Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Tom Vanacore]: Are you Thomas? Yes. Okay.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Good morning. We're back in action, 10:45. We're going to talk about, some, a lot of different, subjects, about rock dust and limestone. And I can look on the committee page. There's a lot of different subjects that we can go with here, so we're gonna not assume with what's gonna be said. And we got Thomas Vanacore in the witness chair, and go ahead, sir. The floor is yours.

[Tom Vanacore]: Thanks very much, appreciate it. My name is Tom Vanacore, I'm from Bridgeport. I brought with me Travis DeMurse from Sheldon Limestone Corporation and Jonathan Corcoran, who started the Addison County Regional Organic Network, localization movements back in probably the early 2000s. John also was involved in the first organic baby food company in the country, Urst Vest, that was located in Middlebury. They outgrew the state. Know, Trent was probably Shelburne Limestone, a third generation limestone processing company. Also, processing the Black Shales, which is what we're, one of the things we're gonna talk about here today. My history goes back, I've lived in Vermont since 1976. I was involved in masonry contracting, my day job for thirty five years. Did architectural carving, restoration, actually contributed to this some of morning, the change.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: My very electric voice, so I'll get rid

[Tom Vanacore]: of that. I was involved in some of the restoration work on the Capitol here back in the day, the House Assembly, restored some of the monuments down at Battlefield Of Gettysburg, including the first US sharpshooters, which is the furthest forward marble statue on the on the battlefield.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Did you do anything with former Senator Joe Benning? He spent a lot of time down there with some monuments and stuff.

[Tom Vanacore]: I believe he was involved in raising the money back in 2000 that supported that project. Put together carving, restoration of the original monument that was built in Rutland in the late 1800s and had been destroyed by a falling tree in 1994, and so we had to put back the actual carving piece from the recarved and the gold marble, and the National Air Guard actually transported down there with us, so we set it up on our own basket. In the midst of all that, John, one reason I brought him, he handed me a book on soil remineralization as it relates to agriculture. This was back in the late 80s, And it sent me on a mission to find local resources, agricultural resources that could be used for local economies as fertilizer replacements, also as a way of addressing the climate crisis that back then was really only just discussed in theory, so that we're talking about back in the late 80s. And know, fast forward to now, it's sort of a major question of what we're gonna do for adaptation, mitigation. And we've come pretty much full circle in terms of understanding what the local resources are and the importance of the local resources. And that should be the subject of our conversation today. I understand we only have like forty minutes or something. What I want to do is use the objective reality that we have natural resources including mineral resources in the state that can provide for fertilizer alternatives, can provide for water quality improvements and especially for phosphorus mitigation, can provide for nutrient dense food and also can address some of the climate issues, greenhouse gas emission reduction being primary, and also improving soil health, which gives us benefits of withstanding some of these extreme conditions that we're seeing now, flooding or drought being two of the month. I think that discussing the Black Shales is a good place to start for Vermont because we put a lot of effort into proving it during the Vermont Phosphorus Innovation Challenge, which was Governor Scott's initiative back in 2019. We submitted a proposal and were accepted. Jeffus DeMurris, myself, Shelburne Limestone, and then another operator, George Wilcox, down in Shoreham. Wilcox Construction is mining and quarrying this black shale which runs along the lake from around Shoreham and Orwell all the way up into Canada on the Vermont side. There's two economic supplies that I know about, George Wilcox as being one, and then Sheldon Limestone in Swan is also working the black shales alongside their carbonates at the same point. We suggested that the black shales could be a selective sorbent for phosphorus because we have proven it on our own, using our own bench top experiments. We were also using the material for a certified organic input for fruit vegetable growing through my company, Rock Dust Local, which we established in 2010 officially, but I've been doing work prior to that, always after the 80s. The committee that oversaw the Vermont Phosphorus Innovation Challenge was looking for engineered solutions and novel solutions to address the phosphorus problem. In other words, effluent phosphorus running into the ditches and then down into the lake. Agriculture is a big source of that, not the only source. There's a lot of phosphorus coming from municipal sources, roadways, wastewater treatment plants, but ag is a big source. And our proposal was a little different. We didn't provide for an engineered solution for point source. We were suggesting that you could broadcast these materials to the ground just like you would for limestone or gypsum or other types of rock powders, and that would act as a selective sorbent for phosphorus, capture the solution phosphorus on the surface of the mineral and then give it back to the plants when the plants are growing. In order to prove that, we hired through some of the money that the state gave us as entrants and awardees at the first level. We hired and retained University of Vermont Extension Service agents both in Addison County up in Franklin County, and we had Professor Ross at UVM design the experiments and we produced the material at the local quarries and then put the material out in the fall. We did soil sampling prior, and then we went ahead back in the spring and did soil sampling in the spring against the control. And the controls were common manure practicing on one part of the field and the other part that, you know, with our material applied. And what we demonstrated was indeed we could do that. We could actually capture phosphorus running to the ditches, retain it on the surface of the product, and essentially mitigate the majority of, or a significant portion of that phosphorus running to the ditches over just one season, which would be over winter. And we got through to the, I think it was phase three, got into the third round of the contest, and then the state, the committee of reviewers decided they didn't want to promote us or didn't want support the commercialization of what we were suggesting. We weren't asking for money. We didn't need money. Trampus doesn't need, he's got a going concern. I wasn't asking for money, we had business that was running. What we were looking for then was it suggesting that the state would endorse the materials and methods for best management practices as part of their toolkit for the other things that the farmers do and for cover cropping or we do stillage and these other sorts of things. That didn't happen, and as a result all the work that was done at that time was essentially lost. I mean you can find it, There's a 150 page report. This is just this is just the edited version, which is, I don't know, 30 pages or something. But there's a 150 page report that gives all of the detail. I've sent some digital copies of this report and some of the reports that were done by third parties in terms of proving the materials. Thank you, Chair. I'm I'm always interested in and and this is maybe difficult for you because what was their argument for not moving to school? Well, there's a story about, which I won't get into here, about what that challenge really was about, But I'll tell you what the results were. Main results of the funding mechanism that that was used to sort of create resulted in the funding of 13 or 14 highly engineered point source phosphorus capture machines, for lack of a better word, they're called diffused air flotation that looks like a rocket ship in a barn, equipment that were put on the existing anaerobic digesters in the state. These were manure processing anaerobic digesters for the purposes of reducing the phosphorus loads coming off of those digesters. The connection was the cow power had oversold to the rate payers the amount of kilowatt hours being produced, and in order to come up to their loads, their requirements, there was a settlement that it also included mitigating phosphorus. In other words, to increase the loads coming off of the anaerobic digesters, they had to deal directly with the phosphorus issue. For some reason, this Vermont Phosphorus Innovation Challenge was put in place in order to attract novel methods of managing phosphorus. We came in as pretty much an outlier. We said, we got this local resource that nobody's heard about, we're using it as certified organic material, so in other words, we don't need additional permits to put it on the ground.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: What other properties of value does that material have? What else would it be used for?

