Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Good morning again, we're back. Center agriculture. We have again the distinct pleasure of having the secretary Walter answer Tenditz and he'll do a little introduction in just a minute, but the floor is yours Secretary. Welcome. Welcome and good morning all. So today we're

[Anson Tebbetts (Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: little time talking about, water quality. We were in yesterday talking about the other five divisions, but, this one is, there's a lot going on in water quality, a lot of good stuff that's going on that the agency has done over the years. Just for a little background, this is the, the, tenth anniversary of the Significant Water Quality Act, act 64, we call it. And that, you heard your presentation a little bit earlier talking about some of the work that we do over at the agency relate related to, to water quality. So we've made tremendous progress, in the agency of improving water quality, and that takes a partnership with a lot of people, beginning with our farmers, the agency, agency of natural resources. We have our federal partners, USDA NRCS. We have conservation districts. We have just tremendous people. And I'm joined by Laura DiPiccio who's gonna who's gonna go into detail about the progress that we made in the last ten years. And I just wanna give you a few of the highlights. And every year, we put out a comprehensive report, on the progress, And and you should have that in your inbox as you get a lot of reports on the fifteenth. So that one is dropped in your inbox and give you a lot of detail, about what has happened. But just a few of the highlights for folks. So we do on-site technical assistance. So, in 2024, we had 1,274 visits to farms. So we're on farms, quite a bit. We we hold events. Outreach and education is is really important for what we do. We've had 101 events in 2024 and it takes a lot of resources and investment. Dollars 18,400,000.0 has been invested mainly for infrastructure and programs. Farmers contribute as a cost share program, so we leverage, their dollars and also some federal dollars from time to time on us, but $18,400,000 worth of state dollars is going into that. And we were rewarded about 558 projects. It's clean water projects. And we also have compliance. And you've heard a little bit about that earlier. And we have a lot of compliance and we do inspections, regulatory inspections, enforcement, and reviews on that. We've had three thirty four of those. So you can tell that we are out on the farms doing the work that we've been mandated to do and we're pretty proud of the work that we've done, not only over 2024 but the last decade. And we're seeing progress with the phosphorus reduction. You'll see in Laura's presentation about 90% of the reductions in phosphorus can be attributed to agriculture. So we've got some we've got some data to share with you, and and maybe if it's okay, mister chairman, we can turn to Laura. And Laura's got a nice presentation for you about a little more detail of what what we're doing on the ground.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Laura, welcome to Santa Agriculture. How are you this morning?

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Great. Thank you. And I'm so sorry I cannot be there in person. I am sandwiched in between things, but I will be there in person soon enough and I will certainly come and make myself available to you all to do an in person introduction.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Well, thank you.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Okay. So I'm going to load up a PowerPoint just so that you have a little bit of a visual how skilled I am with Zoom and having one screen. Can you see a PowerPoint?

