Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: Check this same figure. You can pick that up when your system

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Okay, goes that's better. Okay, well, I think we can go ahead and get started then, so thank you. Welcome.

[Joanna Doran — Local Food Access Director, NOFA-VT]: Thank you. Thanks so much, Chair Durfee and committee members for having us here today for Three Squares Vermont Awareness Day. I already introduced myself, but again, for the record, I'm Joanna Doran, and I'm the local food access director with NOFA Vermont. I'm here today with partners, farmers, and neighbors for three Squares Vermont Awareness Day to acknowledge this essential program and ask for your support on requests that together will ensure the best results possible for Vermonters and farmers in Vermont. So these requests are, one, to support NOFO Vermont's request for $500,000 in ongoing funding to strengthen Vermont farm viability and address food security through proven programs Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus and Farm Share. Support Vermont Food Bank's request for $5,000,000 total appropriation in FY twenty seven, including $2,000,000 to support their network partners, dollars 2,000,000 for the Vermonters Heating Vermonters program, and $1,000,000 for Ready Response to ensure food access in disasters and emergencies, and fund the necessary administration costs to operate the Three Squares Vermont program in our state to counter federal funding changes. So I don't want to spend too long giving this intro because I want the committee to hear from our community partners and farmers, But I'm going to give a quick intro about the Three Squares Vermont program and sort of lay the context for the state. So some of you may already know this, but Three Squares Vermont is nationally known as SNAP. And in many households across Vermont, it's also known as a lifeline. It is a federal nutrition program operated on behalf of the federal government by state agencies, is the most effective and efficient federal nutrition program because it provides funds directly to families to buy groceries on a monthly basis. And they can spend these dollars at grocery stores, as well as places like farmer's markets, farms, farm stands and CSAs. Three Squares helps nearly 10% of our state buy groceries each month. And that is approximately 63,400 people in Vermont, the vast majority of whom are children, older adults, and people with disabilities. There is a lengthy application process in order to access benefits with various income eligibility requirements. For most households, benefits are issued on an EBT card that looks like a debit card, and they can spend their funds at over 600 retailers in Vermont, including 40 farmers markets and many farm stands and CSAs. Every month, Three Squares Vermont keeps more than $12,000,000 in our state economy. This makes Three Squares Vermont not only our most effective food security program, but it's also an essential economic stimulus program. In rural areas, that spending often determines whether a small business can keep its doors open. In the first half of this fiscal year alone, just over $150,000 in Three Squares Vermont benefits were spent at farmers markets and programs like Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus extend the impact that those dollars can have and in turn provide additional income for our farmers. While Three Squares Vermont effectively reaches the most low income folks in Vermont, we know that the program only reaches about 40% of those eligible in the state. There are many reasons why this is the case, but it is incredibly important to have trained benefits as sisters to help folks access this program and navigate the application and paperwork that comes along with it. I will not go through the federal changes that happened with HR one. They are in my written testimony and Addison from Hungry Free Vermont did give you an update in November about those as well. But overall, those changes have made it more challenging for low income folks to tap into this important program. Our state agency did a lot of work to try to understand those changes and service providers did a lot of work to quickly communicate those changes to community members so that they could continue tapping into that program and get the food that they need for groceries. Something to remember is that because a lot of folks are either ineligible for the program or not able to access it for one reason or another, it's really important to have a cohesive suite of programs in the state that provide for people's food needs, including investing in the charitable food system. So, food security is a policy choice and Three Squares Vermont is an essential part of the pathway to food security for everyone in Vermont. The message we want to convey to you today is that when we work together and we support the suite of requests that we're bringing to you today, we can ensure that everyone in Vermont gets the food that they need and want, and that we can support farmers in doing that as well. Legislators have a critical role to play, and you can make policy decisions that can ensure the best outcomes for Vermonters. When the state of Vermont invests in meaningful food support for food security, the positive impacts are felt around the state. So the policy choices in front of you today that we're asking you to support are, again, support NOFA's request for $500,000 in ongoing funding for Crop Cash Plus and Farm Share, support Vermont Food Bank's request for $5,000,000 and a total FY 'twenty seven appropriation, and fund the necessary administration costs to operate the Three Squares Vermont program in our state. Thank you so much for your time. I can take any quick questions before we move on, or I can pass

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: it Why don't we move on so that we're able to hear from all of the one question.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: One quick one. In my district, there's a gas station food store that says not taking EBT cards. So how does that work? Is it completely voluntary whether a retail food business takes EBT or not?

[Joanna Doran — Local Food Access Director, NOFA-VT]: Yeah, it's up to the retailer's choice to apply for SNAP authorization. And there is a process to go through that. They have to be eligible based on some different requirements, either what they're offering in their store or in the case of farmers markets and farms, usually it's they can easily meet a requirement by saying, We sell all these vegetables and meats. Obviously, we are carrying food that are going to meet the needs of Vermonters. I won't get into the details of what it's like for a gas station or corner store, but it is an opt in program. And organizations like NOFA and Hunger Free Vermont exist to support those retailers in navigating the application process. And we really want as many retailers as possible to participate in that program.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Remember when I was running the co op, somebody came in to inspect, if it had to be renewed, I guess you apply and you then occasionally every so often have kind of a rigorous inspection process. All right, thank you.

[Joanna Doran — Local Food Access Director, NOFA-VT]: Yeah, thank you. And I'll hand it off to Stoney Thompson.

[Stoney Thompson — New Tradition Farm]: Hello. Good afternoon. I'm Stoney Thompson, and I'm a vegetable, fruit, and nut grower in Huntington on five and a half acres of leased land. And I'm gonna read because I write better than I speak. Up to now, my farm, New Tradition Farm, has sold produce at the Richmond Farmers Market, the Burlington Farmers Market, a CSA, the Williston Food Shelf, two farm stands, as well as several other wholesale accounts. I'm proud to say that 2026 will be New Tradition Farms' sixth season in production. I say that I am proud because it would be an enormous understatement to say that it hasn't been easy to make it to this point in building an economically and ecologically viable farm business. To be blunt, there have been seasons when I've stayed in business by the skin of my teeth. The programs we have been advocating for today, Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus, NOFA's Farm Share program, and the Vermont Food Bank's feeding Vermonters program, among others, have been essential sources of income for my farm during these startup years, and I know that these programs have been equally essential sources of nutritious food for my customers who enroll in them. I became a farmer because I am passionate about feeding all my neighbors and stewarding the earth in an ecologically responsible way. I believe that we all deserve fresh, healthy food that nourishes us, and I know for a fact that we can grow this food in a way that protects and even enhances the vitality of the ecosystem that we are enmeshed in and dependent on. However, it didn't take me long to realize that if I wanted to stay in business as a farmer who prioritizes long term soil health and ecological well-being, as well as fair wages, I to charge would prices that some of my neighbors cannot easily afford, especially at a time when so many of us are struggling to make ends meet with housing costs, health care costs, student debt, and widespread inflation that we've experienced over the last several years, and more health care costs. This is a disheartening realization, because at a time when we're facing all of these ecological crises and losing enormous amounts of top soil to erosion and development nationwide, if we neglect soil health and ecological well-being in the name of cost cutting, we're robbing future generations of abundance and health. And yet, if our neighbors can't afford our vegetables and we're excluding them from that same commonwealth of abundance and health in the here and now, we are excluding them from that same commonwealth of abundance and health in the here and now. As I stated before, I became a farmer to steward the earth, feed my neighbors, build a resilient food system, not to sell a luxury good to only the most affluent among us. The Crop Cash programs and the Farm Share program offer a win win solution to this conundrum. In the case of Crop Cash, eaters see their EBT, or SNAP money, doubled and are able to enjoy top quality fresh local vegetables, and farmers like me gain a whole new set of customers who otherwise may not be customers or would buy far less. Since the state has invested in in the crop cash program, I've gained many new customers who were shopping at the farmers' market for the first time. In 2025 season, Crop Cash accounted for nearly 10% of my gross income, and there have been days at the farmers' markets when crop cash accounted for nearly 25% of my income. In a business where the margins are razor thin and cash flow is often a source of stress, this revenue is truly a lifeline. The Farm Share program has similarly been a boon to both my business and my customers. They receive a season's worth of vegetables for 25 to 75% of the normal price, and I receive payment at a critical time in the spring when I'm buying tools and supplies that I need for the season, a win win scenario for all. Finally, I've been working with the Williston Food Shelf since 2021, and they've seen their need increase every year. Last year, I delivered lettuce mix for 20 to 30 families a week to the Wilson Food Shelf, and this was made possible in part through funding from the Vermont Food Bank and the Vermonters Feeding Vermonters program. In all, I've experienced firsthand how NOFA's crop cash and farm share programs complement the Vermont Food Bank's programs and how they're both vital to keeping our communities fed while supporting local farmers like me. Finally, I'll speak to any elected officials who might be hesitant to to come on board. Even if you think the budget is too tight to support this or that there might be more important priorities than feeding your neighbors or ecological sustainability in agriculture, consider this. As our world, our country, and our communities in Vermont experience the predictably unpredictable shocks from extreme weather and economic and political instability, a robust local food economy is something that all families will rely on in times of crisis. The COVID nineteen pandemic, with its empty grocery shelves and supply chain chaos, demonstrated the fragility of our profoundly not local food system. The programs we're advocating for all constitute critical elements, critical investments in local farms and a local food system that are our best hope for weathering the storms to come. For all these reasons, I urge you to support NOFO Vermont's request for $500,000 in ongoing funding to strengthen the Vermont farm viability and address food security by sustaining the proven programs of Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus, Farm Share, and everything that Vermont Food Bank wants.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Thank you. You. Stoney, how many people work on your farm?

