I know that in fifteen minutes stomachs will start to rumble and I want to

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: be sure that we're stuck. Yeah,

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: so I'm actually wondering, I don't wanna shortchange you, Liz. Do you wanna should we switch gears at this point? Or what do you think?

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: If there's any other slides you

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: were really hoping to cover, maybe check those out. There's so many good ones. Mean, we've already talked about, I think, lot of these things. I can skip that. I guess I'd like to end on this one because I think this is such a great point to make and I'm sure many of you

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: around the room know this.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Conserve farmland is more than just protecting the amazing soils, although to your point, Representative Nelson, that is so important. But we know that our farms in Vermont have a lot of other amazing, important resources on them. A lot of them are heavily forested. And so really just putting a finer point on the fact that when we're conserving farm, we're also conserving wildlife habitat, forest land, wetlands, and this project is a perfect example of that down in Wakefield, David Durfee's conventional dairy farmer worked with the L. T. To acquire another 63 acres of good ax soil right on the Madder River, and through this process, two miles of river frontage, have 50 foot buffers on them now, six acres of really wet land that really wasn't very farmable is now being restored to wetlands. There's a one mile portion of the Mad River path in this project, so it just ticks all those boxes, really good community resource, and it's just one example of many that we do. So.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: The Johnson Farm in Canaan.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: What's that?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: The Johnson Farm in Canaan, you know. Yeah.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: I'm actually not familiar with that one.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: It's just a great use of resources and moved all around.

[Stacie Sibilia, Associate Director of Conservation, VHCB]: Yeah. Alright, so, Zula's some help. If you want to start with your finger next, we'll let you decide.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: Hi, everyone. Again, I'm Liz Gleason. I'm program director for our Farm and Forest Viability Program and Rural Economic Development Initiative. I'm going to breeze through some of these, but please stop me at any point. This is just a couple other examples of a bunch of farms that we worked with at the point of conservation and farm transfer, or that they were both happening but not consecutively. I think this June down here is another example of what Gus was alluding to earlier about a really early easement when we were first trying out this school that doesn't have housing built into the easement. So it's an amazing piece of land. June Farm had been located in the Intergall, and they were looking to get out of the flood plain that's on this land. They're not currently able to build a house on it, but everything else they need. We work with them on business planning. They're growing their wedding flower business, and it's a really exciting move for them. And it's a farm that's sort of asking the same question that Gus is about, is there a process outside of the courts for amending? So the Farm and Forest Viability Program was established twenty three years ago. Now we've been doing agricultural conservation for a while, and that's a voluntary tool. We've done a lot of it. It's not the right tool for everybody at the right time, and we knew that farmers needed other supports to navigate a really volatile marketplace that doesn't do a great job at returning profit to farmers to take care of themselves and their families and the land. So our program is really focused on business assistance. We get really in-depth. It's a super individualized process. We're really focused on financial management. What are the goals and aspirations of the farmer? How do we get there? How do we make sure they're profitable? How can they pay themselves, save for retirement, take care of the land, pay their employees a good wage? How do they figure that all out? We also do a lot of marketing, help folks with access to capital. You can see Don and me's bubbles. These are our impacts from folks who finished the program in 2025. We do track a lot of economic indicators because we are basically a small business development program, but we're nested within a community development organization with a really holistic mission. Quality of life, land stewardship are equally important to us as these economic indicators. But I'm really excited about these from last year. It is half out there right now in the ag industry, and we are still seeing some really solid success. So we had a lot of businesses that grew at least a little bit last year. 70% increased their sales, 82% added jobs. On average, their sales increased by a little over $50,000 folks we work with accessed almost $5,500,000 in outside capital to improve or grow their farm and forest businesses. And we do really focus on those business management skills. Folks usually come to us with really strong production skills, they're looking to broaden that skill set. We kind of need it all these days to succeed in ag and forestry. Somebody yell at me if I stop you. I just want to give a really big shout out to the organizations that we partner with to deliver this program. We are a network based program. It's a shared program model where agricultural service provider organizations come to us and say, We want to run this farm and forest liability program at our organization. So those five logos at the top, NEFA, Interval, ABM, Center for Non Economic and Land for Good, are the organizations we've been partnering with the longest, and they're the ones delivering that branded program. It's generally for folks who've been in business for at least a couple years, have records, are ready to make a major change, or we do a ton of farm transfers. It's like a third of the businesses we work with in any given year are at some point in the transfer process or the land access process in the beginning of those.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Are you just helping them do the transfer? Or in addition to that, are you providing other technical business?