[Steven Heffernan (Clerk)]: Yeah. It's also on our website.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Oh, share. Okay. Sorry, I'm a Teams person. I've got to get used to this.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I'm in now. There we go. Okay.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Great. Well, so I'm going to respectfully just I'm going to give you a really fast lightning presentation. And I appreciate that it's hard to retain everything, but hopefully I'll just be able to point out to you the highlights that you really, I want to make sure that you hear and understand. Because the details, we have them, if you ever need them, you come to us, we will get you whatever detail you need. So generally, what we do is these things. We educate, we provide financial money to help do projects, we provide engineering. So we have engineers that will go out and design and develop projects. We also have sort of lighter weight and not engineering, but technical assistance to design things that don't meet that level of standard. And then we also do the regulatory work, the inspection and enforcement. So I'm going to cover these areas very quickly to give you a sense. So as Anson had mentioned, we do a ton of technical assistance and I wanted to show you the blue bars in this chart, that's our partnership. We call it AgCWIP. So that's us moving a lot of money to people like UVM Extension, the districts, watershed organizations, farmers have their own organizations. And that, as you can see, is the bulk of the people that put on these workshops and efforts to get people educated. As a reminder, farmers, custom applicators, and people who write nutrient management plans, they're all required to get some level of education and keep track of it. This is sort of the venue that does a lot of that. And then the money that we give out to the ag community or the partners to then get to the ag community. One thing I want to point to you here is obviously like the increase, right? It is substantially changed since act 64 of 2015, and which has been great because it's been a a good opportunity. Farmers were educated and at the same time they were ready to do these projects. So having the resources really was wonderful to be able to get to that space. One thing I'll show you though is so the dark blue is the capital funding. One of the things you can see is as ARPA came in, the purple, the blue shifted. And so ARPA is about to phase out. And our goal is to make sure that we keep those capital funds because it has been a big component of the projects that we do. As you'll see, I'll show you some photos, lots of construction heavy projects on farms to do this water quality work. And also you can see there's a lot of great match that comes in between federal government and also farmers. So here are a couple of examples of the types of projects we do. This same barn is the barn in the photo here. And you can see when there isn't good infrastructure to scrape and maintain and stockpile manure, it all can just get integrated and then runoff can obviously occur and runoff downstream. We put in projects like this that can get everything so that it can be managed and maintained in areas that are contained and then land applied according to a nutrient management plan. Here's another one where this project we've been working with this farm obviously for a number of years. You can see the benefits that the riparian forest buffer is having in this space compared to what it was back when originally farmers engaged in this project. And these are fifteen year projects on average. And so often, you know, at year 14, we go back to see about re enrolling it and so they can enroll for a lot longer. And it's a federal partnership program. So it's 3 to 1 federal dollars to state dollars. So a really good program for the state. This is an area where grazing is occurring on the left side of the photo. And we're able to work with them to say, let's get the animals farther back. Let's get this better seeded and also support you in getting a grazing plan so that you can do a better job maintaining the site. So in all these kinds of programs, we're generally paying either for the capital construction cost or like a per acre payment to get this infrastructure put in place. And then there's terms, often ten, fifteen year terms that farmers sign up with. This last one is a filter strip. So we have regulatory buffers, but if people are willing to go and do a wider buffer, which might fit their equipment better and they can harvest it so that they can utilize it as part of their forage. We can help prevent or, sorry, support them to do that project. So this is an example of one of those. I am not gonna go through all of this. And this is, again, we're high level. I just want you to remember and think about, we have lots of cost share programs that help provide farmers. Farmers typically pay like 20% of the cost of these projects, but this is a list and you all have the presentations, you can read it. We offer multiple different types of programs to help firms. One that I'll just point out to you, a couple of these that are innovative. Not only do we pay direct payments, but we also have ways that we're thinking about it differently and instead paying people for their performance. And so saying, if you can reduce so much phosphorus, we'll pay you for that pound of phosphorus, for example. And so we've got modeling and other ways to build incentives and programs that we're also running with lot with help from the federal government to support them. So the progress that's being made. So let's talk about what our goal is that we have to do. So the pie charts on the right here. The first one, if you can see my mouse, hopefully you're able to track that. The yellow slice of the pie is agriculture. And one of the things that that