Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: All right. Welcome back.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: My name is Miles Janes. I'm from Huntington, Vermont. I was born and raised there. I come from a long line of carpenters, And so I grew up around it. I grew up in my dad's shop and also in the woods, teach myself how to use Macs. And when I was pretty young, just early twenties, I started working for a local restoration timber branding company called Building Heritage with a friend and colleague of mine and Elliot Lothrop, who actually, that's one of the projects that I recently did with him. It's right here. That's one of my crew. So I did that for about seven years, teaching myself a lot, coming up through the ranks there. I'm quite self taught and also worked, done a fair amount of work with the Timber Framers Guild of America and T TRAG, the Traditional Timber Framers Research in the Missouri Guild, which is about traditional preservation craft around timber branding. And then about twelve years ago, I started my own shop, which is called Vermont Heavy Timber, based in Huntington, which is where our shop is. I employ six people right now. I started the business with a and a used tractor and a woodmeiser sawmill, about $5,000 grown it to where it is today. We've been growing pretty steadily over the last twelve years. Right now, we're about 1,300,000.0 in business last year. We should do a fair amount more than that this year. I guess I have six employees. Make between $25 and $45 an hour. And we are, as far as I know, one of the few, if not only companies in the state who works to there's a set of standards for preservation that's set forth by the office of the secretary of the interior. So there's standards for preservation, standards for preservation, which are two different things. And we're one of the few, if not the only companies that specializes in timber framing and works to those standards in Vermont that has it for. There's a couple of other companies that do that work, but they're one man shows. We often, like my colleague, Elliot, we've helped them out in the energy projects. These standards are important for a few reasons. They maintain our historic fabric, both here in Vermont and nationally. And as such, they are the standards that are mandated when projects are funded by grant funding, whether state or federal grant funds. So we do a lot of work for municipalities and some work for the state. And we do a lot of work in concert with NRCS and different other parts of the federal government, which give money, grant money to these projects. These days, we're focusing more and more on municipal projects specifically cover bridges. We very much love to do work on trusses, which are wooden assemblies that create large spans. So cover bridges are some of our favorite things to work on. And so probably the preeminent cover bridge restoration company the state. And also meeting houses right now, we're working a pretty large restoration project on the South Hero Old White Meeting House. We just finished one in Ferrisburg last year and also churches. And we do plenty of barns as well. We also jack and move buildings as kind of a sideline. We often have to do that work as part of our restoration work just to be able to get to the broken bits of the timber frames that we work on. And so we have the equipment, the knowledge and the insurance, which is very expensive. So we can make decent money moving other buildings around and jacking them up in response to flooding events. So we do that sort of fit those jobs in around the the larger focus of the business. We As I mentioned earlier, we have a sawmill. We are one of two sawmills in the state that can saw we can saw 53 feet long. There's one other sawmill that can saw fifty, sixty feet. So we sell specialty timbers to companies like ours, timber frame companies. We don't do a lot of selling boards and whatnot. It is something that I think I'd like to get into a little bit. But generally, we are focusing on fairly niche projects. Our business has pretty high barrier to entry. And I've been lucky enough not to have to compete in a marketplace against large businesses. We're doing free specialty work. So we saw almost all of our own timbers, about 90 to 95% of our timbers. We saw we do buy some timbers occasionally from LSF Forest Products up in Jeffersonville, and they also will do custom planning for us. So we'll saw all of our timbers, bring them up there, they'll plane them for us. That's when we're doing some new frames, which we do a couple of new frames a year generally in the winter. Every spring, I'm immediately thinking, what are we going to do next winter? How am I going to keep the crew warm and happy? So we do some work outside, but I'm always trying to keep everybody inside and winter, especially when it's five degrees outside. And they certainly appreciate it. I've been very lucky. Just a side about myself. I am very focused on traditional handwork and was lucky enough to Well, I've been lucky enough to work all over the world and worked three years ago for almost a year. Was living in France working on the restoration of Neuchamp Cathedral, and I've also worked in Estonia and Italy, councils and windmills and other projects like that, teaching and working. No Trauma is a really interesting project for me. I mean, that's obviously a really cool building, but for me, it was the thing that I'm proudest about that is it felt like a bit of a coup for handwork to be able to show people here to say, we can do this by hand. Because there is a barren amount of work that we do by hand. According to those structures that we work by the restoration and preservation, we're replacing in kind. So when there's a spruce, a hewn spruce timber in a cover bridge or a church that's rotten, we're replacing it with a hewn spruce timber. And a lot of people say, no. This just isn't feasible. It's not efficient. And I can say, well, if they did it here, on this one, a project of this scale, we can do it anywhere. It really is efficient. We are fast and can do a good job. I'm not saying we're faster than softball, But John Henry has always been