[Tom Vanacore]: Well, that gets back to the way soil minerals work in the ground, and the whole concept of soil remineralization is you can provide rock powders that have the major elements, except for perhaps nitrogen, so calcium, magnesium, manganese, iron, you know, the major nutrients, silicon, and all the way down to the trace elements. And what you're doing there is you're providing the ground nutrient value that allows for the actual process of nutrients and delivery to the plant. So not just providing nutrient to the plant, but actually feeding the microbial populations and providing for healthier soils.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So we had a fertilizer composition, I don't expect a lot of people to understand what it is. I was in that business a little bit. Is there like a twenty, ten, 20, or is there a composition of a number of the way fertilizer works as far as what composition you're hearing here, the three ingredients of fertilizers in that? Is there a number that goes with that?

[Tom Vanacore]: Generally not. What's happening now is we're actually, and Travis is involved in this, is we're using, we're introducing these materials into fertilizers as fillers,

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: And as smart so as a filler, the main role of that filler is going to be is what it does, is what you're promoting, that it captures phosphorus and holds it there for the plant to be used, and that's the function of that.

[Tom Vanacore]: It will do that as well as provide soluble silicon, soluble calcium, soluble magnesium, and all of these trace minerals all the way down to the micronutrients and traces, even down to what they would call rare earth elements. And so what's happening now is agronomy is starting, or the agronomic sciences are starting to move towards understanding the weathering effects of microbial populations and healthy soils and how those healthy soils actually function. What is soil organic matter doing? How is that helping deliver nutrients to growing plants? So much of what is being done now in terms of the forefront of science, of agronomic science, includes all of these micronutrients and traces that nobody ever hears about. So these broad spectrum rock dust, like the vine, or the black line we're calling, or the black shales, can be used for balancing pH, can be used for these macro and micronutrients other than M, P, and K moss. You will have a number phosphorus, you will have a number of potassium, and you will have some traces of nitrogen, but it's the interaction with those major nutrients that makes these things work and work very well.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Historically, limestone's been the tiller of fertilizer, and does limestone do any of what the shale does? The shale is the bonus part of it. Yeah. It actually has a function, other than just being an inert material just to make the true packed ton fertilizer compute.

[Tom Vanacore]: That's a good way of looking at it. So Travis is spending a lot of time, and he I think he could probably jump in right now and explain what what SLC is doing in in order to try to commercialize the black shales as opposed to the carbonate line. Why don't you why don't you jump in a little bit? Is that okay?

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Alright. Do you wanna come up? Yeah. Pull your chair right up there, and you can just sit there.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: Yeah. And just introduce yourself. Yeah. Travis, the very sharp limestone. So we provide limestone that is a repeat supplement for dairy, but in all, and also hens that lay eggs. The flip side of that is the filler, as you're suggesting, for fertilizer. The Thank you. Movement currently is the and Maine being one of them, one of the first leaders that did this, they fan biosolid fillers. So human waste fillers that go into fertilizer. In in those fertilized in the human waste fertilizer, biosolid fillers, there was a whole bunch of micro So there's a void right now in that industry looking for those micronutrients to replace the biosolid fillers. I dubbed it to dumb to make it simple, and I'm a I'm a not a a nutrient agronomist or whatever. I'm a production guy. So calcium carbonate in a fertilizer bag is what I dubbed dumb filler. It doesn't do a lot. It takes a long time to react. Right. The black shale, which has which has been accepted by APCO as carbonaceous marine shale as a micronutrient cross product. It is not a fertilizer. It does not meet the threshold to be qualified as an NPK fertilizer.

[Tom Vanacore]: And that shale It's in the

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: Through the enhanced weathering process, which we just did freestyle cycling, and and there's a report that you folks had that we just received, shows that when it gets through the freestyle cycling, it releases calcium, magnesium, and we're further gonna study silicon because there's a obviously, it's a silicate shale. So there's tremendous amount of silicon in there. The weathering process is what we're looking for so that as a company, we can go to a bag fertilizer and we can say, hey, you can replace either calcium carbonate filler or you can use it as a filler for biosolid fillers, and it reacts. It does something. All of

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: the claims, and I apologize to jump in, know it does get confusing, but all the claims that you can make with that, can substantiate with the testing that you've done. Yes. Yeah,

[Tom Vanacore]: we did extensive testing, not only for the phosphorus, but also for the reactivity of the material.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: Yeah, And we're and we're we're continuing that testing as we speak, and and and where we come in is trying to replace our calcium carbonate with the carbonaceous marine ship. That that would be a win for us because then that would allow us to provide more calcium carbonate to the birds. So right now, we're somewhere around 10,000,000 birds that were feeded. And without our calcium carbonate, they they dump it on the stomach. They gotta chew chew it up in their gizzards. Well, calcium carbonate, high calcium carbonate, not limestone, that's calcium, high calcium limestone, is is rare. It's not that that in in New England and Pennsylvania, it's running us. And and so we're trying to figure out how to save the high calcium for what it should be used for instead of putting it in a bag and just spray it on your lawn, and then it doesn't do it. That's that's where I kind of fit in into the to the storyline that that Tom has done all the engineering, all the study, you know, brought this this this material, which sits underneath our our carbonate layer. So we've been we've been in our Swan Pori, which is where it exists. That quarry has been operating since eighteen fifties, called '47, and the black shale is sitting underneath the carbonate layer. Ironically, the black is is younger at 445,000,000 years ago. The carbonate sitting on top of it is 485, and that's the reason being is the high gate thrust rolled out. And so now we're getting closer to the end of the carbonate layer of life up there at that facility, and we're trying to figure out what we're gonna do and how we're gonna keep that facility open. There's an abundance. We estimate maybe about 30,000,000 tons of this material that could be processed into a pelletized product, agglomerated products, or fillers for fertilizer that could be enhanced with humics, with seed kelp, which Tom's involved in another one of his projects, and create a filler product that does more than just filler in a bag.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So why do you need us to do that? Again, don't take that the wrong way as far as why are you here. So why do you need us? Why can't you just do that as a business model yourself and and make and make that point? So so I guess I'm asking how can we help or what?