[Stoney Thompson — New Tradition Farm]: Last year, it was just me. I've had seasons where I've had one other person.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: What are your nuts that you have?

[Stoney Thompson — New Tradition Farm]: This is a project that started two years ago, and I've got chestnuts, hazelnuts, some more marginal things like walnuts and odd ones like Bartnots and butter hearts and things like that, a little experimental, and then some fruit, persimmon, pear, plum.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Pawpaw. Well,

[Stoney Thompson — New Tradition Farm]: Huntington is Well, it's changing. Yeah, Huntington up there near Campbell's Hump. It's like 4B at this point, I think, is what the new maps say. But this site has great air drainage. It's very different in different parts of Huntington. The vegetables are in the valley, and where I've planted the trees are kind of up top.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: So do you grow any greenhouse then, or is all of that outdoors? Because I tried to grow pawpaws in Southern Vermont, and mine died in winter. Yeah, well,

[Stoney Thompson — New Tradition Farm]: I'll find out. They're outside. Mean, it's a whole bunch of different Some cultivars, some seedlings. So hopefully, we'll find some that can handle this.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Okay, so you did plan everything as You're expecting everything to outside and weather over the seasons.

[Stoney Thompson — New Tradition Farm]: Yeah, the plan with that particular project actually has to do with finding things that can handle this environment. So I'm expecting some death, and hopefully we'll find the ones that want to live for the long haul.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Great, thank you. Thank you.

[Mark Montalban — Green Acres Homestead]: For the record, I'm Mark Montalban, the owner of Green Acres Homestead that was formerly based in Burlington. Now we reside on 4.95 acres of leased land in South Duxbury. The reason I'm coming is I'm in a particular interesting situation that I am actually making a living as a farmer, making the margins, while also family is receiving SNAP benefits. My son is under a Katie Beckett program. If you know, it's a general old term that you have a child with a permitted disability. So we both receive funds and then we work within agriculture. Presently at my budget, I do hire three people a year, starting the March to the last week in November. Also, I do provide some employment and support under my son who is under Social Security, as you know, a limited amount of income to be done. The importance, I would say, and the request that we continue with the half $1,000,000 on the crop crop cash plus benefits is last year, there was a great increased demand at all the markets that I do that do take crop cash. Now I do seven mark market locations a year. I do a 100 I literally do a 134 market dates. And so historically, I've gone from Brandon up to Montgomery over to South Harrell over to Northfield. Year, I'll be doing five summer markets. I'm doing three winter markets, I'll be covering the counties of Addison, Chittenden, Washington, Lamoille, and Franklin. I carry quite a diverse set of items, from honeys to eggs to duck chicken, some limited rabbit, stone fruit, foraging for mushrooms, ramps, fiddleheads, to preserves and other items. I would say at the peak season, and I'm looking earlier this morning in July and August, at the Windham Farmers Market, I was averaging 22.4% of my daily sales on Sunday from people using prop cash. And that's both, as you know, what's the great advantage is you can go to these different markets. If, for example, I would, I would take out my SNAP card, go to the market manager or someone, and then say I want 20, I'll get 20 of the tokens for that market. Then I get 20 of the crop cash to use, fruits and vegetables. Then I get the crop cash plus, which is a quarter of that cross pollination of the general amount. So one thing that's very beneficial is for every $20 that I spend at the market, I mean, that I have, I can get $60 to spend. And I'm going to local farmers who care items I don't have. Perchance, I'll and I won't digress too much of Windham Market, two amazing farmers, I think we should always support, is last resort, Emiliekton. I purchased from them directly at the market and the Smith Farm for meats and other items coming out of New Haven. So that's an example that's very common. So not only does it help pay our bills, hire people, help feed myself and my son, but we are utilizing what other farmers are making use of. This Saturday, I'll be at the Shelburne Market, similar situation. I have things to sell. People will come and purchase items from me at that market using Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus, and the Shelburne tokens. And I know there'll be two other folks. Someone does amazing sourdough bread. I wish I had the time to make sourdough bread. I wish I was that capable. I will take the the tokens that I have and purchase that. So the impact is amazing. One next, the last thing I want to mention is that farmers markets are really a place and resource for people to get together and learn. So at the Windham Market, very common, I'm getting seniors from the senior housing coming and finding about it. Young families with kids, folks dealing with different disabilities and different needs. There's often POP, other programs, which is kind of the term through POP is power purchase, especially for kids. So people come in, they get the little POP things, which means kids can come around and say, I'm selling my peaches, my plums, my nectarines, my cherries. People can come in and purchase that. Also, we have what we call our cheat sheet, which means it's out there showing what people can purchase with the crop cash, the token to Crop Cash Plus. So it's an information thing. So us as vendors are helping inform our customers and allowing them to utilize access to our markets while finally being able to pay our bills. And it's a great social network. One thing that I find very amazing within it is that it really is a sense in this day and age of communities getting together, whether I'm in Jericho, whether I'm in Middlebury, whether I'm over in other locations. So my request is to continue this amount of money. It goes very far. It builds community. It builds support for all of us. And I appreciate the support from last year because, again, I would say 13 roughly 13% of my income was directly from people paying through SNAP benefits. And I think I've probably said enough on it. And if you have any questions,

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: yeah. It was really nice to hear your perspective. Thank you. Is a customer and pharma. Thank you. Right. And I'm I'm just astonished that you are able to do that stuff for your week all year round. It sounds like market's here.

[Mark Montalban — Green Acres Homestead]: It's well. I used to be a special educator. I used One thing is why I have a good gift for gab, I used to

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: be a social worker.