[Unidentified Committee Member]: a leading light of mine.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: So we were given We started out We got a grant, we were given two years of technical assistance through the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, which has been really helpful. And we were partnered with two people from the UBN Forestry Extension and put together a business plan, have been working just on growth. We've never grown really for growth sake. The employees are just the cornerstone of what we do. It's a really technical trade. We don't really hire people who are just there to bang a hammer. The folks who work for me are really focused on being reservation term framers. And so we grow when we have the people and the work. Although I would say we've been very lucky to have steady work almost all the way through. I never had to lay it anyway. So we started with that technical assistance grant. And through that, we applied for and received the grant, the working lands grant. We were given $50,000 to build a drying shed. So this is building a three phase building that is a little over a 100 feet long and 25 feet deep with two fifty foot bays because, obviously, we use some pretty long 10% artwork. So we need to be able to store them. One of the big bottlenecks, we do so much work in the winter, prepping for both new frames and for restoration projects that we have in summer. So we'll go to a project, we'll do all our measuring, we'll draw up our drawings in CAD, make all of our shop drawings and I'll cut them in the winter. So when we go to use our summertime, we can be as efficient as possible. But we end up at the end of the winter, we have a massive amount of timbers and barely anywhere to put them. So that's been a big bottleneck for us. And so is Esme being able to build this building, it's been really helpful for us to grow. We because we have so much work, you know, unfortunately, it's a funny place to be there. You know, I would generally say most companies, construction companies, maybe any companies would say, I don't want competition. Well, for us, there's such a dearth of people in the trade. I would actually welcome competition. It's really that's a shame because there's a lot of historic projects that just can't find people who can do the work, who can do it well or even can do it up to the standard. And there are people who use So there's, as you might know, there's a grant program that the brown the state of Vermont puts out called Vermont Farm Grant program that gives I think it's up to $50,000 matching funds. And there are projects that lose their funding because they can't find a qualified contractor, and we have to turn down projects pretty often. And it's a shame to throw up to that. So I invite people to We don't look at the people in our field as competition. We look at them as colleagues and people who always interested in helping them. I'm very open with what I see as my colleagues about just about anything, business. I share my numbers. I share how I do things. I love to see our trade grow as a whole as opposed to just my business. I think we can all do well together. So because we're so busy, are growing, there's project managers. It'll be 10 to 11 employees, hopefully, by end the year. And I would say this grant has really helped us. Would we have done this project anyways? Yes. But over time, we want to done it right away. I'm not afraid of taking on some debt. We've we've recently bought a couple pieces of equipment that we've taken on a little bit of debt on. But generally, we've actually been really lucky. And for the last five or six years, we've had no debt at all. There's a huge amount of money that passes through the company and there's also a fair amount that I put right back in the company as long as I can eat and have over my head, pretty happy. So this grant has been really helpful for us. I appreciate the state of Milwaukee has been giving back to a little bit easier to pay my tax bill. That puts a smile on my face. Probably more I could say, but

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I'm just wondering, how does so if you have three or four positions that you'd like to try and fill, what qualifications or experience somebody need to actually get right in and contribute for you?

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: Yeah, so teaching is a really big thing just because there's such a dearth of people who do this work. And even with talented carpenters, even if we find a stick framer who's been doing it for ten years or fifteen or more, there's still a lot. The rigging and the jacking, the preservation work, it's just very specialized. And so no one comes to us knowing everything that they need to know. So we it depends right now. Or in general, there's a certain amount of people who are fairly green that we can take on. And the more experienced people, the more green folks we can take on and teach. So right now, we're looking for a couple folks who are not super experienced and then maybe three folks who got quite a bit of experience project leads lead carpenters, but they can be more just stick framers and we'll teach them the rest of it. Yeah, thank you. Do you do a

[Unidentified Committee Member]: lot of mortars and tenon or you play? No, no, all mortise and tenon all by hand.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: Yeah. Well, I mean, we have chain mortisers and stuff like that. But we can do it all by hand.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. You need to tap into the Amish.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: You know, they have such a good reputation and but I've also seen work that they do that's not that great. So it's hard to say. Yeah. If they're willing to ride their car to my shop, I will have

[Unidentified Committee Member]: to change it up for now. We have a And We have an homeless community really robust and and they can walk on a really pitched roof I think in the snow just like a mountain though. They're they're they're pretty amazing. Yeah. And, you know, and that the barn ravens, of course, they build everything on eights or twelves, you know, they said, why cut out timber if you don't need to? Yeah. But, No, that's a wonderful trade that you're into. It's a nice work. Very lucky. Isn't it great?