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: So the land application is where you folks could help us tremendously. So, obviously, the farm community is is not sitting here, abundantly wealthy looking for different opportunities just to get rid of amount of the. And and we all know it. So the the land application for us is important because when we produce the stone, we could take the coarser material, but we end up with the fines. What do we do with the fines? If we could sell the fines and put it back into the land, remineralize, re for regenerative farming also that's a popular subject within the kidneys, or learn some more about it and be able to to get it out, broadcast spread it, and put those nutrients back in the field and reduce the amount of of fertilizer or make the fertilizer that's in the ground actually be be available plant available, then that's a win for everybody. But nobody's telling you that

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: you can't broadcast that on there now? Oh, no. Not at all. Okay.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: No. No. No. And we're not we're not we're not sitting here saying that either.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Right? No. No. I'm not. No. You know, what what? Information for us. Yeah.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: Sure. So we're we're sitting here trying to to get some sort of traction behind some legislative branch or committee or best management practice, something like that that puts a label on it and then creates it. After that, we you know, the if there if there's some sort of funding mechanism in which there's some sort of credits and swaps and all that, that's kind of you guys. Right? I can't do that type of the legislative branch. So I I fit in on that end of it. The phosphorus is completely the phosphorus recovery is completely Tom's Tom's, you know, baby that he's been studying and totally understands. It's it's it's beyond me. Right. But in in my simple mind, I'm like, okay. If I drill blast crush, I can take the filler, replace biosolid fillers over here. I can take the minuses, put them in the field. If I can re if I can manage phosphorus in the field, then I can clean the lake up that I like to go bowling that job. It's that it that's my simple version of it. Tom obviously has to do all the science part of it, but but I think what why we're here is just to get it in just to get it out there and say, hey. Can we gain some traction somewhere? Right?

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yeah. So Has Heather have have you been involved with Heather Darby at all? Has she been involved with any of the Yeah.

[Tom Vanacore]: I think testing and Yeah. Heather hasn't taken us an interest with the extension service, although there was some talk about it earlier this year for them to do some of this. I don't think Heather we did most of our work with Jeff Carter before he retired. And is taking a look at it. Other you know, there's there's interest there. The UVM ex extension was sort of being forced to run as a business themselves in terms of where they're gonna get their money. And although there's a lot of science around this area, not just for phosphorus but for the use of the alkaline silk case, it's not science in this state that's doing it. A lot of the science, even the science that's going on in the state has been, is Yale and some of the bigger operators are are here doing work for enhanced rock weathering as an example, is a kind of technology. I'm gonna use that as an entrance way to talk about what you guys can maybe help us with. First of all, there are programs already that this would fall under, the NRCS programs, and I've listed them out in my little thing. I mean, Vermont also has the Vermont Paper Phosphorus program, which is a VP of P, but the USDA NRCS programs are conservation management codes that the state is participating. There's the three thirty six, which is soil carbon amendments, there's the five ninety, nutrient management, there's the seven eighty two, which is the phosphorus management like filtration system. So those are accepted practices and best practices, and these materials would fall right under those edicts. Right now they're not being endorsed. This material is not being endorsed for that use by the state, And the way that the state can get involved with, and this is just my suggestion, I'm trying to do my job and you guys are, I'm sure you're really good at your job, would be to make the connections between these local materials and the state objectives. So there's two objectives. There's the water quality issue which we're talking about, that this goes, you know, materials, the black shales and biochar, which is a, you know, bio carbon, which is forestry basically by product, that can be part of that. The climate mitigation in other parts of the country and other parts of the world, the alkaline silicates, which this is, actually is being used as climate- as a climate technology at scale. The alkaline silicates actually do capture CO2. They manage greenhouse gas emissions through their reactivity for the same reason that they manage phosphorus. They also will grab hold of CO2. So there's this mechanism and it's not that hard to describe. It's well described in all the scientific literature, But this material does this. And you have a study that was just concluded up in North Endwell. This is Yale. And the title of it is Multiple Lines of Evidence Reveal Rapid seasonal watershed responses to enhanced weathering. So the key here is enhanced weathering. This is a climate technology that we would embed in best management practices. In other words, we're not reinventing the wheel, we're not bringing in material from outside, we're just saying let's use our local resources and just pay attention to what it's doing when we put this material out in order to further the state's objectives for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Those can be from avoidance of nitrogen applications. In other words, if you reduce your applied nitrogen, you're avoiding nitrous oxide emissions, which is worth about 300 times CO2 as far as a greenhouse gas emission, it's power. And you're also reducing costs. You're reducing your inputs, imported inputs. In other words, if you're not importing nitriding as fertilizers or you're not importing synthetic fertilizers, but we're building fertilizers using local resources, which we have here, biomass, minerals, and microbial populations are everywhere, We can use those, we can harness those like we're doing in California. Then we, as long as we're recognizing those things and taking the time to measure, which isn't that hard to do because we're soil testing all the time, right? We're doing these things. Now you've got satellites overhead that are, you know, with remote sensing are doing all kinds of hyperspectral imaging. You can do all sorts of measuring now that you couldn't even do five years ago. These things can be built into sort of a whole systems approach to addressing these major issues. So the state really would win just by endorsing the use of these materials that we already have. The growers aren't going to get hurt by it. The growers are gonna actually benefit

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: from it. So to get us quicker down the path of what you're talking about, who else would we talk to to come in and say, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all good stuff. Who would come in here and have that conversation with us?

[Tom Vanacore]: Well, you can read the reports that we've submitted already from Which we will. For phosphorus. Mhmm. There's a 150 page report that includes all the work that UBM Extension did, all the work that, professor Ross did with his graduate students and undergraduates. That's there's a lot of good knowledge. That's third party knowledge. So it's not me telling you this. Yeah. For enhanced rock weathering, there's peer reviewed science all over, but this one, this is the study that was done in

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Danville. Yep. You got Is that on our webpage? Did we get that report? You did

[Tom Vanacore]: get it. Thank you. So this this is you know, you got a whole list of people, but Yeah. Noah Plunkett, who's here, he's probably the James Sayers. These are the guys that they're the top scientists in the world on this particular topic.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Sure.