[Mark Montalban — Green Acres Homestead]: So I often work to communities with same populations. Part of me is helping my son and part of me wanting to move as I got older, as I call like an older Vermonter, I guess I am at age 66, but I don't feel like it. Maybe that's a good sign, I guess, is that it's part of way of something that we're growing and that we're using for our homestead that we can bring to markets and sell. And really, it's the hope that regardless of your income, what you have in your pocketbook, so to speak, you can buy our products. So it's really a twofold. And I would say I've been doing farmer's market since 2017, full time since 2019. So I've gotten to see a lot of great interactions. I've seen people grow up. I have regular people who've been buying my duck for the last seven years. And it's really kind of that interpersonal experience. I will also add that there is a slight possibility if we can grow enough on our increased land that will apply, look at doing a CSA farm stand in South Duxbury. So there'll be even better access because people say, can we go to your farm? We're not set up yet, but give us a couple of years. So that funding helps put us in that situation. So we can be hopefully maybe one of those farm sand CSA in Duxbury.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Right, thank you. Okay, thanks.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Hello, my name is Emmett Mosley. I'm the Addison County Food Hub Supervisor for CVOEO. That's the Community Action Agency for the Champlain Valley. And my program is called Feeding Champlain Valley, and that's the name we give to our network of four food pantries, three food hubs, and a commercial meal meal production facility. In 2025, we served about 12,000 food insecure Vermonters through those programs. We're the largest direct service sort of hunger relief organization in the state. I know our time here is really limited. I want to speak specifically to the request for that the Food Bank has made for $5,000,000 for Vermonters, feeding Vermonters, and other programs for agencies like mine to purchase and distribute food that's grown in Vermont directly from Vermont producers. You know, I've been working in this field for about fifteen years doing every job from a free spurs outreach worker to a chef to a truck driver. And now I sort of oversee a staff of two overseeing a food pantry and home delivery program. And I think that we've seen over the past couple of decades that what we used to call the emergency food system has really become, you know, the emergency never ended. So people don't come to food pantries anymore because they've had a medical emergency or a sudden loss of housing or some other life event, though that does happen sometimes. But the vast majority of people come simply as part of one of many strategies they're employing to make their ends meet every month. So we're as much an economic support as we are a nutritional support. And I think once you sort of come around to that point of view, you have to ask yourself, well, what's the food that we're able to provide for people? A lot of that food, that food typically used to be provided in two big pots, commodity foods from the USDA and donated and rescued food from local sources. Fifteen years ago or so, we started gleaning. So people like me, they would send young people whose backs weren't wrecked yet out into farm fields to harvest produce that was going to be tilled under before before the farmers had to move on to the next crop. And that was really the bulk of the local and fresh food we had to offer our clients. Subsequently, through efforts from organizations like NOFA, like Hungry free Vermont and the food bank, and with support from philanthropy and state, we've built out the charitable food system to have the necessary infrastructure to collect, gather, distribute the high quality, fresh and locally produced, wherever possible, food that our clients really need. So, you know, last year, my agencies, we distributed about 300,000 pounds of produce, and we spent about $100,000 to purchase dairy, eggs, and produce locally. And that's you know, and that was with a relatively small allocation last year. Think they asked me for about four times as much. So just wanna strongly urge you to support this allocation so that we can continue to do this work, to continue to expand it, and to offer the 70,000 or so food insecure Vermonters the opportunity to access fresh, healthy, locally produced food at the hundreds of meal sites and food pantries around the state that basically serve every single every single person or people in every community in the state. I know our time is really short, so I'm just gonna leave it at that, but I'd be happy to answer any questions as well.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Stevie O'Brien is Community Action Agency?

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Yeah, it's the Community Action Agency for Chittenden, Franklin, Addison, and Grand Island.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: And then Champlain sorry, feeding Champlain Valley. That's just kind of

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: the name we've given to all of our food security programming. So we have a food pantry in Richford. We have a food pantry in St. Albans. We have the largest food pantry in the state in the North End in Burlington, and then food pantry in Middlebury at the Addison Food Hub where I work. And that's actually a space that we share with another nonprofit food hub that does aggregation and distribution work for local producers. So we actually in my job, I get to see the same producers who are donating, who are purchasing from, the customers who are buying CSA shares and bulk orders, and our clients are all kind of mingling in the same space. And I think that that's kind of possible because of this cultural value that we've had that says we should be providing locally produced, high quality food to everybody. I think we know, we've come to understand that the food bank itself doesn't have a storefront, but it works through lots of organizations across the state. How much of the I don't know how you measure this, but to what extent is the food bank your primary supplier? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's probably 70 to 80% of the food that we distribute comes through the food bank. That's either they distribute federal commodities. They they do large scale food recovery efforts at every large grocery store in the state, and then they also purchase bulk quantities of food through the and distribute that. And they also have a co op buying program, we can buy products at probably 50 percent of the cost that it would cost to go through a wholesaler. Mean, the grocery business is basically a cartel at this point. So if you're a small agency, even like ours, it's actually not possible to purchase the food you see in the grocery store anywhere near even the retail price, regardless of how much you're buying. So agencies like the food bank are are really critical.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah. We had some testimony yesterday, the day before. We were hearing about this. It was a distributor question. But if anything, maybe we should, yeah, better understand to the extent to which it's a cartel.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Yeah, I think there's been some really good reporting. I mean, it does violate federal law, but I think you won't get into

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: that now, but thank you very much.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Thanks for your time.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: And just for everyone's information, we're gonna switch now to a different topic, very different kind of topic. We're gonna hear from the Agency of Agriculture with their FY27 budget recommendation or the administration's recommendation. And I see Secretary Pevets has joined us. And on the line, I see director Dubuque, and welcome. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you. And maybe this has already been taken care of, but do we need to give anybody permission to share anything?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: It looks like I have permission, but I will be sharing the PowerPoint.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: If you want to, okay. Good. Well, we have a moment here, and then we can launch right in. I'll just sort of kick it off by saying that we have, yesterday, your colleagues from ANR, Forest Parks and Recreation came in and we started their budget presentation. So we've had a little bit of a chance to try out the new approach that we've been asked to take with looking at budgets and not just the administration's budgets, but anything that anybody comes into the room with, trying to just really get a handle on how money is being spent, how well it's being spent, given the new fiscal reality that we're in. So with that, welcome Secretary Tebbetts. Well, good afternoon. Anson Tebbetts, Secretary of Agriculture Food and Markets, joined online by Nicole Dubuque, and also in the room is Amy Mercer,

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: our financial director. So it's it's great to be here to talk about our proposed budget for, the next fiscal year, and that will be beginning July and running to the following July. You know, as a legislature, and you touched upon it, mister chairman, you're facing some incredibly, difficult decisions. You've got a lot on your plate with the transforming the education system. You got property tax issues and the pressures there. We got housing issues. We got public safety. But agriculture intersects with all these issues, and it has the role and play in in Vermont's future. Our budget, for the most part, level funds most of our core programs, and we'll go through those in just a few moments. But in this current economic and and budgetary climate, I I consider that a victory, to stay level funded. There are a couple of, changes, though, that we wanna bring attention to you as we go through the presentation. One is, targeting some investments in a couple of areas. One is reducing the costs for our dairy farmers. You've probably heard over the last few weeks, it's not a rough stretch for our dairy farming community, with considerable price declines in the price of milk, and some of the inputs are pretty high or continue to increase. And the other area, is related to, adding a position in our business office, which is urgently needed to improve the customer service for our farmers and producers across Vermont as we continue to try to get more money to them so they can be more affordable for their business. So if we can begin, maybe we

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: can just

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: begin. One thing I always like to do is our mission. It's to facilitate, support, and encourage the growth and viability of agriculture while protecting the working landscape, human health, animal health, plant health, consumers, and the environment. Our recommended, the governor's recommended budget, 61,190,000.00. And you can see the breakdown of where the dollars come from. We do rely significantly from federal funds. We have a small slice of in department in departmental transfers. General fund is about 13,740,000.00 or about 22%. And then we have some special funds that are also part of

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: our budget, about 40% of our dollars come from special funds.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Chloe, go to the next one. Does it want to move on you? Want to go to the next slide?

