Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Perfect. Yeah. Alright. Why don't we go ahead then?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Alright. We're good? Great. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to present on this today. I present with the official UVM disclaimer. This is strictly not testimony for or against either of these bills. I'm completely agnostic to them. I'm here to present my views, not the views of the university or Cal's or extension, but just to talk about my position from where I come from. So I should tell you where I come from. So I was born and bred Vermont farm kid, grew up on a dairy farm in Orange County, next door to next, you know, metaphorically next door to John. Attended UVM in the 90s and after serving there, I worked with the extension service and the research arm of the UVM apple team. I was a commercial fruit grower for three years in Vermont and Massachusetts, and then came back basically at the turn of the century as the director and manager of the orchards and vineyards, which I still serve that role now. I was a research technician and specialist for fourteen years until I attained my graduate degrees and took over as the faculty director of the fruit program. So my role, I'm the tree fruit and viticulture specialist for the state. I'm the extension technical service provider, as well as department head and a few other pieces. So that's my background and what gives me the reason that people reach out and ask me to speak out on some of these bills that pop up. So what the UVM program does, we used to be called the UVM apple team. We are a little more broad now because we also cover viticulture and some other tree fruits. My work as far as research has mostly been on cultivar rootstock germplasm evaluation. So we plant something, look at it in the ground for ten years and determine how well it works in Vermont conditions. I spent about twelve or thirteen years working on evaluation of organic apple production. Last time I looked on my CV, I think the word organic shows up 93 times. So I do speak fluently organic, and again, I'm agnostic to production system and not against conventional organic, whatever it might be. Spent a number of years working in cider apple research, that's a little bit aside from this, conduct various public service like this. I teach a number of courses, including sustainable orchard management, viticulture, and agricultural policy and ethics. And my students will actually have to evaluate the recording of this after Thursday's class, tell me how I did. And then I have an extension program. So in my extension program, that's a lot of jobs to have. And my ability to do the extension side of things really comes by working as a team. And I say a team like regionally. I'm the chair of the Northeast IPM Tree Fruit Working Group. So this is a group of extension professionals from really Michigan to Maine to Virginia. And we confer with one another to make sure that we're giving recommendations to growers that are science based, that we are kind of having strength in numbers. There's much fewer of us than there were over time. There's been about a, depending on the state and the discipline, 40% to 60% reduction in the number of extension professionals available to growers. So we share our newsletters, we write in each other's newsletters, we collaborate, and that's sort of been my biggest piece in the last few years is helping to coordinate the work of this group. I am the primary person. This phone is what rings when Greg's got a question or any other grower has a question. I have a mailing list of about 400 people for apples and grapes throughout New England. Send out about 50, not quite that many now, probably thirty, thirty five bulletins a year. Pull together the annual meeting of the Tree Fruit Growers Association, the Grape and Wine Council, and work regionally. So that's establishing sort of my background. Apples and so I'm specifically talking about apples for the rest of this. Apples, when we think back historically about Vermont agriculture, you always think of milk, you always think of maple. Apples was, and to some degree still is really the third largest crop and really the third one that is, and the last one that has actually produced enough quantity to export out of the state. Before 1995 or so, late 80s, early 90s, Vermont was shipping about a million bushels of apples anywhere from England to Texas. We had a robust, I wouldn't say robust, we had a steady export market. We were putting apples on trucks going to grocery stores, and that was about 85% of our production was wholesale, large scale production. When I look at data, you can see that, you know, things that there's a reason why my data ends in 2017, and that's when the New England Ag Statistics Service stopped collecting granular level data. And if I ever get some funding to do a new strategic plan for the apple industry, which we did thirteen years ago, We intend to update these data with some local data, but I can tell you from my experience, our bearing acreage is down to probably 13 to 1,500 acres now, depending upon whether or not one or two of larger orchards goes out of business any particular year or takes blocks out of production, should say. That's down from about 3,000 acres when I started in this business in 1995. So we're about half the size in terms of acreage. Just like with dairy, the analog is very similar. The value is almost the same. So we have fewer people producing almost as much value in apples, not as much volume of apples. And that's because we've switched from about 85% wholesale to 70%, 75% retail. And those retail growers are fetching a much higher price than someone who's putting it on a truck and expecting to get a check from a packing house. So we're capturing a higher price. I think we're seeing more kind of embeddedness in the communities in terms of how we relate to customers. Our largest grower in the state who testified last Thursday, I think it was, Bill Shore, is sort of in between that, grows arguably a quarter of the acreage in the state and sells almost all of it within the state. So he's kind of doing a little bit of both of those, large scale production, modern production systems, which I'll be talking about, but also going close to the consumer with it. We are about, if you add in cider and particularly with fermented cider being such a high value product, we're about a $30,000,000 business. So half I'd say or so of maple and a fraction of dairy, of course. These orchards are located throughout the state. The major production areas, of course, being the Champlain Valley, especially Addison County, Isle Of The Champlain Islands and Windham County, Windham, Windsor to some degree. But there are commercial orchards in every county except Essex. Here's Greg from a long time ago. This is a slide from the strategic planning session I did twelve years ago, which we had across the street at the Capitol Plaza. And we did a survey of growers. And I just highlight this to mention that orchardening is a long term business, right? People get into this for generations. It's not something that you can start and stop and move around your piece of land. You stick a tree in the ground, you better be there for a while to take care of it. And in fact, we'll see soon, you don't make any money off that tree for a long time. And we have seen that orchards now as of ten years ago anyway, most of the orchards in the state were planning to send their farms onto the next generation. Most ten or thirteen years ago, were looking to increase their production. I'm not sure how true that is right now. Some were looking to increase acreage. I'm not sure how true that is right now, but most folks were looking to increase their production even on the same amount of acreage. And how do we do that? This is another general table that shows the breakdown of the number of producers or the share of producers in the different size categories. So less than 500 bushels per acre, that's a pretty small, one to three acre, pick your own, makes up about a third of our growers. At the other end, about 20% of our growers were growing 25,000 bushels or more, and that's probably at the 40 to 50 acre and up. Right now in this day and age, I would say five of our producers are producing the vast majority, meaning 85% of the fruit grown in the state. And that's just because they're larger. So they, you know, when you have a one two hundred acre orchard that's 20 of yours, that's, you know, just the numbers are, you know, just a scale of production. We have become a much more diverse industry in terms of how we cover wholesale to retail, post harvest processing, you know, cider, that sort of thing. Then the old days where you grew Macintosh, just enough empires to pollinate the Macintosh, put them on a truck to shore them co op and sell them somewhere elsewhere and hope you get a check-in in April. In April? Yeah. Usually, by the time it made it through the production system, your checks weren't showing up until the spring of the following year. So that's where Yankee Farm Credit comes in. That's wholesale production. Orchard systems. When I talk about systems, this is a graphic I pull from a textbook for it's over thirty years old. We didn't think about this when we thought about orchards, right? Big trees, you know, and Bill talked a bit about this at his testimony, how he would moved his orchard from 30 trees per acre to 2,000. Those are really on the extremes. Some of the numbers I'll be showing you are a little bit in between that. But we have been changing how we grow an apple tree for the last one hundred years, certainly for the last fifty pretty rapidly. And that comes down to really changing the architecture of how a tree is grown. And we're now at a space where we have both systems, kind of the older traditional style. You'll hear me use the term freestanding central leader. You'll see that on some upcoming slides where the tree holds itself up with a central trunk versus what we call tall spindle. There's some variations where you have to hold that tree up with a trellis, and that's the more intensive high input, high output, high production systems. And there's a lot of pieces that come into play here that make this, I would say, quite a complicated system compared to the older style, more resilient, much more high labor systems that were used. So we can see some differences in orchards here. I believe this one on the left is UVM horticulture center. These are freestanding central leader trees. This is what most people think of when you think of an orchard versus something from this is Barney Hodges, Sunrise Orchard in Cornwall. This is a modern tall spindle planting, probably four years old. In here, probably got two twelve trees per acre. Yeah, my arrow is showing. In here, you probably got 1,200 trees per acre, and that's been the real shift. The expense in putting in the hot tall spindle orchard is an order of magnitude higher than the other system. So why would people do this? About twenty years, Terrence Robinson is one of the main horticulturalists at Cornell. These higher density systems were being installed in Europe probably thirty, maybe forty years ago amongst some of the most progressive growers. And Terrence was kind of going on a tour about twenty years ago to convince folks in the Northeast that this is the way we should be growing apples. And this chart, I'll show you a different version of it coming up, my own version, but this chart is looking at different types of apple training systems. None of these is that old freestanding central leader system, but they're all different variations of high density. This is from a European journal, so divide that by 2.4 to get the number of trees per acre, but you can see you're talking about, you know, thousand to 1,200 trees per acre versus a couple 100. So that's what I was showing earlier. These graphs is called a net present value graph. So this is a way to look at the cost and returns of an investment, whether it's an orchard or anything over the long term. And so it takes a dollar and it discounts that dollar by the interest rate over time. And so you can look at how things will perform over time. You'll see that in year zero, when you plant the trees, there's a high cost, right? So I guess in year one is when started. So more trees cost more money, you know, so this is $50,000 an acre or a hectare twenty years ago, so that's $20. This is Bill mentioned the number 50. I think if you own the land, it's more like $40.38 to $40,000 per acre before you've seen an apple, well before you've seen an apple. And then the fewer apples, the fewer trees you have, the less infrastructure, it costs less to install that. But the production is lower, the full yield maturity, and even more so, it takes longer to get those fruits. So the longer you go between sticking a tree in the ground, spending $35,000 $40,000 and getting a return, the further out you're gonna have before you break even, before you cross this plane. And you'll see that even under these 20 year olds conditions, and there's a lot of different back background that goes into this, you know, you're out there a decade before you're breaking even.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: That's amazing that none of these break even until ten, twelve years.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And ask questions as we go. John first? The productive life of an apple tree, has