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: What particular did you work on at the Nootra Valley?

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: So we're working on the section of the roof called or in the section of the cathedral called the nave. So that's the section in between steeple and the belting hours, which is about 130 feet long. And there's the trusses are about a meter apart. They're very tight. Yeah, they're quite steep. It was like a 16 pitch or something. It's about 43 feet wide. Yeah, massive amount of dry air. Yeah. Handgun? Yep. Every single piece was handgun. If you go up there today, it's pretty hard to get

[Unidentified Committee Member]: up into the attic. If you go up

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: there today, besides the timbers looking new, you cannot tell the difference. Queued just our part. I think we used 1,100 logs, French French white oak logs. I think

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: saw that they saw it down close and then you.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: For that, some of the work we did, we hewed from around and some was processed processed like all mixed, which is where you saw just two faces, slightly oversized, and then you hew those two faces and then hue the two round faces. But as long as the trusses you know, you think of looking at the truss this way, the members have to be straight in this direction, all the members have to be coplanar. But in this direction, they they can bend quite a bit. So that's why we we were just sawing in two planes so that, you know, the tie beams and whatnot can describe our sensor. Were actually hewing along with the which keeps the structure in the timber.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you. Really impressive presentation. Following up on represent Burtt's question, I'm a lot

[Unidentified Committee Member]: of I'm do a lot

[Unidentified Committee Member]: with LST supplier. Yeah. But as you pointed out, you know, old growth red spruce aka Adirondack spruce has a different you know, the rings are like the dollar bill now. They're Yes, sir. So and I'm I worked in in Notre Dame long before it burned and when it was all after it burned, but it was all sealed off. But and I've been in the, like, the foray to Suave near water where Maria Theresa planted white oak four hundred and fifty years ago and a ferocious European white oak. Yes. It's not comparable to Hudson River Valley White or any of the North American white oak. I have a dream because How did you when you sourced that white oak to replicate any sort of remnant of grain pattern or or growth grain pattern. Was that a big challenge for sourcing that?

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: It was a pretty big challenge. I mean, the carpenters went out into the woods and selected single trees, you know, and so these are the ones we want. That was pretty amazing, both the investments that the National Forest Program made and also private landowners just for the honor of

[Unidentified Committee Member]: being These able to trees I could turn five trees to three on trees. Really cool.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: Yeah, so the carpenters actually went out and they were looking not just for the strength spec but also specific curvatures to match what was there. And you remind me, sorry, I did miss this. It must be very kind of sort of said, you know, you can talk about the log or something. So I did want to just say, depending on the year, five to 100% of what we use comes from Vermont. Almost all of our wood comes from Vermont and the rare occasion that it doesn't is white oak because it's pretty hard to find here. It's not very common. There are some patches but sometimes whether it's white oak or a different species because we're often looking for really special trees, really big perfect trees. I will get on the phone. I'll call every county forester in the state and every private forester I know. I've just got a list of foresters and all the analogs, you know, and I just what

[Unidentified Committee Member]: each CPU can use

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: spruce locker spruce is the most typical is what most buildings, traditional buildings are made out here. Yes, Yes. Sometimes we see it. It's not very common parts of we have seen some chestnut. That's kind of hard to find. Not the size that we need.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's be clean.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: Yeah. But actually, last project I did overseas, I was working up in Northeastern Italy and that was we were working with chestnut. That's beautiful. It's so cool. Really exciting. Huge Chestnut. Congratulations. Doctor. Brian? That was sort

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: of my question. Just how do you source things? Like if you find a Chestnut needs to be replaced here, you have a conversation about what's

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: going to replace that or Generally, we're replacing a hardwood like that. Or hardwood. Nice. I've got my eyes. Yeah, I mean, drive around and you know, I don't text while I drive, but I do, sir. Look at sagging rooflines and steeples that are only gonna back in big trees.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's unusual too to. I mean instead of a whole log load of something right here. If you

