Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Good morning, sir. Appropriations here. We've, taken over appropriations. We are, that's what we're gonna just kidding. April Fools to everyone. So I Good meet for a second. Am I in the wrong room? So good morning, everyone. It's April 1. We are gonna just spend five to seven minutes. I just wanna do an introduction for Dana, who's going introduce himself as well. We're going to be spending some time on taxation stuff. We've spoke several different times. Some We requests from the forest industry about some taxation. Dan, if you could just give us a brief introduction and what you're going to be talking about next week, and then we're going to move on. Welcome, the floor is yours.

[Dana Duran]: Sounds good. Happy April Fools, everyone. Good morning. Thank you to all of you for having me in today. My name is Dana Duran. I'm executive director of an educational nonprofit called Professional Logging Contractors in the Northeast. We're a group that represents timber harvesting and timber trucking contractors here in the state of Vermont. We just were invited by contractors in Vermont to come here two and a half years ago. We now have 35 members here in the state of Vermont, and we also represent contractors in Maine, New Hampshire, and New York. In the grand scheme, we'll probably end up representing contractors throughout the seven working states, but we just expanded seven years ago. Roots of our organization, we started in 1995 in the state of Maine to represent timber harvesting and hauling companies in the state of Maine, small businesses. Average size of one of our members, both here in Vermont, but also in Maine, New Hampshire, New York is about nine employees, so all small businesses. Appreciate the Senator inviting me and just saying a few words about our organization. So as I said, we have 35 contractors here in Vermont. We have two twenty members in the state of Maine, 10 in New York and a couple in New Hampshire. What I'll just pass out briefly, which I think would be helpful to all of you, I only brought five copies with me, I'll give my last one to you, just I wanna reference it. This is an economic impact study that we just published one month ago. It was published by our organization. We have conducted this study in the state of Maine in 2017, 2020, 2023, and we're now, as a regional organization, we thought it would be very ideal to now publish this study for all seven Northeast states. So this has never been done before, but if you turn to page eight inside, you'll see the state of Vermont details. So logging and trucking in Vermont, it's about 140,000,000 economic output, 75,000,000 labor earnings, 800 direct jobs, 500 indirect jobs, and 9,000,000 state tax revenue. So that just gives you an idea of what logging and trucking means in in the the state of Vermont. In total, the region produces about $1,300,000,000 stops from logging and trucking in the seven Northeast states, but this gives you the breakdown of what it means in Vermont. Just trying to be respectful of time. I've been talking to Senator Ingalls about potentially having this committee consider a sales tax exemption for log trucks and trailers back in 2017 and 2018. Actually, this committee moved forward the sales tax exemption for logging equipment to become sales tax exemption, both in purchase and use and the sales tax, sales and use tax. What we're requesting will be on the sales and use tax only for logging trucks and trailers. Again,

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I'll give

[Dana Duran]: you background on some bills that were introduced last session and why we're only focused on the sales and use tax for the logs, log trucks and trailers next week. But that's a little background about us, about the industry, the state of Vermont, and potentially what we'll be talking about next week. So happy to answer any questions, but I'm trying to keep it brief and respectful this morning.

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: First of all, thank you for coming and having this. Obviously, on

[Dana Duran]: this

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: small industry that uses gas, there has been impact. How much has it been impacting you and, obviously, the numbers that we see here? Yeah.

[Dana Duran]: Great question, senator Major. I actually was asked that a public radio story that I think was on yesterday about this very question.

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: So So full disclosure, I heard that, and that's why I asked him.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Okay. It's rewarding over you. I appreciate that. You're not on the.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: You wanna talk about a softball? I gotta load it up and tee it up. Hit the card.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Can I help you out?

[Dana Duran]: So the last thirty days have been obviously a volatile situation. And the diesel, I would say a month ago, but you know, and let me just kind of set the record. With logging and trucking, all equipment uses diesel. You may see some pickup trucks that may still use gas, but for the most part, the entire industry uses diesel for operations, whether that's a skidder in the woods or that's a log truck that produces that that transports wood to market. So the average price for both for on road diesel about a month ago was $4.75 a gallon, off road diesel was about $4.3 $4.35 because difference of sales taxes. Today, I mean, you've seen what it is, it's $5.75 to $6 right? So we've seen a 20% increase in the last month alone. Like farmers, loggers are price takers, not price setters. So there's no way that they're able to pass that cost along unless a mill effectively passes along a fuel bonus, or they take it out of stuffage from the landowner. And passing along that to the landowner right now, they're basically cutting off their nose to spite their faces. I mean, it's hard enough to move wood as it is, it's hard enough to harvest wood, and for a landowner to take that on the chin in terms of reduction in stuffage is really, really challenging. So we're hopeful that the mills eventually will do something. Right now they're doing nothing because we've gone into mud season. Most folks are pulling out of the woods. The wood has been produced. Now it just needs to get trucked to market, and the mills have what they need to take them until May, early June. But when we get to that time frame, if the diesel prices are still where they're at, it's gonna go in one of two ways. Either the mills are gonna step up and they're gonna provide a fuel bonus for those diesel costs. We could see, I should say, one of three ways. We could see a reduction in diesel by that timeframe, or you're gonna see a lot of folks just kinda not hungry. That's I'd say that's where we are right now because, you know, we're right where we were in 2022. And there was a lot at that point in time, markets were different. Markets wanted wood. Right now, markets don't want wood like they did three years ago.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: I'm gonna leave it there, fair enough to our list, but I would wish that when you come back, I'm sure that you will, but I would really want it here, because what I'm hearing from all of our mills in my area are the pains of what are going on in the in the logging industry. And I wish we would be a little bit heavy on that. Yep. Not to make your point, but to make our point as far as to that this industry is really, really struggling right now and it's an important industry. So I want to thank you for coming in. Look forward to having you next week, and yeah,

[Dana Duran]: I think you will we appreciate your time. Yep, and I'll pass that last copy down to Senator Ingalls, so everybody gets a paper copy.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: That's good. Thank you.

