Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Depending on what they've done with the funding. So this is another opportunity for us to better understand why this program is important. We do have a little less than two hours in total, so roughly half an hour for each. So just committee, don't want to discourage questions at all, but just bear that in mind.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I'll try to come back to some chair.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: All right. Why don't we go ahead and get started?

[Sippel (Program Manager, Working Lands Enterprise Initiative)]: Yeah, I think just So for the record, Sippel, program manager of the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative. And just to that first point, we did build in some time for questions into that two hour period. So the presenters today are gonna they have some talking points that they wanna share, but then, you know, we're planning we plan time for questions, which is very important, obviously, in every hearing. Yeah, exactly. As you said, we're going to hear from four businesses today. We're going to hear from David Keck of Keck Wine Enterprises, owner of Keck Wine Enterprises, and then Claire George, CEO and founder of Butterfly Bakery of Vermont. And then Miles Jenas. Is that I just want to make sure I said your last name correctly. Okay. From Vermont Heavy Timber. And then lastly, Michelle Johnson, from Freeverse Farm and Apothecary. All of the businesses that you're hearing from today were successful applicants, to the business enhancement grant opportunity last year, so in 2025. Just as our presentation yesterday focused on 2025, the grantee businesses are also all from the 2025, successful applicant category. The business enhancement grant is, I think, with the service provider and producer association grant, they're the flagships of the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative. Those are the grants that we try to offer consistently. And that's what we offer if we have the base appropriation only. We offer the supply chain impact grants when we do have dollars that are special appropriations that allow for that. And I think the reason for the reason that the Business Enhancement Grant, I'm going to talk about that specifically, because that's what we're focused on today, is such a central part of the programs or of the boards, is prioritized by the board, is because it is a grant opportunity that is able to very flexibly respond to a whole diversity of businesses across the farm, food and forest sector's most pressing needs. So as you started to see yesterday, and you're going to see more today, the Business Enhancement Grant funds a whole range of businesses from small to large, from beginning to, you know, mature stage. And so that flexibility to respond to a diversity of businesses and a diversity and to their most pressing needs, you know, we think is a really important part of the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative, remaining impactful and responding to what the landscape is needing. Yeah, and I think in selecting or inviting grantees to join us today, we actually are always trying to capture that diversity. So you're going to hear from farm food and forestry businesses. And you'll also hear in the presentations that businesses also received quite a diversity in funds, right? So that's a part of the diversity of this program and a part of how it responds to businesses' unique needs. So we had award sizes from 13,000 up to 50,000 in 2025. But I think without further ado, we're going to hear from the heart and soul. It's always, in my opinion, the best part of our hearings or our time together. Yeah, hear directly from the businesses that are working so hard to steward Vermont's working landscape.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Great. Thank you. Just, David, if you're getting seated, welcome back, first of all.

[Sippel (Program Manager, Working Lands Enterprise Initiative)]: Thank

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: you. I think what we'll do just in terms of time management, this will be a good exercise for us. I'll ask the committee to hold its questions for the end of the presentation. Take note of, I'm sure that questions will pop up, just take a note and then we'll plug them in just to be sure that we allow the same amount of time for everybody.