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: just find one or two

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: sometimes that's exactly what we're doing and and logging. I mean I do love working in the woods and my foreman I actually bought a skidder last year just because we love working in the woods, but I can't say it's the most profitable part of our business and. But it's hurdle, It's something we love to do, and and it's also something something that we have to do at times because sometimes we're just looking for very specific things. So we we don't we can't find a logger who's cutting that or forester who's had that job done. And we might just find a landowner who has it. And the other thing is with the dearth of loggers and also the dearth of sawmills, loggers and sawmills really have to rely on each other. And so we pay more. We'll pay 10% more, sometimes even more. Even necessarily for the really perfect stuff. Sometimes we're just saying, okay, we need a whole bunch of pine in these links. And even though we're paying extra, the loggers, the sawmills are so that relationship to them is so important because we just can't do the volume. We are a specialty. We buy a fair amount of wood, but we're not LSF or in any other big sawmill. And so they will sometimes turn us down even though they'd be making a fair amount more for the wood, for a couple of truckloads of wood. It's just not worth it to them because they have to maintain that relationship with the sawmill and vice versa.

[Unidentified Participant]: All times.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: Mean, they're great. Tucker's love. I love them. I we've over time, you know, it used to be that we would have bought more from Tucker just because I mean, love the variety of what we do. And I also I have a thing about if I can keep, if I can pay one of my crew to do instead of paying another company, well, great. I loved it. But also being that diversified has its own downsides in terms of making money. So there are certain times when we would have bought a lot more from Tucker and he's just been so far booked out. Although now that they were just they're closing, I think they're finished with their expansion, which they got quite a grant from the working landscape. So they might not have that four or five months waiting list that they have.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Perfect. We need to transition to our last presentation, but are there any last quick questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, so you said you do use white pine. Yes, sir. And do you ever dismantle old structures for the tempers to catalog them?

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: No, it's very rare. I mean, I took down a barn South Hero because it was cheap and I probably put it up for myself or something like that, but that's not. There's a couple of reasons why not, you know, The with that replacing in kind or the structures set forth by the Secretary of Interior's office. One of those are readable repairs. And so we're never hiding. We're never taking old timber from somewhere else and putting it into an old barn because that sort of, you know, conflating two pieces of history and we'd be confusing historians in the future. So we're we're doing our best to hew our replacement timber in that same style and we might be such nerds that we might even look at the axe marks and say, we a whole wall full of axes. We're going to use that one because it matches. We can tell what kind of axe that back here was using. So no, we generally don't do that. There are some companies that take down barns and fix them up and turn them into great rooms for people. It's just not general. We're busy enough doing the other thing. Yes, What was on your website of some

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: of the European projects you've done?

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: There might be a couple. Don't honestly, you know, I'm because that's not necessarily the business. I try not to advertise too much about Just like I do as a I wanna see more pictures. Pictures. There is some we have an Instagram account. There is some on there. Instagram.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you. We need we need to Thank you for your time. I will say, thank thank you. Fascinating. All of these presentations. We're here to better understand the program, but it's a wonderful side benefit that we get to hear all the stories.

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: Same thing. That's pretty cool.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Let's have a we should come right up then.

[Unidentified Participant]: I can talk to the Europe. You should talk to the taro makers. Also, we're looking for a low pin. The trucks coming from Eastern Europe are plentiful for French oak

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: these days. This is the one thing that I feel like I'm being gentrified out of, know, that white oak's so expensive because the

[Unidentified Committee Member]: garlic barrel, green plasmatic. All right, let's give

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: our next witness the same amount of time that everyone else has had here.