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: We have a core set of services that everyone gets that are around, number one, what are your goals? Number two, what are your financials? Do those match? Do your financials actually need to be improved to be more accurate? How are we going to use real financial and production data to make this all work? And then with transfer planning, it can extend into many, many, many different places. Some of it is setting people up with retirement planners. Some of it is doing an exit strategy. Some of it is bringing in ag mediation if there's a need for that kind of facilitation and hard inter family communication. Everyone gets a core set of services that's really around business management skills and financials. And then depending on what they need, we will bring in other technical assistance. Everyone has a budget at first. We also know that the Farm and Forest Liability Program isn't exactly what every business needs at every moment. So when we're able, we also fund other business technical assistance that's out there that provides either a pipeline into our program or is for businesses that are bigger than we typically work with, like the Sustainable Jobs Fund. So you can see those folks over there. So I just want to touch on a couple big themes right now in our program. We've obviously heard so much about the ongoing impacts from floods and drought, and I'll just say that we are continuing to see those impacts show up. The quality loss of income from the last couple of years. But he's very much still on folks' mind. We've talked a bit about farm transfers, so I'm not going to go into a lot of depth here. But know that Maple Grove and Rock Bottom, Stratford Creamery, they're both transfers that we're working on right now. Woodlawn was a diversification into cheese making, and they also do a lot of climate resilience work. They grow a lot of their own feed and grain. But mostly what I want to talk about is low commodity conventional milk prices right now. We have just had a super intense influx of conventional dairies calling us. Milk prices are really low. They are as low as they were, I forget what the year period was, but it's like $18 a 100 a week. It's a lot less now than it was back then, and it's the same number. And people's cost of production have only gone up because of inflation.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: So yeah, it's pretty

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: good farm, yeah. Things are really tax free. Extra cost. Yeah. And this is not just We're seeing really excellent farms that have great management, great land stewardship, wouldn't be in a bad financial position. It's just that the conventional health workers are far, far below average cost production. There are some upsides right now. The organic market is strong and organifiers are taking new farmers, so there's some conventional farms that are really looking into that. It is generally better to transition to organic when conventional prices are not really, really low, because it costs money to transition. It takes time. But there is that positive side. We also don't have some of the support systems that existed when there was a big wave of organic transitions a handful of years ago. Vida ran a low income loan program for dairies transitioning to organic, which I believe was funded by the Windham Nights program. So I'm assuming you'll be hearing more about this coming up, and I think we're going to probably need some interventions in this moment. But we're doing a lot of business planning with folks who are really taking a super hard look at where they're at. Quick story about one of the forest businesses we work with. This is Bestwood Customs Sawingdon and Putney. It's a really cool little sawmill. They are milling local lumber, including, I think, Black Locust. And they work with a lot of small scale community based outdoor recreation projects, building trails, things like that. So that's a really neat business that we've been working with. They also got a small grant from us to help rehab some of their mill space so they can work undercover, outside in the winter. So this is just a slide. In addition to the business planning, we also run a variety of grant programs, direct financial support to all kinds of businesses, both water quality grants, grants to help people implement their business in transfer points. Then we started a small community based garden grant as another effort. We need all different scales of agriculture and food growing in the state. And there's people that would love to learn to do that, but are not yet able to become farmers who never will.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Liz, if

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you ever have, say a farmer is having challenges like you're talking about, and they apply for, say, a working land grant, and with your of shoehorning VHCB in for the technical expertise, does that relationship ever work as far as