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us here. Good to see you all again. I will apologize if I sniff a little. I was in the winery for twelve hours, and it's forty five degrees in there. You too. Also that time of year. But if anything, hopefully not. I own Keck Wine Enterprises, which is sort of the umbrella over Stella fourteen wines, and I've presented actually, I think it's a great follow-up to the last time I presented where we were discussing sort of the need for funds to encourage Vermont vineyards and the growth of the Vermont wine industry. And this is a perfect example of how that can work in the state of Vermont successfully, I think hopefully continues to be successful. So we are a small winery we produce at our height about four fifty cases of wine, we started with the Boyden Vineyard, which we lease from the Boyden family in Cambridge, Vermont, which is about six acres. And we started farming that vineyard in 2020, and producing the wine in for Gens, Vermont at Shaxbury's old facility and then created a winery in our barn on our property, which is five minutes from Boyden and started producing wine there in 2022 and have produced there ever since. In 2020, we'll get into that shortly. But in 2023, we started farming the vineyard at Golden Dog Farm, which is on Pratt Road in Jeffersonville headed up towards Smuggler's Notch, which is right there. It's decent view. And in 2024, we planted another 3,500 vines there. And in 2025, received the grant, from working lands to trellis those vines, which is a crucial step. And I'll kind of go into what all that means. But that's the quick overview of our business. Make over Vermont wine, we don't buy grapes from anyone, we farm everything that we produce, we converted everything to organic farming. In 2020, when we took it over before that, the vineyards were conventionally farmed, the ones that Boynton had Golden Dog, excuse me, were already organically farmed. Organic farming is challenging in Vermont because we have a pretty humid climate, which is not super easy with respect to fungal disease, which are sort of the only things that the hybrid varieties we work with are prone to. So But we don't add anything to our wines other than occasionally a small amount of sulfur, which I could go on and on about that. Mostly we don't add anything and natural fermentations, we don't add yeast and so far we have distributed in the state of Vermont and have expanded to New Hampshire, California and are hopefully in the next couple of years expanding to Massachusetts, Florida and Texas. So that's the broad picture. Let me see if this works. So in 2023, things changed a bit for us, we were kind of on a pretty good upward trajectory as far as our work at Boyden was concerned. And then I've spoken to this group about the farm security fund, which I know is in a lot of discussion right now. We were heavily affected by the frost in 2023. We lost 90% of our crop to that May frost for two reasons. One, April was super warm and everything butted out early and then it was 25 degrees in the vineyard from midnight till 7AM. So it's not great when your vines are already budding out, which they had. Then a month later, the vineyard looks like the middle pictures there, which was at least partially underwater. It didn't affect us tremendously for two reasons. One, we didn't have any grapes hanging because of the frost. And number two, the vines are pretty resilient in that respect. But, it did lead us to explore other options, which is when we talked to Golden Dog Farm and started farming their vines because they had a vineyard that they had inherited when the owners, the current owners Doug and Becca Warppel took it over, had tried to make wine, weren't very excited about that as an aspect of their business. They have a lot of other moving parts up there on their farm, including sugaring and fruit trees and everything else. So we took over farming that vineyard. And that is in the corner of me and my wife, beginning to bird net that in 2023. So we harvested those grapes for the first time in 2023. Fast forward to 2024, we actually signed a 10 lease on the vineyard, knowing that we had a lot of challenges with the vineyard itself. One of them in the middle, my friends, Surinder, Una, and it looks like Dave, You can see the posts on the end have been kind of enhanced with some further posts. They basically had planted, they had established a vineyard the way you would establish a vineyard in California. The black walnut posts are pretty effective if you don't have any moisture or acidity in your soils, but Vermont soils don't really work that way. And so those are all sort of rotting and falling down. Thus, the extensions and the requirement that we have people on shoulders to pull our bird nets and things like that. Half of the vineyard is also being reclaimed. The previous owners had mowed under five acres of vines, six acres of vines. And if you don't pull vines out, they'll continue to regrow. They're sort of weeds. And so the picture on the left here is what half of the vineyard looked like when we started working with it, which is some bamboo posts that Doug and Beck had put in the ground and vines that were kind of starting to come back, not being mowed down anymore or hayed, but also not trellised or given anything to sort of structure their growth. So you can't really farm grapes that way. You can, and we explored some ways to do that. It's not great, and it's not super effective or financially viable, but this is definitely not gonna go. So in 2024, being stubborn, as Vermonters frequently are, we said, Okay, we frosted in one vineyard, we had success in this vineyard, and we know that the soil can grow grapes. And we know that a vineyard is successful here, it just wasn't planted well, nor has it been maintained well, so let's plant more. So in the top is a neighbor of ours who pulled out a 1920s plowing implement, which he fixed and hooked up to his tractor and was not super successful, but was a really interesting exploration and ingenuity when you don't have money to plow a vineyard. These are 3,500 vines that I drove down and picked up in Paulette, Vermont, where Andy has his nursery and is sort of the provider for hybrid varieties in the country really. This is what the vineyard looked like before we started working with it, is an enormous hayfield. That's my border collie and my wife beginning the planting process. And here are friends, neighbors and everybody else helping to get the vineyard planted. Yes, sir.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: How big are those vines when you're starting up? Are they in flats?

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: So I thought I had a picture. I don't. We get them bare root.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And would a water wheel work with that? Like people use when they're putting in to an experiment called hemp?

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: Yeah. And it they need to be planted just a little the root ball needs to be a little bit lower. And so I don't think those dig deep enough to make that viable.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: My god. You can make one heavy enough and a big enough tractor. You could poke a hole in the ground as deep as you wanted to go.