[Unidentified Participant]: Folks, thank

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: you. Everybody, thank you for having me here today. It's a pleasure to talk a bit about our farm, Freeverse Farm. My name is Misha Johnson, and I run Freeverse Farm and Apothecary, and we also run Freeverse Farm Shop in Downtown Chelsea, and our farm is just a mile north of the village as well. We started our farm in 2012 in my hometown of Norwich, where we rented land for a couple of years before finding our own land in Chelsea. We grow about 100 different herbs primarily to try to make into spices, teas, tea blends, herbal remedies, herbal body care products. In addition to being a farmer, I myself am also a trained herbalist. And I also do the graphic design and photography for our business as well. So if you look on our Instagram or you look on our website, a lot of those things have been taken or designed by myself. We cultivate approximately two acres of herbs right now and are in the process of scaling up our business to more like three or four acres of cultivated herbs. But we also do a lot of wild crafting as well. So our land is about 38 acres, which is about half field, half forest. The open acreage, we also graze cattle in during the summer months working with another farm on the other side of Chelsea to do so. They are American milking devons, which is a heritage breed. They're a multi purpose breed, but they're raised for meat purposes. And the herd is an integral part of our wild harvesting as well. So we can harvest ahead of the herd before the herd is grazed through certain areas. So we'll harvest things like red clover, which we all love, it's from Montrose, of course, but it's also a wonderful medicinal herb. Then we also will harvest St. John's wort, yarrow, red raspberry leaf. And then there's plenty of trees and shrubs that we can harvest from as well. So things like linden or basswood, as well as elderberries. And I could keep going on about all the wonderful herbs that grow wild in Vermont. We will harvest everything from blossoms like the red clover I mentioned. We also harvest calendula, chamomile. We can harvest the aerial parts of the crop. So that's the aboveground part, leaves and flowers. So that might be spearmint or oregano or thyme, something like that. We can harvest the bark, things like cherry, and also the roots of things like burdock, dandelion, marshmallow, plenty of others. We got our grant from working lands for scaling up our aerial production of crops. As I mentioned, the oregano, spearmint, things like that, the list goes on with the number of herbs that we grow that we can use it for. And primarily we're looking to find ways to make our production more efficient. So for example, with a 100 foot bed of any given herb that we harvest the areas of like oregano as an example, it might take us about three or four man hours to harvest that by hand and bring it into our herb drying barn to dry. But with the harvester that we got, which is a Teratek, what's called baby leaf harvesters. Teratech is a French company. That machine allows us to harvest in ten or fifteen minutes, that same amount that would take, as I said, three or four hours. So the amount of efficiency that we can achieve with it is really dramatic. And it benefits not only efficiency of our farm, but also the backs of our employees, and allows us to spend time doing other things like just making sure that the herbs are clean, that they are high quality, so that we can continue to scale up while maintaining the quality of our herbs. The herbal marketplace, as you may know, has been globalized like so many other things, and herbs is sort of an unmet need, especially locally. We've found since we started our farm that there's just a dramatic increase in demand for local herbs that's unmet. And there are other farms popping up around the state that are also producing really high quality products. And we are pleased to be a part of that growing demand in the state. So we can provide bulk herbs, as well as the herbs for our own products that we make too. And we sell locally in our shop, River's Farm Shop. Through our website, we sell to people both locally and around the country. And then we also sell wholesale, direct wholesale. Claire mentioned FARE, which is a marketplace that we use as well as Mabel. It's another online wholesale marketplace. And we also work with Food Connects, the nonprofit food distributor, as well as the Acorn Food Hub to distribute our products. And then one of the things that's really beneficial about scaling up our production and having this efficient harvester is that we can meet the demands for larger buyers. So for example, this past year, we've been able to work with Vermont Bean Crafters to provide parsley for their bean products, like their bean burgers and things like that, that they produce. And they've been trying to find, like Claire, a lot of local sources for their ingredients. And we feel that we can meet that demand as we continue to scale up. To tell you a little bit more about the harvester, I wish I had brought some photos for you, but I neglected to do so. Apologize for that. But if you look up the Teratech website, you'll find some photos and videos. It's spelled T E R R A T E C K. And if you look at the baby leaf harvester, there's a couple YouTube videos and photos of the machine there. Unfortunately, we don't have any photos of it on our website.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: I think there is a photo of the inspector for it.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Okay. So

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: the machine is about as wide as this table here, and it's electrically powered. There's a cutter bar at the front end that cuts the crop. There's a reel that knocks the herb onto a conveyor belt that brings the herb up into a tote. Yeah, there you go. There's a photo of me doing that. So here's the bringing up the earth and there's blue toad you can just see the end of there. And so this is me actually doing our first harvest ever with this last late July, I think it was. And this is a skullcap medicinal herb that we love to grow. And what's great is that as you can see the wheelbase straddles the width of our beds and allows us to very quickly and efficiently just run down the length of the bed harvesting the crop. And probably at least maybe 50% of the crops that we grow can be used with this. We can't use it for, I mentioned the blossom crops, which all have to be done by hand. But it's one of the most important types of ingredients that we use for our spices and teas and bulk herbs that we offer.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: It's one of these things?