[Dana Duran]: Thank Thank you. Thank you.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yep. Okay. We're gonna move on to what we originally had. We're gonna talk about tile and drainage. We have Heather Darby. Always glad to have Heather in the room. We have Addison Flex this year, which is, sad to me. I always, appreciate her presentation. Jeff Faulkner, director of UVM Agriculture and Environmental Testing Labs. We're gonna have some other questions too that we were, brought up yesterday as well. Heather, we're gonna have some testimony on ParaClot next when is that? Friday. Friday. This is actually Friday, and we would be interested in having whoever might have done some testing or have some direct knowledge on Paraquat for Friday. So we're mirroring what the House has passed as a bill. But anyways, I'll stop talking and good morning. The floor is yours.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Yeah, thank you. Good morning, everyone. I actually, just to clarify, you want me to come back on Friday or you wanna ask questions about Paraquat later?

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: No, we'll do the Paraquat on Friday. If you can and that's something that you're comfortable about testifying about, absolutely. We would love to have you. Linda can send you more of the details. And we just none of what we saw on the witness list, maybe maybe one, I can't remember now. But I I I always if we're going to talk about agriculture in the state of Vermont, I want UVM present. I want UVM in the room, and so very important for us.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Okay. All right, great. Thank you. Thanks for having us back. And I think Joshua, if you want to start because I believe you're going to give a little intro to tile and drainage and then I can wrap up with yields crop crop related stuff. So

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Good. Joshua, I'll

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: turn it over to you to start.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Glad to do that. I'm gonna share my screen. Folks, let's see. Hopefully, you can see that. You see the