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: Then maybe. We're maybe we need to talk about it. Yeah. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're gonna anyway, we played it. I ended up taking an auger on a skid steer and going through and blasting those holes into the ground because we finding somebody to plow until a field in June is May, June is pretty hard even if you can't afford to pit. So So we planted the vineyard. There we are planting the last vine. You can see how big they are. There's basically sticks that are about six inches high. And then the picture next to it is that entire field planted and boxed. So we put grow tubes around each of the vines to protect them mostly from critters and give them a little structure in their early growth. And all of this was done basically on credit, loan, labor from friends and just making it happen because we had faith in the future of this project. We also had potential for a couple of things coming through to help us financially, which did not come immediately to fruition. The other thing that we needed to check was to make sure that the style of trellising we wanted to do. So trellising goes into a vineyard. It's basically the end posts and high tensile wire run through the vineyard, and each of the vines has a piece of bamboo or pencil rod that attaches to the vine and gives them the direction to climb. And then they climb along the wire or you train them along the wire, and that's where your fruit hangs. We wanted to use metal posts as opposed to the wooden ones that are used frequently, but they need to drive at an angle and they need to drive pretty deep. So we had Steven Wilson, who owns VT Vineyards out to basically help us drive a bunch of posts and check to make sure that this was viable. So this is at the 2024 in November. And we found that it was viable. It was going to work. And and that was when we got a quote from Steven for the working lands grant that we were working on, and we began our application, which was filed in December. So here's the math on why this why we need to trellis this vineyard, why we and why we decided that it was worth taking the risk, even though we were pretty terrified about the process of trellising. And I realize this is a lot of tech, this is what you're not supposed to do on slides, it's about a bunch of text. But the current vineyard production with the sort of unsuccessful trellising that existed and the feral vineyard that was in the middle was about thirty to fifty cases per year, or it would be provided we helped the lines become a little bit healthier because they were all pretty disease ridden. That's about $15,000 in product that barely covers your inputs, the lease and maybe trying to sell a little bit of wine, not to mention the glass, corks, etc. By adding the untrellised portion of the vineyard that was planted but not trellised and kind of running feral, which is another two acres would increase it from fifty cases a year in a good year to one hundred to one hundred and twenty cases, which is what we're looking at in 2026. Now that that is trellised, which looks set, that is closer to $36,000 a year in product that starts to be viable, for a vineyard. By adding in the new plantings, which were planted at a very different density, they were planted in the right spacing and provided that we trellis them properly, which we then were able to do, we could increase from 120 cases a year or so in 2026 to two fifty cases in '27, which will be the first year that we harvest grapes from those vines. And then when it comes to full, fruition 600 cases, which is closer to $180,000 a year in product coming from that vineyard on an annual basis. None of this includes, of course, the tax dollars that are generated tourism dollars that are from people visiting the vineyard, which is in a really beautiful location, and then wine tastings, etc. All the other things that sort of sustain the business, but also encourage visits to Vermont and specifically to Jeffersonville, because we're very committed to our local community in Cambridge, Jeff, and we're like the smallest mountain town that isn't a mountain town. And I think there's a lot of potential in that area. So the biggest challenge and this is where we really leaned into Working Lands and where Working Lands made it made this all possible is that without it, we would have been basically trying to fix old trellising that was busted on our own, which would have been sort of cherry rigging the thing as it existed. Countless hours sort of on our hands and knees digging out vines and trying to get them either into bush vines, which are where you don't trellis them. I was exploring all of this because they do bush vines in Southern France. They're very successful. It's bone dry in Southern France. So like trying to bush find grapes is not ideal, but I figured we would try. And then there was always you know take out more loans, find families that was willing to participate and all of that. But all of that would have kind of at that point we had taken a big hit with the twenty three Frost and we were really looking at we had gotten our wine into multiple markets, we were getting good traction on the wine and all of this would have sort of crippled the business. And so Working Lands provided us the opportunity to keep forward momentum and really keep moving forward. And you asked about the harvest this year, which I hate to say this in front of other people in agriculture, but the drought is like the best thing that can happen to grapes in this climate. Like we everywhere else really struggled and people were asking like, how did the drought affect you? I'm like, are you kidding? Beautiful dry weather through all of harvest. Like this was the nicest, it was the easiest and most beautiful crop we have ever seen. Like we just picked grapes. Normally we're kind of going through you have to sort a little bit sort in the winery to make sure there isn't any rot or fungal growth or anything. It took us less time with less labor, and it was it was an unbelievable harvest for us last year. It was great. Today, the vineyard looks like this down below. It's hard to see the vines because this is like full growth with grass and everything else. But you can see and we were in there trellising, which made it difficult to get

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: it and

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: mow. But you can see the end posts throughout the entire vineyard. The wires are run throughout the entire vineyard. Have we were able to divert funds, which we were planning on using for getting this vineyard into a better place to keeping part time employees. And actually, we work a lot with West Farm, we were talking about West Farm, who has a full time staff there. And Angus was like, hey, like April is a tough time for them, because it was so wet this year. So we would we were able to sort of borrow some of their team to help with our projects. The two acres that were in terrible shape with a bunch of wooden posts that were falling down have been re established, re trellised and established. The three acres in the middle that were feral and tied to bamboo but no infrastructure now have trellising all throughout there. And then the three and a half acres down at the bottom are all trellised. And this year, we will go through add pencil rod, which gives it even more stability and tie all of the little baby vines up. And if all goes well, we take good care of them, those will be on the wire by the end of this year, meaning that they'll be producing fruit for next year. Another huge aspect of this just like a lifestyle and surviving the workflow during the year perspective is that all of the work, had we not trellised this year or been able to fix the trellises, would have been basically on hands and knees excavating all this stuff and digging around. And we're actually able to we're moving now to mostly standing up. And a lot of that work happens from now until April, May. So pretty gnarly times to be digging around in the mud. So kind of from a family and work life balance perspective that changed things a lot for us. So we just got our sign to go in the vineyard. And there's the vineyard actually on Lauren and I got married right after we planted these vines. Word to the wise don't plant 3,500 vines just before you get married. But we do a whole lot of work in the vineyard. Or on the farm with tourism, we have a lot of people coming to do the golden dog experience, but then also farm tours. And I do wine tastings where we talk about cold climate viticulture and the future of that and do vineyard tours. And now we're able to park them where this picture is taken actually and walk them up through the vineyard and where before that was walking through a field and through feral vines. Now we can actually take them through a vineyard that looks like a vineyard. We really mean, the main thing is that we would not have been able to do any of this without working land. Last year would have been a really tough year. And we weren't entirely sure how we were going get there. We would because you make it happen. So I think you'd said we were gonna save questions till the end.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Say that, yes. So I'm sure we've got lots of questions now. Thank you. Of course. No, my pleasure. Thank Very, very interesting. Representative Nelson?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Is it proper to ask how much the grant they received or not? Yeah, we

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: received $50,000 which almost covered LaLonde. I mean, we ended up going above that with respect to just wanting to, do again, working with Angus's team to get in and really have the vineyard in the best possible shape when they came into trellis it. So we ended up putting some money into the labor. But the grant covered the quote for materials and labor to install.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And so that and that did five and a half acres?