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: So this

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: is the flow of funds, and this is, we'd like to share with you this as well. So general fund, federal funds, special funds, and a little bit of the transfer between different agencies. So that's sort of the flow we have here. Six appropriations, administration, is

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: what I'm in, we have food safety and consumer protection, agriculture development, plant industry. We have

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: the lab, which we call Bale down in Randolph, and then we have water quality.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: And there's the breakdown in dollars

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: that we are proposing. And you can see it's a pretty lean increase, The overall increase pretty lean. Areas of increase, some of these are already baked into the budget. You can see retirement, some of our medical programs, childcare. We'll get more into the special funds with clean water grants. Believe, Amy, correct me if I'm wrong, that's the one that comes from the Clean Water Fund that comes to us. Health insurance salaries, we did have, and you addressed it in the last session, some of the federal funds that we did lose in some of the grants, and also the Lake Champlain Basin program here. But that is just an accounting issue. You need the Lake Champlain one coming over to us.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: All right, the next one. Sorry, just before we leave that one, just for context. So if you wouldn't mind going back, Nicole, the health insurance and salary increases are about a million dollars roughly. I'm adding those two numbers up. Can you just remind us what the total increase dollar wise is year over year? Think about that $1,000,000 in the context of what's the total change in this year's budget versus last year's.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Sorry, I was going to look at you Amy.

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: For the record, Mercer, financial director. So are you asking what the total dollars of our, how this relates to the total dollars of our budget? Yes. Oh, okay. So the million dollars would be 69.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Is that the We have a $61,000,000 budget. And what's the change? What was last year's budget? So I'm trying to get the million dollars compared to the What it was last year? The change in last year's total to this year's total budget.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: In dollars or in dollars? K. Well

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Percent. Yeah. Percent. What so how much of much of the difference between last year's budget and this year's budget total numbers are attributable to those salary and benefits. For these items, I may have to get back to you on that. What did we hear was 10%

[Rep. John O'Brien]: from FBR? Was that health insurance?

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Or the state maybe this week? I don't even remember. Yeah. Yesterday. I've heard that increase maybe.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Yeah. Amy's gonna look

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: is it okay if Amy looks

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: up those numbers and we can move along to the next one.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So as you know, we have the Dairy Business Innovation Center, and since we last talked, we have received word that they are going to fund that in full. So we received the information. They released those funds that we were nervous about. We were expecting them in October. A couple weeks ago or last week, announced they'd been released. So those funds will be coming to us. That fantastic news. Some of these are the ones, the federal funds at the beginning of last year that we lost. And then this 1,000,001 down here from the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, we're coming to the end of that grant. It was a five year grant. So beginning in July, those funds will no longer be available.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: So is the 3.5, the Innovation Center, is that no longer gonna be are we getting is this up to date, or does this reflect the expectations that are now have been updated?

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So this is for next year's budget and what they're doing is spending more on grants instead of contracts. So we're reflecting the decrease in contracting work for the Dairy Business Innovation Center because a certain percentage has to go out as grants. So we're focusing on the granting portion.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: So there's no difference between what's in the budget and what we now expect is going to happen?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, it's just going on in a different form of It's going to be grants as opposed to contracts, but the dollar should remain the same.

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Well, I mean, there is a reduction based on there's like several rounds of these grants. So this reduction expresses the current rounds that we have for granting with DBIC, if that makes sense. All fluctuates from year to year.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Something that you just said, Chittenden, is just, I I wasn't sure that I was understanding correctly because I know that the budget was presented two or three weeks ago. The federal government has been slow in letting you know things that it normally would have let you know in the fall. And I thought perhaps I heard you say you just heard something that is now going to make us be thinking differently about what to expect in that program.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I think there was concern that they could have decided not to fund and release those dollars. That has changed. But I think this is reflecting just to how we're getting the money out the door in a way, even though the exact dollars match up that that they released, if if if that makes sense.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Representative O'Brien. Thank you.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Maybe was it back in November we heard like like what was the FY twenty six budget for DBIC? Because it seemed like what was it six to eight something in there? And then we heard it was going to be half or something like that, just because over all DBICs were being cut to some extent.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. I think I think I think there was we're clearly over prescribed in that area. And I think the there was a proposal to increase the funding to all the regions, and that has not come through yet. But I think it's pretty static right now as far as what we're getting. They haven't said fewer dollars, they haven't said more dollars. We do have a detailed, as we go through this, we'll have a whole detailed DBIC slide that will maybe explain some of this for you. Okay, so is the we're asking for one more employee. We have the smallest business office probably in state government. It's an office of four. We are handling a tremendous amount of more dollars, both federal and some state dollars. And it's probably slowing us a little bit, getting the money out the door and making sure that we're complying with all the bulletins and all the granting and all the work that goes with that. So we are asking for a new position and we would go to the pool to get that position with us. And Amy's one of the four. So that's probably our biggest ask on the personnel side that we have that we're asking for in this budget. These level funded, one that we've dealt with over the last couple of years, the Natural Resources Conservation Council. From time to time, we may have come in and asked for a haircut on that. We're not asking for a haircut this year. We're asking for level funding on that. So I believe you it's been increased up to $612,000 We're level funding that this year. We also have grants that we do in significant amount of grants that go out to the councils that help do their work, but those go directly to some of the work that's happening on the ground. But everything else is essentially level funded.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: I have one question here, Representative Lamoille. Do these

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: grants mean? I mean, you're not talking about Vermantas feeding Vermantas or is that anything in particular?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: It's related, but it's not that one, right, Nicole? That's not the one that's weak.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Sorry, which grant are we talking about at the moment?

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Well, just on the spreadsheet, it says local food grants, but I was just asking what kind of grants, what grants?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So we have their local food purchase assistance is one of the programs that is run through Ag Dev. I can bring up some information about it if that would be helpful. Apologies. I'm feeling technologically challenged here. So in order to run the slideshow and bring up other links, I'm a little it's a little difficult for me to do, but I'm happy to send you the link exactly to to this program so you all can see more information about it.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: Is that about is it specifically about local food for schools, which is the line above it or not necessarily? Well, before I misspeak,

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I can bring it up on my other It's okay.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: You can also send it to me later. It's fine. Okay.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. So I'm gonna go to

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: wait. Where did you go to it?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So I went to the position, and then if we go to food safety consumer protection, nothing really significant there. Standard increases for salaries and benefits. We did receive some federal funds for the milk testing program with bird flu. There's been some overtime and temporary employees do that, but we have an agreement with the federal government to help with that. We did get a reduction from the FDA. This is the Food Safety Modernization Act, we call it FSMA. They trimmed us about 40% of that program, so we had to remove essentially the education component of that through UVM, but the inspections and the food safety part of it on the ground continues. But that was a grant that all states, received a trim on that, and it was significant for for many many states, including Vermont. It was about 40% reduction in in that, so that's reflected there. Agdev, local food systems and schools, the reduction there, the 300, the RFSI, the infrastructure grants, the one time agreement we had with those, and then the Vermont Dairy Promotion Council did not fund, something in the farm to school arena is there as well. I think you had a working lands report recently. Yes. So, yeah, so that was I think you have a a good grounding of how successful that program is. $1,000,000 in general fund. We also are grateful to Vermont for contributing $20,000 to that. And so it outlines, you know, where those investments have been have been made and the contributions in the jobs and the economic impact that they have in many areas of Vermont both on the forestry side and also on the food side.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: The 11,000,000 roughly in federal grant dollars awarded, does that include the dairy?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, that's a significant thing. Yeah, because we have a significant federal grant with that. So that Okay, was Ag Dev. There's some of the breakdown of working lands. Okay, go to the next one. Yeah, this and this breaks down some of the where the money is being distributed.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Did I? Yeah, I skipped over one answer, I'm so sorry.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, so this is where we're at the Innovation Center. So it's Vermont, but it's also 10 other states. And you can see word gets out, Vermont's done quite well over the years. But as word gets out, it's becoming more and more competitive across the region. And essentially it's infrastructure improvements. Pasteurizers or some sort of equipment that needs to be made. And there's some marketing dollars as well that have been successful. And then you can see there's the little map. And these are grants, which is really important. Yeah. It's not a loan. It's not