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Yeah, saw Great.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Okay. All right. I'll I'm just going to talk a little bit about tile drainage basics, make sure we're all on the same page, give some context for the discussion, and then talk a little bit about some of the research that's happening at UVM related to water quality, and then pass it back to Heather. So I think the first thing that the elephant in the room here around tile drainage is why are farmers interested in draining maybe more so now than they have been in past years? And that's a pretty simple answer. It's that we're getting wetter here in Vermont. And I think everyone knows that. If you look at this figure here, we saw this really precipitous increase in annual rainfall from 1992 to 2011. And of course, that was capped with Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. This was just a tremendous amount of rain on an annual basis and an increasing trend. And I think that's really when we saw more and more tile being installed and interest in that growing. And then we had a few dry years or more quote unquote normal years. And then in 2023, it was, you know, another record year, actually wettest year on record stretching all the way back to 1895 when we started keeping annual rainfall records. And this data here shows in Addison County, July and August had 16 inches, but I had some weather stations out in that county that recorded over 23 inches in several places. So that's almost half the annual rainfall in two months. So, of course, challenging for farmers. And that's really shows in the data. This is USDA risk management agency data that just indicates where crop insurance payments were made. And you can see well over half of the pie here from 2001 to 2010 was made because of excess moisture. So what tile? Tile is used to actually be terracotta clay. You can see a couple of horseshoe shaped tile there on the left hand side of your screen. Of course, now it's a little more modern. We use this black plastic corrugated perforated pipe. It's placed just below the root zone of a crop, typically three, three and a half feet in-depth. And its sole purpose is to lower the water table below the root zone of that crop in a pretty quick way after we receive rainfall. It's not new. You know, it's been shown that it existed in ancient times, that farmers were trying to find a way to drain land and make it more productive. So this is not a new idea. The big benefits of tile and we call these the big two. It really gets farmers off of a roller coaster of yields from dry to extremely wet to normal good years, bad years. It levels things out and increases productivity. And you can kind of see some of those numbers there. The figure on the left bottom of your screen is from Ontario. So, not too far away from Vermont. And then, the longest running study that I'm aware of was performed in Ohio there where they looked at yield improvement over twenty five years. So, it really does improve yield. And the other thing that we don't talk as much about is improved trafficability. And that just means farmers are able to get into the field and do what they need to do when they need to do it. They can plant when they need to plant without damaging soils. They can harvest when they need to harvest without tearing the fields up. Some activities in the middle of the growing season. That's huge because that then directly translates to improved yield as well, and actually helps protect our environment and protect the soil. In terms of here's the closest data we have, I think, for some of the yield improvement over a long term study. And this was taken from Northern New York by Larry Gearing over at Cornell several years ago. And you can see this increasing yield as you go from undrained conditions to a surface drain ditches essentially to widely spaced tile drainage, and then tile spaced at 50 foot. And it's just, you know, yield continues to improve as we drain more intensively in cropland. And like I said, one of the things that we don't talk enough about, I think, is drainage tiles benefit to soil management and protecting our soils from damage, and especially compaction. As soils stay wetter longer, the forces under tractor tires, bearing pressures, travel deeper into those soils. And they compact those soils. And this is especially true in the clays of the Champlain Valley, which really hold on to that moisture, as I'm sure some of you are aware. And those, we can get those really deeply compacted layers beneath, you know, beneath where a typical 10 inches plow would be able to reach because of sustained moisture. So I think it's really important in that sense as well. And then, it doesn't just have a benefit in the wet years. It also has a benefit in the dry years. And that's a little counterintuitive. Folks think some folks think, well, it's taking all the water away. And if we enter drought, then I won't have water for the crops. It actually looks works a little bit differently than that. It keeps that water table low in the early season so the crops can really establish deep roots early on in the season so that when we do have drought later in July and August, we have those roots down close to the water table, deeper soils where they can access moisture. So it really has a benefit in most years. And I think it's important to say that, you know, Vermont's always been wet. It's just a wet place to live. And this is a quote from the Vermont annual report of the Ag Experiment Station in 1912. And even then, Vermont farmers really recognized how important drainage was to production in this state. You know, back then it was done a little bit differently, but it was still recognized as essential to a productive agriculture. And now, of course, like I said, it was done differently then. Now, it's commonly done in these large pattern systems. You can kind of see the different types of designs there on the left hand side of your screen. Really, the factor that has changed in the past probably ten to twenty years is how closely we space these tile drains. It used to be they would go in at maybe 50 feet, 60 feet. Now, it's common drain spacing in the Champlain Valley, and those heavy clays, which are really hard to drain, is close is more 20 feet or 25 feet. So that's been the big difference. But this is kind of what those systems look like as they're installed, if you take an aerial view. And then, of course, we can't talk about tile without some of the environmental concerns. For decades, we really thought that phosphorus would not reach tile drains. It really phosphorus bonds tightly to soil. So we thought, well, as water trickles down through the root zone, through the soil profile, phosphorus is going to grab on the soil and not move into those, into tile drainage lines. And that's really not the case. So we started to see this and became, I guess, much more front of mind with some work in Ohio and the Western Lake Erie Basin around twenty ten, twenty twelve. And we started to see a lot of phosphorus move into drainage tiles there. And then, course, Vermont became aware of this, and we started to do more monitoring. And we had these new rules. You can kind of see some of those on the screen there. So this is really something we need to be aware of. And really, what makes this a concern, especially in the Champlain Valley, is that we get what we call preferential flow. Or essentially, instead of water traveling down through the soil nice and evenly, just kind of soaking the whole soil down through the tile line, it moves pretty quickly through cracks. And we have these clays in the Champlain Valley, which are shrink swells. So they form these cracks. And then water can zip right down through those cracks, carrying phosphorus or carrying nitrogen or whatever with it to reach those tile lines. So this is why we see the challenges with tile drainage and phosphorus movement loss from fields that we do in the Champlain Valley. You can kind of see an image there of where we did a dye test. You kind of take this is from my old lab in grad school at Cornell. Take dye soaked water, pour it onto the soil. And you can see there at the upper soils, it soaks in nice and evenly. But then there's these streaks where this dyed water just zips right down through these macro pores, old root channels, wormholes, or cracks in clay, and can reach a tile drain. There's been a lot of conversation about how tile drainage might affect high flows and streams in watersheds. And I'm sure you're all aware there's been some lawsuits over that. Really, what the scientific literature says is that the tile drain tends to decrease. It tends to dampen those peak flows in streams where it's in watersheds where it's installed. And you don't need to worry about the text on this slide. Those are just some backup citations. But that figure really makes this point really clear, I think. That if you look at that watershed with no tile, that's the flow rate. So it shows have this really steep peak, half flow after a storm event. But then if there's tile in that soil, it slows that water down. Water moves through it has to move through the soil instead of running off the surface of the soil. And before it enters that tile and it's discharged into the stream. And that just tends to really dampen the hydrograph.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Josh, Joshua. Yep. That's a 1990 slide. Have they done any more current research?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: There was a study that was released last year, and what it did, it took, it was called a meta analysis, and it looked at all the studies that had been done on this particular topic. And it essentially produced the same findings. This has held true through many studies through time. We don't have anything specifically from Vermont that addresses this question, but, but we have studies from many other places.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Because I know the, the naysayers would say, well, that's a study back in the 1990s.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Sure.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: But sometimes when they tell me, ask me that question, I can say, where can I find that information? On the UBM website? Or that I can direct them to say, hey, there's more current data that we can go here to find that.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Yeah. Good, good question. We don't have this up on the website, but certainly I'm glad to share any of this. If you want to point someone in my direction, that's All