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: that changed at all, like with the new systems?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: So the argument is made that by the time you get out to twenty, so these are always done twenty, twenty five years. The argument is made that twenty five years from now, the next variety is what people will want. You often are losing money on growing older varieties, Empires, Macintosh. You should be growing Honeycrisp or Sweet Tango or Evercrisp or some of these newer ones. So the argument is the market's going to change before the fruit trees will stop producing.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. So you're saying this is net present value. I'm looking out there following the black line of tall spindle and you're getting out there about twelve years.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yep.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: At twelve years, you've reaped enough fruit to be at breakeven.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yeah. Now these include I'll I'll show you my this is my version here. So I have a this spreadsheet. Someday I'm gonna publish the actual spreadsheet and get some more use out of it. But I've been using this for twenty years where I can enter different parameters into this and generate my own curves. So this is based upon, so this does pay anybody who's going into business needs to factor paying themselves a management cost. So this does include a management cost in there. So this is just strictly on profitability. And you'll see that under this other model where we are, I'd have to look back in the model where the prices are higher under that old Fornell model, it's all wholesale, high productivity grocery store fruit at six dollars margin between cost of inputs and your returns. When we look at another system where you're either looking at a pick your own or higher value varieties, you can see that a tall spindle system like this one, you're really looking at about five years, five to seven years, and the freestanding central leaders, you're further out there at closer to that nine or ten years. And this is what's convincing people, particularly retail orchards who are fetching a higher price to adopt the new systems. So one the things I wanted to highlight was when you look at these systems, you've got these big trunks at about 200 trunks per acre, and you've got these little skinny trunks which often have thinner bark at 1,200 per acre. I use Bill's number of 2,000 here actually, after he reported, and I just did some simple arithmetic. If you look at the trunk diameter, the length of what I call the vulnerable shank, so this is basically what's below the snow that could be fed on by voles or hit with an herbicide boom or something. This is where I talked about this. This is about trunks. It's not necessarily about the materials. And you multiply that by trees per acre. The tall spindle has about two and a half times as much vulnerable trunk area as the older style systems. Also the older style systems tend to get shaggier, thicker bark, so they tend to have a little bit more resistance. They also, because they have a greater circumference, if a vole, which is the field mouse is what feeds on the trunks, which matters for herbicides because ground cover encourages vole habitat. If a vole chews on this much of a trunk and that's your whole trunk, the tree's dead. Whereas if it chews on this much of a trunk, got a six inch trunk that then the tree can usually survive or you could graft around it to help it to survive. So we have substantially increased the vulnerability of trees by moving to these smaller systems. Also have a whole body of research and I always fall back on Ian Merwin, was one of the other Cornell palmologists who spent thirty years, basically spent his entire career studying ground cover management systems. And I'll go into some of his slides. I could have pulled out of a number of his papers over time. But the first thing we look at is just basic agronomy. Weeds reduce the growth of your crop. And we can see from one of his papers from about fifteen years ago, looking at different ground cover management systems, including mulching, but looking at sod, so mowed sod, a post emergent herbicide, pre emergent herbicides, we could see a substantial reduction in growth, total biomass in a grass based system where you didn't have any weed control. We'll look at those other components in a minute. This is a really messy slide, but I wanted to just mention another trial that was done at Cornell about twelve years ago. The main thing to look at here is they were looking at a whole bunch of different herbicide treatments versus an untreated control. And this is the main thing I want you to get at, which is what matters in untreated control in terms of TCSA, that's trunk cross sectional area, size of the trunk, apples per tree, bushels per acre, you can see not treating your weeds versus any of the weed treatments has a substantial decrease in productivity. So we need to control weeds in these high density systems. And this happened across two different orchards and the level of weed control basically is correlated to the profitability of the particular orchard.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: So if this was an organic orchard, how would they factor into this?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: So the vast, vast majority of organic orchards in The US are in the High desert of Washington state.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: We have some in-