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: a a grant. Award cycle for those grants when you announced that.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: We do it's it's a rotation depending on what pocket of money they wanna kick out. You know, they I think there's about five different rounds of different pockets they do from time to time, but it's all kind of on a schedule. They're all reviewed. They're all scored. We are having a conference in Albany, a regional conference on the tenth and eleventh in Albany, And we expect a good crowd of people to come. We do it every two years. And we hold it in Albany because it's kind of a central place where people from Pennsylvania and over from New York and Vermont and Maine all kinda get there for that. But that's coming up in March.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: You mentioned Vermont has done quite well. And you can see that on the graph. Not disproportionately well given that we're a big dairy state and Rhode Island is not. So you wouldn't expect to see them there, but there's no concern that somebody would look at this and say, well, because it's based in Vermont, the last

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. I more than their share. I don't think so because I think they're all they're very detailed about the scoring and how it's you know, because it's very important that, you know, these are taxpayer dollars that are coming and they have a a system of review. It's really quite thorough. We have outside people looking into it, so it's not just the agency. So there are other people that review these grants to make sure that they're, you know, some ideas could be solid or maybe that might not work. I think in all, I think there's so many sets of eyes on it that I think it's fair.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Yeah. I was just gonna say, also, I mean, the grants go from farmers up through, say, broad sensors, like Habit. One, like cracker fat cheese. And so like the Giovanni's and Fairlife's are eligible to apply for grants.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: They are and part of the part of it is they have whatever there was one that did with sustainable packaging. So all that information is shared with everyone. So it's not just for that company. So if we learn something about packaging, some other producer or some other company can can use that knowledge. So that's part of it. But it could range from someone that needs, you know, a manure spreader that's at a small farm. They could get a infrastructure grant or it may be at a a bigger scale, for example, like Agamark slash Cabot, where that infrastructure was helping multiple farmers through the coop system. But those grants, know, if available, are were cons were big. We did some energy projects down in Massachusetts as well with changing the Cabot plant over to another another system of fuel, which has saved them a considerable amount of dollars. So there's the breakdown.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I am just putting an LFPA in the chat, and then I can move right over to here.

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

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Plant industry, formerly farm, simplified our world by just calling it plant.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: So

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: you may remember it as farm in other budgets. Pretty status quo. Industry, lab is even simpler, mostly just standard increases in salary and benefits. Sometimes if we do need something for the lab, it's more related to infrastructure, so we go through the capital budget. If we needed some sort of new piece of equipment, normally we'd go through the capital budget so you wouldn't see it in this budget.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: You know, we had a nice visit to the Weight and Measures. Oh, yeah. And I'm sorry you weren't able to

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I know. Was the lab does incredible work. Did they did they show you the the weights and measures, the little tiny Oh, yeah. In the gloves and the Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. They do incredible work.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah. That's great. Mark is a very wonderful host as well. Yeah.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. Here's the clean water and water quality. And this is the one I wanna highlight here, and this would be a significant change. For more than a decade, we relied on some fees which farmers have paid. The large farm operations and the medium farmers under the regulatory scheme have paid a fee. The large farm have paid $2,500 annually and the medium have paid 1,500. The small operations have not paid the fee. So if that sticks out why the small farmers are not included, they have not paid that fee over the years. And considering what's happening in the economy, we thought this would be a way to lighten the load a little bit. We know this is not an answer to solving some of the issues that are currently happening in the dairy economy, but it is one less bill that they would have to pay annually for this. We are not changing anything with our programming. So we're not reducing staff, we're not reducing what we're doing out in the field. We're essentially asking, to switch to general fund dollars and take the fee off, the farm community, with this change.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Senator Burke? Is that for the small farm operation or all all sizes?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Small has not paid a fee. So they they would so they've never paid a fee. So if they were, we we would have included it. And it's just for the medium farm operations and then the large farm. We think it will help about a 131 farmers. And if that bill comes off the pile, I'm sure that that money will be used elsewhere in the operation to do something else within the within the farm. We are one of the I don't think any within our region have this have this fee to operate essentially operate. You know the origin of this, how long it's been? It it came along with act 64, so the new significant water quality. And I think it was to you know, there was not a As the RAPs were developed, as the new regulations were developed, there needed to be more personnel. So I think it's about well, it's probably more than it's about a decade old because I think we're celebrating the tenth year of act 64. So I think it came along when that new law came in because they had to address some of the funding sources. And this was a way to generate some revenue, but also I think at the time they wanted everyone, the all in concept. I think that But as the program has matured, I think the expectations of everybody have been met, and it's just one of those that's it could help the dairy sector, not only this year, but over time. Because someone that's paid $2,500 over ten years, it's a considerable amount.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: So the proposal is not just for FY '27 to Yeah. With a The

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: base it would go back into the yeah. We would receive that base money would go into our to operate the water quality programs. Under the general fund. The general fund.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: As we got there. Okay. Got it. Representative O'Brien. So when revenue comes in

[Rep. John O'Brien]: to the agency, does it almost always go into special funds? So like the waste of measures you're hearing about or pesticide registration or even this kind of thing. Those all that flow to the special funds usually?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Special funds and they essentially fund staff, right?

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, staff and operating funds.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: So

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: that's a significant change in that one. And this is where Nicole, do you want to take over the we have something a little different. We've worked with the performance measures a little bit. So we have a new system. And if you would like to go through to see how I think you mentioned that at the beginning that you're you know how our dollars are being spent and if they're effective or if they're working. We do have a few slides that go through some of our programs and talk about performance measures. Do you want to take that, Nicole?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, I'm happy to. I'm happy to. And I will just throw a couple things out before I go through that. One, I did put the local food purchase assistance grant information in the chat, so the link is there. Also, the Clean Water Act was 2015. And then as far as DBIC goes, sorry, I'm jumping around here, but I tried to raise my hand. And like I said, I'm technologically challenged. With DBIC, I just wanna point out because I think it's helpful for reference that Connecticut, for example, has roughly 80 dairy farms to our just under 500. So when you look at it that way, the grants and how they're going out are are pretty well spread comparably. Okay. So I have worked with our different divisions as well as with the chief performance office to update some of our program performance measures, and I'd love to go through those. Happy to take questions. But like I said, I can only see PowerPoint right now, so some somebody yell at me if you need me to. And for the record, Nicole Dubuque, chief operating officer for the Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets. So the first one is our produce program. We've got the objectives up here, help Vermont fruit and vegetable growers implement on farm produce safety practices, and comply with the food safety modernization act. So here, we're looking at the number of produce safety implementation grantees who indicate new markets reached or current markets maintained were at 88% there. Number of support services provided to Vermont produce farms, 104 in twenty twenty five. Number of verified farms in the Vermont Windham database is 717. Then we'll move on to working lands. So in 2025, the percent of business grantees that show increase in net income over the grant period was 56%. Percent of grantees that added FTEs over the grant period by business grantees was 49%. The percent increase in product output for business grantees over the grant period was 68%. So we definitely get a good return on investment for working lands initiative projects. Moving on to DBIC, we did not update these performance measures this year. So we do have 2024 and 2025 to show you, which the numbers will jump around a little bit, but I'll explain that. So the number that experienced increased sales because of marketing and or promotion activities, 70 in 2024. As you can see, we really ramped that up. So we're at three nineteen in 2025. Number of new and or existing delivery systems access points. Again, you can see like that really ramped up in 2025. We went from 1645 to 19544. The number of farmers who have learned new management strategies, that one went down. My understanding is that's mainly because we're not gonna do the same education twice for people. So we're kind of catching people as they start being associated with the program. So we went from fourteen twenty seven in 2024 to 300 twenty three in 2025. The percentage of participants that expressed satisfaction and positive outlook for the future of their business were at ninety nine percent both years. That is a self report measure from the grantees. Moving into food safety and consumer protection. This is our meat inspection program, and I'm not gonna go through each one of these, but you will notice as we go through the programs in food safety and consumer protection, that what we do like to track for each program is the number of licenses, registrations, and permits, just so we know how many folks that we are serving in each one of those programs. The number of in plant non compliance reports, 23. The number of inspection visits at a plant that our meat inspection folks did is 3,056 in 2025. Number of inspections resulting in enforcement actions from compliance inspections is 28. So as you can see, the number of enforcement actions versus the number of visits we did, that's a great number in my book. Number of compliance inspections for commerce and retail, we did 876. And these numbers, the bottom two are the ones that I would deem the most important, which is the number of recalls of state inspected product, zero. And the number of implant microbiological residue samples positive, zero. So that really is a great measure that we are doing our job. Moving on to dairy inspection. We also track the number of licenses and registrations here, 2490 7. The number of inspections completed in 2025, 3768. And the number of compliance activities beyond level of field staff. So this is like the point of a notice of violation. We had eight in 2025. Animal health, same thing. Number of license and registrations, 99. Number of inspections completed, 94. And the number of compliance activities beyond level of field staff, again, to the point of notice of violation, we had three. Wait. Yes.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: I didn't have to shout. Thank you. You know, just on the that previous slide, the number of license for registrations, yeah, 99. What what's what are those exactly?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So it's when we're talking about folks that are selling and moving livestock. And I don't know, Anson, if you have more definition to that, but that's who.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Essentially, that's it.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Thank you. Mhmm. Representative Lipsky?