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: right. Thank you. You bet.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: But then, you know, we have these environmental concerns. But then, it's complicated because we also think there are some environmental benefits from drainage. And these are just some of these points that I think don't get discussed as often as they probably should. One is that as we see more water draining through the soil profile, it creates more space in the soils above it for additional rainfall to soak in. So we actually decrease surface runoff and decrease erosion when we tile drain a field. We've heard this from farmers. They drain a field, and now they don't have gully erosion. Now they're not losing soil like they once were. And that's supported by the USDA NRCS soil erosion tools that are commonly used all over this country. They make that adjustment. Of course, as we better drain our soils, we are more able to achieve full yield potential. That means we're soaking up those nutrients that we applied in manure or fertilizer, so they aren't there to be potentially lost to the environment. And then Heather's done some survey work that has shown that as people drain improve their drainage situation, they're more able to adopt some of those best management practices that we promote so much in extension like cover cropping and no till. And I think that's a really important point as well. So what have we actually seen in Vermont? I'm going to show some data from collected in the Dead Creek Watershed. We published this a couple years ago. This is from two years, 2020 and 2021. And basically, these were these years were on the dry side. So 56% of normal precipitation in 2020, and 68% of normal precipitation in 2021. And there you can see the annual loss we saw from two tile drain fields in that watershed during those two years. So and those are in pounds per acre. So somewhere between zero point seven and one point one five is where we're hanging with phosphorus loss from Vermont fields. And just to kind of put that in context, this is what's been published around the country that a typical range is 0.35 to 1.4. So Vermont's smack dab right in the middle of that national range of what losses have been recorded. And I think the other thing to put this into context is how much phosphorus gets applied to a farm field. You know, somewhere ranging from 60 to 100 pounds per acre per year. So, this is a very small fraction of the phosphorus that gets applied. So and then the last study I want to talk about is this, which we're currently still in the process of working on in Bridport. And this is a very large field used for production. And on one side of the field, we have a tile drainage network in that BAU kind of orangish color. That's business as usual. So that's more conventional practices. And then in that soil health green side of the field, we have another tile drainage network. And there we're injecting our manure, we're planting cover crops, and we're using no till. So, and then at the bottom end of that field, the south end where all those little red dots are, this is where we're monitoring flow from those two sides of the field. And we also have some tile drainage phosphorus filters installed. So I'll talk about what we're seeing coming off the field, as well as how those filters are performing. Here's another look at those filters. They kind of look like a septic field installation. We dig down underneath the tile drainage main, which is you can see at the top of the screen that black pipe. And we let water kind of come off of that main down into this manifold with perforated pipes. And then we cover these up with a pea gravel mixture with just iron shaving, simple pea gravel and iron. And as water flows up through that media, it the iron tends to bond with the phosphorus. So very simple technology. Doesn't take up much land. And here's what we're seeing. So The years this is Sorry.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: One of How good

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: many years would that system last?

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

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Would it have to be replaced, maintenance done?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Yep, good question. So our design accounted for fifteen year performance. And at fifteen years, we anticipate it would have 50% phosphorus removal. So it's still performing at fifteen years, but it's not performing as well as it does in the first few years because the iron fills up with phosphorus. It kind of becomes saturated with phosphorus and can't remove anymore. In terms of maintenance, we don't think there's any maintenance. We've had this one in three years, 36 storm events, really, you know, solid storm events. And we haven't had to do any maintenance yet. Of course, is our first experience. We're three years in. We may find differently. But thus far, no issues. Great question. Thank you. Yep. So here's our data from one of those. This is the business as usual side of the field. And I'm showing concentrations on the left and loads on the right, which is just kilograms per hectare. But that's roughly equal to pounds per acre, if you want to kind of think of it that way. The blue boxes are incoming concentrations. And the yellow boxes are out going concentrations from that filter. So this filter removed about 70% of the total phosphorus load over three years, or 36 storm events. So it performed really well. And then I put a little red bar up here on the figure on the left. And I just want to make another point here. This is business as usual. So these are all your conventional practices. That's incoming concentrations there averaged around 1,000 parts per billion in business as usual. So just kind of keep that figure in mind. Because we're going to look at the soil health side as well. Here's the soluble reactive phosphorus. So the total phosphorus includes the phosphorus that's bound to soil and the soluble as well as the soluble. And then we break out the soluble because it's really bioavailable when it gets into the lake. And we saw on off of this field and through these filters, we saw almost a 90% reduction in soluble P loss. And so I threw that red bar up there again. So we're right around 300 parts per billion here coming off the business as usual field. And then as we move to the soil health side of the field, where we're using all those good BMPs, the soil health management BMPs, we actually saw lower performance from that filter, removing about 54 of the total phosphorus. But the concentrations of total phosphorus coming off that field are about half what they were coming off of the business as usual. And I think that's a really important point to make here too. That it's probably not just filters or just BMPs on the field. It's probably a combination of both if we want to get, you know, the best water quality. And then just looking at the soluble phosphorus on that side of the field, again, about 50% removal. And that's likely due to a very kind of lower incoming concentrations caused by the BMPs and how they're working on that field. And then before I transition it to Heather, which she may talk about this project, but this is something we have in the works, which is we're looking at kind of this question of what's the total phosphorus loss from a field that's drained versus a field that's undrained. And no one's really been able to answer that question or do a good job answering that question. So hopefully, we can do that in Vermont up in the St. Albans Bay with this Discovery Farms project. And I'll stop there and send it to Heather unless there are immediate questions.