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: We have some.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: One, I know.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: We have a couple. Yeah. And they are much lower in productivity in terms of bushels per acre in yield. It's less than 1% in the acreage in the state for a lot of reasons. So I don't know. I mean, I've got a fact sheet out there. I meant to bring a few, if you really wanted, you can Google it, but it's non chemical management weeds in Vermont orchards. There's a lot of different techniques that can

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: be

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: used. All of them have substantial drawbacks and some of them are really expensive. Bill texted me in the morning and said, Well, if you can put in a plug that I can get some money for a laser weeder, maybe they'll help me out there. And I don't know how much laser weeders go for, it sounds expensive. The oftentimes organic orchards wind up outgrowing the weeds by using larger rootstocks and older style systems and end up having to wait that fifteen years reach profitability. That's the trade off. I say that as if there's enough of an end to make generalizations, there's really not. And you can read my dissertation if you want, but the conclusion out of it was this might not be the best system for Vermont. It's just we have too many pests, many things that want to grow under the trees, too many diseases. It's a tough thing. Keeping an eye on my time. I think I'll be wrapping up soon. So looking at some of the different ways that you can manage, we mentioned post emergent and pre emergent herbicides. Pre emergent herbicides are not really that common in Vermont. So this is where you apply an herbicide to the soil and that herbicide prevents weed seeds from germinating. And there's a lot of reasons why it doesn't work. We have a lot of moisture, so that tends to wash it out of the root zone. They're expensive, they're very specific in terms of which weeds they manage. And if you are preventing biomass from growing, so you have a clean strip, you're not allowing nutrient cycling and organic cycling to happen. This is one of the big findings for me in Merwin's work was let some stuff grow later in the season and then kill it just as we do with no till cover crops with dairy farms, and that allows for increased soil organic matter and you get a higher quality soil.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Hold on a second. There you go. You're good.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: So there's three main post emergent herbicide options, glyphosate being one of the first ones, it's a systemic post emergent. So systemic means it gets into the plant tissue. Despite some of the popular media claims, does have relatively, and I would even say for a pesticide, low mammalian toxicity, but it kills trees. You hit the tree wrong on that thin bark, on those lower limbs, and I have done it myself, I've done long term damage to both orchard and vineyard crops using glyphosate, you have to time it very carefully and apply it very carefully to not have that collateral damage. Glufosinate is a non systemic post emergent, so this is one that it's similar to paraquat in that it will kill what it hits, but it doesn't get into the tree. Again, low mammalian toxicity, when I say REI, that's a re entry interval of twelve hours versus four hours, so you only have to wait four hours before you go into a glyphosate treated orchard or field, twelve hours for glufosinate. A plant pathologist at Cornell about fifteen years ago was finding issues with these trunk cankers that were forming on glufosinate treated trees to the point where Cornell and Rutgers actually stopped recommending the use of this herbicide. I'm not to the point where I think we shouldn't use it at all, but it's again, you have to be careful with using this particular one. And then there's paraquat, non systemic post emergent, certainly higher mammalian toxicity. It is considered to be inactivated by absorption to soil particles, which is why it has a fairly short reentry interval for something that's that toxic when you think about something like, well, guthion's gone, Fosmet, Imidan, which is a organophosphate insecticide, that is a seven day reentry interval. It's hot stuff and it stays in the canopy and it stays hot, whereas this tends to break down over time. There's actually, I was surprised actually, reread the label, there's actually no pre harvest interval on this, which means you can spray it the day that you harvest, not the people do, you've got better things to do at this time. So there's generally lower potential for damage to young trees from the use of paraquat. I wanted to highlight rodent damage just to mention that, remember our vulnerable trees, rodent girdling will often kill 30 to up to a 100% of trees. I have killed a whole block of trees by not managing weeds correctly. So most of our growers that are using rodenticides are using them in a bait station like this, which is very different from how the bag says about playing at £50 per acre. I've been using the same bag of rodenticide for I think ten years. We fill up the bait station and we come back in the spring, we dump it back in a bucket, we save it, we put it back in, or we rotate different ones. So the best management practice for rodent management, it's good weed management, trunk guards when you can afford them, although they get very expensive and the labor gets prohibitive on 1,200 trees per acre, and the precision application of rodenticides. I also just want to mention bore damage. So there's a lot of insects that like to burrow into these tree trunks, and some of these dwarfing rootstocks have something called burnauts, which are these little adventitious roots, because these things like their rootstocks, they like to root well, and this insect will bore into those root knots and cause substantial damage. And the more weeds you have at the base of the tree, the more bore issues you have. The previous method for managing borers was the use of chlorpyrifos insecticide, which the state decided to not reregister maybe five years ago, and I personally don't think that was a bad idea to not reregister it. And so we're really relying on sanitation and some other softer materials to treat it to the trunks. So to just show one piece of this, we have our freestanding central leader orchard. I've got an extra, I haven't figured out what that middle green one is there. It's a second piece, but what I wanted to show was we have our tall spindle orchard, which will attain us over twenty years, dollars 180,000, so $18,000 a year over time. We have our older style orchard, so we're so we're bringing making in twice the revenue. Doesn't mean we're necessarily profitable over the course of twenty years. If we were to model this out and subtract out 30% tree loss, and that can be a pretty mild number for either tree decline from weeds, rodent damage, herbicide damage from the use of glufosinate or glyphosate, that takes out 80% of our gross revenue over a twenty year period. So whatever we do, we need to protect those trunks. And I think I end with that. So any questions? That's just a QR code to my faculty page.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: So can you just go back to that? And I will say thank you for being conscious of the time that you're

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: We talking to the held

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: it. We did, yep. This is an important topic, so I don't want the committee to feel like we need to stop the conversation now if there are questions. Go ahead.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: Yeah, so I mean, sounds like both from what you've stated and from what we've heard from a couple of other farmers, like in terms of growing apples, paraquat is kind of the methodology that's used right now.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: I wouldn't actually wouldn't say that. It's one of the methodologies. I've actually never purchased paraquat in my life. I'm a licensed applicator up until last year. Did all the spraying at the farm. And the nature of our farm doesn't really lend itself for me to use paraquat, but it is one of the practices that's used.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: So I guess I have two questions. So, I mean, the bill is to limit or eliminate the use of paraquat because of the consequences for humans, mostly because of the likelihood that they don't allow Americans for some folks. And it seems like there's a pretty strong correlation. So, guess so the first question is, so this last slide where you say 30% loss, would that be about what you would expect if we suddenly said, oh, guess what? Pear claw is no longer a tool in your toolbox. You're saying 80% is the loss that would happen to most farms that have been using it.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: That's a number I picked based upon some experience with having certain years where I've had substantial rodent damage or herbicide damage from using other herbicides. So just because you may not be using paraquat doesn't mean you're not going use another herbicide. And the use of glufosinate or glyphosate lends yourself to potentially greater damage to the trees. I was in an orchard, this was probably fifteen years ago, chatting with the grower and one his workers drives by with an herbicide boom going, and I said, Oh, you're spraying Roundup. He says, Oh, no, that's Paraquat. And I, you know, I stepped back for a second for a little bit and it said, Didn't we kind of stop using it? There was a time when we kind of did use less of it, and the change to smaller trees, I think, has brought more people in. But he said to me, he says, Terry, paraquat doesn't kill trees. And that was the piece that to him said that this was something in these systems that And this is a wholesale grower putting all this fruit on a truck and sending it out. And so very different set of market conditions. And he said that the risk was too high to switch to one