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: No. That's

[Unidentified Committee Member]: it. It's in the last page, you hear it. There

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: is a video on their other websites I mentioned. And it's self propelled as well. As I mentioned, it's electric, so it's pretty quiet, no fumes, anything like that. It's always been our goal to do as much by hand as possible, or just to have humans on the ground looking at the herbs. And that's how we feel we can maintain the quality of our products. And this machine allows us to do it. As you can see, I can walk behind and I can watch each stem come up into the toad. And we always go through and check the herb before we harvest. And then we bring the herbs into our drying barn, which we completed in 2022, which is a solar powered drying barn. We have these trays that are again about the width of this table, they're four feet by four feet, with basically window screen on them, and we spread the herbs out and we stir them once or twice a day. And usually the herb can dry in two to three days. So if we harvest say a 100 pounds of herb, oftentimes that'll dry down once it's fully processed, to about 10 pounds of herb if we're talking about a leaf crop. So we get about 10% from that large 100 pound volume. For some of the blossoms, because we're not processing away any of the stems or other parts of the plant, it's maybe more like we get 25% of that original harvest weight. Yeah, let me see if anything else to mention. Did you have a question?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Arterotech that would also have other application, would it like work for harvesting lettuce or spinach?

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Yeah, it would. And they actually have a so this is the two different models that they offer. One is more commonly used for things like spinach or lettuce mixes, you're talking about. This one has a stronger blade and a stronger motor so that it can cut through woodier stems, which we have with a lot of the herbs that we grow. So you may have seen smaller scale veggie growers that do use something like this, But this works really well for for our herbs, which as I said, have a woodier step and they're trickier to to cut.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Would you ever think of diversifying more, you know, I mean, the herbs wonderful, fantastic, there's a market for it. That's great. But would you ever consider if you wanted to put more land in going to like a leafy vegetable crop as well?

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Yeah, we've thought about it. I think the thing holding us back is just a total change in how we our workflow and how we operate. With drying herbs, we're just we're going out on a sunny day, harvesting her, bringing it in, there's no washing needed. It can go right in the dryer and get dried in a few days, and then it gets packed bagged up and it can go into storage. With the leafy crops, then we have to get it fresh to market or fresh to a store or something like that. So we'd be open to it, especially starting out with selling to our store in the village. But yeah, for now we're focusing on the herbs.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And do you do anything with ginseng?

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Yeah, so I mentioned our woodland, and so we have done some work with establishing some woodland medicinals like ginseng. Those take, as you probably know, like many years before they're ready to harvest. So we're not there yet for harvesting from those crops, but that is a dream of ours to do that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And you've never gone out mountain climbing looking for it? I've always wanted to go look for ginseng, I've

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: never had.

[Unidentified Participant]: Yeah,

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: I've looked around in various woods that I've enjoyed hiking through, but I haven't really come upon like a big patch of it. Although I have heard that Chelsea and Orange County has some of the best soils for growing those woodland medicinals like ginseng around because we have a great hardwood forest in our area. I know

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the market here in Vermont, every now and then, someone has some pretty good substantial ginseng. Yeah.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: A wild ginseng. They foraged. Yeah. Elizabeth?

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: Yeah. No. I just also wanted to call out that I think one of the important aspects of one of the things we wanted to feature was just the diversity of the Business Enhancement Grant. And I think it is important to name that this was like a $13,800.900 dollars grant. So one of our smaller grant awards from a dollar perspective, but that did end up having significant impact for the business. And I think what's important to say out loud is that the board is conscious of making investments that are impactful for the scale of the business, right? And that's how smaller farms and smaller operations end up being included in the grants. Think it's and that's part of what we're trying to capture here today. Think when we are talking about pure dollars and number of working lands businesses impacted, like the story of Butterfly Bakery is really compelling. But when we're talking about a $13,000 investment and the efficiency that it has added to this farm's production and worker well-being and ability to scale, it was still very meaningful and obviously compelling to the reviewers. So, I just wanted to spell that out. It might have been clear to everyone already, but don't know.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It's a great story. All the diversity of our agriculture in this state and the working lands, and it's all fabric of what we are, and I really appreciate what you do.

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

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And to hear you talk about it, and and I've heard about these things. I've never worked with them or tried them, but it's

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: When did you acquire? I think it

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: was late July of last year. So we haven't had a full season yet to use it. And our goal is to scale up. We've roughly been producing around 800 pounds of dried herbs a year, and our goal is to scale up to close to 2,000 pounds in the next, say, five years or so.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I think to Elizabeth's point that committee is interested in better understanding the impact in ways that can be measured over time. And so at some point, perhaps you'll be hearing from the working lands staff to try and collect some information on how did you actually end up doing in terms of your ability to meet those goals.

