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Vermont Conservation Strategy Initiative
(VCSI)

Rural Vermont has a seat on the Agriculture Working Group of the Vermont Conservation Strategy Initiative (VCSI). Legislative Director, Caroline Gordon, represents alongside Rural Vermont Board Member Stephen Leslie who represents the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition in the discourse around how agriculture fits into the conservation vision and future plan for Vermont. On Valentines Day, Rural Vermont got to celebrate a successful push for transparency in this relevant public engagement process: All meeting recordings of all groups of the Vermont Conservation Strategy Initiative will be made available online! The VCSI aims to find recommendations for land use in Vermont through conservation planning by the end of 2025.

Follow updates on this process in our policy blog here…

Follow our 3/8/24 Action Alert here…

See our 3/12/24 Action Alert Infographic here…

VISION

Act 59: The vision of the State of Vermont is to maintain an ecologically functional landscape that sustains biodiversity, maintains landscape connectivity, supports watershed health, promotes climate resilience, supports working farms and forests, provides opportunities for recreation and appreciation of the natural world, and supports the historic settlement pattern of compact villages surrounded by rural lands and natural areas.

Rural Vermont’s Comment: Good to see a vision that goes beyond conservation alone but expresses support for working farms and forests! 

GOAL

It is the goal of the State that 30 percent of Vermont’s total land area shall be conserved by 2030, and 50 percent of the State’s total land area shall be conserved by 2050. The Secretary of Natural Resources shall lead the effort in achieving these goals. The land conserved shall include State, federal, municipal, and private land.

Rural Vermont’s Comment: Let’s make sure that conserving agricultural land counts towards this goal & make sure that implementing the vision doesn’t fall short through plain focus on this numeric goal. Instead, the conservation agenda should seek to enhance support for agricultural development goals.

THE VSCI PROCESS

Phase 1: Conserved Land Inventory by July 1, 2024

Including review of existing Conservation Categories


Phase 2: Conservation Plan by December 31, 2025

Including language from HAG Committee: The plan shall include… (4) recommendations to implement the vision and goals of this chapter while also enhancing the State of Vermont’s current investments and commitments to working lands enterprises, rural landowners, and the broad conservation mission implemented by the Secretary [of ANR!] and VHCB, including conservation of agricultural land, working forests, historic properties, recreational lands, and surface waters.

JURISDICTION & LAW 101

ANR - Jurisdiction over Land Use
= Conservation policy
= field of Planning Law which is part of
Environmental Law


VAAFM - Jurisdiction over Agriculture
= regulation of agricultural practice (RAPs)
= field of Agriculture Law

HOW DOES FARMING FIT INTO EXISTING CONSERVATION CATEGORIES?

Act 59 defines: Natural resource management area” means an area having permanent protection from conversion for the majority of the area but that is subject to long-term, sustainable land management.

What does sustainable land management mean?

Act 59: “Sustainable land management” means the stewardship and use of forests and forestlands, grasslands, wetlands, riparian areas, and other lands, including the types of agricultural lands that support biodiversity, in a way, and at a rate, that maintains or restores their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality, and their potential to fulfill, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic, and social functions at local, State, and regional levels, and that does not degrade ecosystem function. 

Rural Vermont’s Comment:

*conserve agricultural land in a way that benefits farmers. A policy that would facilitate land access to farmers could marry agricultural development goals (namely the NFNE 30% goal of local food consumption from local food production by 2030) with the conservation goal & realize the vision to support the working lands.

*instead of monetizing nature and repeating the PES & Soil Health WG we want to make sure we get a discourse on how to built on existing tools and laws available in the planning context to uproot any attempts to restrict farmers’ autonomy.

*tools up for discourse include conservation planning, conservation easements, current use, zoning, the organic program & more to incentivize sustainable land management 

*recommendations for more incentives for sustainable land management on conserved agricultural land could include to “lift the bar” and write Soil Health Principles into the RAPs during the 2024 rewrite (different process within VAAFM)

Potential for Policy Discourses

  • Mandatory Current Use:
    1. Fix tax reduction for non-farming landowners;
    2. Satisfy “perpetuity” requirement of conservation & make agriculture count towards 30x30 goal;
    3. 2nd tier of tax rebate for farms with Conservation Plans, Easements, Organic Certification to incentivize a Just Transition in Ag

  • Land Access Fund:
    Credit the current use tax rebate and tax revenue from cannabis and alcohol tax to a newly created land access fund for farmers

  • OPAV for farmers:
    1. fix that only land trusts are able to use OPAV’s
    2. use the land access fund to
    3. subsidize land access on all agricultural land for farmers
    (Land Trusts could then administer this)

  • Right of First Refusal: demographic change will bring many acres of farmland for sale - give farmers a Right of First Refusal to buy farms 

  • VT Farmland for Farmers Act: secure farmland from corporate land grabs independently from pending federal legislation

  • Keep pushing back on Carbon Markets, Emission Trading Schemes

  • digitalization of agriculture

RESOURCES

30 x 30 GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Nature-Based Solutions - claimed “solutions” to the climate crisis based on the idea of leveraging the capacities of nature to store and hold carbon. It is another term used for land-based carbon offset programs including forest, soil, agriculture, and ocean offsetting programs. Carbon brokers and managers make money off of the projects, while polluters can claim carbon neutrality or that they have met their net-zero emissions reduction targets.

Off-set - the purchase of carbon credits bought for the purpose of compensating for (or ‘offsetting’) greenhouse gasses. Forestry and agriculture offsets are the most prominent nature-based solutions. Ultimately, carbon offsets allow polluters to keep on polluting.

Carbon Market - The theory that you can turn carbon dioxide into a commodity (in the form of a carbon credit) and put it in a market to disincentivize the release of further carbon into the atmosphere. 

Natural Asset Company - a type of public company defined by the New York Stock Exchange as “a corporation whose primary purpose is to actively manage, maintain, restore (as applicable), and grow the value of natural assets and their production of ecosystem services.”

Corporate Farmland Acquisition Subsidiary - A subsidiary is a company that is owned or controlled by a parent or holding company. Corporations use multi-level subsidiary structures to conceal their investments in farmland.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory - The national greenhouse gas inventory is developed by the Environmental Protection Agency each year to track trends in U.S. emissions and removals.

Net Zero – When corporations purchase carbon offsets equivalent to the carbon they release into the atmosphere. Net zero is not true zero, and allows for corporations to continue ecologically devastating practices while appearing to be ‘green.’

Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) –  the name given to a variety of arrangements through which the beneficiaries of environmental services, from watershed protection and forest conservation to carbon sequestration, reward those whose lands provide these services with subsidies or market payments.

References:

Environmental Protection Agency’s Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, 2023

Nature-based Solutions Curriculum: A Guide to deepen a shared understanding of the threat of Nature-based solutions versus real solutions for climate justice by Hoodwinked in the Hothouse, November 2023

Senator Cory Booker’s Farmland for Farmers Act

Conservation Categories Workgroup Report to the VCSI Science and Policy Committee DRAFT January 26, 2024

Draft report available HERE.