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: Just what's the the initial cost of what depends on the I'm sure acreage of putting in the tile that initial investment.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Of the tile itself? Yeah. Roughly a few years ago, we were running $1,200 an acre. I'm guessing we're probably $131,400 dollars an acre now just because everything always Sure. Goes

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Sure. We'll go on to you. So Josh, I'm curious. What's the optimum level, depth level in Vermont for a drainage system? You mentioned three and a half, four feet, something like that.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Yeah. So it depends on the if a clay soil, we wanna get them three and a half to four in a wider soil. Because, you know, you think about that clay, it wicks water upward. Like it just, you know, the capillary rise really draws water upward in a heavy clay. So, you want to get a little deeper in a lighter soil, you know, a nice silt loam or a sand or grown vegetables. I mean, Quebec, they put them down around two feet, you know. So it varies depending on the soil.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: And are there companies in the state that install the tile or the farmer do it himself?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: It happens both ways. There is a contractor. We've seen some come and go. There is currently a contractor in the state that does it. And they have you know, they've invested in the technology to do it right with GPS guided installation. But some farms have chosen to get equipment themselves and do it themselves. And that's an option. There is an advantage to having a professional do it, think. They're just a lot more experience.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Frost doesn't seem to bother. You don't have to get down below the frost line.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: No. It doesn't usually cause an issue. Yeah. It with, you know, ideally we're draining the water within that profile. So we're not having really concrete frost around that tile line. It's just, yeah, it's an unsaturated soil down at depth that freezes and it doesn't cause any issues.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: In your professional opinion, the phosphorus transfer versus the ability to grow more crops, the growing of the crops far outweighs the phosphorus effect of where somebody might be not in favor.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: I think we do need to use BMPs. We need to use some of these practices. But I think there is a tremendous benefit, especially when it comes to soil erosion. And I think it does outweigh the loss potential. But what we need to be mindful of that and manage for that.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So we know phosphorus is a problem, but is that the number one problem of a field that should have tile drained versus not?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: That depends, because in some watersheds where we're draining to a water body that's sensitive to nitrogen, tile drainage actually moves a lot more nitrogen than it does phosphorus. But here we are in the Champlain Basin. Our concern is phosphorus. We've measured nitrogen and tile. But we're not really concerned with that because our water body is not sensitive to it. But, you know, so it depends where you are.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Fair enough.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Do we have any more questions for Josh? Yeah.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: John, though. Connecticut Valley. We do worry about nitrate, right?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: We do. Anything

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: to combat that? Like the field system?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Yep. Really it's in field practices, nutrient management, really trying to fine tune those nitrogen applications so we don't have nitrogen that can be lost. And then there are also filter systems, much they're wood chips instead of iron shavings, but they do a very good job of removing nitrogen. So it's kind of same ideas, it's just applied a little bit differently for nitrogen than it is for phosphorus.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: And you said $1,300 an acre for the drainage system? Is that, did I say that correctly?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Yeah, right. A few years ago it was 12. So I'm guessing it's it's And going up that's on a large acreage. Now, if it's a small job, prices go up. You can imagine, you know, to mobilize equipment and to do all that kind of small site work. The price per acre will go up on like a small vegetable farm versus a 50 acre corn field.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Are they creating incentives for farmers to be able

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: to do this? Right

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: now you're just doing a practice thing, correct? Or a study.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: That's correct. Yep. So NRCS does cost share these filter systems that I showed you. The catch with this is that, you know, unlike a lot of conservation practices that we have incentives for, to be quite honest, there's really no benefit to the farm in terms of production for these filters. So they're hesitant to use their ability to capture incentives for these practices versus something like cover crops, which does have a benefit to the farm in some, you know, in terms of production. We can do it, but a lot of farmers aren't actively pursuing it.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So $1,300 an acre is a lot. You know, it doesn't seem like it is, but it is. And what would you say the payback is? And I don't know if that's a fair question to ask, but what would you say the payback is before the payback is before they start seeing the benefit?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Yeah. It ranges from four to six years, so it's pretty quick in the big picture.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Yeah.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: This why farms are draining. Yeah.

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

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Is there a period of time after the dirt's been dug up and then the system installed where there's a certain amount of natural compaction that must happen? Can the farmer still use that field immediately?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: They can. There is some natural settling. Oftentimes they'll choose when they're going out of hay into corn. So they're already going to be tilling, plowing, and do the drainage then. And then they'll be right back on it with corn that first year. Yeah, there's no idle time.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Okay. Really? Yeah, great. Thanks. Thanks, Josh.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Very nice.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Okay. So, I'm going to build off from what Joshua talked about a little bit. He did mention we conducted a survey of farms a few years ago to try to better understand who was installing tile, what kind of farms, how they viewed the return from the tile, what they thought the benefit was. During the same time is when there was a lot of con conversation around banning the installation of tile. There's still a lot of negative view around tile in the state and the impact that it has on the environment. As Joshua noted, one of the things that we've seen out in the field as service providers and professionals working with farmers is that anecdotally, we've seen farmers be able to actually adopt more conservation practices when they do have fields that have been tiled. This was something that we wanted to try to get a handle on. We surveyed farmers throughout Vermont with a paper survey essentially that was sent to them. These are farmer opinion and experience that I'm going to show you. So, you know, the real question was, should tile drainage be considered a conservation practice? And I will tell you, you know, from the results that I'll show you some of farmers would say yes, it is a conservation practice. I think the data that we're collecting to again, evaluate the impact of tile on water quality with BMPs is really important so that we can take farmer experience and knowledge and match it up with what we're seeing in the water. So, we know that tile improves field conditions. We know that it can help increase the adoption of no tillage, cover crops, reduce tillage. Farmers say they see increased yields. And then they're on the fields more timely, but also under better conditions. So farmers stated that it increased the timeliness of planting, the timeliness of manure applications, and of tillage, a fertilizer, and they also said it helped them to reduce pesticide use. So these were the various benefits that farmers saw, giving us even more support for the fact that tile is really assisting with conservation in the state of Vermont.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Heather, what about the health of the plants as far as winter kill with your legumes? Is there any data that shows that tile fields are better for those acreages than not?