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: That did. Yeah, so I mean, it's kind of three and a half acres of no, I guess it's five and a half acres of full on trellising and then two acres of repair and re trellising work.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: No, hey, work life balance is important. And these efficiencies are very important in every endeavor we do in agriculture. You had a boom year last year. Yep. We don't know what's coming ahead. Again, congratulations to you for being able to make wine during that drought. I was really nervous for y'all.

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: Oh, I appreciate it. It was yeah. We're really happy with how the wines came out last year.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Don't get up don't get up yet. I think we're

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: Loving myself. Okay. Yeah.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: This is not specific to Grant, but I was just wondering about the conversion from organic that you talked about in one of the vineyards. So did you have to pull out the vines, or can vines that were not organic when you bought them still produce organic grapes?

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: So we don't we're not certified organic at Boynton, we just farm them organically. It was a tough transition the first year that after we went from spraying conventionally to organic sprays. They struggled a bit, I think it took a couple years to kind of get used to. I mean, when you're spraying four times a year with synthetic fungicides, and I'm not pedantic about this either. Think there's a time and a place for everything. But we moving from four sprays of summer of fungicides to spraying every week with less effective organic fungicides. It was definitely a transition period. I don't know that we'd ever be able to certify the vineyards at Boydton simply because of their proximity to their other crops that Mark Boynton farms.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Are you able to use that as your selling point? The fact that you're raising the grapes organically, it isn't certified? For sure. Yeah, absolutely.

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: And we are certified at Golden Dog. The entire farm is certified up there.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Can you just tell, just as far as the grant program goes, what you've had to do? You submitted an application, you went through a rigorous review process that not everyone survived or not even received something for it yet. What's happened since then?

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: With respect to the conversation with working lands?

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah, and have you gotten the funding or does the funding come from No, your

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: it did. And they were fantastic about that. And it moved in phases. And they were super flexible as far as the conversation about when we needed the funding because the grant can and I correct me if I'm wrong, think it can be stretched over two years as far or?

[Sippel (Program Manager, Working Lands Enterprise Initiative)]: Fifteen months. I mean, yes, we Extensions are requested and we most can comfortably do adapt to whatever business is leaving.

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: But for us, we knew that we were going to need to order materials and get all that sort of on the front side. And I didn't want Steven with his company to be sitting on that bill, which is about $35,000 worth of posts and wire and everything else. So we've moved in phases and we did status reports with them, pictures to sort of show where we were, discuss what we've done, receipts, all of that.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Great. Well, thank you very much. Congratulations.

[Sippel (Program Manager, Working Lands Enterprise Initiative)]: So just one that I'm not sure, just to clarify also, I think it's an important flexibility. We talk a lot about the flexibility of the Business Enhancement Grant, but the typical payment plan for the Business Enhancement Grant is fortyfortytwenty. 40% upon signing the grant agreement, which is unique, and it allows businesses to not have to take out loans to finance the grant projects, which we think is a very kind thing to do to very busy businesses. And then the second 40 is based on a status report. And then the final payment is based on completion of the work and the final report being received. But the program does have additional flexibility to sometimes increase the 40%. I'm wondering

[David Keck (Owner, Keck Wine Enterprises / Stella 14 Wines)]: We did 45, 45, 10.

[Sippel (Program Manager, Working Lands Enterprise Initiative)]: Yeah. So, on if it's a very heavy infrastructure related project where people are needing to buy a piece of machinery or a lot of materials all at once, we work with the business to make it work for them.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you very much.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I still want to go up and spend a day mucking around and getting your address. Anytime.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay, so Claire, are you next then? So