[Tom Vanacore]: And they'll say, well, we we put the the basalt rock the basalt rock out there. That's an alkaline silicate. This is an alkaline silicate. And the direction that they're going, the academics are going, are actually coming back around to our approach, which we've been doing since late 1980s, where we're actually building more of a whole system. So we're not doing this climate tech thing where they want to monetize CO2 and bring in a bunch of money for that. We're saying these things will happen. All you have to do is pay attention, measure it, and build it into management practices so it's a regular part of their program, their growers' program. They could be small holders or they could be large.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: So, when we were talking, the main thing is trying to get the word out to get the farmer to start using it, because the benefits are there, and I think that's what he wants from the community to, you know, maybe be an extension. Problem we kinda run into is the cost of it. And that's, that's

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: maybe where Yeah, what is the, what is it? And I wanna ask her one question. How much of this product do you have? And you're I mean, you have a definite amount of product that you can Yeah.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: As I suggested, there's we estimate in Swanson, Vermont, there's 30,000,000 tons of this product. Okay.

[Tom Vanacore]: And Wilcox has got about 13,000,000.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So let me ask you this. If you've got that product, you don't have a market for it. Why why does it cost more? Because it's abrasive.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: Because excuse me. It's abrasive to Okay. Crush. Okay. Because of because of of the composition of the materials. Okay. So calcium carbonate with with very little bag Crumble. Yeah. It does not wear the manganese of the pressures out. The slag shale with what's what's in it is is gonna wear wear factor quite high. And I see that. Where the difference in the cost comes.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So I get that. I just wanna make sure. John, are you gonna jump in on this or you're you're gonna list I just wanna make sure that because we're getting short on time and we'll run over a little bit. But is there anything that you wanna jump in on with some of this? Can you guys just say your name for the record?

[Jonathan Corcoran]: My name's Jonathan Corcoran. And I just wanna say for the last twenty years, I've been working down in the Middlebury area with Acorn, Addison County Relocalization Network. So we're all about local food and agriculture. One of my strong interests is for Vermont to start feeding itself. And to do that, one of the most important things we need to shift is the soil. We need to bring the soil back into agriculture because that's where the nutrition comes from. And we understand this more and more now because we have a chronic disease epidemic that is a hockey stick is just going through the roof. We need to change the way we grow food. And Vermont has this great opportunity because we're a small state. We can't do what the big states do, and I I don't think our farms really have a future playing in that game. We have the opportunity to, how do you say it, develop and create a new model that's appropriate to our scale. And so I'll start with the land. We need to take care of the land. And to do that, we we need to support our farmers to transition to growing food, not only for our local market, but for our bioregional market. We're not a competitor in food globally. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is the health of our people. I am convinced that we will eventually learn that our health, and particularly our gut, which we now know is absolutely central to the whole chronic disease problem, is connected to the health of the soil. Okay. I want

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: to probably stop you there- Sorry? I'm going to give you guys five more minutes to wrap up, and I apologize for that, but we got other folks going, so I want I I just cut you off, John, as well, so I apologize.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: That's fine.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Wrap this up in five minutes to give us a direction in which what I'm trying to get to. I'm just trying to get to it to where how do we help you both, all three of you, as far as to get where we wanna get to to investigate further and to try to help where where you guys want us to be.

[Tom Vanacore]: Yeah. I I again, I'm gonna come back to trying to see a pathway, whether it's through administrative rules or legislation where these materials, these local materials can be integrated as an accepted endorsed in fact as part of the best management practice scenarios for the growers that are already getting help doing those things. In other words, I I I've given you the NRCS codes where these fall under. You also have the Vermont Phosphorus Program, which is a which is a pay for phosphorus reduction. In my mind, there's no reason why a grower shouldn't have the opportunity to be aware of these materials and have it on the list of accepted best practices, because the science is there. That would really help us.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: And what about have you been in any conversations with, like, laws that are in culture service or any of the fertilizer producers as far as of those types of folks that are out there? Yep. Yep.

[Tom Vanacore]: Yeah. They they actually they actually been spreading the material in the phosphorus challenge.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Now are they buying it directly to sell to consumer or are the consumers asking them to come or they're supplying? So how is that relationship working?

[Tom Vanacore]: Well, the relationship is working where we hire them to spread our materials. That's And the way it they participated in the phosphorus challenge by providing application services and things of that nature. Laws that laws is more likely because they're dealing with smallholders and organic farmers to to look for this sort of thing. But quite frankly, you know, we we sell direct. We don't have to, I mean, my business sells all over the country and we have, we've set up manufacturing in California. The Californian market is ready for this sort of thing and they're getting behind these initiatives. I think the reason that I'm back here again at the State House is to try to, because we have a different group here now that is more practical minded, that understands the value of some of these natural resources that we have here. And they're, we're constantly looking for solutions, and it almost seems like the state has been looking at distance for solutions when it's like, it's right here. We have these natural resources. We have the know how, the science behind it. There's no reason why we can't participate in this. And design it we we can help design programs that make more sense in terms of policy for the state too if you wanna start integrating greenhouse gas emissions reductions and things. We pioneered a lot of this. And there's big there's big businesses that have been funded by, you know, fintech tech companies at Silicon Valley out in California. Nobody's doing that on the East Coast. There's no reason why we can't.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Tom Vanacore]: So I I hope that this is a good introduction.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I think it is. I mean, I think that you've hit on some very big keywords. One being phosphorus, capturing more phosphorus, and, you know, obviously, trepidosis where where the concern of is the leak and legacy phosphorus is laying on the bottom. Yeah, I think it was an interesting discussion, but even more than that, I think it carries a little bit of merit. So please let dig into this a little

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: bit more. The only thing I'd add and I think Tom should submit to them is is the the study out of Yale in which they recognize that the a silicate shale would regulate the pH, and then if you were to then apply calcium carbonate, the, net reduction and c o two emissions that came out of that study also. So you you sorta need to you kinda use both of them, and it doesn't matter if it's a mag or calcium carbonate. So the thinking would be is is you could use a basalt or you could use a black shale, get it out on the land, regulate the land for the pH first, then a lot and then apply your your alignment. That's what you you choose to do. And then there is a net negative c o two emissions, you know, accomplishes the goal of everything. Right? Remember so you you manage phosphorus. You're re you're putting nutrients back in the soils, micronutrients all the way down through that are that are sufficient and been taken up over the last two hundred years with synthetic fertilizers. And then and and then at the same time, you're managing your phosphorus. So you so to me, if we could create this system and where where you folks would have to come in at some point here because this one would never get started without some sort of mechanism funding mechanism. Right? So there has to be some sort of credits and, you know, similar to what they do with with railroad tax credits, things like that. Right? Okay. So that that would be where I see you folks would have to do to get the ball rolling.