first pie chart is how much ag is contributing to Lake Champlain. And then if you look at the second pie chart, it is how much ag has to reduce from Lake Champlain. And this is about phosphorus. If you notice, the reduction pie is bigger than the generation pie of how much phosphorus they make. So agriculture, if you look at the orange slice, that's development. Development has a bigger slice of how much it contributes, but it doesn't have to reduce as much as it contributes. So ag really has to go on what I call a diet. You have to do even more than you're contributing, you have to reduce. So that pretty much gets it what we call legacy phosphorus and trying to mine phosphorus out of some of these farms. And so it's a big lift that the agricultural community has to do. And it's been amazing how well they've been doing it. If you look at the data on the left side of the graph, it's it shows you the all sectors progress is the goal of the Lake Champlain is x. We've gotten 26% of the way there of achieving it with all of the sectors. But ag alone has achieved 33% of the progress that agriculture needs to achieve for the agricultural reduction. So we are doing very well in our space and in comparison with the whole. What more importantly, I think is to share is that the reductions that we're achieving for agriculture are 77% of the statewide amount, but it's only 24% of the state budget when it comes to the water quality budget. So agriculture has huge bang for the buck for getting lots of phosphorus reduction for very few dollars. And a lot of that is because what we can do is annual practices, like making sure that there's cover and the field looks green, that might be a cornfield, it looks green all winter long because they planted a cover crop, for instance, so to protect erosion during that winter season. Here is the chart that we refer to a lot. Is the yellow is agriculture. These are the reductions that have been achieved from each sector since the Lake Champlain Basin. TMDL has been passed and we've been tracking how well is every sector doing. And so you can see consistently agriculture has been the driving force in meeting TMDL goals. And I'm sorry, a lot of you may not know acronyms. TMDL is total maximum daily load, which basically means it's a phosphorus budget for a lake. And so we have a budget that we have to meet, and these are the reductions to get there. We also do this work in Lake Memphremagog. They also have one of these TMDLs for phosphorus and a very similar story, right? The slice of the pie that has to get reduced is bigger. It's more on track, consistent with the statewide that agriculture is achieving, but it's still, when it comes to economics, it's still a small portion of the budget, a big slice of the reduction. And here again, it's the same similar concept. You can see ag in this watershed as well is achieving the greatest reductions. So one more thing before I move on to regulatory is I just want you all to be aware that what we do is we coordinate with a lot of organizations. You can see there's a list on the right, but it's not complete. These are just the organizations that are part of an organizational partnership that we have. But we meet with everyone to make sure that any program that anyone is running is coordinated and that we're not sending multiple people. We're strategizing how we move our money so that we can utilize, you know, as much federal money as we can bring into the state and get projects and programs put on the ground quickly and efficiently to farmers. So I just want you to be aware this is massive effort that's been going on for a number of years to make sure that there's good coordination for agriculture and how all this money is spent.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Laura, we have a question, please.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Yes. Of course.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Hi, Laura. Who decide what phosphor, phosphate levels, you know, what is a bad level? What is who came up with the numbers to say, hey, this is what we gotta be, meet meet this criteria?

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Certainly. So the TMDL was done in for Lake Champlain by EPA. And when I was involved, when they did that, they hired a contractor named Tetra Tech. And there's a science across the country that's used very consistently about how to quantify what's going on. And one of the cool things about Vermont is I think we have one of the longest records of water sampling in Lake Champlain compared to anywhere else in the country. And so we know how much phosphorus is in the lake generally. And you can use all of that science and information that's been collected over the years to build a model. And then you build that model and there's lots of science and research that has gone into figuring out how much agriculture, wastewater, storm water, how much all of these sectors are able to contribute, because it's all kind of mapped and estimated based on there's impervious surface here that could contribute X. So it's a model for a short answer, but there's a lot of science and information that has gone into that.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So I think about the farms of the past and I know when I was selling dairy supplies to farmers, used to go to 300 of them in a biweekly cycle. And they're not there anymore. The land's being farmed, I think they're probably being better. We don't see the manure pits, the non manure pits of the past and the things running in and all of that. Mean, we've got to be winning this battle of phosphorus. I can't even imagine what the levels of phosphorus would have been forty years ago as far as because we weren't doing any of it. And I know, I saw the run up, I saw and I've seen the changes. So we've gotta be winning that battle, aren't we?