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: of the

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: other So service what

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: percentage of apple growers do you think do use tart hair

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: right now? I don't know, but I have been hearing the 100 gallons that people have been throwing around, which sounds like a pretty small amount compared to a lot of the other materials that are used around the state. So I honestly don't know. I know that there's, I shouldn't say the number of growers, the number, the amount of, oh, do I wanna say? I haven't done a good survey, so I don't know. I'll say that.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Just to, actually we got a lot of questions. I'll try to be- Navigate. But just to sort of summarize what I think you've just said is there are other tools in the toolbox, but for certain growers growing a certain way, this would be the only effective way to?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: There's never one effective way. All of our way that we manage pests, whether it's diseases, insects, weeds, we're always rotating materials, mechanisms. I know one thing that Bill does at Champlain is he'll use herbicides early in the life of the orchard and then switch to mulches. I used to do that when I was certified organic as I would use cultivation and switch to mulches and then use organic herbicides. You're always using different tools in the toolbox. Jed?

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah, Bill, Doctor, if you would go back to, you had a slide where the pole were doing damage, Just wondered if before that damage to the pumps or that. Oh, this one? Yes. What were you doing with, you know, the one That one? No. You had it.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: That one. That one.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah. No. You're you're moving too quick.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: With levothyroxine. Okay. There. Yes. You referred to blisters Cankers. Cankers.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yes. So can you for us, those of us who are not blue growers, point out to cankers.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: So the canker is, this is the canker, so this is a dead area, is that showing? Show you here. Come on, there's a delay between my screen and your screen. So there's a canker right in there, you can see that line. I have necrotic tissue, and if you cut that

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: bark off, you can see it's just dead.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: So paraquat doesn't do that. Glyphosate kills trees a different way, but this is something that was found, and it doesn't happen all the time. People do still use this, particularly certain varieties that are more prone to this. Drought stress trees are more prone to this. But it's enough that, like I say, the professionals at Cornell and Rutgers for a number of years just said, stop using glufosinate, which we thought glufosinate was going to be a replacement for paraquat. Was safer to people, had the same sort of action. But then people were getting concerned about this. And younger stocks and that Younger stock is always more more susceptible. Yeah. It's just thinner bark. Yeah.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. Thank you, Chittenden. Jared, a couple questions. So other contact herbicides that you were used post emerge herbicides, I'm licensed. Dicamba, one of them to control your broth.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: No, it's a broadleaf herbicide so it'll damage the trees. I don't know- Even if you don't spray it on a foliate. It volatilizes, yeah.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Okay, all right. And I saw you had Prowl up there, wasn't it?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Prowl, so yeah, some 24 is used at times. I mean, some of those, AIM is another one. Those are selective herbicides. And so, if you have one specific set of weed issues, but often they're dealing with multiple weed issues. So, there are some others, but they're less commonly used. And what do organic people use for herbicide beside mulches? They use in things like copper sulfate? Not as an herbicide. They might be used as a a fungicide or a bactericide. Actually, the vast majority of remember, there's less than 1% of our orchard acreage is certified organic. So it's hard to make generalizations there, but most all of us apply copper sulfate first spray of the year as a fire blight management. It's a certified organic material. That doesn't mean that conventional or non organic people can't use it. So yeah, I know where you're going on that one, but it's not a commonly used herbicide. Right.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Representative Cooper?

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: Yeah, I just wondered, Terry, Cornell's recommendations these days, I mean, I Cornell used to be the go to and I'm guessing it still is for one of these recommendations. I remember them recommending that Perrotol be used at least for the first three years for their trees. Noticed Bill Sherb said the same thing that that's what they do with their young trees. Are you aware whether or not that's still a recommendation

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: for Paraquat? It is still their recommendation. You can see in this research trial when they had different treatments, the post emergence treatment was one, two, three, four, five applications of Paraquat in this particular trial. It is still their recommendation, particularly on young trees, because of the sensitivity of young trees to the other herbicides and even other mechanical. I mean, if you want to go online and look up organic orchard weed badger, you'll see a video of me taking out trees with a mechanical tree, you know, weed implement in organic orchard. So, can be a lot of damage that occurs for mechanical systems as well.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Are you aware of any

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: the in the state of New York, any discussion is, like, we're having about paraclot? Don't know. I don't really stay

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: up so much on their politics there. I have not heard that so much.

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: You mentioned earlier that in Europe is where they started the high density a few years ago. But then we also know the EU banned power clock. So what happened? What was the outcome of that? Did they just turn to a different IPM?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yeah, so they use different IPM. Also the majority of fruits that are grown similar to what's grown in The US, I'll say the majority of fruit, maybe not the majority of acreage in the EU is grown in Northern Italy and sort of Southern France. And again, not quite high desert, but in arid situations where weeds grow differently. There is a lot of mechanical cultivation that's done. There's also a lot more labor that's used in the EU that I don't know that we have labor issues here. That's the best I can I haven't dug much into the rest of their production system for the last few years?

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: The Orchard Management System started really They pioneered that before the Paraquat.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Oh, It was forty years ago that

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: they were designing these systems.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yeah. Which is right about when Paraquat came on the market. Yeah.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: I know you started by saying that you were speaking on your own behalf and not for the extension. Sure. But to Greg's point about Cornell issuing the experimentation there or their extension issuing recommendations, do we do that as well? I do. Sure. Wearing that hat. Wearing that hat.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Not this hat, but that hat. Sure. And I recommend that people control their weeds as using the tools that they best need to. What we typically fall back on is the New England Tree Fruit Management Guide, which is our online publication with all the lists of pesticides. I will tell people when to be wary. So, one of the common extension recommendations with something like glyphosate is put the jug away after July 4 because the trees are much more susceptible to that systemic damage. So, people will use that early season. I think Bill even mentioned that late season, that paraquat is more commonly used products because the tree is more susceptible to damage from the other herbicides. So, again, it's that rotation that you bring it.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Right. One more question. Yeah, Jed.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I don't see Paraquat.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: What is Gramoxone is the brand name of Paraquat.