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Yeah. Already, it's even just using it that one time, like you can see in that photo, everybody on our crew was just blown away with just how quick it was. And everybody was able to just kind of do other things while I was standing there doing the harvest. So I think everybody was excited about the opportunity

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: it provides. We used to that he was talking about work life balance earlier, and has a little more time to do the best of the things that we all like to do in life. There's a benefit to that that maybe isn't as easy to measure, but good to know about. Doctor. Burtt I think I've had I just

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: wanted to point out an observation of this is also preserving an art, which you're all preserving the art in the mid scene, pretty confessing surrounding it, that's just really special enough, so there's a lot to be said just about that. That might not have a dollar value on it, everybody does, because value that surrounds the art that involved in. Yeah, it's just, I was like, I'm happy. Very niche things would require not many, you know, you can't just come into any of these businesses, there's a lot of learned knowledge that you all house within your businesses, that's invaluable to our state.

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Feels like part of what

[Unidentified Participant]: Vermont's about anyway. Right. It worked in actually being a part of the thing. Yes.

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Not just

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: running a show

[Unidentified Committee Member]: or something. Thank you, Charmander. Do I press in Mishya? Mishya. Mishya. Yeah. Every one of these, the diversity of the presentations, Elizabeth, is really great. But the medicinal, you're you know, refer to big pharma there in the news. They control world health. How is everybody doing? World health. But what you're doing is 40,000, 20,000, 10,000 years old, and you are bringing to the twenty first century some of the wisdom and growing. It it that was really impressive and just whether it's viticulture or, you know, you know, herbs and medicines to you know? So it's curious on maybe an acre and a half or two acres. Can you be a net a netting business that has employees just with the rarity and the care that we put into these 800 pounds of product. Yeah. Annual production.

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Yeah. We hire a few folks every summer to help us on the farm. I think overall we have maybe six or eight people that work with us between our various ventures with our shop and off carry and farm. And we hire on often people who have farm experience, but also just herbalists who are interested in herbs and working more intimately with the plants because a lot of herbalists get trained just on dried herbal products or a bottle of a tincture or something like that. We find that people will come to us, whether it's who studied at BCH or other schools in the region, they bring a certain passion that helps us bring that quality to the products that we produce. And a lot of people, herbalists will buy, whether it's a home herbalist or somebody doing another herbal business or a food business, they wanna use really high quality herbs for their products. And so we're happy to support them and like to see what kinds of things that they create for their self.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: No, it's interesting. I just want to share actually, yeah, in one minute, one minute, own sort of rationale or say our own rationale in the selection of the because I think it's interesting, like I didn't actually like your point is very interesting to me and I hadn't absorbed that previously, but like for us, for the board, the wine production or vineyards, it's like, my understanding is that we're at a very sensitive moment where there's a lot of opportunity for growth, but there's also a lot of challenges, and we haven't ever had a We have had other working lands investments in vineyards, but we've never invited a grantee to come and speak. So, I think that was the perspective from which I reached out to David. And then for Claire, it really is like thinking about how investments can have this supply chain impact, can benefit multiple working lands businesses. The map isn't up, but that's a great image of that. And then I think for Freeverse, we were thinking a lot of like, yeah, the larger dollar investments are great, and we do support larger farms, but I think it also felt important to say, and we also make small dollar investments in smaller operations. That was, reverse was exemplary of that. And then of course, for the forest industry, the board has talked quite a bit about is they're always very interested in investing in the primary forestry. So investing directly in logging and sawmill operations or logging operations, I guess sawmills would still be secondary. But I think for what I hear the board thinking about a lot is how important it is to invest in businesses that are making those primary businesses more viable. And timber framing, and I think, you know, and maybe, and I think timber framing and not even just to the level at which Vermont Epi Timber is working on the preservation front, but timber framing in general is something that the board thinks a lot about as being, having significant consumption market for Vermont loggers, for truckloads. And has been projected, but really has become sort of a trademark for the state in some ways. Like, people recognize the craftsmanship of timber framing in Vermont, and I think the demand is steady. So I just thought it was helpful to say out loud what my Great. Thinking

[Miles Janes (Owner, Vermont Heavy Timber)]: The diversity.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: And I will say that there are also other grantee stories in the impact report in addition to the grantees that we highlighted during the hearing yesterday.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Think we got time for one more.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: John? Just a question to follow-up on what you're thinking about. It the applicant who comes up with this sort of dollar amount that they need? Is there any sort of coaching or saying like, because you could have asked for 50,000, right? I'm sure all farmers could use money. So how do you land on like, this is going to be impactful? It's really up to the applicant to get that dollar number that if I get this grant, it's going

[Unidentified Participant]: to be impacted by a

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: specific farm or forest operation.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: Yeah, that's right. So, it is up to the applicant to explain how the project is going to be impactful and spell out those impacts. And I think what's really important though, is to say that, we, the board is looking for investments that are impactful in relationship to the size of the business, but the investment should also be in relationship to the size of the impacts, if that makes sense.

