With crops under water, farmers weigh a future of floods in Vermont

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

A friend, who was pumping water from his own basement Wednesday night, prompted Mangione to look outside. At 9 p.m., he saw a river streaming into his barn, where he was keeping 500 week-old chicks.

He got on his tractor and tried to “move dirt and earth to reroute the water towards the brook,” he said. It was “just too late.” He lost 400 chicks.

After that, the storm kept Mangione up all night. He watched in disbelief as the smallest of three streams on his property caused so much damage that he’s now questioning whether he can continue farming the same land — or at all.

“Where that tiny stream used to flow, it no longer flows. It instead goes directly through our barnyards and behind our barn,” Mangione said. “All our pasture fences have been damaged to some degree. All our livestock pasture water systems are torn out.”

His diversified livestock farm, on which he keeps poultry, pigs and sheep, is “a hardly functional operation at the moment,” he said. He gave his 100 remaining chicks to neighbors, and he plans to sell his six-week-old pigs, then try to manage the livestock that remains.

Mangione said his emotions are fluctuating a lot, and he’s feeling overwhelmed.

“But, you know, our house is undamaged. We’re safe,” he said. “There’s a lot of things to be grateful 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 Wednesday and Thursday was more localized than the devastating floods that flooded the state last July. In total, there appears to be less damage throughout the state than last year. But in some areas, this year’s flooding hit with more water and more vigor.

“We’re going to see significant damage. We don’t know the full extent of it right now,” Anson Tebbetts, secretary of the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, told VTDigger on Friday.

The agency is thinking about farmers in three categories, Tebbetts said. There are those who were not hit by last summer’s floods but experienced flooding this week, those who have been flooded twice, and those whose farms flooded last summer but were spared this time.

Those hit twice may see compounding losses. It’s the third difficult year in a row, because a drought impacted some farms in 2022, Jen Miller, a program director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, said in an email.

This spring, first cuts of hay were plentiful but lower quality, she said. For dairy farmers, flooding reduces yields of feed crops because farmers have to stop cutting, and when the quality of the feed is reduced, it has fewer nutrients. That’s a double whammy: Farmers get less milk and have to purchase more feed they otherwise wouldn’t have needed to buy.

“It is a lot to navigate amidst low pay prices and our current economic conditions,” she said.

A similar scene

On Thursday morning, at the Intervale Center in Burlington, the scene was eerily similar to exactly a year ago. The center is home to seven independent farms on hundreds of acres.

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

Produce that comes into contact with floodwater cannot be sold, so the center put out a call to action for volunteers to start emergency harvesting.

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

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

“It’s very 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 ground was less saturated, and the lake was lower, “so we’re seeing the waters moving differently.” She recalled how last year’s “rushing, roiling” floods were “terrifying” as they moved fast 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, farm business 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 roads and farm bridges, making it “hard or impossible” to access fields.

‘Not infrequent anymore’

Nicole Dubuque, chief operating officer of the Agency of Agriculture and the head of the Agricultural Recovery Task Force, said the task force had been meeting once per week before news that the storm was approaching. Throughout the week, members met daily, and they will continue to do so through next week, she said.

One of the group’s charges is to collect better data in the aftermath of the new floods. Last July, different entities posted different links asking farmers for various information, she said. The task force has been working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to streamline that process so that agencies can “get information from farmers once, rather than 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 that information, and they’re working on a survey to send to farmers soon. They should also reach out to their local Farm Service Agency, Tebbetts said. Several organizations may have emergency funding available, he said, including the Vermont Community Foundation and the Center for an Agricultural Economy.

“One of the challenges of this event is, the crops are just coming in, so this is the time for income for our farm community,” Tebbetts said. “With crops destroyed, they don’t have any income, but they still have employees that need to be paid.”

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

“We need emergency produce, purchasing money and meals, like, now,” Fischer said. “Like, today, like, literally right now. People are gonna be hungry tonight.”

Heather Darby, a soil expert with the University of Vermont’s Extension Program, is also worried that farms don’t have sufficient access to emergency resources.

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

On Friday, Darby was headed to assess the damage at farms across the storm’s impact area, 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 flooding as the year before, “that makes it really hard to look to the future and feel like it will be different.”

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

She 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’d grown this year. The farmers produce 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 the farmers with nothing but tomatoes. Near the Passumpsic River, they lost everything. They went to survey the damage early Thursday morning and saw “flooding greater 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.

Still, Skovsted was focused on solutions.

Friends have set up a GoFundMe for Joe’s Brook, which had raised more than $26,500 by Friday afternoon. He’s planning to use the money to “meet payroll, keep the crew on, clean up the farm and put it in a position to both replant for fall crops and then clean up the farm for next season.”

Justin Rich, who owns Burnt Rock Farm in Huntington, will have to wait to know the extent of the damage. Out of 25 acres and six greenhouses of organic vegetables, Rich said he had 15 acres “underwater, in various degrees of devastation.”

A raging Huntington River carved out a field that held sweet potatoes and onions. A field of potatoes is underwater but could be salvageable. Another field of kale, broccoli and cauliflower also went under and can’t be salvaged because of laws that prevent produce that’s directly touched by floodwaters from being consumed. Such waters are often heavily polluted.

“Everything else that didn’t flood is just sopping wet and muddy and going to be diseased. But again, to what degree 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 experienced shortages in the stores,” he said. “Food just shows up. But it does come from somewhere, and as more and more of the world is exposed to these sorts of events, I don’t know if it’s wise to take it for granted.”