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Yeah, yep, absolutely. Both yields and quality survivability of the crops have all been shown. And then, you know, farmers state the same results. So of of the farms that we surveyed, you can see we we had good response. We had 60,000 acres kind of worth of Vermont farmland reported to in the survey. So when you think about this, this is actually quite a substantial amount. And you can see that the majority, so the dark green is the majority of those acres were not tile drained. So of the 60,000 acres that responded, there was only about 15,000 of those acres being managed under drainage or with tile. And you can see that one of our biggest respondents was field crops. So this would be corn and soybean predominantly. And that was the demographic that had the most subsurface drainage or tile drainage. So you can see about 11,000 acres were being managed under tile of the nearly 30,000 that were reported. In hay and pasture systems for the 30,000 acres reported, you can see far less was being managed under tile, but there was still tile out in hay and pasture production systems. We had some perennial crop acres reporting as well. So this would be apples predominantly in our state. And you can see that there was a fraction of that land that was also tiled, and the vegetable acreage was really small in comparison, but there was tile there as well as low as half an acre. So regardless of the production system in Vermont, people are utilizing tile. It's not just corn farmers or dairy farmers, it's generally anybody who's growing crops in Vermont have and continue to install tile to manage water on their farms and grow crops here in this state. So, we asked the farmers lots of questions trying to capture the impact that the tile had had on their farm. So, you can see over to the left, we asked them what life was like before tile drainage. And these were some of the experiences that farmers reported. So this would have been before they had tile drainage. 75% of the farms had experienced complete crop failure in one out of five years. That's a really high number, and it really supports what Joshua was showing in his presentation about crop losses in Vermont. 98% of the farmers said that they had experienced depressed yields compared to average, and ninety nine percent of the farmers were implementing field practices often in less than ideal conditions, which means they're going out on really wet soil. And none of the farmers felt like they met or exceeded their yield goals in all of five years or any of the five years. So tile drainage was really important to those farms. Then of course, after they installed the tile, nearly all the farmers reported yield improvement and also improvement in being able to get their fieldwork done in a more timely way. One of the comments, of course, was without it, we would have to double our environmental footprint, meaning they would have to farm actually more acres to obtain the same volume of crop. There's a lot of benefits to the farmers installing the tile. Again, this is self reported. And, you know, to the farmers, tile is super important. So what about conservation practices? And so we know that before tile, farmers reported less cover crops, less acres and no till, less ability to implement their NMP. Then you can see after tile drainage, there were vast improvements in adoption of cover crops, till or reduced tillage. Farmers reporting reduced pesticides and I think this in some cases has to do with re spraying because of conditions and then of course, improvements in implementing their NMPs.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: What is Okay. Is

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: that Yeah.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Management. Okay. Thanks. Yeah.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Implementing their NMP, basically, this really revolved around them being able to get on fields to apply manure or fertilizers. Maybe this is known, maybe it isn't, but oftentimes, in adverse conditions, there's lots of land farmers can't get on because it's too wet. And then they end up having to divert really manure resources to fields that are drier. It's hard for them to follow a plan because of those conditions. Having better drain fields has allowed them to essentially distribute and apply the manure to the rates and at the time that they're planning to.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Heather, I just want

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: to point out, and I didn't

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: really think about it until Joshua mentioned it. It's not just when it's really wet, In the drought conditions that we've also experienced, the ability to have a good tile drainage system in place is that the roots of that plant can get really deep. The yield improves and all of this stuff is in a better situation, I think, right?

