By Margaret Laggis, special to NEAFA
As Vermont enters the final few weeks of the session, the end game is getting interesting. Bills that are still being worked on include a bill that will allow for airport expansion (H.610 and S.278) without having to go through Vermont’s onerous Act 250 law about prime agricultural soils. The point being that areas immediately adjacent to airports are probably not that ideal for farming. There is a farm immediately adjacent to the Burlington Airport that is a working dairy, but it is not an easy task to keep animals there. It is unclear whether this language will make it out of the Senate Ag committee on its own or perhaps be attached to another bill.
The Senate is also working on H.466, a bill that is trying to set up a system to permit surface water withdrawals that come out of a stream and end up in another water basin. This bill will directly impact vegetable and berry farmers all over Vermont, and they are quite concerned. It doesn’t affect dairy farmers as they generally use well water and not surface water. The bill at first only requires reporting of withdrawals of more than 5000 gal/day, which is a low threshold, and then moves to a permitting program without any requirement for science to show any harm.
The Senate Natural Resources committee is interested in looking at the exemptions that agriculture has from permitting through Act 250. S.234 will study these exemptions. These exemptions are incredibly important to the industry as Act 250 is an onerous, neighbor-driven permit process. At the same time, there is another bill that would expand the exemption to include on-farm accessory businesses, H.744. This bill came out of the House Agriculture Committee, but is being held in House Natural Resources Committee. H.626 is the bill that began as a ban of neonicotinoids. This is now languishing in the Senate Agriculture Committee, as they heard from the Agency of Agriculture and many others that neonics are not present in Vermont’s environment, so there is no evidence that they are impacting pollinators at all. It is unclear what the committee will do with the bill at this time. The Agriculture Innovation Board will take up treated seeds as an issue this year as part of their work and will report back to the legislature before January.
S.282 is a bill that deals with the unplanned outcome from Vermont banning organic matter from ending up in landfills. Due to this ban, this food had to find another outlet. The solution is to de-pack the food from grocery stores and restaurants, turn it into a slurry and then either put it through a digestor or land apply it. The problem is that this slurry contains micro plastics and possibly PFAS. The EPA and FDA have not determined if there are safe levels of either of these products in food or soils. This causes a problem for Vermont farmers, who are being asked to solve a problem for legislators that passed this law without understanding what the solution would be. The bill requires a study while placing a ban on any new de-packing facilities.
The Agency of Agriculture has submitted new pesticide rules to the Interagency Committee on Rules (ICAR) which is the first step for new rules being developed by Agencies. There will be time for public comment. From the first reading of the rules, the Agency is simply bringing Vermont into compliance with current EPA standards for pesticide use and handling.
Vermont is working on several workforce development bills that would use some of the Covid dollars that the State has received. Both bills are being held up due to discussions with the Governor’s office. Both bills look at making a bigger investment in technical education and internships as ways of getting more high school kids interested in the trades. There are also a couple of housing bills that will put money into the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to improve on-farm housing and possibly to assist manufacturers in providing worker housing in an effort to attract some employees to those manufacturers who are struggling to hire enough workers to run their plants.