[Tom Vanacore]: It'd the it'd be like the inertial wheel. I mean, I think the business would the businesses would stand on their own. Right now, we're just at the point where it's it's the chicken and the egg thing. You know, has to make million dollars worth of investments. He's got people knocking at his door saying, can you deliver us, you know, 20,000 tons of this product? Which comes first, you know? You gotta put a million dollars in before you can deliver 20,000 tons of product. George Wilcox is the same situation. He's he's producing winter sand now down in shore where I work out of his quarry, and he's generating a bunch of fines from the winter sand. So now he's got an act two fifty permit that he's got to amend because we've got all these wonderful byproducts, which has rocked us local, made its business on looking for byproducts, mineral fines.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yep.

[Tom Vanacore]: And so now we have we we need involvement at the very beginning to get this thing moving. And once it once it moves, the growers will see the the benefit. If it's if we can market value added, you know, however you wanna market it like they're doing in California. We just need that. We need that buying from the state for and I use the word endorsement. Yeah. It's, know, And you know what we're doing in California for fertilizer replacements, bio mineral fertilizer, we can do that here. And we just don't have the market in order to justify all those investments yet.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Well, I hate to cut you off, and I'll give you some extra minutes here to get through with it so you can get it out and for us to understand it better. I think we do understand it, so I want to thank thank you guys for coming in.

[Tom Vanacore]: Thank

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. I touch with get Senator Heffernan, we'll see where we're going with this.

[Tom Vanacore]: Be happy to come back in, and talk to Anson Pebbetts. He's aware of what we're doing.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yeah, well we certainly will, we certainly will further those conversations with him.

[Tom Vanacore]: Thank you

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: very much. Thank Bennington. Bennington. Thank

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: you, Bennington. To meet you. Yeah.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Bye. St. Travis? Yes. Okay,

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: committee, we're gonna pivot to Brian Patch. Brian, sorry for the delay. Are you with us?

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: I am. I'm right here.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: Oh, no. I'm sorry.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I thought you were on the screen.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Yeah. I'm gonna share some slides. Good morning.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Cheated on your on the screen. I'm looking up there. Don't see you anyway.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: No. Not yet. I can put my camera on. That would help.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Oh, sorry, Ryan. Welcome, come on up. Sure, thanks. Yeah. Get plugged in here. We're long time. Take your time, take your time, you're good. Good

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: morning. My name is Ryan Patch. I work for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture and Food and Markets, where I'm a Policy Manager. I was invited to share an update on agricultural land use, and so I have far too many slides to get through, but I'm going to be talking very high level, And so hopefully these slides in the background will show as the demonstration to what I'm trying to communicate. Jumping in, want to start a conversation with the hill behind the State House that we can see from this room. This is what the view looked like in Vermont between 1870 and 1880 here. Lots of agriculture on very many parts of Vermont, 80% of Vermont was in agriculture. If we fast forward to 2023, we can see that certainly in this region of the state, the landscape looks very different. I like to put this photo up to represent some of the challenges I think Vermont is going to be experiencing as we continue to move forward to climate change and also play the game, spot the agriculture. Because while agriculture in the 1880s was apparent everywhere, in many parts of the state, agriculture and farmland doesn't cover as much as it So, I'm going to start this conversation with a review of Vermont's land area, about 6,000,000 acres. When I talk about land area, I'm using this figure, about 5,900,000 acres, and then Vermont has about 250,000 acres of water within our political borders. This is from the US Census Bureau, and just to make a note that throughout this presentation, there are lots of different sources that are drawn from, and so numbers don't always line up. Oops, there we go. Vermont is definitely very hilly when you use the LiDAR hill shade, you can see the spine of the Great Mountains there, Champlain Valley, Grand Island Franklin County flat up there as well. When you try to represent this as far as aspects of the landscape that are steep or have a shallow depth to bedrock, we can see that a large portion of the state of Vermont is covered by those features. And then when you add another restriction that farmers often run into, at least the productivity of crops, Vermont is very wet, whether you're talking about mapped wetlands or hydric soils. And when you overlay the USDA NRCS prime ag soils rating map, the prime, the statewide and local, and the NPSL, the not prime statewide or local, we can see that Vermont on the whole isn't really the best place to farm as far as the entire state. There are lots of areas where farming is much less possible. Now of course you can farm on soils that are NPSL, it's just the productivity of course will be reduced compared to some of the very nice alluvial soils out there. So 30 pounds of corn in the flood plain could be, well you can't actually grow crops, would think, on a hill like that. A lot of restrictions exist in our geography in Vermont. And so, we overlay the political boundaries of the counties just to look at, well, what are the different amounts of prime soils in the state? Grand Isle has the largest share with 10% of its soils being 100% prime, but on a statewide basis, only 4% of Vermont soils achieve that rating of prime. Statewide soils cover about 19% of the state's land base. And so taken together, about a fifth of Vermont's land base is very well suited to farming. Again, you can't farm those other soils, but there are challenges. This is the most recent crop data layer from aerial imagery that represents hay, pasture, and annual crops. You can still see the outline of Vermont with the extent of agriculture, but it is a little faint, certainly compared to the 1880s. When you compare the two of them together, well, seems like there's an association where there's good soils, you're gonna have more farmland because the economic or the agricultural economic system we have in Vermont mostly relies on economies of scale. And so the most yield you can get for input is likely gonna be where you will find more profitable type farms. So co association, good soils, agriculture seems to be pressing here. Oops. This is an older crop data layer, but it's prettier and it shows all of the different land uses up there from wetlands and forests, other perennial vegetation agriculture. And just to review what could be considered permanent agriculture or land that is secured in perpetuity. This is a representation yellow are the agricultural fields that are conserved performing and other easements are represented in green. So 226,000 acres of agricultural easements exist in Vermont. And just talk about kind of what do today's farms look like within those easements, we see about half is used for active farming, 10% is wetland, 35% or so are enforced. And when you look at the breakdown of those, that land that's used for growing food, about 75% is hay, 25% crops, and a small percentage is pasture. So, that's the land we have, here are some of the trends that exist for agricultural farmland. This is from a 1968 report. They go back to 1880 here, where there were 35,000, we're down to about 6,000 total farms in the state from census, 400 or so dairy farms, right back in 1880, there were 35,000 farms and 84% of Vermont's land base was in farming. On the right hand side of the screen, this is from that same 1968 report, they predicted that the percentage of land in farms and the number of farms would decrease and the size of farms would increase. And on the whole, that prediction was correct. This is data from the 2022 USDA NAF Ag Census going back to 1925. Starting with that figure from the prior slide, 84% of land in farming in 1880, 56% of Vermont's land was in farming in 1925, 69% was '21, and today we are down to 9% of the state of Vermont is actively used for.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So can I jump in there just for a second? Sure. Is the land that is no longer in farming been used for other purposes or they're just not being farmed anymore?