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

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Yeah. Is that on the,

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: I'm not sure if it

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: was a later slide or an earlier slide that had showed at the bottom with the untreated. So that was Glyphosate. Those are all. That's glyphosate treated. Yeah, maybe different. So is Prowl a glyphosate? No, Prowls. So you had a chart that had results and Prowl, there were several Prowl products and then there we go untreated at the bottom.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Prowl plus paraquat.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Okay. Is the Prowl plus G is that Prowl like to say there is that Prowl?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: I would have to double check. I have to double check. I can't guarantee this is this is

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: not my set data. I just had one quick question. So, saw the rates are two pints per acre, it looks to me like you're spraying 18 inches swath. Probably a

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: little bigger than that, but yeah, like say four foot. Yeah, let's say four two foot on either side of the tree.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Two foot on either side and then how much green space you got in between?

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Well, the full strip of the row. Yeah, so if so to do the math out, if you're growing on 12 foot rows and four feet of that is herbicide strip. So you have a third of the acre is treated. So

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: when you're saying two pints per acre, it's really

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: two thirds of the line. Right? Did I do the math right?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Well, no, it would be two divided by

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: a pint a third. Yeah, four thirds of the pint.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. And so you're really not applying a whole lot per acre because of the acre of orchard you have, you know, 100 acre orchard or or 10 acre orchard. You're you're you've got trees on a third of that orchard. Mhmm. So you're applying herbicide at three acres and the rest of it is green space.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yeah. Or if we can do some head math for a quick second, and then I'll wrap up here. Know, if we said a pint and a third per acre, so that's multiply that by a 100 is a 133 pints per acre, divide that by eight. Let's do that. Let's do that real quick. 12 and a half is 20 gallons. 15 gallons. Yeah. So there's 15% of the statewide's allocation on that one orchard application. And you're mixing that with maybe 10 gallons of water per acre? Most of your herbicides are going into 25 to 50 gallons of water per acre. Wow. Yeah, we apply more water. So, especially the contact herbicides cause it needs to saturate that material. The translocated systemic herbicides can go in lower water because it gets pulled in.

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

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: Yeah, so we heard a number that I don't know, it was 100 and some small number of gallons is what's used in the state. But I was talking to some people and trying to understand where does that number come from? Is that like every year you read, because like people that I've talked to personally said they don't register every year. They might have a gallon or they might have a five gallon and they use that for several years. So where does that number come from? Is the number from a few years ago or that's just the new batch? That'll have to

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: come from the agency of VAG. My guess is there's two different reporting systems. Private applicators actually do not report to the state. We have to retain our records for three years, seven years, whatever it is. I have to report because I'm a non commercial applicator. I apply on public land. That's why I don't use Gramoxone. I also have dogs that run around, eat everything there. So, I have to report. A commercial applicator has to report. So, when you hire someone, they have to report what they apply. The other place that it gets reported, and this is more accurate, is the sales. But that wouldn't be captured by county. Everything would show up in Addison County because we all buy from Nutrien over there or maybe Northeast Ag.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: That's what they told us. They told us that all of it was in Addison County. I personally know of at least two farmers that use it that aren't in Addison County. So I was like, something's not

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: We're probably buying it from Nutrien.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Yeah.

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

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Yeah. So Tomorrow, the agency, tomorrow morning, the agency is going to come in and testify, and we can try and Yeah. Saw that. Yeah. Think I had answer on that question.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: And Steve is probably watching and preparing for that question.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: He probably already was preparing. I actually got

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: a text from one of the staff here, I

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: think they're keeping up on it.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Yeah, because I think the point today was I wanted to compliment Bill's testimony and just explain how we grow trees and why we need to protect them. And I know there's some bills out there that may affect that and vote as you will. But I just want to present sort of where the state of the orchard industry is. And again, much like the dairy industry, it's been in a space for the last few years that it's been a little tougher to make a living doing this. And, you know, I think it's important that we make sure that growers are able to have the tools, whatever that they may be, to try to do this successfully.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: We appreciate all, yeah, great information. Thank you.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Thank you.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: We are gonna seamlessly transition into the next presentation. And who's going to be presenting? Okay, great. Right.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Okay, bye everyone.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Thank you. Thank