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: I appreciate you saying that because I've been trying to say, I see the changes, but I'm very close to this work. So it's great to hear someone who can just from your community see those changes. One of the things that I thought was so cool that we did to get to where we are today with all of our regulatory, with the ag community, is we spent time, we created an ag working group and we brought the farmers in before we knew that EPA was going to have to revise this TMDL. And we said, look, we know we're going to have to increase regulations. What do you think are the most logical things that can be done? And, of course, there was some tug and pull there of, it was all positive. But in the end, you don't ask the farmers, what can you do? Then the reality is if we come up with something that they can't do, they're not going to be able to implement it. And so we had this great ability to do that. We came out with a report, the report came to the legislative body and the legislature said, do that, because it was a really good set of practices. And that's what our regulatory scheme predominantly is based on at this point. And we spent 90 meetings going around selling people about those rules. And so that ability to have come and had farmer input before we did it, and then to do a ton of outreach as we went through it, farmers understood it and they understood why they were doing it. And that's why I think we see this monumentous change in the landscape and buying into all of this, frankly.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Well, with a new board, and you're gonna hear some of the questions that you've answered over and over and over the years again, but again, going back to the times of the past, on every little mud pond, there was nothing. And now we have year round homes on every lake that's everywhere. I mean, even the legacy lakes like Lake Champlain, I mean, we have more year round houses that are there on septic systems probably that were ever attended. I just, I hope that we are accurately monitoring where this phosphorus is coming from versus blending it on the weakest link of the people that can't defend themselves, which is in the agricultural sector, I believe. So I just hope that when I look at Chittenden County's sewer plant overflowing seven or to 11 times out of the year and say, well, that's what it was designed to do. I just hope that we are being fair that farming is being recognized first for all what you're doing and actually after is making sure that others are doing what they're supposed to do and not pinning the blame back on agriculture.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Yeah, so there is a little bit of agriculture taking some of that responsibility, which is what I showed you in those pie charts. But what I will say is, Vermont is very innovative and I think ANR does a really good job of trying to keep researching and understanding what we don't know. For instance, when we wrote that TMDL, stream bank erosion was considered in it. I think it's the only TMDL in the country that has stream bank erosion as a consideration for phosphorus loading, because it's just not what people normally think about, right? It's easy to be in a municipal box, in an ag box, a forestry box. And now there is more and more research being done about what legacies are the phosphorus, for instance, and sediments are already in the bottom of those bays or lakes or places where sediment will settle at the end of a watershed. Because phosphorus doesn't go anywhere, right? So if it's sitting there and we know the conditions can be right sometimes to release that phosphorus into the water column and then create algal blooms. And so they're doing a lot of research into this space so that that can be a component. They call it internal loading. So it's the amount of phosphorus that there's got to be another different mechanism, right? So, they're talking about alum, for instance, in Lake Carmine. And so, there's more and more work to be done to understand all the components. But I will say the big ones like waste water and storm water, there's a lot of research and there is certainly, I think a good understanding of how everyone is being partitioned in that space.