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Great question. I think there's a lot of things that happen to farmland when it's no longer farmed. One quote I've heard shared in testimony by farmers before is, kind of the concept is farm the best and leave the rest. As farms go out of business and they're taken up by larger other farms, gotta stick with the fields that A, your equipment can get into, so you need large fields if you're a large farmer, and B, you need an economic return. So wet soils, generally, and stony soils, the best for growing crops, and so that tends to revert. And so as we'll see in the next slide, right, today in Vermont, farmers actually manage more forest land than they do land for cropland pasture and woodlands.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So tell me where I'm wrong with this conversation we've had in the committee, and we haven't had it in-depth, but I think the committee knows it's going to sound familiar to what I'm about to say is that we are, and we don't have a bill yet, and we might have a bill, but we're kind of waiting to see what happens. But our commitment is going to be that we are going to do everything that we can do to protect farmlands, and we in fact, we have the solar folks coming in that would really like to build on all our great farmlands because it's easy to build on. Where our where we're starting to say is, say, you know what? Exactly what you're saying is that there is this much other lands available for people to use, it's just harder for them to use it. A lot like the same reason why farmers aren't using it. Farm fields are farm fields because they are productive and they are easy to use. We are going at some point in time to craft something after we talk to enough people about protecting farmlands in a way and say, Okay, well that's fine. You want to put your solar fields on. Just across the fence from this great farm field is a pasture land that farmers don't use anymore because they don't really pasture anymore. You can build on that if you'd like. Where are we wrong with that idea?

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: I believe that the costs are higher for less highly rated agricultural soils. So it will raise costs of other industries, because the increase of this place is always to

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: put it on open farmland that doesn't require permits to be converted. Exactly. So So we're fine we're fine with it costing more

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: in other places because what happens, and our whole goal is just to always protect farmers and always protect their interests, that land that is of no value to them will become more valuable to them because that's the only place we're going allow these solar fields to be. At that point in time, the value of their land will go up and they'll be able to capture more dollars while protecting farmland in the state of Vermont. We don't get down to 6% or 4% of farmlands being used for purposes other than grown stops. The

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: presentation, I have some information on some stuff that relates to that and maybe that will provide some additional

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I'm meaning to throw you off.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: No, no, no, you're not throwing me off at all. Just There's a lot of competing interests right now, and this presentation is attempting to elevate the important role agriculture will play in a climate resilient future for the state of Vermont, and to me, the finite resources, prime and statewide agricultural soils are the soils that have been used historically for a long time for agriculture. Because as I'll touch on, the conversion of forest land to agricultural land has theories, externalities for a lot of environmental concerns, and so if in the future you have to convert land to grow food, right, that's probably not as desirable as just maintaining the land you have today.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Well, and again, getting off of your subject a little bit, but again, I'd rather have somebody else convert land for what their purposes are other than farming than to have farmers having to spend their money to convert that land to grow crops. Russ? I have a question too. You showed the previous slide was basically fiftyfifty, whatever. How much of what is now forest was at one point farmland?

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: I have to do it. I don't know.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: I think it's good. Do some study. Interview farmers and ask, What did your grandfather farm? What are you farming? Just curious.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: That is for the first time in modern day, it wasn't always forests probably.

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: If 80% of I mean, yes, if 80% of Vermont was open farmland and today, maybe this one does, that doesn't do the percentage, but 75% is forest, then I would imagine, yes, if that's been a farm continuously since 1750, then I would imagine a lot more of a farm was absolutely cropland and And balancing so that is an ecosystem service farmers are providing, which is they are stewarding all of this farmland off of the cropland that they use to make their land. And of course, forests provide a lot of important resources as well, but as far as my focus on agriculture. Environment's changed so drastically, you know, recently she Yeah, know. And we didn't have the equipment we had, so Yep.

[Trampus Demers (Shelburne Limestone Corporation)]: And the fields didn't produce like

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: they do now, because we didn't have all the stuff we had. Absolutely, efficiency is required to compete in today's agricultural economy, believe, depending on scale and what your target market is. And so this is just that, right? As agriculture has decreased its footprint, the natural condition of most places in Vermont is forest, right? And so it makes sense that forest did recover as well. You're not farming, right? Trees are kind of weeds, they grow back, and it's kind of been stable. It goes up and down depending on which year you look at the forest service, but the forest has recovered. And then we look at the other land use sectors on this chart, I've got agriculture in yellow, I've got forest in green, mapped wetlands are blue, and urban land is in black. Since, I guess we'll go back to 1909 on this slide, right, the three main use sectors in agriculture have recovered and agriculture has continued to decline and it has continued to decline despite the intervention of effective policies that Vermont adopted beginning in the 70s to protect the conversion of department.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Since I was just looking at that last chart, since 1987, it started with upward trends of more wetlands. Is Vermont and climate getting wetter? I guess we get floods and always have that, but are getting to, are there more wetlands being created naturally? Because I think as you look around it doesn't look to be that way, but your chart shows different. I'd advise you to ask