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: Yeah. Nicole, maybe it was back another one. You've there were a number of licenses, and then there are a much higher number for the number of inspections that some farms get inspected more than once a year.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yes. So this number is a little bit pooled together. So we inspect both dairy farms, and then we also inspect dairy plants. So the folks that are moving the milk, and we don't necessarily go there once a year. We go there if depending on where we're going. We could get called out because they have an issue with equipment that they need us to come out and certify. That usually results in us going out multiple times a year. When we're talking about the actual dairy farms, typically, we'll go out if there is an issue, we will go out and reinspect to make sure that the issue has been fixed. So we end up on some farms multiple times a year, and we definitely end up in the dairy plants multiple times a year.

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: Thank you very much. Mhmm.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Representative O'Brien? Just again, what was cool? What does that stand for?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Country of origin labeling.

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: Okay.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Alright. For weights and measures, this is when we're talking about retail mostly. So we've we've got a number of licenses, registrations, and permits, 11878 across the state. The number of inspections that we did, 10,589. And that could be an actual store gas pump, looking at a scale, it could be all sorts of things. So the number of device inspections, specifically 9,921. The number of calibrations performed, so this is the weights and measures that you all got to see, 6,598. The number of device inspections failed, 305, and the number of enforcement actions, 73 weights and measures. Alright. Maple. So we've been trying to amp up what we do as far as tracking performance and going out and doing inspections in Maple. Tucker and Sam have done a great job on that. So the number of consumer complaints resolved, one, that just means we got one formal complaint that we had to be sent out on. The number of licenses, registrations, and permits, 30. We're specifically talking about the large scale packers here, which this has gone up from 28 to 30, so that's good. Number of inspections completed, 16, which we're right on target because we're trying to do these every other year. So we're our target is to get to about half a year. The percent past retail inspection, 66, and the number of retail enforcement actions, 28. There's a lot with maple as far as color and grading that that can go wrong, but that's to keep kind of the high quality of Vermont maple.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Is that typically what the violations are?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. It's usually yeah. It's usually, you know, intensity or and sometimes flavor if there's something that's, you know, off flavor. But, essentially, yeah, it's a grading density. So

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: that is just kind of a high failure rate. If 66 passed, you've got a third that didn't pass retail inspection. Mhmm. Is that typical?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Well, we just started tracking these. Okay. But I'd be happy to talk to Tucker and see if he has a sense of how common this is to be at 66%.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I can give you an anecdotal, and this isn't scientific, but there are a number of contests that are held at at fairs. And they have a and they sometimes have a north of 30 failure rate of entering the contest, getting past go to be so it could be could be something as simple. They brought it in a container that may have something in it before and it created an off flavor. It could have been the color wasn't right or the density. So there is a rate of not passing the grade, not upon, but not passing the grade in some of the contests. So what we do is we randomly may go into a retail place and pull something from the shelf and just, you know, look at it. And I think working with UVM Extension, working with Tucker and Sam and and the Ag Development Division, we are focused on making sure and the industry has helped us, asked us to work more on making sure we make sure we preserve that high quality. And there's so many new people getting into maple now, and I think that may be reflected in some of it as well. And it could be how the container sits on the shelf a certain line, because it can change if it's on the shelf for a long period of time. Representative Burtt may know more.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Yes, I'm just gonna say that, in, well, I think it goes for glass too, but their grade just tends to darken in the geog over time. And a lot of that, I mean, there's some control and that you can try to predict how much it'll drip. And I would assume that that's a lot of it. And I think especially now that we use high levels of concentrate before we boil, we start off at a high grade and then over. I think

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: it has more opportunity for it

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: to drop in the container. But the labeling is based less on the color now and more on flavor. Think partly for that reason it gives more flexibility for packagers to call it either amber or dark robust. You can be in either category with the same syrup, but it's more based on flavor than color. But I think it makes it a little bit ambiguous to the packager. I don't know. That's It's a substantial issue. And

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: if you get into the scale of packers, they're blending as well. So that's another element that's part of it. But we are doing at the packer levels, as Nicole mentioned, we're starting to do more inspections there.

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: Yes. Thank you. And this to you, Anson, or possibly to doctor Simon Burke, but the container, if there's glass, there's a plastic of sorts or it could be about a tin, that you'd find that what the material is, the quality or the change that occurs from shelf life depends on the materials packaged in.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I have not heard of anything of flavor related to that. The more I hear about is the color could change depending on what the container is, but I have not heard the flavor component of it. I mean, if you look at the evolution of the maple industry, it comes and goes of what kind of how it's marketed and how consumer wants. And I think probably the consumer right now is in that they like to see what's inside the package. The glass seems to be the but there are others that do just fine with the regular job. I haven't heard the flavor part. I have heard the color changing over time if it's on the shelf too.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: My experience.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Making a note to schedule some people's testimony from.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: And they do Mark at Arkansas hired at UVM does a lot of tasting, flavoring, all that kind of stuff. It's a science by itself.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Alright. Are we ready for cool?

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yes.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. So country of origin labeling, cool. It's to ensure that produce and retail outlets are properly labeled. This is really complaint based, report based. So the measure that we have here is that the percentage of assigned reviews are completed. So whenever we get somebody calling us needing a review, Tucker does go out and do it 100% of the time. Alright. Produce safety inspection. So this is the food safety and consumer protection side of it. The other one that I read was in Ag Dev. So you'll see here the number of produce terms verified in inventory. This is again in Windham 717 matches the other the other slide that you saw. The number of inspections, 15. The number of consumer complaints resolved, NA, we didn't get any in 2025. The number of enforcement actions, five, and percent past inspection, 47%. This is also one where there's usually some point of technical assistance or education that we provide, and then we go back and reinspect or or update. But usually things aren't a 100% correct the first time we go out. Plant industry. Okay. So they worked really hard on these performance measures, and I I think they're great, and they are new for 2025. So the first is the percent inspected with regulated disease, and this is specifically in regards to apiary registration inspection and zero. That's what we love to see. Percent in compliance on first sample analysis for Vermont manufacturers when we're talking about beneficial products registration, 65%. The percent passing exam on first try when we're talking about certified applicator registrations, 66%. Percent in compliance on first sample analysis for Vermont manufacturers when we're talking about feed products registration is 77%. For mosquito control, the number of mosquitoes collected and identified in calendar year 2025 was 89,179.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Aw. I wish. It's like Not

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: quite all of them, but you know? The percent inspected that received stopped sales, and this is when we're talking about plant nursery inspections, 10%. Percent of inspections resulting in enforcement for pesticide use compliance, this one is also quite high at 57%.