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: this is just a poster that we use at events that shows the farms that we work with. So, I'm going be sitting and blocking all of it. But yeah, so this is just a map of all the farms that we work with at Starflite Acre and Fat Toad Farm. So I am going to be very dependent on my notes.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Fine. When you're done, send us those notes if you could, and we'll post them so that people can if you've got something written out.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yeah, I've got basically a script, is what I wrote, because that makes it easier for me to say all the things I wanna say. Hello, I'm Claire George, I own Butterfly Bakery of Vermont. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to speak, the grantees to speak. I'm grateful for the chance to share not only my own experience, but to help illustrate the multiplier effect that the working lands program has across farms, jobs, and the broader Vermont economy. I started Butterfly Bakery Vermont as a small one person, middle of the night maple syrup sweetened wholesale bakery in 2003. I was baking alone, delivering my own products and doing everything by hand. Twenty two years later, I have 15 employees and our products are sold in every state and in seven countries. Our hot sauces have been featured on the hit YouTube show Hot Ones four times, and we have been recognized in Food and Wine magazine for having the best hot sauces in the country. That kind of growth and evolution does not happen in a vacuum. I was able to go from a small bakery to an internationally recognized hot sauce manufacturer because of the long term patient investment that the state of Vermont makes in agriculture and in the businesses that depend on it. Butterfly Bakery Vermont has received two working lands grants last year, a $45,000 business enhancement grant that we focused on marketing, and a $5,000 trade show grant to attend the New York NOW trade show. We've also received technical assistance and support from the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, an organization that plays a critical role in delivering working lands, funding, and expertise to businesses like mine. That guidance, strategic support and long term perspective has helped us turn grant funding into lasting operational change and not just short term spending. But just as importantly, we have benefited for most of our existence from years of working lands grants received by the farms and agricultural businesses that we rely on every single day. Butterfly Bakery of Vermont is a farm to fork food manufacturer. That means that 100% of our milk, produce and maple are sourced directly from small farms within 200 miles of our Berry Vermont kitchen, and that is almost entirely from within Vermont. That sourcing is not accidental. It's possible because Vermont farms are supported, stabilized, and strengthened by consistent public investment. In 2003, I did not set out to become a farm to fork food manufacturer. What I set out to do is to make the best food with the best flavor. And again and again, I found that the ingredients with the best flavor came from Vermont soil. Historically, farm to fork food has been the domain of high end restaurants, with price points reserved for special occasions alone. Because one of my superpowers happens to be logistics, I've been able to take that rarefied occasional world of farm to fork and turn it into something repeatable, distributable and every day. When small farms grow primarily for restaurants, they're limited by very real constraints. They're limited by the number of table turns on a Saturday night, by how many leafy greens can be harvested and sold before they wilt, and by how long squash can sit in storage before its quality declines. That model is valuable and important, but is inherently capped by time, seasonality, and perishability. When farms grow for manufacture When farms grow for food manufacturers, those same crops can be transformed into shelf stable products that last years and can be sold not just across the state, but around the world. Manufacturing removes the ceiling that perishability places on farm income, and replaces it with predictability, scale, and long term demand. Farm to fork restaurants play a critical role in discovery, experimentation, delight. They introduce new flavors and celebrate seasonality. Farm to fork food manufacturers, on the other hand, are designed to create repeatable, dependable staples. They take Vermont grown ingredients and turn them into products that can show up in a home kitchen on a Tuesday night at any price point all year long. Together, these models don't compete with each other, they complete the system. But building and maintaining that kind of system requires more than good intentions or good ingredients. It requires investment, expertise and support in areas that even strong successful businesses don't always have internally. Every business owner has something that they're not good at, and that's where you come in. For nearly twenty years, I grew Butterfly Bakery Vermont entirely through word-of-mouth. When you start with extraordinary ingredients, people talk. Through that organic growth, I was able to cross that million dollar gross sales threshold, which is something that only two percent of women business owners ever achieve. What that growth masked, however, was a real vulnerability. While I can make logistics and manufacturing sing and dance to my whim, sales and marketing are far outside my wheelhouse. When the world changed, as it has repeatedly done over the last twenty two years, I didn't know how to intentionally guide how my business changed with it. I recognized that I needed to control our narrative, but I didn't yet have the tools to do that in a changing marketplace. So in 2025, I applied for a working lands business enhancement grant to invest in improving our marketing efforts. That impact has been transformative, not just because of how the funds were spent, but because the foundation the grant gave us to build upon. In that same year, we were able to secure outside investment for the first time, a key reason investors were willing to take that leap with us with our participation in the Working Lands program. We could point directly to the trust the state of Vermont had placed in us and our plans. The message was simple and powerful. If the state of Vermont believes we can make these plans a reality, then others do too. Our working lands grants are part of a larger plan to double our branded sales over the next four years, with roughly 20% growth per year. We are already seeing these changes take effect. In the 2025, our branded sales grew 27% compared to the same period of 'twenty four. Looking at only November and December, that growth was nearly 50%. About two thirds of our sales come from customers and businesses outside of Vermont. If we double our branded sales over the next four years, as we are on track to do, we will bring in more than 5,000,000 additional dollars into Vermont from out of state customers alone, compared to remaining flat. That is not a bad return on the Excuse me, compared to remaining flat. That's not a bad return on a $50,000 investment from the state of Vermont. These dollars don't stay on a spreadsheet, they circulate. With revenue brought in from outside the state, we're able to turn around and purchase tens of thousands of pounds of ingredients from farms like Honeyfield Farm in Norwich, True Love Farm in Shaftsbury, Jonesland Farm in Hyde Park, and West Farm in Jeffersonville. We would be able to grow our staff by 25% from 15 to 20 full time year round employees across our kitchen, shipping and sales departments. The working lands model works because it funds the entire ecosystem, not just one link in the chain. Farmers and manufacturers rise together. Without manufacturers, farms hit a ceiling. Without farms, manufacturers have nothing to build on. Working lands is the connective tissue that allows both to thrive. Because we purchase more Vermont grown chili peppers than anyone else in the country, even more than Whole Foods, we have to commit to our crop purchases in the depths of winter, while farms are still planting their fields right now. We spread spread these purchases across our network of small farms, so that the successes or failure of any single farm does not jeopardize our ability to consistently produce the products our customers expect. That strategy protects our businesses, but more importantly, it protects our farms. If one farm has an off year, we are still there to purchase again. The next year, they are ready to grow, and that consistency matters. When we commit to large crop purchases, farms can breathe a little easier. Jeff Kleiss, a Familia farm in West Pollet, put it best when he said, Butterfly Bakery is it gives us a market that we don't have to invent or manage every single day. If I get a flat tire, I'm not missing my one chance to sell that week. Our days are more predictable and our mission is clear. We can focus on growing 15 crops really well instead of juggling 30 just to stay competitive at the farmer's market. I can focus on farming instead of marketing. Our Working Lands grant did exactly what it was designed to do. We updated our photography, we tried paid advertising for the first time, we attended trade shows, we learned about earned media and how to tell and sell our story. Some of these efforts worked incredibly well. Some did not work at all, or not the way that we expected. But the grant allowed us to take informed risks. If something didn't pay off, it didn't threaten the survival of the company. That freedom to experiment allowed us to identify where to invest our own dollars with confidence and has directly contributed to the growth trajectory that we are now on. Without working land support, we would have been limited to making only sure thing bets. But when your expertise isn't sales and marketing, it's hard to know what a sure thing even looks like. For many food businesses, that path leads to competing on price alone and slowly abandoning local sourcing. Instead, we learned how to tell our story. We learned how to help customers understand why the farm that grows the chili peppers in their hot sauce matters to them, even if that farm is hundreds or thousands of miles away. Marketing when done well isn't about discounts or hollow storytelling. It's not about racing to the bottom on price or chasing short term attention. At its core, good marketing is about translation. It's about helping customers understand what makes a product different, why the way it's made matters, and how their everyday purchasing decisions connect back to real places and real people. For Vermont grown products, marketing is the bridge that allows a small farm in a rural town to reach a customer they will never meet in person. It gives Vermont farms and food manufacturers a platform to compete nationally, not by pretending to be bigger or cheaper than everyone else, but by clearly communicating value, integrity, and quality. When marketing is done thoughtfully, it ensures that Vermont grown ingredients are treated not as commodities, but as something worth seeking out, paying for and sustaining over the long term. The Working Lands program allows businesses like mine to plan five or even ten years ahead, instead of operating in a constant crisis mode and scrambling for cash every quarter. That long term perspective changes how we make our decisions. It allows us to invest in people, infrastructure and relationships, rather than chasing short term fixes or delaying unnecessary improvements. And that stability ripples outwards. It helps keep Vermont lands working by giving farmers the confidence to invest in their fields, their equipments, their people and their soil. When farms have predictable markets, they can focus on building healthy, resilient soil and communities instead of simply surviving to the next season. In turn, business like mine are able to grow in a way that is durable, align, and capable of weathering economic shifts, climate challenges, and market disruptions, rather than being undone by them. Vermont has an opportunity to continue leading the nation in how it supports working lands, not as a nostalgic ideal, but as a modern, resilient economic strategy. Programs like working lands prove that relatively small, targeted investments can generate outsized returns on jobs, tax revenue, and rural vitality. Thank you for continuing to fund this program. Thank you for putting Vermont in a position to lead the way in producing the best food in the country. And thank you for having the foresight to understand that when you invest in farms and the businesses that support them today, you are bringing millions of dollars back into the state tomorrow and ensuring that Vermont's working lands remain truly working for generations to come. Thank you.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: If you want to slide your chair over, you can leave that right there. Just if you want to just tell us what the farms are and what products Absolutely. You get from