[Steven Heffernan (Clerk)]: So Laura, it's great to see you again. I want to just chime in and support what the chair said. I have yet to meet a farmer, and especially a dairy farmer that ever said what a great feeling it was to put a discharge of some sort of bad thing into the lake. It's just I think the farming community has stepped up way more than any other segment. The other thing I'll mention just for the committee's benefit, we're not alone in what we are putting into the lake. There's a New York aspect to it, and a Canadian aspect to it. So there's an intersection there of three different sources, if you will. But I think we're doing the best job of the three. And, you probably can either agree with that or not. But, our farmers are doing a heck of a job.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: I totally agree with that. I sit on a national committee and I see what other states are doing. We are amazing. We have one of the best regulatory programs, in my opinion, in the country. It's very comprehensive. So there are certainly some critiques of that, right? There's a lot there. But, you know, and I also sit on committees with Quebec and New York. There is a lot of communication. That's not without saying that there isn't this ability to coordinate. But yeah, we have a lot of pressures here in Vermont, and we've responded to those pressures over the years. And I think the farms have done an amazing job of coming forth. A lot of them, they do it because they love the land and they love being, you know, where they are in their community. And it shows because they've committed to this stuff. All right. Do you all have a hard stop at eleven No,

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: we get 11:15.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Okay. All right, great. So the bigger part to transition is the enforcement work that we do. And what I want to highlight is, you know, there's a lot of information in the news suggesting that Ag and A and R don't get along. I just want to be clear, we do a ton of coordination with them on multiple levels related to this type of work. Everything from what you would think of the obvious, let's inspect a farm and make sure that discharges are managed, but also in the waste realm, right? Because now with waste not going to the landfill, there's a lot of conversations about imports on farms. And we manage the nutrient management side of things, which is the balance of nutrients on farms. And so we have conversations with them as well. So there's just all kinds of conversations that are going on on a regular basis. So please don't be fooled by the messaging. We do talk a lot. So for what we do on the ground, Anson had mentioned we did three thirty four assessments this year. You can see the trajectory is up, there's a low spot there where COVID, we did pull people back from the field a little bit, and only do the very, very necessary work that we needed to do. And so you can see there's a little bit, but generally, you know, we are staffed up, we are doing this work. And if you look at the bottom line graph, you can sort of pick out 2015 and look backwards and see that the average was about forty-fifty enforcement actions a year per firms. And if you look forward since Act 64 of 2015, you can see that essentially, by staffing up and getting the resources and programs, it has doubled the enforcement actions that are taking. And that's purely a more eyes on the ground, you're going to find more problems. But what I do think is very positive is that the eyes on the ground aren't really seeing an increased amount of problems. It's sort of leveled out. And, you know, our presence, as you'll see, compared to other states, is there a lot. So there's a lot of opportunity to see these problems. So I think to all of your points, you know, farmers, no one's perfect, but it's not going the wrong direction. It's going the right direction. To discuss sort of, we also work with the Attorney General's Office and the Agency of Natural Resources, DEC, the Department of Environmental Conservation. And we have an MOU with the Department of Environmental Conservation that describes we do this work here where we inspect farms for non point source. And then if we see something that is a direct discharge, we have to let them know about it. So the turquoise graph shows you how often we're seeing those in an annual basis and sending them over to the agency of natural resources. And then we also have an MOU with the Attorney General's office. And if the case is significant enough or if the Attorney General has interest in it, they would take those cases. So there haven't been any of those in the last several years, mainly because Agency of Agriculture and Agency of Natural Resources have been managing those issues. But you can see from the graph at the bottom, the majority of the issues that we do find are in production areas. So what you would think of as the farm. But we do see also record keeping and field practices. So whether they've got their buffer in place, or they're in the right corn or hay rotation that they're supposed to be kind of things, or if they have erosion, we check all of that. And so you can kind of see the percentages of how that breaks out in terms of compliance. Okay. So to explain the framework that we have in Vermont, I will just say again, it is I think the best in the country. And it's because we have full coverage. You have ANR that can issue CAFO permits, and that's what's in the news. And I'll explain a little bit more about the differences between these permits. But that is a permit program for actual discharges. So seeing something go into water, for instance. To where if you see something that looks like it went 50 feet and maybe the water's another 100 feet, And you're like, well, probably over time, we'll get there, right? Because