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: It's not exactly how we usually see it on the ground. Usually what happens is someone reaches out to Working Lands, they're like, we would actually recommend you do business planning first, and there's a direct partnership there. Or we'll be working with someone on a business plan, and the business planner will be like, we think now is a great time for you to put in a competitive application. But this program is free to farmers. We fund a small amount of technical assistance no matter what for each business. They don't need to raise funding to cover their enrollment.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: It's not a match.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: There's no match. There's a $75 application fee that we waive all the time if that's going to turn people away. Yeah, and then this is my last slide. Rural Economic Development Initiative started in 2017 here in this building. We love the Ready program. We were asked to help small communities and working women's businesses access big federal dollars for complicated projects. We also will sometimes help with other complicated money, philanthropies, and state dollars. And we realized that we're up to $35,500,000 accessed by a bunch of really small communities around the state. This is the Miss Dallas Falls banner, which is in close for a long time. It's like the second banner that made it onto the National Historic Register. USDA Rural Development Plan, I think, to reopen and hopefully employ six people again in this really sweet dinner. I don't have another slide on this one, but we do a lot of work with farmers and sometimes forest businesses through Ready as well. On the flip side of that hard times in conventional dairy that we were talking about earlier, We've also seen a lot of success in some recent dairy projects on the ready side. For example, Maple Brick Farm down in North Bennington, which is, I don't believe it's a farm anymore, but they process a lot of local milk into mozzarella, help them get a grant. Another one is even creamery, which makes great creamy base and it's a dairy, help them get a federal Dairy Business Innovation Center grant, I think, last year. So there's great things happening out there. We worked with folks who are having a hard time and folks who are really successful and wanting to get better at what they're doing. So always would love to hear about businesses in your area or community projects. Our doors are open and we'd love to help. I want to say thank you so much for all the support that you have helped us pass through to rural communities and farmers. And I'm always happy to come back and share anything else you want do about.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: The REDI program, REDI came up just a few minutes before you came in because we were looking, as I think John mentioned it, reports. And for some reason, I had trouble, I think maybe we all had a little trouble remembering what Ready is. And I wasn't associating it with your work. So we'll try to be better about that. But the immediate question was, you also report on Ready each year to the-

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: Yes, I'll be sending you a report probably early next week that includes farm and forest liability and REDDI in the same report, which is complementary to our overall BHCb-one. Okay. Yeah, but it's two separate reports that you'll get from me and BEST.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Okay. And I'm ask not going you to respond to this, but I will say that the exercise we're going through was looking at all the various reports that we get, there are many, and trying to see whether there's any that we would say we don't really need to get that every year. So I'm just telling you that and I'm not asking you to respond to that. I

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: would just say we do like to tell our story, you told us you wanted it only every two years because we touch natural resources and other committees of jurisdiction yes we probably and because you invest a lot of money in this yes you'll probably want to continue to rest be accountable.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: And as you said, you'd like to tell your story.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Yeah, I just do want to say, you know, one of the things the legislature did as things got better was to increase the amounts appropriated to us under the carbon transfer tax and that has allowed us to enhance both the development rights program and business program. This coming year I think we're going have about between state and federal funds about $10,000,000 to purchase development rights and we've more than doubled the size of our allocation to loses program which is now going to be in excess of $2,000,000 So your support for our budget is turning into bigger investments into the agricultural part of our mission.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: Yeah, the program year that we're in right now is the most farmers we've ever enrolled in our program, and that is due to your support and some federal fundraising, and we're so thankful.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: Does Ready come out of the larger VHCb's budget? Okay. Did you get ARPA funds too? Did a bunch flow through to Ready? We did work with the agency of administration when you, and I don't know if the source was ARPA or just general fund surplus when you asked them to do need a technical assistance and subcontracted some of that work. So we're not trying to be everything for everybody. We're trying to stay in our in the ways where we have expertise which tends to be agriculture, agricultural recreation, historic preservation, housing. But we have done a couple of projects that have led to municipal infrastructure investments as well.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB)]: A lot of libraries and community centers that serve economic and community development functions.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Great. You mentioned we may have you back in to talk about going a little more depth on farm worker housing. If you would like to present, once the report is out, if you would like them back and present on that, you're welcome to. Okay, we're happy to come back.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I don't know if it's appropriate, but I would love to hear the HCB's take on where PAC-one 180 one's going, and just flag things that we should be responding to.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: Can talk about that, too.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board]: But I do think that asking communities and regional planning commissions to designate areas they want to see grow is a really good thing, and hopefully will make managing permitting a little bit easier for everybody.

[Committee Chair 'Beth' (unidentified)]: All right, well thank you very much. We will stop for the morning and pick back up again a different topic at one.