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: So while in this talk, I primarily focused on Butterfly Bakery and our hot sauces, we do also own Fat Toad Farm and we bought them in 2022. So most of these farms are produce farms, but for dairy, we also purchase from Jonesland Farm in Hyde Park and Ayersbrook Dairy in Randolph. From our peppers, we buy from Honeyfield Farm in Norwich, which is one of our largest farms. Full Moon Farm, we get our onions from. We've got champagne orchards that we get great apple cider from that we use in our hard cider smoked onion mustard, which also has Eden hard cider in it, which is also Vermont grown apples in there. They're not even mentioned in But yeah, we've got Pete's Greens and Dog River and LePage and Paquette. Interestingly, Paquette Farm, I didn't know this until after the paperwork was signed, but one of my bank lenders is one of the owners of Paquette Farm. Duchess Farm, Quill Hill, a really great pepper growers of ours, Emilie Farm, that was the one that I quoted in the story there, True Love's Farm down in Shaftsbury. We are really committed to We kind of got into Farm to Fork by accident. Our baked goods are entirely maple sweetened. And when I was experimenting at the farmer's market, I would experiment with baked goods and I would trade them. If they didn't sell, I would trade them with the farmers, and they often had chili peppers left over. Because chili peppers actually grow really well in Vermont, but there wasn't a huge market for them back in 2011. What do you do with a whole bunch of chili peppers except make hot sauce? So I made hot sauce, and it turned out people really liked it.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Yeah. O'Brien? Claire, just looking

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: at your website, you have a piece on your generosity mission. Yes. Is that long Have you been doing that a long time? Yes. Just with your