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: you, Gary. Appreciate it. You're the Heather Darby of the apple tree.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: I'm Hi, Kate. Thank you for being patient, all of you who've been waiting. And do you have, I didn't ask whether you have a hard stop at three.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: No, we do not. We would appreciate the thirty minutes if you have that.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: We certainly do. Got it.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Awesome. Can you make me able to share my screen? Do, Colton.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: Thank you so much.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: We're going to, Kate's setting up there, we're going to hear now a budget request from the organization Serve, Learn and Earn, which think we heard something about last year as well. Some of this will be familiar. And I'm not going to try and say anything more, Kate. I'll let you step right in.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Well, thank you so much, Chair of your fee and committee for having us this morning. My name is Kate Logan. I am the Director of Development and Communication at Vermont Works for Women. I'm coming to you with my serve, learn, earn hat on. And I'm joined by my colleagues from Audubon, Vermont and Vermont Youth Conservation Corps today. My role is to share with you a little bit about our collective impact over the last year. And then my colleagues are going to dive deeper into the details of their program and how they align with your mission as a committee and the overlap there. So just a very small reminder about who Serve, Learn, Earn Partners are. You can see them up on the screen. We work really closely with our colleagues at the Agency of Natural Resources, at the Department of Labor and our AmeriCorps programs here. So the mission of Serve, Learn, Learn is to provide paid, high quality training and workforce development programs across the state. And what's unique and actually a little bit rare is that we do that as a collaborative. So these are four nonprofits who are working together. And what that does and what that provides for Vermonters is an increased depth of services, the ability to stack and connect training and more connected programs and initiatives with our educational partners, as well as our employer partners, which I'm excited to get into. For the state to achieve its climate, its natural resource management goals, its ag related goals, we believe workforce development is a critical piece of that. And that's why we're here today in front of your committees. I imagine you must all have whiplash going from apple tree growing to workforce development. So please just ask questions as we go along. We'd love to do that. Before I dive a little bit deeper, though, I did just wanna take a moment moment of appreciation and gratitude for the committee. We've been a state funded through the legislature since 2021, and you have been an integral part in our success and allowing us to expand, allowing us to serve Vermonters in each of your communities. And we're excited to share the success that we've had over the past year and much to the depth of the legislature. So thank you for the time today and for the past support. Really quickly, Server and Earn provides a continuum of programming. And so this is really unique for a workforce development umbrella organization to have programming that both starts with our high school students and goes all the way through supporting our adult Vermonters who are looking for immediate placement into employment. And we build transferable skills, we build technical skills in the fields in which we train. And we are connecting with community and employers. So that is a critical part of our cohort based training program. So we have 14 programs, and there are three things that are true about every single serve, learn, earn program. And it's in our name, right? Is that our teaching and our participants are learning technical skills that make them valuable to our employers here in the state. They are earning funds or earning stipends or wages as they participate in our programming, which makes it extremely accessible to any Vermonter. And then there's a service component. And service is a vehicle in which our participants are learning skills, are learning how to be a professional in the workplace, and are having impacts in our community. And I'm gonna show you a lot of the projects that we do. But when you think about the return on investments to the legislature, the outcomes of those projects, as well as the workforce development outcomes are really critical in that calculation. So in the last year, this map that I'm showing here, this is the location of all the participants that we serve. We served nearly five fifty participants last year. You can see that sixty one percent of them are between the ages of 15 and 24. So we really have a target of our young Vermonters. And why is this critical? This is critical because we know that in Vermont, we actually have a very high high school graduation rate and a very low matriculation rate into college. And so where are our young Vermonters going and what are they doing? We know that for our young people in the state, having continuing education and training past high school is a critical component of them being economically successful. But we also know that so many of the jobs in Vermont actually don't require a college degree. And so having training accessible programs in their backyards to help them transition from that educational system into the workplace is critical. We also are serving a lot of people, a lot of adults who have many barriers to employment. So that might be poverty, it might be justice involvement, perhaps they're in recovery. Being in a rural community is actually a barrier to employment, right, because of our lack of transportation. So our programs understand those challenges and work with folks to overcome those. So many of our programs provide IRCs, which are called industry recognized credentials. So for this committee, a really important one in the forestry industry, right, is that game of logging. So that's an example of that. That allows someone to get a foot into the door. It allows them to get paid more money. It also allows them to be useful to an employer on day one. These are critical components of someone's ability to enter the workplace. So we are providing opportunities for that training. We have more internal certificates or badges that help people develop those personal professional skills, right? So we hear every year from our employee partners, really, we just want someone to show up on time each day, have a great attitude, and we can train them for the skills that they need in this work. And so being able to have those personal qualities and attributes is critical. And then some of our programs also provide college credit, high school credit, or continuing education units, which is important for our folks still education. This map is a map of our collective projects that we completed this past year. We completed projects in over two seventy projects in these eight buckets. So for your committee, probably the ones that are most interesting to you are our habitat assessment and improvement projects. So those we're looking at forest resiliency, hazardous tree removal, we're removing invasive species, working a lot on our public lands, our state and federal lands, well as in our state parks. We do a lot of outdoor recreation projects with VYCC in Audubon, Vermont. We do flood recovery projects as well as food security. So we have projects in each of sort of your buckets of purview in this committee. Can you say something about the food security projects that I could, but I think Breck at UICC will touch a lot on it. Yeah, absolutely. We've worked with over 300 employers each year across the state of Vermont. These are just a sprinkling of them. But each of our programs engages local employers to make the connections between their participants and our employers. Many end with warm handoff into employment. Most of our programs offer like a paid work experience, where you will be connected with an employer to do a week or two weeks training with them. It's free to the employer. It's sort of a no risk opportunity to engage with a potential employee, see if they're the right fit. That is a really tremendous added value that we bring to our employer partners. We continue to get to work with new ones as our programs rotate around the state. We have spent one of the things that is so critical to our successes is our data and being able to come to your committee and others and really share with you what we think our return on investment is. And one of the challenges about workforce development programs is that long term impact is the person employed, are they economically independent? Are they having a successful career? Those are really hard to capture. And so we've really worked hard on this. So I want to take you through this slide. So this pie chart here, this is what participants tell us their goals are coming into our program. So like I said, many of our participants are young Vermonters. And so some of them are returning to high school. They're returning to college. Right? They know that this is perhaps a summer experience or a short term experience, and then they will finish their degree. Some of our participants are employed but are underemployed. Perhaps they're working part time. Perhaps they're not making enough for themselves and their families. They need to advance in their career for economic stability. And then so they are looking for career advancement. About 50% of our participants are unemployed, and their intention is to use our programs to become employed. So it's important when I say we served five fifty people to know that only about half of those are looking for that immediate job right afterwards. All of them are looking to build skills. They're looking to serve our communities. They're looking to grow professionally. So we look at data six months after completion of programming. So last July, we looked at our twenty twenty four participants and surveyed them. Now, people are not great at returning surveys. Let's be real. Okay? But of the people who returned our survey, and about 170 of them did not, but ninety nine were newly employed within six months. 100 and fifty seven returned to the schooling which they had stated in their intentions. 20 continued on in another service opportunity. So many of that is AmeriCorps or another service program. 10 remained with their employers for career advancement. And then six indicated others. So what we're looking at here is about one in three of our participants who said, I want a job, got a job. And like I told you, you might be like 30%. That's not great. But these are folks that have persistent barriers to employment. They may be new to the workforce. And so in workforce development circles, 30% is actually a very strong result, knowing that we're probably under counting because people won't tell us what they're doing afterwards.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: I wanted to just

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: give you a little bit of a historical look on where we have been going over the last five years. So just to note, this is the current year, so we're only halfway through, right? So don't get too concerned yet. But we really have seen just an increase in the number of people that we've been serving, in the time that we're engaging with them, the time that they're committing to service projects that improve our communities, and their ability to earn credentials of value, those industry recognized credentials that help them advance in the workplace. So in wrapping up my little section, and I can take questions too, but we are asking for this committee to support funding from the legislature for serve, learn, earn. We currently have base funding in forest parks and recreation of $500,000 That's this white yellow bar here. This is the second year that we have had base budget funding from FPR. Before that, in the gray and blue, that has all been one time funding. I'm sorry, just the blue has been one time funding. Last year, we had base level 500,000 plus a $250,000 one time appropriation. What we are asking is for you to support an additional $500,000 in base budget for a total of $1,000,000 to support these programs that really boost our workforce in the areas of conservation and sustainable agriculture and forestry. We think these are critical programs for Mott. We think we have a strong return on investment and would really be grateful for your support in your budget letter. Any questions that I could answer for you at this moment?

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Just to confirm that the governor's recommended amount is for FY '27 is 500,000. 500.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Okay. Good.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Thank you. Representative O'Brien.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: I just wonder

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: where that money flows through. Does it get some of those through FBR? So

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: it comes from FBR and it flows through Vermont Youth Conservation Corps. They're our fiscal agent and then it's distributed out to all four organizations.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Additional 500 would follow that same path.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Same thing. Yes. That's always how it's been. VYCC has a real long history of doing that kind of contractual work with SPR.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Is the program five years old or it goes back farther?

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Five years, we're in our fifth year of funding. Yes. So it's only been five years. Our programs, our individual organizations go back for many, many, many years. But Serve, Learn, Earn as a collaborative is just five years.