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: I don't know if you

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: guys have any questions about plant industry, and then I can move on to Vale.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Well, I yeah. I was just gonna say it's too bad that representative Nelson's not here because I know he took a real interest in the beneficial products updates that we did last year. So Mhmm. Anyway, 65% there. Okay. Representative Burtt.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Yeah. I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit to these percentages, like the fee products registration for sample analysis. It's kind of similar to the maple numbers a little bit, like 77% that's significant. Like, yeah, could you speak to that more? So

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: when we're talking about these products being registered, we have staff that take samples, and we want to make sure that what is in the product matches what is on the label. So we do that through sampling analysis at our lab. And so really, it's just showing that out of the samples that we take 77% of the time, what's in it matches the label.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Which means the 23% of the time it doesn't. Is there I guess that

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah. And then there's

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: follow ups. Yeah. Yeah. Is there

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: any follow-up that could be done

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: in the past? Or Yeah. So there is follow-up. We provide technical assistance to the manufacturers locally and national companies, we do that. So it's it's a report to them that they need to fix it. I'm not a specialist in this division, so I don't know if secretary Tebbetts has more to add on that.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: No. That's essentially it. It's a you know, if if something is is not in compliance, the next step is to go back to them and say, hey. We found this. You know, how do we fix it?

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: It seems like I mean, can understand that you're going to get changes in color of syrup over time and that some people might not understand how to a lot of people, apparently, might not understand how to apply pesticides. But putting the right label on a bag of feed products, that seems like it would be harder to get wrong.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: And I think maybe Steve in plant industry probably could explain that whether it's, you know, whether it's common industry wide because they changing their product or if it's just

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: know? Yeah. Hope so to see it anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: There's so many different feed products, and I will not pretend to be an expert in how they are packaged or or what the the common issues are that come up. I know it's not necessarily that what it says is in the bag isn't in the bag. It's more so like the ratio of how much of a certain, you know, mineral or vitamin it's supposed to be in it is not necessarily measuring that way. But, yeah, I would say Stephanie Smith or Steve would be probably great to have come in, and they could explain this in detail. I always find it quite fascinating.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Representative Ruth, last question is how did you have one or

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: two interns count the mosquitoes?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Army.

[Rep. Mollie S. Burke]: All

[Rep. John O'Brien]: the FTEs have to count over 5,000.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. Moving on to Vail. So the number of completed analytical tests for clients provided by our lab was 35,489 in 2025. As you can see, these performance measures have not changed. We've been tracking these for the past several years and continues to increase year over year. The number of unique Vermont based projects who rely on Vail's analytical services for essential monitoring, consumer protection, animal health, and regulatory compliance is 90. So our lab, as I'm sure most of you know, they serve all of the divisions well, not Ag Dev, but they serve all of our regulatory divisions within the Agency of Agriculture, as well as multiple divisions within the Department of Environmental Conservation and Fish and Wildlife over at the Agency of Natural Resources. So we share. Okay. Next is water quality. These performance measures also have not changed. So in 2025, the number of regulatory farm visits was at 375. The number of nonregulatory technical assistance visits is up 2,000. Acres of production area inspected, 2,643 percentage of compliant production areas by acre, 70% number of educational events, 186. And the value of on farm implementation investments, this is when we're talking about the different granting programs that we do, where we partner with NRCS on that. 8,209,672. And then we move into our carry forward funds, which I'm happy to talk about or perhaps Amy is happy to talk about any specific items on here that that you might want more detail on. But generally speaking, these are all multi year granting programs where the funding is contractually obligated in existing grant agreements. The caveat here is we also have $27,975 set aside for Pay Act. And I'm trying to see if there's any other outliers here. Amy, jump in if there's one specifically I should talk to speak to.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: You maybe Amy or Nicole, whoever, just explained for all of our sakes what we what is a carry carry forward fund? And is it counted in the budget? I mean, I I think we all can understand that it wasn't spent, so we're somehow gonna try and spend it this year. But is it in the budget? In the in next year's budget?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: It's not part of the base budget. So it would have been part of the budget in the year that we received it. So some of these are base appropriations that are obligated. Some of them are onetime appropriations that are obligated, but essentially, they're funds that were appropriated to our agency in a previous fiscal year that are sitting right now in executed grant or contract agreements.

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So whatever appropriation it was originally funded for, If we have encumbered funds at the end of the year, those funds will carry forward into the next year essentially being added to. So if it is a base budget appropriation like agricultural development, in this case it would be at in addition to our ask for 27 because we've encumbered those funds they just haven't been expended yet. Does that make sense? Yes.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Like the working lands we heard of yesterday. It would be like that. The last 10% we haven't closed out that great. Correct.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: That's still in our bank account. Yes. And it just it's already been we know where it's going to go but yeah.

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Right, it's been committed it just hasn't you know we can't control when necessarily when a project ends or when somebody submits an invoice for a claim to for a payment.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Just quickly, what's the schedule for dairy farm inspections? Is it LFO and MFOs every year?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: LFOs every year, MFO is every three years, small farm is every seven years, unless there's a call out or a complaint or something happened on the farm, go out much sooner.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: So that's the schedule then? Yeah, that's the schedule. And with ANR usually involved with

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: From time to time ANR does go with us, yes.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: So thank you for that explanation there, Nicole. And so so should we is there anything to point out that's unusual about these carryovers?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Don't think so. I think pretty standard just that they haven't closed out all the programming and executed all the grants, but I think it's pretty standard. There's nothing that's significant.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: No. Nothing significant. Most of them are in multiyear granting programs where it's some sort of construction project or, you know, a business initiative that takes a longer period of time to actually fully implement, like, maybe a phased project.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Well, so there you have it. That's that's our proposal. And and just to highlight that, you know, the two things is the fee reduction and going to general fund, the one new position, and then protecting all the programs that are currently there essentially a level funded. It's where we're at. Things seem to be pretty stable in the world on the federal front. Ones that have been of concern have been addressed. So that's, you know, it's day to day, but that's kind of where we're at.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Representative Burtt, I know I think you had 20,000,000 in federal funds this year in your budget at 05/27.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Similar to what you what was in

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: what what you received for

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: the by 05/26.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: And a lot of those are just standard programs that we have from time to time, whether it's through meat inspection, cost share programs. But some of those grants that are related to ARPA or what came out of the pandemic are coming to an end. And then there were some that were started in the previous administration, the federal level, that they decided to either discontinue or not re up. And those related more to the local food purchasing one. LFPA was the big one. There is some chatter and there is a bill in Congress to recreate that program. And I think it does have some bipartisan support, know, whether they can find the funding for that. But I think nationally people really liked it both on the farm side and also on the food security side because it helped farmer, but it also got, you know, local food to people in need. So there is some chatter in Washington to revive that, whether they can find the necessary dollars to do it, I don't know. But that was the biggest one for us as far as the federal reduction. The other pockets seem to be stable and there could be new programs. They haven't announced any new programs. Those could be coming. The latest this week was they hope to do a farm bill this year, and that has been put on hold. I think we're two years behind, and that's a five year blueprint. Some of it is contained in the the bill that was passed, the big almirbus bill that was passed, and we are okay on all the federal programming with shutdowns and everything because agriculture was included till October, So that was one of the pockets. So this recent one that we had where some agencies were, you know, put in a time out for a couple of days, and we weren't part of that. The federal agriculture was taken care of prior to that. So I think our next timeline would be October, would be the next deadline for the federal stuff.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Just a follow-up on that question. I think I see 20,000,000 in this year's budget, but do you

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: have numbers on what you received last year?

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I can get you those.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Just out of curiosity. Sure. I that.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I have them. Can actually bring it up now. So one, to answer your original question, what was our budget last year? Was 59,990,000.00 compared to $661,000,000 this year. And then what was the specific area that you were looking for?

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: What was coming through federal money?

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Total federal funds. For both of Okay.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So our total federal funds from last year was 23,990,000.00, roughly 40% of our budget.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Similar. It was a little bit of a match. Yep. Okay.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Mhmm. Thank you. Is there a slide, Nicole, that shows, like, just the total budget, so that 61,000,000 on one slide?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yes. I can bring that up for you right now.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: And how it's broken down by not by revenue, but not by, you know, source, but by outlay. Mhmm. So let's do this.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Alright. So it's right here. This is the breakdown you're looking for?