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Yes. Again, these are our farmer reported impacts. What we're trying to do at the research Discovery Acres, which Joshua mentioned is to monitor and measure on a operating farm, you know, the impacts that farmers report and then also how how our tile and best management practices impacting water quality, soil health, and crop productivity. This project started really back in 2020. We're now in 2026. But we're really only going into our third full season of data collection where the treatments have actually been applied. So, this is a long term study, we hope. It's really important and it takes time to basically assess the data. So, we need more years of data collection. But I'm going to share with you a little bit about the yields and conservation practices that we've installed. Hopefully in the coming years, we can talk more about impacts on water. This is the site in St. Albans Bay, and if folks are familiar with that area, it is heavy in dairy farming and agriculture. There's also quite a few people down there. There is predominantly very heavy clay soils, similar to what people would see in Addison County. And we have some of the most severely impaired watersheds in that region, Jewett Brook being one of them, which is where this site is housed. So again, this is kind of a very large scale experiment where we're looking at treatments in acres, not in, you know, 100 square feet. We have tiled and untiled treatments that we're comparing BMPs versus no BMPs. You can see the dots here, that's the tile lines in both the north tile treatment, we call it, and the south tile treatment. And in the south treatments, we have business as usual. That's what Joshua called it. So, I'll go with the same thing. And then in the north treatments, we have BMPs. So, the BMPs are cover crops with no till and injected manure. The cover crops themselves are allowed to grow. They're allowed to actually get quite large and we don't terminate them until we actually plant. So we do something called planting green, which is where we go in and no till into the living cover crop and then terminate the cover crop after planting. And you can do that with no till production. In the South Side where there are where it's business as usual, there's tillage, there's manure. There are cover crops as well, but those cover crops are terminated as soon as humanly possible, which is what the farm does. So they go out and they'll either till them under immediately or they will spray them with an herbicide as early as they can. And I'm going to tell you right now that if they could get out there next week to spray out that cover crop, they would. So, you know, we generally don't have a a very big cover crop over here. And then there's tillage and there's manure. Okay? So that's business as usual. So we're One looking

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: of those rectangles, Heather. How many acres? What

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: are these Joshua? Four to seven or something like that?

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: Three to four.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Three to Each. Okay.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: And so then at the edge here, can see these little white boxes. And those are the stations where water is collected and there's water collected from surface runoff. Okay? And then there's water collected out of the tile outlets. So here where there's tile, we collect water that comes out of the tile and then we also collect water that comes off of the surface. And where there's no tile, we're just collecting obviously water that that runs off the surface of the field. K? Alright. All right. So as far as what the farmers stated about being able to grow better cover crops and being able to implement no till, we have observed that in discovery acres. So I think you've heard before that no till, especially implementation of no till on heavy clay soils is very rare. It is not common practice in Vermont, and in fact, pretty substantial tillage on those clay fields is common practice. And I would say cover cropping isn't as widely adopted on clay fields either, okay? So this is cover crop biomass in the BMP fields with tile, okay, or without. So, what I want you to see over here in the tile is that the cover crop, the amount of cover crop biomass is always higher than where we do not have tile. Okay? So, regardless of when it was terminated, remember I said sometimes it's terminated really early and sometimes it's terminated late, regardless where we have tile, we have better cover crop growth and establishment. And you can see the bars kind of match up in the practice. So where we have tile and we have cover crops that are left to grow, you can see we have almost double the amount of cover crop under the tile fields. And in the treatments where we terminate it early, we also have double the cover crop biomass when we have tile. So we've seen this year after year right now in at Discovery Acres that where there is tile, we have more cover crop growth and better establishment. And I know I'm running out of time.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Took some of your time. You just keep doing what you're doing.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Okay. That's really important because we're investing in cover crops, the state invests in cover crops, the federal government, the farmers, we get more and we get better cover crops when we have tile. We also get better ground cover, which means the soil is better protected from erosion, right? So the more ground cover of plant biomass, the more it's protected from moving water, raindrops, snow melt, all of that stuff. And you can see over here again with the tile, regardless we have better cover. In cases where we let the cover crop grow longer, we have really significant ground cover. I know 40% doesn't seem like a lot of ground cover, but that's actually quite significant, especially when you're comparing it over here to less than 30. So again, tile has been really beneficial or what we're seeing to establishment and growth of cover crops. Alright, so nitrogen management and crop yields, I would say there's some interesting things that we're observing at Discovery Acres because we have really good cover crops and I'll talk about that in a minute. But this is one year of data we collected from discovery acres where, again, both of these scenarios have manure that is applied to the field. And we go out just prior to top dressing the corn and we take a nitrate sample. And that nitrate sample tells us what the available nitrogen is in the field. And that helps us to better determine how much nitrogen a farmer should top dress. And we do this throughout Vermont and we're doing it in this trial as well. So, when we measure nitrates in the tile treatments, you can see that we have more, actually have more nitrates. So we had 14 parts per million. And then in this no tile drainage, we had less nitrates. So what that means to a farmer who's taking these tests is in the plots where there's tile, they only need to add an additional 65 pounds of nitrogen per acre. In the plots where there was no tile, they need to add a 105 pounds of nitrogen. Now interestingly, you know, based on what Joshua said was mentioning, oh, there there could be more loss of nitrogen under tile. And and that could certainly be true. But we also know if there's more air in the soil, and the soil can warm out faster and microbes can function better, they may be doing a better job at releasing nitrogen that's there and making it available to the crops versus if the soils are saturated with water, we may see more losses of nitrogen from nitrous oxide. So in this case, there was a fertilizer savings to the farmer under tile. That's a benefit clearly to the farm. The same amount of manure was added to each of these plots, But in the tile plot, for whatever reasons, some that I just mentioned, there's more available nitrogen to the crop. So let's look at crop yields from that same moment in time that same year where the crop yield from the surface or no tile was about 11 tons per acre. And we put on an additional 105 pounds of nitrogen. And in the tile treatment, our yield was 21 tons per acre, and we only added 65 more additional pounds. So under tile, we did see higher yields in this year by quite quite a substantial amount about 50%. Okay. So I wanna break this down a little bit and and why this is even more important, not just that the tile yielded more corn in that year, but the tile with no till yielded essentially the same as the plots that had tile with tillage. This really, this is a huge success. It's hard to actually state how much of a success this was. This was the first year in tile in a heavy clay soil in a very wet year. This gave us evidence to support what farmers were saying that even in some of Vermont's most challenging soils, you could implement no till with cover crops and retain the same yields as using tillage. And that was really exciting, at least to me. Now, if you go over here to no till with no tile and no till or no tile with tillage. There's too many tills tiles, it's becoming a tongue twister here. Okay, so no tile and no tillage. This is what we would normally expect on these clay soils. But no tile with tillage, right, you can see higher yields. So it's a really hard sell for those farms on heavy clays to convert to no till knowing the potential yield depression that they might see. So again, this data showed us that no till could be implemented on heavy clay soils very successfully in a short amount of time when there was tile.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: And the farmer would save in a

