Valley News – With crops under water, farmers weigh Vermont flood future

Zach Mangione, owner of Cross Farm in Barnet, watched this week’s storm cautiously as it approached Vermont, but thought it would be able to handle 2 to 4 inches of rain.

A friend, who was pumping water out of his basement on the night of July 10, prompted Mangione to look outside. At 9 p.m., he saw a river flowing into his barn, where he kept 500 week-old chicks.

He got on the tractor and tried to “move dirt and earth to redirect the water to the creek,” he said. It was “just too late.” He lost 400 chickens.

After that, the storm kept Mangione up all night. He watched in disbelief as the smallest of three water streams on his property caused so much damage that he now questions whether he can continue to farm the same land – or at all.

“Where that little stream used to flow, it no longer flows. Instead, it goes right through our yards and behind our barn,” Mangione said. “All our pasture fences have been damaged to some extent. All our water systems for our pastures are broken.”

His diversified livestock farm, where he keeps poultry, pigs and sheep, is “a struggling operation right now,” he said. He gave his remaining 100 piglets to his neighbors and plans to sell his six-week-old pigs, then try to manage the remaining herds.

Mangione said his emotions fluctuate a lot and he feels overwhelmed.

“But, you know, our house is undamaged. We are safe,” he said. “There are a lot of things to be thankful for. I try to keep that in mind. It’s a struggle. Farming is difficult on a good day.”

The storm that hit Vermont on July 10-11 was more localized than the devastating floods that inundated the state last July. Overall, there appears to be less damage across the state than last year. But in some areas, this year’s floods hit with more water and more force.

“We will see significant damage. We don’t know the full extent at the moment,” Anson Tebbetts, secretary of the Agriculture, Food and Markets Agency, told VTDigger on 12 July.

The agency thinks of farmers in three categories, Tebbetts said. There are those who were not affected by last summer’s floods but experienced flooding this week, those who were flooded twice and those whose farms flooded last summer but were spared this time.

Those hit twice can take cumulative losses. It’s the third difficult year in a row because a drought affected some farms in 2022, Jen Miller, program director at the Northeast Vermont Organic Farming Association, said in an email.

This spring, the first hay cuts were plentiful but of lower quality, she said. For dairy farmers, flooding reduces the yield of forage crops because farmers have to stop cutting, and when forage quality is reduced, it has less nutrients. This is a double whammy: farmers get less milk and have to buy more feed that they otherwise would not have had to buy.

“It’s a lot to navigate amid low prices and our current economic conditions,” she said.

A similar scene

On the morning of July 11 at Burlington’s Interval Center, the scene was eerily similar to a year ago. The center is home to seven independent farms on hundreds of acres.

“In a good year, these farms produce tons of food and millions of dollars worth of food for our community,” Intervale Center Program Director Mandy Fischer said.

Produce that comes into contact with floodwater cannot be sold, so the center has issued a call to action for volunteers to begin emergency harvesting.

“We had hundreds of volunteers out here all morning into the afternoon as the waters rose, just getting everything we could out of the ground,” said Melanie Guild, the Intervale Center’s director of development. She estimated the number at around 300 people, an “amazing response”.

Fischer doesn’t expect to know the full extent of the damage until next week.

“It’s really bad, but it’s not as bad as last year,” she said.

The 360 ​​acres managed by the center saw less flooding than last year, with Fischer noting that the soil was less saturated and the lake was lower, “so we’re seeing the waters move differently.” She recalled that last year’s “rushing, rushing” floods were “frightening” as they moved quickly through the area. This year, she said, she felt less scared.

Like last year, this week’s flooding came at a particularly bad time, according to Bill Cavanaugh, agricultural affairs advisor for NOFA-VT. Across the state, farmers invested in seeds and labor but were flooded before they could harvest, he said. Farmers also reported damage to agricultural roads and bridges, making it “difficult or impossible” to access fields.

“It’s not rare anymore”

Nicole Dubuque, the Agriculture Agency’s chief operating officer and head of the Agriculture Recovery Task Force, said the task force had been meeting once a week prior to word that the storm was approaching. During the week, members met daily and will continue to do so until next week, she said.