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: a wetland ecologist that question for an answer. Understanding from agriculture, we have definitely seen an increase in precipitation, 20% increase since 1900, thereabouts for Vermont. And I remember walking on a farm in Chelsea and Washington and the farmer was like, this was never a wetland, this was never wet. I've never seen this running like this in a dry time of year. I don't know, that's anecdotal, but yeah, as you get more water, could make sense that more water collects in the lower areas, the more water that collects in the lower areas, the larger a wetland becomes. So, these interventions, Act two fifty, Use Value Appraisal, Vermont Housing Conservation Board were all implemented, what were the conversations that happened at the time to cause those programs to be implemented? And so what I'm trying to do on this chart is to, let's look back to use value appraisal in 1978, and then let's take use value appraisal and look back at the same amount of time to 1935. I mean, it's forty three and forty four years. It's not apples to apples. It's, know, all this is a generalization in these presentations, but, they lost 70% of their farmland from '35 to '78. And we lost 50% of the farmland from '78 to '22. So have definitely decreased the rate of loss, but 50% loss is significant by my eyes. And so looking at, these are Act two fifty reports that have come out at various times, are others or more. This one's from '68, '88, '19, and 2023. And I identified who was on those committees, right? 1968, there was a farmer member that was there, in 'eighty eight, there was a farmer member, but no farmers were present in 2019 or 2023. Further, how many times does an agricultural keyword mention in a report? I don't know if this is really a useful measure. You see it done in some news reports like the speech mentioned this, so this must be important. How many times is agriculture and other agriculture related words used? So 0.42% of all words in '68 were agriculture, and then it decreased, decreased, decreased to about 0.1%. And that's the chart with those concatenates they want. So agriculture is not, really seems like the focus of these reports and the focus of these committees. If you look at kind of the recommendations about agriculture from these two types of reports, those that have farmers on the committee and those that don't, right? In 'sixty eight, the objective was to preserve the state's agricultural and forest base as the intention of the program and in 'eighty eight, it is to support our agricultural heritage to working landscape. Right in 2019, the charge remains the same to preserve rural areas, farms and forests. However, the 2019 report recommended repealing the exemption for farming, logging and forestry below 2,500 feet when they occur in a critical resource area. And in '23, there really wasn't much talk about agriculture. The only recommendation was to exempt forest sawmills from climatic soil payments, which is supporting working lands, but it was still promoting the loss of agricultural soils through that recommendation. To kind of look at just economic output by Vermont's private industry, I want to just put up here some information about gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. GDP is total market value. So, if it has price, then it can be tracked of all final goods and services produced in an economy one year period. If you adjust it for inflation, it's called real GDP. And what the BEA uses to calculate state GDP is labor income, business taxes, and capital income. GDP does not reflect the distribution of income in the state, count the production of business services into domicile, or count informal or unpaid labor. So it's certainly not comprehensive, there's a lot of flaws with it, but it is one thing that you can look at consistently over time that talks about the amount of economic output of a particular sector. So to summarize, the top 50% of Vermont's real GDP comes from real estate, professional services, which includes lawyers, consultants, and accountants as examples, and healthcare, and all the way down at number 13 or 14 is agriculture. So here's that chart that you can look at all the other sectors that are ranked there. Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting as an aggregated sector is the thirteenth to fourteenth food provided. This is just more information that breaks down, because finance, insurance, real estate, rental, leasing is a very large category, you can break it down into smaller and smaller categories. So looking at finance and insurance and real estate, rental and leasing, can see the relative contribution of those sectors to that 6,000, it's in millions of dollars, 6,000 and 6,000,000,000 value there. So just putting here and then this chart's also here, if folks want to look at kind of what was the percent growth since 2000, right? 48% growth in finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing, 169% growth in professional business services, 77% growth in education, health care and social assistance, farming and forestry has only increased about 10% at that same time period. Goods are the physical goods that someone produces, food, timber, services, lawyers, consultants, etcetera. The percent growth in these sectors between 2024 is something I found interesting. Our private good producing industries have only increased their output by 3%, whereas the services providing industries have increased their output by 65%. Here are the industries that are included in there. I think this follows and tracks kind of The US as a whole, but it's interesting to see this information for Vermont. And so now to kind of get back to the question about climate change and Vermont agricultural land use, yes, is certainly getting warmer and wetter. But as we know from the drought this summer and has been represented in reports prior to this year, not only is it gonna get more wet, but episodic droughts are likely to become more pronounced during the growing season. And so farmers can be hit by all sorts of disasters. This is from the UN Environment Program, that's their cover. They're asking for action on climate change. This is from the report and it talks about the likelihood of warming exceeding a specific temperature limit. And with all current policies continuing, there's still a 37% chance with a range of one-eighty that the world will hit three degrees Celsius warming by 2100. That's a long ways away, three degrees Celsius is the big scary one. And currently, I don't believe all current policies are continuing from 2024 with regards to climate action. So just putting this here to say the climate disasters that farmers are experiencing, they continue to happen. So an OECD study reports that global agriculture is projected to absorb two thirds of all climate change costs by 2060. That may be related to the fact that the most productive soils are co associated with rivers. And if you have more flooding, you may have more effects on your farmland. These are all of the disasters that were declared in Vermont for 2023 and 2024. 28 unique USDA disaster declarations were made covering a range of gamuts from freeze, excessive rain, severe storms. And if you plot those out, you see the eastern side of the state was hit by more of the declarations than the rest of the state. This is a representation of some of the projected climate risks that Vermont is expected to endure, the relative risk, the high risk to no risk, extreme rain, front of mind, hurricanes, front of water stress, we saw that this year, definitely an issue. Wildfires are increasing, heat stress is a challenge, but sea level rise, unless we get another inland sea, Vermont likely is gonna be threatened by sea levels. However, if you zoom out, right, climate change is not just Vermont, it is everywhere. Sea level rise definitely threatens or may threaten parts of the Northeast. And those parts of the Northeast are where everyone lives in the Northeast. So as areas adjacent to the sea maybe have issues with being able to live there safely, people may move, right? And so thinking about migration as a response to climate disruption, that is a potential concern for Vermont and where are people going to live if we don't have enough housing and people wanna move to Vermont. This is two charts looking at the relative threats to the rest of the country, right? Wildfires in the West, water stress, extreme heat, and the vast majority of our fresh produce is grown out in California and the vast bulk of the crops in the country are grown in the Midwest. And so we see extreme rainfall and hurricanes being more of a threat in the Northeast, but certainly we'll have the rainfall that's needed to grow crops. And so to try to talk about like, does this mean for food? If food production is going to be more challenging as climate change