WE HAVE BIG NEWS! Please join us in celebrating a huge milestone toward protecting on-farm slaughter at home in Vermont and nationwide. Last week, the Livestock Owned by Communities to Advance Local (LOCAL) Foods Act was introduced in the US Senate!
On September 19th, U.S. Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) led Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) in introducing S.5106 the LOCAL Foods Act, which codifies current USDA guidance and allows consumers to buy live animals from producers and designate agents to handle the slaughter and processing of their meat.
On-farm slaughter is a practical, humane, and cost-efficient practice that livestock farmers and the communities they feed have relied on for generations. Small scale farmers that practice this tradition face regulatory uncertainty due to outdated language within the Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA) that bases the personal-use exemption on those who raise the animal only.
We need YOU! Rural Vermont members and allies have been guiding our work for nearly 40 years. Please take 5-10 minutes to fill out our Community Survey and help us prioritize the issues that matter most. Rural Vermont is a grassroots, member-led organization representing farmers, farmworkers and agrarian communities, and your thoughts, ideas, questions, and concerns matter. This is one of many opportunities to provide feedback. For more information, contact mollie@ruralvermont.org.
On the evening of July 10, 2024 and into the following morning, July 11th, parts of Central and Northeastern Vermont in particular experienced catastrophic flooding - devastating farms, businesses, homes, roads, and towns. This flooding event occurred precisely one year and one day from Vermont’s 2023 historic, widespread catastrophic flood.
Rural Vermont has been created a resource page (Flood Support for Farms) specifically to centralize direct aid efforts for farms affected by the July 2024 floods (crowdfunding, mutual aid, volunteer opportunities, and more). This list is a living document and is evolving. If you have an aid effort or know of one, please go to this page to submit a fundraising campaign or a volunteer opportunity. If you are able to volunteer or donate funds to support impacted farms, take a look and give!
Sadly, for the second year in a row, in response to the devastating impacts caused by the severe flooding that occurred last night and into this morning, we would like to offer a comprehensive list of currently available resources. In solidarity.
Join Rural Vermont for a chicken barbeque at our Quarterly Member Forum on Thursday, August 22nd from 5:30-8pm at the idyllic Four Springs Farm in Royalton. Come enjoy grilled chicken and a potluck picnic featuring high summer’s bounty; embrace your creative side at our art stations; catch up with friends, neighbors, and Rural Vermont news; and help us celebrate the passage of Act 93, the parted poultry bill that makes it easier to buy and sell Vermont poultry! The chicken at the center of our shared meal will come from and be prepared by Jack Vorster of Four Springs Farm.
Everyone is welcome! Free for Rural Vermont members and their families. For everyone else, there’s a sliding scale fee of $10-$15 per adult and kids are free. (Helpful Hint: Rural Vermont membership is $35/household – join today and attend for free!) Bring a picnic blanket or camp chair, place setting, and a salad, side, or dessert for the potluck. RSVP is required for planning purposes. We look forward to seeing you there!
8/18 UPDATE: This event is FULL and cannot accommodate walk-ins.
Come join Rural Vermont and Mary Lake on Saturday, August 17th at NewGrass Farmstead in Wolcott for an on-farm slaughter and processing workshop. This is an opportunity to learn about the need for culling as part of livestock management and the benefit of on-farm slaughter to ensure quality of the entirety of life for the old beloved livestock animals. In the first half of this 2-part workshop, participants will learn how to humanely slaughter a culled ewe. In the second half of the workshop, participants will learn how to efficiently butcher and process a ewe.
The workshop will be hosted by Gwyneth Harris at NewGrass Farmstead where she specializes in raw cows' milk, Clun Forest sheep, pastured meats, small batch wool yarns, and working border collies...
Check out this 2024 End-of-Session Recap for a summary of changes in policies that may affect you. Read the executive summary where we capture the session’s highlights or listen to the full audio recap here. Many thanks to our wonderful communications intern Melissa MacDonald who recorded all legislative updates and to Noah Lafaso and Sadie Farris for their tireless coverage of 2024 committee proceedings for Rural Vermont.
Please help us to continue centering our work generating resiliency, accessibility, and inclusivity for Vermont farmers and the communities they serve. These efforts, big and small, work to preserve and maintain a vibrant Vermont agrarian landscape now and into the future.
Donate here, see our Mid-Year Progress Report here, and read our full appeal for your support here!
Governor Scott vetoed H.706 - the legislation significantly limiting the use of and exposure to neonicotinoids. In preparation for the veto override session on June 17th, we encourage you to reach out to your representatives to express your support for this bill. This was a very popular bill in the statehouse and across Vermont, but we do not know if there are enough votes in the House and Senate to override the veto at this point. If you are a farmer or farmworker, your voice is very important right now to help representatives understand that this bill is supported by many farmers and farming organizations despite narratives from Governor Scott and others that it is “anti-farmer”. Rural VT and the Protect our Pollinators Coalition have developed this sign-on for farmers, farmworkers, and food professionals in particular to show your support for this bill - but please directly contact your legislators as well!
The 2024 legislative session has adjourned and, in the coming weeks, we'll be sharing a comprehensive recap of the bills that Rural Vermont prioritized, advocated for, and followed. Stay tuned! In the meantime, follow the link below to read on for select updates on bills and issues of interest to the agrarian community.
Now available: informational/educational materials on avian flu (HPAI H5N1) from the UVM Northwest Crops & Soils Team to support biosecurity practices for raw milk and raw milk cheese operations.
A series of last-minute amendments arrived at through a very poor and non-representative process that substantially affected H.612. Some are positive - like the establishment of a Cannabis Social Equity Working Group including members of our coalition; but some are negative enough that if they continue to be a part of the bill we will work against its passage. We need your support now in getting Senators and House members to bring reasonable yet significant amendments to the bill or to vote against the bill as it goes to the Senate Floor, and likely again to the House over the coming days.
The Miscellaneous Cannabis Bill (H.612) contains changes to existing law which could have a substantial negative impact on outdoor cultivators; and does not contain recommended substantive changes supporting an equitable adult-use marketplace, medical patients and caregivers, and reparative social equity investments which Rural VT and the VT Cannabis Equity Coalition have been advocating for for years.
The VT Cannabis Equity Coalition is a coalition of 5 member-based not-for-profit organizations (Rural VT, NOFA VT, VT Racial Justice Alliance, the VT Growers Association, the Green Mtn +Patients’ Alliance) collectively representing thousands of constituents of VT lawmakers, individuals in the legacy and regulated cannabis community, farmers, farmworkers, medical patients, caregivers, and more….yet we often struggle to be heard in committee and have our recommendations acted on, and this session we have seen the narratives of independent lobbyists, the largest and most capital intensive licensees, and a single conflict between one cultivator and one municipality dominate the conversations in committee and consequently what ends up in proposed amendments to H.612. We need your support!
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 required for planning purposes.
Vermont’s ability to feed itself relies on thriving community scale farms working together towards 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.
In this legislative update we are sharing the latest status updates on the bills we’ve been reporting on so far and introducing you to additional bills that are relevant to the agricultural community. Those include legislative priorities of the migrant farmworker community, the Senate’s river corridor legislation, and a couple of bills from the House related to financial assistance to the forestry sector, land improvement fraud, and miscellaneous agricultural subjects.
H.81 would ensure owners and operators have the autonomy and ability to repair their equipment themselves and/or determine who they would like to repair it. Currently, farmers and loggers must rely on dealerships and non-legally binding agreements (MOUs) for repairs on modern equipment. H.81 provides the choice for farmers and loggers to repair their own equipment, go to an independent repair shop while also maintaining the option to go to a local dealer.