One of the group’s tasks is to collect better data after new floods. Last July, different entities posted different links asking farmers for various information, she said. The task force worked with the US Department of Agriculture to streamline the process so agencies can “get information from farmers just once, instead of asking them to fill out the same information multiple times.”

Tebbetts said farmers should document their damage through pictures, videos and notes. For now, farmers can contact the state agency with this information and they are working on a survey to send out to farmers soon. They should also contact their local farm service agency, Tebbetts said. Several organizations may have emergency funds available, he said, including the Vermont Community Foundation and the Center for an Agricultural Economy.

“One of the challenges of this event is that the crops are just coming in, so this is the time for our farming community’s income,” Tebbetts said. “With the crops destroyed, they have no income, but they still have employees who need to be paid.”

Fischer, of the Intervale Center, called for more emergency support for farmers. In the short term, a statewide emergency fund “could quickly deploy resources to farmers facing climate-related weather disasters,” she said. They also need basic support, including meals.

“We need emergency supplies, buying money and meals, like, right now,” Fischer said. “Like, today, like, literally right now. People will be hungry this evening.”

Heather Darby, a soil expert with the University of Vermont Extension program, is also concerned that farms don’t have enough access to emergency resources.

Asked if there is a good system in place to help farmers get through such extreme events, Darby said, “There isn’t.” She spoke to a farmer yesterday who was still waiting to receive assistance after last year’s floods, she said.

On Friday, Darby was to assess damage to farms in the storm’s impact zone, along the Winooski and Lamoille rivers and in towns such as Hinesburg and Richmond.

Farmers have an “eternal optimism that next year will be better,” she said. When “next year” brings the same destructive floods as the previous year, “it makes it very hard to look to the future and feel that it’s going to be different.”

“It’s not uncommon anymore,” she said. “So if someone has had a catastrophic event — like a fire, or a death, or an accident, or this random storm, flood event — people rally. But at some point, it becomes normalized, right? And it becomes what it is.”

He wondered: What happens then?

Total loss

During this round of flooding, Barnet was among the hardest hit towns.

Not far from Cross Farm, Eric and Mary Skovsted, owners of Joe’s Brook Farm, lost almost everything they had grown this year. The farmers grow about 12 acres of organic vegetables and strawberries, which they sell at a farm stand, a CSA, farmers markets, local grocery stores, restaurants and institutions, including hospitals.

Near Joe’s Brook, the storm left farmers with nothing but tomatoes. Near the Passumpsic River, they lost everything. They went to survey the damage early Thursday morning and saw “more flooding than we’ve ever seen,” Eric Skovsted said.

“We experienced a percentage loss last year and this year we experienced a total loss,” he told VTDigger on Friday.

However, Skovsted focused on solutions.

Friends have set up a GoFundMe for Joe’s Brook, which has raised more than $26,500 as of Friday afternoon. He plans to use the money to “meet wages, maintain the crew, clean up the farm and get it in a position to replant for the fall crops and then clean up the farm for the next season.”

Justin Rich, who owns Burnt Rock Farm in Huntington, will have to wait to find out the extent of the damage. Of 25 acres and six organic vegetable greenhouses, Rich said he has 15 acres “under water in varying degrees of devastation.”

A raging Huntington River carved a field containing sweet potatoes and onions. A potato field is under water, but it could be recovered. Another field of kale, broccoli and cauliflower also fell and cannot be saved due to laws preventing the consumption of produce that is directly affected by flooding. Such waters are often heavily polluted.

“Anything that hasn’t flooded is just wet and muddy and going to be sick. But again, to what extent is the question,” he said.

In a world with a changing climate, Rich said, he’s not sure what else riverside farmers can do to adapt to flooding.

“In modern America, most of us have never had a shortage in stores,” he said. “The food just shows up. But it comes from somewhere, and as more and more people are exposed to such events, I don’t know if it’s wise to take it for granted.”