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: What

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: exactly do you use the money for?

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Yeah, thanks for asking. We use the money for direct program expenses. So this is, you know, staff time, equipment, travel, training, and as well as the stipends for the participants. From the very beginning, serve, learn, earn has said that what we think is the wise ways to use this public funding that we're giving is for direct program. It's not for administrative use at all.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: If we weren't able to come up with even the 500,000, or let's say we weren't able to come up with the additional 500,000 or some other number, what would that mean? What would the impact be?

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: So in our current fiscal year, we have 750,000 down from 2,000,000. And so 68% reduction in public funds this year. So far, we've seen a 17% decrease in our ability to have part to serve participants. We're serving about 17% less than the first six months of this year. We're projecting about a 25% reduction by the end of the year. And so our organizations have always been run very fiscally responsibly. We have savings that we are accessing this year. I mean, the loss of funding is not simply just from the Vermont legislature, We have lost federal funding. We have seen reductions in some of our other revenue, like our fee for service. Some has gone up, some has gone down. So it's a generally very difficult land budget landscape for everyone, including nonprofits here in the state. So I would say that we would continue to see a reduction of our ability to serve Vermonters.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Yeah.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Philanthropic community in Vermont has been extremely steady this year and all of our partners have different sort of funding models, but we are getting it from the Vermont Community Foundation that we get it from private, like family funds. I think one of the things that is a success marker for Serve Learn Learn is that we've been able to leverage this public funding that we've gotten into some national level funding. So we are in our second year of a multi year million to over million dollar investment from an Ascendium Foundation. And they are particularly interested in the work we're doing because it's getting public funding because they say, oh, the state of Vermont is saying this is a good program, and because of our state wide reach. So we really see that where nonprofits can be useful in this kind of public private work is our ability to bring that philanthropic funding in. And so we're really proud of that. Yeah, go ahead,

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: John. Is this sort of a co ask with like house commerce, for example, because it's job development.

[Kate Logan (Director of Development & Communications, Vermont Works for Women; Serve, Learn & Earn partner)]: Yes. So we have asked house commerce will testify with them tomorrow. We're also in house environment as well. Yes. Yep, absolutely. So let me pass it along. Yes, I'm gonna pass it to Jamie from.

[Rep. John O’Brien (Member)]: Director,

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: would have

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: to be in the house environment at 03:30.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Okay. That is on my stop. Okay. We're we're set.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Thank you. That, yeah, will work well for us.

[Jamie Fidel (Vice President, Audubon Vermont)]: Thanks, Kate. Good afternoon. Jamie Fidel with Audubon, Vermont as vice president. And I spoke about this very briefly in a slide when I was here recently testifying on the Wood Products Manufacturing report. Just went over a little bit of the work that we do, but just wanna cover a couple of bullets that relate to work that I think you're interested in this committee. I can provide a lot of stats. I think Kate at this presentation has a lot of the kind of metrics of, you know, the habitat and forest forestry related work that we're doing. And I'll touch on some of that in a minute, But I just wanted to start with a story because this morning, I was over at North Branch Nature Center and I was meeting with North Branch to talk about how we could share resources and serve the public the best way we can through educational programming that we do. And went around the room and people were introducing their selves and young woman, Annie, mentioned that she worked full time with North Branch as an educator and had gone through this program with Audubon and is now employed. So it's it's one of it's just one of the many success stories where you actually see how this program makes a difference. People are actually getting jobs in the careers that they're interested in because of the experience that they can get and the investment that they've gotten through this. Other employees that have gone through this have gone into work for like Red Start Forestry, who does work with landowners and forest management plans, implementing current use plans. A lot of our work is centered around teaching skills on how to work with landowners related to our forest management work in Vermont. So whether that's habitat improvement work, we have a lot of work that we're doing with sugar bush owners trying to really advance, trying to maintain healthy forests that are both serving the economic interests of the sugarbush managers, but also doing it in a way where the forests are going to be resilient over time. And so addressing climate change issues, trying to manage for healthy bird populations, looking at how to manage more complex and diverse forests while also having the economic return that they're looking for. Gaining skills and doing forest assessments, habitat assessments, helping with forester endorsement program, bird friendly maple program, which relates to the sugarbush management, seasonal educators who are, you know, that one example of Annie who are going on and actually becoming educate full time educators of of our of our children and helping them to understand the value of the environment and how to be good stewards of of our natural resources. So that's kind of the bucket that Audubon contributes. There's there's more work that I can go into, but just wanted to kinda try and create the strongest link to to, I think, work that's of interest in your committee. You saw before some of the metrics far as how many different like habitat assessments that we're able to do. It's quite a lot. And so, you know, without the funding, we've already been cutting a number of the aspects of the program right now. So we're trying to hold on to sort of the foundation of the programs that are left. And, you know, I just want to underscore our appreciation for the investment that the legislature has made over the years. Really appreciate your attention to allowing us to come in today, talk about the value of the program. Breck will talk about some complimentary work to your to your committee's interests, but maybe I'll just pause there as I wanna keep it brief and see if you have any questions for the work that Audubon does.

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: Questions?

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Alright. Thank you, Okay. Thank you.

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Hello, friends. It's good to be back. Greg Nelson with Vermont Youth Conservation Corps. Doctor Durfee, thank you for the invitation. I'd also be remiss if I didn't thank Patricia for herding cats and being creative with our time management today. Kate provided an overview and data that tries to capture who we're serving, the impact we're having, the return on investment. And, of course, Jamie gave a quick overview of some of the work that Audubon is doing. I think what I'll do is try to provide a window into what our programs look like on the ground, what it's like to be a participant in those programs. We have many different initiatives that we're working on, but three, and I think I can cover three pretty quickly here, are forestry, food security or food resilience, if you will, as well as agricultural training. I may combine the last two because they're kind of two Ps in the same pod. But I'll start with forestry. Representative Lipsky, good to see you again. Thanks for visiting the crew. Representative Lipsky came out and visited a VYCC crew in Braintree last summer. I think it was July or August. And it was just awesome to have someone who's been a logger his whole life to be able to speak to young people. There's a beautiful life and beautiful career to be had in woods. And young adults, when they come into Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, often have just a seed of an interest that they want to pursue. They think, well, maybe I could try this out for a little bit. And so to be able to connect with professionals in that workplace and hear from them about what they've learned and get advice, I think it speaks to, one, generosity of your time, but also the way in which BYCC is really focused on having a crew experience not just be a labor source for a partner, but actually having it be enriching and learning experience. So when Is it Terry Bradshaw, not the quarterback, the apple grower? Okay, yeah. He was Doctor. Bradshaw was speaking, I was thinking if he were to visit a VYCC crew in the field, that would be another example of a really rich learning experience where he could convey a lot of what he's learned. We do a lot of that with Audubon. VYCC is really good at field operations, risk management, project management. Audubon is awesome because they have a scientific understanding of the principles of silver culture and their teachers. And so when you combine service and workforce development and projects that are getting done, along with a really thoughtful, smart way of teaching, it creates a powerful learning environment where people go on and they say, Yeah, this is the seed of an idea that I had. It's something that I want to pursue. So it's a long winded way of saying, great to have you. Thanks for coming. And I hope others will join the crew this summer.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah. I may just interrupt you What was so poignant about that day, and a lot of what Jamie said, it's when you have these young people I I wasn't like a dinosaur, but I realized they have more complex, different motivations and desires. So you're expanding, you know, all the critical components of forestry that are way beyond just civil culture or man That impressed me. And make me feel like I want to be reborn again.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: You know I'm saying?