accelerates, This is from New England fitting New England. And it's a question of, can the six New England states provide 30% of their food from regional farms and fisheries by 2030? And they have a bunch of different volumes, looking at eating patterns, looking at the question of supply, and then looking at the mix of industries needed to ramp up the food production. On volume two is what I'm gonna share on the next slide, which is the representation that the top one here, this is current land in New England, a lot of perennial forages, a lot of permanent pasture, 97,000 acres of vegetables, right? According to this report, to satisfy 30% of regional demand, not only does the type of and the amount of foods grown, so vegetables have to increase, fruit has to increase, but also additional cleared land is predicted to be needed if we wanna go from 21% regional production, which is the current best estimate to 30. So to increase regional consumption by 9%, basically Vermont would have to double the size of its agricultural land use, right? That's not what the report calls for. It talks about Maine and Vermont as historic producers and there's opportunity to look at bringing underutilized farmland into better production. But as a thought experiment, I think it's significant that to just increase 90% food for the region, gotta double the size of agriculture. That's And you gotta find the farmers to do it. Well, there's, again, yes. About all sorts of challenges. So, the profitability of farms is challenging, Over half of farms according to the 2022 USDA Nasdaq census in Vermont were unprofitable, right? So that's definitely a driver of farm loss. I think another potential driver of farm loss in Vermont right now, this is from American Farmland Trust. And they predicted that from 2001 to 2016, 21,400 acres of Vermont agricultural land were developed or compromised fragmented. Between 2002 and 2017, Vermont lost 94,000 acres of crop land and pasture according to the USDA Nasdaq census. And now that's one to 16, this is two to 17. So it's not apples to apples, but if you wanna just do the math, it's about 22.5% could be attributed to direct development. Yeah. So this is a map that takes that prime soils layer that I shared in the beginning and it overlays spatial analysis of the impervious surfaces in the state. So in black here highlighted is all the buildings, roads, or the impervious surfaces in the state. This is Chittenden County I've outlined here, this is Burlington. 69 Percent of all roads, infrastructure and housing in Chittenden County, Vermont have been constructed on prime statewide soils of agricultural importance. There's an affinity. There's another layer I wanna do something with, which is the suitability for basements. That's even more restrictive than prime soils rating and the intersection of those soils that are available for construction. But just, as you raised with solar siding, right? The cost is reduced when you don't have to clear land. You don't have to do a lot of permitting, right? Like it can move quickly and that's why agriculture is such an affinity for building. It's tough to build on the hillside. All right, so talking about ecological services that, I got three minutes, I think I can get through this. Services that Vermont covers UVM, oops, sorry, keep pressing buttons. The UVM estimates soil carbon sequestration potential in Vermont farm fields. This is a realistic estimation of the potential for soil carbon to be sequestered in hot foot bed soils. It's close to a million metric tons annually. And that annual reduction would be the same as removing 200,000 cars from the road. Now required, soils are a finite storage resource. Eventually you're gonna saturate the soils and that's the amount of carbon they can take in. So about nineteen years or so maybe if you were to try to sequester carbon at this rate. So you could put a lot of carbon in the soils that doesn't solve all the problems for every sector, but there's a lot of potential. This is information from the Agency of Agriculture's Water Quality Division. They administer programs for financial technical assistance to farmers. This is from last year's report, close to 500,000 acres of conservation practices have been implemented through those programs since 2016 and they include funding for practices like cover crop, manure injection, nutrient management, precision agriculture, no till, vocational grazing, all of those practices that have a co benefit for the reduction of phosphorus loss from a field. And this is the representation of that since Act 64, 2015, all the work quality work really ramped up as funding has increased from the state and the feds. And here's some other information. So on the left, this is some other farm somewhere else, maybe Iowa. This is what happens on a steep slope if you have full width tillage, no nutrient management, no field specific conservation practices. This is a Vermont field, not a steep to be fair, but you can see no till, you can see cover crop drilled in, you can see riparian buffer in the distance, and you can identify those management practices that a farmer has implemented. You can track the average phosphorus reduction from the implementation of those practices on that soil. And you can also use modeling from USDA to predict the COAP benefit, which is additional carbon sequestration benefit from those practices being implemented. That's the beauty of agronomic work on farms, is you can make the field more resilient to a little bit more water, but you can also reduce phosphorus loss and sequester carbon at the same time. And so this is modeling that the agency has been working on, it's not fully published yet, But if you take those practices which have a USDA estimated carbon sequestration benefit and you apply it across the state, there is a lot of sequestration benefit that could be calculated. And you can turn that into car equivalence because that's usually the most accessible thing for people to think of in climate action, like how many cars does this take off the road? So if you take 2016 to 2024, those practices that have been implemented have a greenhouse gas emission reduction benefit, about 86,000 metric tons of sequestration benefit could be calculated at a average cost of $77 Now, the state didn't pay $77 they paid for the phosphorus reductions. This is just a rider benefit on top of it. And if you take that 86,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, it has the same climate cooling effect as removing 16,000 fossil fuel powered passenger vehicles from the road. Vermonters have only registered 15,000 passenger battery electric vehicles during the same period. So a lot of good, 86,000 metric tons isn't a lot in the scale of emission reductions required in the Global Warming Solutions Act, but as far as a co benefit from our water quality work, I think it's pretty significant and useful to call out. The farmers are the ones doing this work on the ground. 94% of Vermont farmers believe they have the knowledge and technical skills to enhance soil health on their farm. Yet only 58% of farmers have the financial capacity to do so. And I think that's the biggest gap is like the will is there, the payment and milk check doesn't cover all of these additional benefits, all these additional practices that provide those ecosystem benefits. So there is a gap there. So in closing, in summary, Vermont is losing Farm to Farmland, have been for a long time. Prime and statewide agricultural soils are a finite and continuing shrinking resource. Current land protection efforts are slowing, but not reversing, or stopping, halt it maybe, the loss of farmland trends in Vermont. Farms need to be economically viable to keep producing food year on year, over half of them are not. To meet that 30 by 30 vision for regional full food production, Vermont would need to double its current acreage to go from 21% to 30% regional production. Farmers in Vermont do provide positive ecosystem services for Vermont through the growing of food and crops, and those benefits can be calculated and include clean water, hardened sequestration of soils, and stewardy and improving biodiversity, like how half of all farms are forest. Farmers in Vermont care and are motivated to address climate change, but Vermont is losing its farms to act and alike. So, there's my overview of Vermont Agricultural Land. Very nice.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: It was a lot of information in there, and we appreciate it very much. It goes a lot with what we've been talking about, so I think it gives us more of a focus of some of our agenda. Excellent. Thank you. My pleasure, thank you. Sorry to hold you up for the few minutes here. We got a little long winded on there. But you

[Ryan Patch (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: saw the stony hat can help with the carbon. It is not. Yep, yep.