rain all goes downhill. That's where our programs can come into place and say, we can tell this isn't really a good thing. It's going to cause problems over this time period. We need you to get a practice in place to be able to fix that or change your management so that that doesn't do that. That is what our programs do. And I appreciate this is like an alphabet page. So I'll lay out these acronyms. CAFO is the concentrated animal feeding operation. So it's a lot of animals in a very closed in space essentially for a number of days. So it's as farms get bigger, they concentrate and that's a regulatory program for the bigger farms. AAFM is us, obviously, and then medium farm operation and large farm operation are these two other acronyms. And so we run permit programs for these farms. They're the same size farms as the CAPO. And the permits were built and the statute was all laid out to be in a space that it was meant to be preventative. But of course, if a discharge is not prevented, then the ANR is there to back it up. Additionally, what many states don't have is general rules for all other farms, anything below. So a medium farm for dairy is 200 mature cows and up. So anything under that, there are a number of states that do not have any regulations for any of the other farms. And Vermont, that's the bulk of our farms. A lot of our farms are smaller farms. And we have rules that regulate all of these. Again, they prevent discharges so we can stop something before we see it happens. But we also cover zoning so that we have sort of statewide consistent zoning through the agency of agriculture for farming. So if you're farming and there's a town boundary between two of your facilities, you know you can have consistent zoning thought when it goes into building infrastructure. And then additionally, we also regulate property boundaries. So we can get involved with very small, small farms and neighbors whether in manure is crossing a property boundary, for instance. So the two different permits, so the one that ANR issues that is called the CAFO permit, it's a federal program. And ANR just is the administer of this federal program here at the state level. So, I've listed it here as a federal permit. And then medium and large farm permits are the state permits that the Agency of Ag issues. So you may just be wondering like, why are there all these permits on farms? And what is the difference between them? So I just, this is not comprehensive. There are a lot of little details. But high level, as you can see, as you start going down the list, they're pretty much the same, except you get to the discharge. So one of the things the CAFO permit does is it allows you to discharge. So if you have all of your infrastructure in place and something terrible happens that was not foreseen, it was not something that was your fault, say a breach of some sort or a mechanical failure, that discharge could be protected under that permit. Additionally, if a very large rain event comes, like the ones that we had, especially think about St. Johnsbury this past summer, that obviously is not something you can plan for. We don't build infrastructure for that size storm. And so a discharge over that, for instance, at that level would be allowed. Our permits say that you can't have any of those. And that is because you have to be equal to or greater than the federal standard. But we go even further, right? We have erosion requirements, we have nuisance requirements. So like your odor, your noise, your flies, if you're a large firm, we can step in and say they're different than another firm and you need to change your management. We have construction check-in. And one of the big ones here is that the ability for who can say they don't like what you're doing. For our permits, it's a directly aggrieved person. To where the federal, it could be someone another state who is part of an advocacy group that prefers to have a say in that process. So, they're different in that way. And that's an important distinction between the permits. They have different buffers. We have a winter spreading ban. Can see, I'll spare my time to go through all these things, but there are differences between the programs and always happy to talk about that if you have questions in the future. How other states do these programs regionally? Vermont, to just start with, you can see that we have all this infrastructure in place, we can issue all these permits. But what we have done is we've not issued any CAFO permits to date. And that is the argument in the petition. One of the things that needs to be addressed is if permits need to be issued because there is a discharge, that's the requirement. And so we have 97 medium farm permits and 36 LFO large farm permits. And our inspection cycles, as you can see, is we go to medium farms every three years and large farms every single year. When I look at the data for how often we go to these farms, is for LFOs, for instance, it's almost twice a year because we'll get a complaint or we have something to follow-up on from a prior inspection. And the same with medium farms. I haven't looked up that data, but we are there more often than three years. But our minimum required cycles are what you see there. And you'll notice as I go through Maine, New York and New Hampshire, they're all on five year cycles, right? So once every five years, someone goes to these farms. And so, you know, Maine is very similar to us, they have an ag agency and an environmental agency and the two work together. The ag agency is the eyes and the ears on the ground doing the majority of the inspections on farms, and then they report and work with their environmental agency when there's issues. But their environmental agency does have six issued in their state. New York has no CAFO permits in their state. Instead, they've chosen to go down a