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: couple of ways. There'd be no fuel needed to run the tractor and

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: leave time,

[Sen. Joseph "Joe" Major (Vice Chair)]: all of that.

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

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Yeah. I mean, was quite monumental.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Heather, I should say it's very positive. Is there any downfalls with the tile so far? Yes.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: I mean, and we saw those last year. Okay. So this was like the year prior, it was wet, you know, it was kind of where you would think about the tile like really helping on these heavy, heavy clay soils. And then we had this year, this drought year, and we saw I know there's a lot of bars here. So, if you go to the second to last bar or last section here, so here's our tile, again, no till. And it had the lowest yields this year.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Okay?

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: So tile with tillage still had 18% more yield

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

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Okay. Then, then the best treatments or the best other treatments. Okay. So it still yielded more, but only with tillage.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: And is that because when you plow or harrow, it opens up the soil more allowing more moisture to get down deeper? Is it, it's-

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Well, my- my suspicion is that our, tile field grows better cover crops. And last year, it grew six tons worth, and that's what the dark blue bars are. Six tons worth, that's a lot, it's almost an entire corn crop, six tons worth of biomass. It was a humongous cover crop.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: What's the makeup once you chill that cover crop in? What's the fertilizer or chemical makeup of that cover crop of what it does for your soils?

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Okay. Part of the issue, what I think happened here, I'm pretty certain happened, is that we grew a humongous cover crop. And in this case, right, in the no till treatments, the cover crop is not tilled under. It's allowed to grow, we plant into it and then it's terminated. So just as all of that was happening, right, the great news was that the cover crop grew huge. It sucked all kinds of water out of the clay. We were actually able to plant only a few days earlier, but the cover crop did what we needed it to do. Right? It grew a lot of biomass, a lot of roots, and it drained also a lot of water out of the field. And then we went into a drought. And this is very common is that we can see big cover crops can take up too much water and also too many nutrients and leave the corn crop at a, you know, deficit. And that, my friends, is is likely what happened, in 2025. The cover crop was it was too good. I can't even believe I'm saying that. But it was too good, and then we didn't have enough water to kinda get the cover crop to break down, to replenish the soil, and it put that particular corn crop at a disadvantage in that year. So, know, there's some learning to do here. But you know, again, at the end of the day, when we had tile and in this case, early termination of the cover crop, okay? So you can see here the cover crop only produced about 1,500 pounds of biomass, where here, we were at 12,000 pounds of biomass. So that, I believe, is the difference driving the corn yields, was the cover crop was too good. You know, so like Joshua was saying, we need time to sort of, you know, look at everything that's happening at Discovery Acres. We're seeing a lot of great benefits to the tile. We're monitoring the water and the crops, of course, cover crops and conservation practices are doing generally much better when there's tile. But we have to manage that too, which is what we learned this year with those huge cover crops. I will end on that just going back that our data is supporting what the farmers have been observing. We have a lot more to learn here, especially how nitrogen in the soil is cycling under these practices. But that's exciting that we have a project like this in Vermont.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: So just one question, something that Josh brought up. The water runoff coming out of the pipes of the tile field versus the runoff naturally coming off the fields and looking at the phosphorus levels, maybe I missed it when Josh said it, but is it, and I know that Josh had said that, yes, the phosphorus is making it down into the tiles, but is there an argument to say that phosphorus levels on those tile fields are so much more harmful that it negates any benefit?

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Yeah, no. Josh was shaking his head. You can go ahead.

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

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: And that field that you're, doing the study in is Addison Clay?

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: It's, virgins, which is a very common clay in the Champlain Valley.

[Dana Duran]: Well,

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: you very, very much. As always, a great presentation. We've been wanting to learn about this for a while and it really is. I don't know that we have any bills in front of us that are talking about this, but I felt as a committee that would be very helpful for us to understand it. And as always, you knocked it out of the park and we appreciate it very much.

[Dr. Heather Darby (UVM Extension Agronomist)]: Great. Well, thanks for having us. Thanks, Joshua, for joining

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: us. Yeah. Thanks for

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: having Thank you both very much. Very informative.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Thanks. Yeah, Heather, we'll probably see you Friday if that'd be great.

[Sen. Robert Plunkett (Member)]: Okay. Yep.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Member)]: Okay. Thanks. Thanks.

[Joshua Faulkner (UVM Extension)]: All right.

[Sen. Russ Ingalls (Chair)]: Committee, let's take a five minute break before the next witness and, you know-