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: No. No. I'm looking for so if you go to one of the crosswalks Yep. With one of the spreadsheets, whether there's a spreadsheet like that that is, you know, the whole 61. Out of 10.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Oh, do we have By division.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah. By division. No.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: No. We don't have the full thing, honestly, because it just wouldn't fit on the slide, but we can definitely get that for you.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yes. Can we just quickly then sort of go through a minute? And maybe it's here just six different slides, but, like, how how does that 60 then break down for each of the divisions? Yeah.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Okay. So we'll start with admin here, And then you can see on the bottom, we're at four point or $4,187,003.22 for admin. Yep. We're at 10,201,260 for food safety and consumer protection. And you can see, like, how it's broken out from general, special, federal, interdepartmental transfer here. But just to get to the total Yep.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: We we have 10,000,000. And then right above that 10,000,000 there, that's the change from last year. Yep. So it's gone up to by 600,000 in this case. Mhmm. Okay.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yep. Then we move on to Ag Dev, where we're at 20,070,306, and you'll see that that's a a reduction of $2,668,005.70.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: And that looks like it's because of the federal funding reduction. Yes. Correct. And I don't know whether you already covered this and but maybe you can just mention again, if you did, why what what's happening there?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So we had a couple of programs that were reduced. So we have the local food systems and schools reduction of $300,000 and that was due to USDA rescinding the grant. And then we had local food purchase assistance, which is the one that I sent a link on, with a reduction of $500,000 due to rescinding the grant. So we're at $800,000. Then we had $30,000, which was just simply that Vermont Dairy Promotion Council decided to fund other things. And then it looks like RFSI would have been an increase. Do you want me to go to the decreases, Amy? Or go ahead.

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So part of part of the rest of that would be the dairy business innovation

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

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Reduction in the contracting portion.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Okay, thank you. Okay. We have

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: more questions on this one here.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: I'm just going to, you know, is kind of a general question I have for all departments, but do you have a system in place of LaLonde was impressed with bunch of weight measures,

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: you know, they're very precise and have very

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: certain systems to control and make sure they're doing the job that they're supposed to be doing. But I guess, kind of more broadly speaking through your agency, what do you do to maintain a level of quality of your work and make improvements? You have someone who's small and is in particular to do that and just continue efficiency improvements across the agency, what does that look like?

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: And I think that's, part of it is the performance measures, and making sure that we meet our, we wanna get to a certain number of stores per month. So they, depending on what division it is, what employee it is. So we know that we wanna do X number of inspections. We wanna make sure we respond quickly if there's something of complaint driven or something happened at a plant that they're out there. So I think it's kind of like, you know, week to week, month to month, but at the end of the year, of look at the scale of how much work is being done with getting to those, particularly consumer protection. But there's, you know, Amy and on the budget side, Amy is always sending us updates of our targets, you know, where where we are on on spending, where we're around on the revenue side to make sure we're keeping track with our licensing and registrations. And some of it's seasonal, depending on the time of the year where people are doing that. But it's a pretty tight shot of dealing with the revenue coming in, making sure that we're not keeping our budgets and not you know, overshooting our budget. And I I don't think we've come in for budget adjustment very much over the last few years. I don't I don't think we were in this year. So but there are emergencies from time to time that that will need stuff.

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: Uh-huh, perhaps Jed Lipsky. Just as a comment about is it such a waste measure? One thing that impressed me is, you know, Mark, who's the of the pop up, all of his experts in different areas led in speaking to us in their various departments and worked hard to gauge their leadership. He was a natural extroverted high level of knowledge, he was trying to grow that throughout his entire department. That was visible and interesting.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Yeah, well, thank you. It's a small group, but they do, as you saw on the slides, a number of things they do. It's unbelievable. How much they do, and it could be a deli scale, it could be a gas pump, it could be an EV charger. I with the chair of the transportation committee today, and he wants an update on the EV chargers, and and that's a whole new realm of what they do. All new world.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Nicole, just one last question. Could you bring up the the crosswalk for the clean water?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Do you wanna yes. I can definitely do that.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah. So can you just talk a little bit about so the special fund column go I mean, most of the increases, all of it, I guess, is coming from special fund. Mhmm. Why is there a big increase there?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: I'm I'm gonna look to Amy on pointing the increase out on special fund. I wanna

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Specifically for just the clean water?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Specifically just for water quality. Yeah.

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So, the bulk of the increase in clean water, which is 2,600,000.0, is due to the passing of the Clean Water Board's budget, which is increasing our state clean water grants by 2,542,000. So that is literally the bulk.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: That's what I thought, but thank you, Amy. So

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: that's the the clean water board makes the recommendation. This mirrors the recommendation rack. Correct.

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: And there's a there's a pretty involved process getting to the proposed budget where there's interagency discussion, public comment. The board is independent. So it's an independent board with members of the public, members of administration. We all get together, decide a budget, they approve it, and that's built into the governor's proposed budget. And then here we are. So that's where it comes from. So that's significant. It's very important that we have that funding to do our programming. It's really, you know, there's a component of agriculture, there's a component of D. C, there's a component of transportation, there's municipalities.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Will this mean actually for farmers? Well, this

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: is programming, you know, technical assistance. There could be some grants that help with infrastructure. It helps with our employees practices. Best management and, you know Yeah. Practices.

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: We do have to remember, though, that some of this increase covers our just cost of doing business. And then also, you see on the water quality side that we had a decrease in federal funds because some of this is increased clean water board recommendation and a decrease from federal funding sources that have dried up.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yep. Permanently dried up?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: Permanently dried up. They were, like, American Rescue Plan Act dollars, I believe.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Yeah. Okay. Good. Thank you. Let's go with one last question, or at least one more question.

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Just a quick one. Yeah. We heard from FBI yesterday that the sort of all in cost for an FTE is around $150,000 So is that consistent with your hire? Yeah. Yeah.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Anybody have any other questions? Don't wanna cut it off if we're still so we we're in we're operating in a somewhat new environment this year as far as the appropriations process, and the appropriations committee says they're gonna be looking to us for guidance on not just one time and not just, little increases, little or big, I guess, but just basically anything that stands out is just a lot of money. So we may get asked questions that we, you may get them directly or maybe they'll be asking us to ask, come back to you. If there's anything else that you feel like you want to highlight for us that this is important, As as you started out with, we're in a tough year. Yeah. And I think

[Anson Tebbetts — Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: this is all the years that maybe I say this every year. I don't think I've said it every year. I think this is probably one of your most challenging with so many significant issues. But agriculture plays an important role in that. You know, your property tax system, you know, farmers are right in the thick of that. You got rural issues you're dealing with, so that's that's important. And if we can help you in any way to, you know, sort of the other people's priorities, if we can help you in any way with, if you need additional information on that, can be helpful with that. And the only thing I would ask if there if there is something that, you know, comes along with it, sometimes if we're asked to administer something, just consider that we may need some dollars to manage that as well. And that's always and that's reflected. I think that's, you know, the one ask we haven't come in for employee in a long time, but that's part of it. Just one of those back of the mind of things as we move forward, but we're happy to engage. And if we need some data or information or reflection on some of those, our representative on the appropriations committee is representative Stevens. So we've been contact with them, and and I believe we're going in tomorrow to present our budget for

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: the house.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: Good. Well, thank you for making time to meet with us. Yeah. And

[Rep. John O'Brien]: Just one more thing that came up yesterday. Do you have any vacancies? Like, FPR was talking about vacancy savings because they haven't hired back people. But is that Yeah. You're at full

[Amy Mercer — Financial Director, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: recruiting for the one right now?

[Nicole Dubuque — Chief Operating Officer, Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets]: So we have three vacancies right now. One is an ag engineer who is based in Middlebury, and that position is essentially federally funded. And so we held on hiring through the shutdown. So we're like in final stages of interviewing with that. And then we have two animal health specialist positions that we are filling right now. And those came about when we had two seasoned staff retire at the end of last year.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt]: Thank you.

[Emmett Mosley — Addison County Food Hub Supervisor, CVOEO]: Alright. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you.

[Rep. David Durfee — Chair, House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry]: We'll take a break

[Jed Lipsky — Committee Clerk]: until