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Yeah. The our forestry initiative has really grown in the last few years. We're scheduled to do 36 project weeks this year. That's on both state, federal, and sometimes private land. The projects range from hazardous tree removal. So the state park has a tree that they think may fall on a campground. Our crews will come in there and safely get that out of there. Or crop tree release or pulling invasive species. We have two types of crews. We have our advanced crews as well as crews that are more of an introductory experience. The advanced crews spend a lot more time with chainsaws, whereas the introductory crews tend to do more invasive species work. But all of it is work to help make the forest healthier. And we're seeing that our graduates are getting jobs. So Hank, who you and maybe others met last year, he was the fellow with the orange oil stained sweatshirt. He's had a job working for a forester. Sorcerer has worked for Run Amok Maple. Sam, who you met, is working for Red Star. And so we're really focused on powerful experiences, but also then connecting them to their next experiences shown by Kate's slide. So let's pivot here and talk about food security. At VYCC, we have a 400 acre campus. It's right in Richmond. You've seen the two monitor barns. And the fields surrounding those monitor barns. We have a 10 acre diversified vegetable farm. Roughly 70 youth and young adults work and learn on that farm, 50,000 pounds of food. And I'll throw out those statistics just as a way of saying that many nonprofits have what they call a farm, but it's really just a garden. What we have is a full on working Vermont farm. And we partner with medical centers or regional hospitals. And those hospitals identify patients who are food insecure or struggle with diet related illness. And then our core members grow the food that is then packaged in weekly shares and then distributed to these nine medical centers. And they're mostly in Northern part of Vermont. So North Country Hospital, Central Vermont Medical Center. The VA is another one. And so there's this constellation of folks who are working in the health sector, thinking about the fact that food is medicine, our core members are growing. It's now Vermont's largest prescription vegetable program. We have over four eighty families who are benefiting from weekly shares in the last couple of years. We've turned that to a year round program, thanks to partnership with the VA, because they wanna continue the food security assistance in the wintertime. I think that's 60 shares this winter. It's gonna grow to 75 next winter. I was going to pivot to agricultural training and leadership, but Representative Bos-Lun,

[Dr. Terence “Terry” Bradshaw (UVM Tree Fruit & Viticulture Specialist)]: did you

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: have more questions there that

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: you wanted to learn more about? No,

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: that's super interesting. I didn't realize there was that food as medicine component that you guys

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: were using

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: and how people get referred for that?

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: By their doctor.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: Okay. Yeah.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: And so it's in a certain geographic region out of one clinic or something like that?

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: There's nine hospitals, medical centers, local food shelf. When a doctor will see a patient come in, they might talk about a specific ailment, but they also might have a global conversation about health. And it's in those second types of conversations where, Do you have enough food? Talk to me a little bit about your diet. That's where we often see a lot of referrals. And then those families go and pick up the shares every week. And so it encourages more frequent contact with medical centers. And I think Christine Hattickel, who's our Food and Farm Program Director, is coming in to this committee in the coming weeks to talk about food is medicine and some of the new initiatives that are perkivating here in Vermont. I think it's this committee.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: I think we did invite, yeah. You did, yeah. Okay, great. Senator Nelson has a question. Okay, yeah, please.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: So we

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: were out there in the two monitor firearm job from '89. How many acres do you have there?

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: No, the campus is 400 acres.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: 400 acres, so the rest of that, that's beautiful soil, I mean, that's lot right. What do you what's the rest of the farmland used for? Is it leased out to a local farmer or?

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: No, so the land that is between the two barns and in the fields north of the barns, that's all our property, and we use that for farming. The land that's on the other side of Route 2, that's not our property. That's that's Darren Pratz and his son's property. And then north of our fields is our forest. And we use our forest for training and so we'll run a game of logging course up in there.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Quite a few acres out of this forest. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Thank you. Where's the number?

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Do you house the participants

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: or do they drive or how to

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: It's a mix. Housing is a real barrier to participation. We offer day crews and we offer residential crews. So the day crews, we don't need to offer housing because they are at home. For our residential programs, there we offer housing in a tent four days a week. So they'll arrive on Monday, and they'll be camping out with their crew, then they'll come out of the field and de rig on Fridays. If they need housing for the weekend, we have a collection of lean tos. But we're also seeing participants, folks who say, I can't join BYCC unless they're housing. And so on a on a parallel track, one of the things that BYCC has done is raise dollars to enhance accommodations on our campus. So all of that infrastructure is being built this year. So maybe one of the points to make here is, and it complements Kate's point about philanthropy supporting operations, but philanthropy is also supporting the infrastructure that our organizations have that also support operations and programs. So we're kind of matching state dollars and augmenting state dollars in a few different ways.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: You need to work your way downstairs shortly, but anything else you wanted to?

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Well, I would just reiterate and offer complimentary language to Kate's budgetary request. Exceptionally grateful for the funding that we've received in years past. Last year, we know it was a hard budget year. It felt particularly hard for serve, learn, earn because it was roughly a 65% reduction from previous years. And in spite of that reduction of 60 some odd percent, we only saw only saw a reduction in participants by about 17%. But that trend is going to worsen if funding isn't restored, if it's lessened. And so we know that you all have hard choices. And part of what our responsibility is here is to, like, let you all know what the consequences of not funding workforce developments be. It's going to be the young people don't have these learning experiences. They're not getting job. The employers don't have highly trained people. It's a cascading effect. While I'm biased here, finding $500,000 in the state coffers for a really important investment seems like it should be within the realm of possibility. But that's where you want to figure out how to do that. So, really grateful. What other questions? That'd be nice. Okay. So much. Okay.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: We actually don't have any money. That's appropriation.

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Okay. Well, so what you all are doing, though, is writing a budget letter, recommendation letter, I could agree that you could put hyperbolic lines and put We that letter to the spatial

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: have about that much control.

[Greg Nelson (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps)]: Thank you very much.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, House Agriculture, Food Resilience & Forestry Committee)]: We'll take a very short break here.