similar path that Vermont historically had done with creating programs like our medium farm and our large farm program. So all of their permits are state permits, not the federal permit. And they only do regular inspections on 300 cows or more. So we're down to 200 cows. They just do complaint based for 200 to 300 cows. And then in New Hampshire, it's very different. The state didn't take over the federal permitting program. Instead, they said, EPA, you can do the permitting in the state. And so there's only one farm that EPA has issued a permit for up in the Upper Connecticut Valley. And actually, that farm farms a little bit in Vermont, because they're right there in that area. And EPA visits them once every five years. And for the other farms in the state, there aren't regulations per se. So, as you can see, Vermont really stands out. We're regulating these farms at a much higher level than generally across the country. And our standards are higher than a lot of these standards, like Maine and New York have 15 foot buffers on their streams, as an example, to where we have 25. So before I go a little further, I wanna show you a tool, but I just wanna take a moment for any questions about any of that, that I just did on the regulatory side.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Any questions? All set? I think we're good.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Okay. Well, last thing I want to show you, and you have access to this, it'll be in the presentation that you have, but this is our dashboard. Have a couple of databases. We spent significant resources in them so that we can respond back to the public. Because for years, there's been this ag is not doing anything or ag is not regulated. And the reality is, is obviously we're doing this work, and we know that that's not true. And so we wanted to share a space where we could show the public and anyone who's curious what is happening on farms so that they're aware that those statements are not true. So this is a data portal that puts all this data in here. And you can point and click and play with it and figure out information for where you live and just anything you're curious about. So there's an overview acronym list if you need some resources there. There's also an instructions page. There's a summary of everything we did in 2024. So you can see, you know, we spent $18.4000000, we put almost 64,000 acres of practices on the grounds.

[Steven Heffernan (Clerk)]: Laura, we're not seeing your screen. I think we're seeing just the slides there. I don't know.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: I think I have to stop sharing and reshare because I'm on one screen. I went to a different page. Let's see, here we go. How's that?

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yep, there you go. That's it.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Okay. Let me just back up and show you. There's this toggle at the bottom. There's the background pages, the acronyms and helpful information. There's instructions, and I was on summary. So essentially, can look by, you know, the basins, the watersheds, what's going on. So you can say, you know, let me look here in this neck of the woods. It's gonna be slow for me. There it goes. So it'll shift all the data so you can see, probably in slow motion for you all, but when you click on the Memphremagog Watershed, you can see there's, you know, 21,738 acres. And that's all from all these years. You can see there's 4,908 phosphorus reductions. If you wanted to select a year in addition to that, say, Well, what was that last year in Lake Memphremagog? You can click on both, if it'll let me. My Internet is being slow. Well, let me go to another page. Maybe it'll be better. Let's see. Let's go to investment. Here, for instance, you could if we wanted to look by watershed Oops, sorry about that. Trying to move my little box. And go back up here And you click on this is by county level, So Orleans County, everything in the page if you notice shifted. So you can start to see there was 2,400,000.0 in 2024 in that county. And you can look back at the prior years at how much. You can see that the majority of the funding over these years is from our best management practice program. So eighty one percent are likely big structural projects. So you can, you can look at all these things, anything you touch, it will click and it will go into that space. And if you want to undo it, just click the same thing you clicked, and it'll go back to the hole. So you can see across the board, for instance, since 2016, we've spent $115,600,000 in the programs that we've issued throughout the agency. So, I invite you to take a look at this dashboard. It's got, you know, the regulatory work we do, you can see, you know, the enforcement actions, the regulatory assessments that we've done, how many technical visits and outreach. So I invite you to take a look at this and just look at all the data to see whatever interests you for your local area. So I'll stop there and just save time for questions.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Committee, any questions for Laura? I think we're good.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: All right. Well, certainly one thing I wanted to stress is we have a very open door policy. If you ever have a question about what is going on, please just reach out to me. I will be in the State House as well and I will come by and check-in and say hello, but I'd rather you hear it from the horse's mouth.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: We're going to have questions, so thank you.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: Great. Thank you so much.

[Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Have a good weekend.

[Laura DiPietro (Water Quality Division, Vermont Agency of Agriculture)]: As well.