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: David could have done half that and maybe that would be impactful, but how do you decide on the 5.28%?

[Unidentified Participant]: I mean, the result of the $50,000 exponentially increasing to what our production would be. I

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: would say that there are quite a few, I know that reviewers look quite closely and it's always discussed in reviewer conversations. If there's ever an ask, for example, that's more than the sales of the business, which happens sometimes. And sometimes there's a strong rationale for it, but oftentimes there's not. And we also guide people to ask for the minimum in the RFA. And that's just because of the demand and the dollars available. So, we say, if you can put matching funds in, or if you can take out a loan for half the project, that's encouraged. That's what we're saying when we say in the, because there's an application guide, we encourage people to ask for really what's needed. Obviously there's room for interpretation. Different applicants will interpret that differently, but we name it.

[Unidentified Participant]: We

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: have, thank you very much. Great presentations. The stories have swept us all away. We're we're here to to learn more about the the the Vermont landscape and and how it's managed. And also trying to sort out lots of budget requests. And we do have we will be talking more about this at some point. We've been asked to give some time to the I always get mixed up. The board

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: The Working Rights Coalition.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: The coalition. Thank you. Okay. Which is just a spoiler alert is going to be coming in suggesting that we appropriate more funding than the 1,000,000 that's in the request that's come from the budget. Who's in that policy? I'm not even gonna try and we'll hear about the list when they come in, I guess. But familiar names and bases. And if the committee has thoughts on what we think it might be helpful to learn in addition to what we've already learned. So I know we've talked about, you know, how do we what do we know about outcomes, about return on investment and so forth? I think that we can be thinking about that. We can share that either directly or indirectly through the coalition, those requests to the agency, and then they can help pull together data that we might not have already seen. Do you want to say anything about that?

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: No, I think that I was wondering if based on the conversation yesterday, and I don't think this I think there's sort of two separate things. There's the budget ask that might, it sounds like be coming from the coalition. And they did share that with us. Like we know what their ask is going to be. But it is important to name that it's the board and the coalition are two very separate entities. So, think if there's data that would be helpful around helping to assess need, like we can definitely provide data. And then I think on the other hand, which doesn't have to be tied to, or tied I think so strictly to the budget conversation for this year, but is just offering some partnership around introducing our new data collection plan and getting feedback, like if there's anything missing. Like I was thinking we could share, because I mentioned yesterday that we've put some significant work into improving our data collection, is coming into effect this year. So feedback this year would actually be very timely if there's something we want to add.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Good, good. That, when you say this year, could that be like in March, say, or is it more time sensitive?

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: So the grants themselves won't close until the summer. So that's when the data will be collected, That makes sense. Like we put it into effect this year. So the final reports,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: your grant is closed, isn't it?

[Misha Johnson (Co-owner, Free Verse Farm & Apothecary)]: Not quite close, no.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: So you completed, for example, the new final report, which is getting to if you're done, you can close your grant early, right? So that's why the grant was closed out early, the outcomes were achieved, and so we don't need to sit on your remaining grant dollars, we close it out. But in this new final report, we are collecting the data that I think the committee is interested in, which is like number of jobs created, and then the grantee's own assessment around those jobs created, to what extent are they due to the grant? And then it's the same question for increased sales, increased productivity, increased acreage increased acreage and and production, worker well-being, labor efficiency, and Equity impacts.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Matching, yeah, dollars.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: Matching dollars.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: The matching dollars, so if you're buying 80,000 piece of equipment and you get a grant for 50, you're throwing in a $30,000 match

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: The something and matching data we can, I mean we shared, we maybe didn't share the match specifically for FY25, which we could share? We shared the dollars leveraged from the beginning of the program, which was like the 31,900,000.0. Right now it's more or less for every dollar the state's invested, there's a dollar leverage from other funding sources. But that's data that we definitely have, and you know, to me.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Well, good. You and I can talk more about that offline, but I think that that's a good idea.

[Elizabeth (Working Lands Enterprise Board staff)]: And then we could stop, you can talk a little bit more about the follow Great.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Talk the the

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: more