We are stronger and more vibrant when we live and work in solidarity with one another
Every Vermont farmer should have equal right to prosper
Farming can heal the land
Farmers are health care providers
All Vermonters should have access to locally produced, nutrient dense food
Healthy soil makes healthy humans
Today on April 17th, we mark the International Day of Peasant Struggles, an annual action day that brings rural communities together to commemorate the Eldorado do Carajás massacre in 1996 and to honor the resistance of agrarian workers worldwide who persist in their struggle for social justice and dignity.
Central to this struggle is the right to food sovereignty, and the rights of people and communities as articulated in the 2018 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas: “Peasants and other people living in rural areas have the right to land, individually and/or collectively (...), including the right to have access to, sustainably use and manage land and the water bodies, coastal seas, fisheries, pastures, and forests therein, to achieve an adequate standard of living, to have a place to live in security, peace and dignity and to develop their cultures.”
Join us Friday, May 3rd, from 9am - 3pm at Foote Brook Farm, 641 VT-15 W, in Johnson, VT for a tree planting work brigade! We will be transitioning riverbank farmland impacted by the 2023 flooding into a riparian buffer zone to increase climate resiliency and adaptation on the farm. Work brigades are a popular education tool used around the world to strengthen communities, build trust and solidarity through collective labor, connection, mutual aid, and knowledge sharing. This is the first in a series of agricultural brigades hosted by the Vermont Agroecology School Collective (an independent project of Rural Vermont). Lunch, refreshments, agroecological education, and tools provided. RSVP is required for planning purposes.
Vermont’s ability to feed itself relies on thriving community-scale farms working together toward food sovereignty and community resilience. We hope you can join us!
Our annual overview of Rural Vermont's priorities, activities, and progress is a quick and visual read that we hope you'll enjoy. As you'll see in the pages of our latest Impact Report, Rural Vermont's 2023 was spent amplifying the voices and needs of the agrarian community at the State House and beyond, offering a robust and diverse schedule of educational workshops and social gatherings, and standing in solidarity with local and global food sovereignty efforts and movements.
Rural VT and a number of other organizations and individuals within and without the Protect our Pollinators Coalition are working to pass H.706; a bill to support the just transition away from the use of neonicotinoid pesticides in VT. H.706 was resoundingly passed out of the House and now is in the Senate Committee on Agriculture. The Coalition has drafted this Farmer Letter of Support as one way for us to further show how important this bill is to the greater agricultural community.
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“The continuous and often brilliant efforts that Rural Vermont provides to our agricultural community, by not only exploring the impacts of current research, policies and politics on that community, but also speaking out to those that create those policies so they might be better informed about what they are doing. This is a key role for the Vermont community at large if we are to keep our working landscape and its farmers successful.”