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yes, no, generosity is something that we've been doing since before we had that ever name for it. So the generosity program works differently for different sauces, but generally, we make a sauce with the sole purpose of donating a portion of the proceeds to a chosen charity. So our biggest one is, it's actually our only non Vermont charity, but food is obviously close to our heart, and so we have our ghost verde pickle sauce, we donate 5% of the proceeds to World Central Kitchen. And obviously we know that they came and fed us during our floods here too, so very important organization. We also have a Sparkle Sriracha, where we add edible glitter to our Vermont Sriracha, and we donate the proceeds of that to the Pride Center of Vermont. Might have to figure out something different to do this year. Then we've done other programs, like we did a sauce called Not for Babies that had honey in it. If you have a parent, you're not supposed to feed your babies honey. Not the only reason that hot sauce is not for babies, And we've donated that to Good Beginnings of Central Vermont. We did a program, the Josh Pilotta Fund, which donated we did that together with fourteen Star Brewery, is a veteran owned brewery, and the Josh Fund helps veterans with re acclimation when they come back from areas Josh Palatta unfortunately committed suicide, and so his family started a fund. So we do a lot of that, giving back, I believe so strongly that as a business, we have a platform that we don't have as individuals, it's at the core of what we do to the point where our bank has said, Do you really need to? And we said, Yes, and they said, Okay.

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: You referenced the food bank too.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yes, oh, right. I forgot that one too. That actually is the biggest one. We donate a portion, a percentage of our proceeds of every website sales directly to the Vermont Food Bank, and that ranges between 35% of our website sales directly to the Food Bank every month. And that's something, the core of the generosity program is that everybody has a right to feel at home in their own skin, has a right to have food, shelter. If you're at the site, you could probably see the exact words, there's core sense of being that's a really important part of our time.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Representative Nelson. Yeah. And you you said you've received two grants over time?

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yeah. So this in this past year, in 2025, we received two grants. So we got $45,000 business enhancement grant, and we used that towards marketing, it was photography, earned media, digital SEO, digital media. And then we also received a $5,000 trade show grant that we used to attend the New York NOW trade show. And it was part of a broader program, we did also receive two other grants last year, another trade show grant, because we are a dairy operation, we were able to do a dairy trade show grant, and then the USDA RFSI program to get us new equipment. So it's part of this bigger plan to grow our business and grow what we can do for farms.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And you have 15 employees now? Yes. And a big kitchen area by the side.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yeah, so our building, I bought the building back in 2020. It's a 16,000 square foot building and our kitchen itself is about 3,000 square feet.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Burtt? Yeah, you said it shows that you're a logistics person. I'm just curious. If you don't mind sharing, do you work with one main distributor since you're working internationally and all over The US, or have you worked with several?

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: I'd love that you asked this question. We have worked out how to buy small on one side, and we've worked out how to sell small on the other side. We do have a few small distributors like Wilcox Ice Cream does some distribution for us in the state, Rainforest is our largest distributor, they recently bought Associated Buyers, but they're a very small percentage of what we do. Working directly with the stores that we sell to is a really important part of our mission, And so we were able to utilize platforms like FARE, which is a wholesale platform to connect to small accounts around the world. So I was just emailing with somebody in Switzerland who carries our hot sauces on his website. And I think when I said seven countries, I don't think I was actually counting Switzerland because I was under one. But we actually have two accounts in Switzerland, three in England, two in France, one or two in Germany, and a couple in Canada, of course. Logistics are our jam. We ship from our own facility, we don't work with a fulfillment center. This is a topic for an entirely different discussion, but the entire grocery system is broken and not designed for companies like ours. And so we really value our relationship with independent retailers, and we make a point, we're learning how to make a point to tell them that we find that they are really excited to hear that our priority is them and not the race to the bottom dollars with big grocery stores.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: We've heard that these are competitive, the working lands branch are pretty competitive, and that oftentimes applicants have to apply more than once before they're successful. Had you applied previously for this grant?

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: I think so. I applied to a grant that I got turned down for, and I think, yes, actually, yes, it was definitely the working lands grant, because I think it was the same year that Honeyfield Farm got a working lands grant, and I remember hearing that they got it. I'm glad that they got it, but we didn't. Yeah, I'd applied to a few different grants prior to this past year of applying to grants, and I didn't quite know how to do it, I didn't quite know how to tell the story, do the narrative, all of that. Fortunately, one of our sales guys actually has a background in grant reading, and so he does our events and direct to consumer sales, and he was like, Hey, I could help with grants too. And I was like, Okay, sure, let's give this a try. And we applied to a lot of grants in the last year, we were only successful with the ones here in Vermont. We weren't successful with There were the Amber Grant and the Brooklyn Brewery, and I don't know, there's a bunch of random grants out there. Didn't hit the nerve with that narrative there, but we did figure out kind of how to hone in on bringing this all together. And we got investment last year as well, which is really exciting in the transformation that we've seen.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I really love Nelson.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, thank you. Claire, where can I I'm from Derby, where can I find your sauces? They sound like they're the spice of life.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: I am not good at knowing off the top of my head which stores exactly have them, my salespeople are better at that, but we do sell in most independent stores in Vermont. Here in town, we sell our entire big batch lineup at Hunger Mountain Co op, at City Market, Healthy Living, all sorts like that, Hanover and Lebanon Co op's on South. We also do a lot of microbatches, we do a lot of experimentation, that's very much at the core of what we do, and those are primarily, almost exclusively only available on our website.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: So if we work your website, does it show where you are as far as retail?

