PUTNEY — On our diversified farm, we produce meat, eggs, hay, sap, and forest products using regenerative agricultural practices. Because we aren't able to afford much land in Windham County, the haying and forest products that we harvest involve using other people's land.
This activity creates a lot of abutting neighbors who need to continuously be educated and informed, and who like to be involved in what a working landscape looks, smells, and sounds like.
The shifting seasons dictate our days. When the ground is solidly frozen, the boys go cut trees and skid them back to the landing. We sell some nice logs to large mills; we saw some logs with our own mill and the rest of the lower grade hardwood logs I process into firewood.
Farming is a life that is thought of as bucolic and simple, but in today's world it's increasingly burdensome for most of us, with high financial losses, regulation, and a culture that doesn't accept you.
When you're a farmer, people welcome the opportunity to appropriate our culture and wear our plaid and use our shiplap and vernacular architecture for a wedding venue or wine tasting, but they have no interest in watching you spread manure or seeing your barn light come on at 4 a.m. when it's time to milk.
I don't have any simple answers, but I do feel it's necessary to share what we've been facing.
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While S.101 is a bill I fully support and a step in the right direction, it's by no means the level of “Right to Practice Forestry” that I think Vermonters have earned.
It's important that we don't just give the illusion of protection when in reality most loggers are stretched so thin that just one week out of the woods on the phone finding a good lawyer and gathering documents for court could sink most outfits.
In the past month it's been hard to watch two more local farms be auctioned off. Both farms run by salt-of-the-earth people will now be moving with their families out of state.
We're creating refugees of our working landscape, people who will now live for the rest of their lives not following their calling, not passing on traditions, and as citizens unsatisfied with how their native land treated them.
That as a community we don't go into a form of mourning when a local farm closes in my mind is disgraceful. At a local meeting when Representative Mike Mrowicki brought up Stoneholm Farm closing, all it got from a room of 30 people were a couple of “awws.”
At our Town Meeting, a couple who recently moved here from southern California brought up the horrors of pollution associated with burning firewood. They said it shouldn't be encouraged as a form of heat for Vermonters. I could feel my heart stop beating for a second, my body tightening as if suspended in fear.
The scenario that we joke about - “One day these people will even try to ban wood stoves!” - is closer to becoming reality. This is why we must be proactive in protecting those who work in our fields and forests.
Radical ideas that are being proposed today in Putney are shaping my individual community, but without intervention these ideas will be proposed in the Statehouse tomorrow.
Within the next decade, there will be even fewer legislators who have ever done evening chores on a farm, who have ever had their arms scratched from stacking hay bales on a hot August afternoon, or who know the difference between a skidder and a harvester.
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The major issues we are facing as a state are the results of a collapsed agrarian society:
• A farm is sold, and the family loses drive, purpose, and self-sufficiency. They aren't able to do what they love and what they know, and there's a sense of failure when you're the link in your genealogy who closes the family business. Rural poverty leads to alcohol or opiate addiction and reliance on government assistance.
• A farm is sold, and the family leaves with its children, taking with them a great sense of work ethic. No coincidence our workforce is struggling and school enrollment is dropping, making high per-pupil spending unsustainable.
• A farm is sold, and emotional support and social structure drastically change. Loving family members are no longer around to babysit the children, so society needs to provide child care. There's no longer a network of extended family to provide oversight, and there's an increase in early childhood trauma.
• A farm is auctioned off, and now there's no roadside stand to sell us affordable food. The community has to buy processed food at the grocery store, and society pays for the related health-care issues.
• A farm is shut down, and the family who always hunted with their grandchildren back in their sugarbush is no longer passing down firearm safety, and the rural tradition of harvesting your own venison disappears.
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We push farms and forestry operations to be bigger and bigger because we want our products cheap, and we want all of it done in that mythical “over-there” place, out of sight and earshot.
Every week in the news we see the vilification of the big dairies, yet we all played a part in creating this system.
These farms might be too large for what their land can sustain. They have to be big enough, and they operate around the clock. Their labor force doesn't exist at the wages they can pay, so they go to a black market rife with immigration violations.
We're really in the last stages of our farming crisis in Vermont. We truly can't afford to lose any more farms - it's possible that we already have lost too many to recover.
While I know there are seemingly more important issues going on this legislative session, I feel they are all just a distraction from the basic freedoms we want to protect.
We must do everything in our power to keep Vermont from becoming a suburban wasteland and keep our heritage alive.