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: We're working on Unfortunately, QuickBooks is our main invoicing platform, makes it really, really hard to grab maps of customers and addresses at the same time. In fact, to get the quote, I knew that it was somewhere around twothree, but ahead of this, to make sure that I did in fact have that correct, I fed two different spreadsheets into JATGPT and spent a couple hours trying to get it to match the two spreadsheets to give me the information I was looking for.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: What was the two thirds number again?

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Two thirds of our sales come from out of state. Two thirds of our dollars come from out of state.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Wow, okay. That's that's great. This is important revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm 15 employees and your property taxes, and someday someday, you'll strive to have a profit in your business that pays tax.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Working on that. I think that one of the wonderful things about the size of Vermont is that inherently if a business grows to a certain size, they're importing dollars from outside. And so by continuing to fund programs like this that prioritize internal in state sourcing, that help the companies grow, they're by design going to be taking dollars from outside of state, and bringing it back into the state, and investing it back into the state.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Absolutely. Is there a co op in Newport? There is, this is a surprise here that I don't frequent yet, but I have a little bit, but like Newport Village Market.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: I think we're in Newport Village Market. We're in some of the other stores in that group. And I think we're there. I think we're there.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Let's open it up. If

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: we're not, tell them that they should carry us.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I am not vouchful. So The associated buyers, they served independent. Yes. Hopefully, still do.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yeah, so Associated Buyers was a really fantastic distributor to work with. It was the one distributor that we actually found success with. And then they got bought by Rainforest. Rainforest is better than some distributors, not as good as AB was, but because we're grandfathered in, kind of get some special treatment as a result, but we bought several distributor relationships when we bought Fat Toad Farm, and we deliberately dropped. So, Keiki is one of the distributors that we deliberately dropped. Are predatory. They're they're predatory. They will beat you up and steal your money, leave you for dead, and tell you that they're doing it the whole way. I have

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: opinions. And how much milk do

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: you buy from Jonesland? They're fairly robust goat operation up there.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Yeah, so we primarily buy from Ayersbrook because they are closer to us, it's just easier, but every goat dairy in the state sells almost exclusively to Vermont Creamery, which the GM of Vermont Creamery is on my board, so good friends. But so when they're in their quota season, which I think they're dealing with right now, or that's about to end for Ayersburg, we buy from Jonesland and Ayersburg is trying to grow their herds, so it's really important that during their quota season, they're maximizing their milk production for Vermont Creamery. Jonesland on the other hand has a fixed herd size, so we pay more than Vermont Creamery does, they're happy to sell it to us whenever we wanna buy it.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And is that truck down to you through a standard?

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: We pick it up. Yeah, so we're a certified milk handler. I have so much knowledge of so many regulations. It's amazing. Acidified food is wild. Yeah, certified milk handlers, we go and pick it up ourselves. And we've got a big insulated tank that we put on a trailer and drive to the farm, pump it out ourselves, and bring it back.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. I think we've got time for one more question from anybody. Yeah.

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: Are there any foods, that could be grown in Vermont that aren't? Because you could influence that.

[Claire George (Owner, Butterfly Bakery of Vermont; owner of Fat Toad Farm)]: Gosh, honestly, I feel like it's a question for the farms. With climate change, it's interesting to see how what is grown here has changed over the last twenty years. So ginger is one of the most kind of captivating ones. We keep buying ginger every year, and I haven't figured out what to do with it yet. So our freezer's 2,000 square feet, it's bigger than my home. We've got probably close to 1,000 pounds of ginger in there right now. You say what? Chutney. Acidified food is a funny thing in the regulations. We really are only outfitted to do what's called hot fill hold, which is pourable things. So anything that's chunky or has bits in it doesn't work in our system. But we've done really fantastic ginger hot sauces, we just do them in our microbatches. We don't have enough reliable sourcing of them to do them in the big batches. One other thing that we do is for a lot of these farms, we make products for them. They send us their ingredients, and then we make products exclusively with their ingredients. So Fieldstone Farm, that's why ginger made me think of it. She grows a lot of ginger, and we made this beautiful maple ginger hot sauce with Fresnos, she's in there. It's so, so good. If you get to the Mollie S. Farmer's Market in the summer, she sells it there. But we do that for Honeyfield, Bear Roots, True Loud, Fieldstone, a lot of other farms. We don't charge as much when they're doing that because it's an art project, but we make money off of it and we learn, we experiment, and we learn every time. Our work with Bare Roots taught us how to make salsa.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you very much for giving us that wonderful information. Very helpful. We have two more presentations, but we're going to take a five minute pause. I'm not calling it a break because I wanna be sure that making the distinction of just five minutes, so we stay on schedule. But I wanna be sure that we're all paying close attention for the second half of presentations too. So we'll take five minutes.