Cuttingsville and Burlington Vermont

May 24-27, 2013

It takes us an entire morning and part of an afternoon to find Evening Song Farm. I think they got wiped out by the flood, the owner of a sandwich shop in Cuttingsville, Vermont shrugs. A few miles down the road, we find Evening Song’s faded sign. No answer at the door. A woman at the garden shop tells us to cross the bridge and then the railroad tracks, turn right onto a dirt road, and follow it to the top.

At last, we arrive at Evening Song 2.0, with its 5 acres of vegetables. However, in the time it takes us to find the new farm, Ryan Wood Beauchamp and Kara Fitzgerald have gone back downhill the old one to eat lunch and rest after a morning in the field. Their newly hired farmhand calls to tell them to expect us, and we head back down into the floodplain. Beauchamp comes out to greet us, and we walk along the river that flows where Evening Song’s crops used to grow.

“What happened was just so sudden,” Beauchamp tells us, recalling the day in late August 2011 when Tropical Storm Irene hit Vermont, causing the river to jump its banks and slash through their farm, which hadn’t yet celebrated its first birthday. “Something that seemed so permanent—land—was just washed away.”

Evening Song was the only farm in Cuttingsville completely destroyed by Tropical Storm Irene, but the storm’s wrath was felt across the state, where many of Vermont’s approximately 7000 farms suffered major losses. After Irene, the Food and Drug Administration ruled that no food crop that had come into contact with floodwater could be sold—protecting public health, but also causing millions of dollars of economic losses for farmers.

“It was very hard to tell these farmers that on top of their other losses, they couldn’t sell their food,” said Ginger Nickerson, Coordinator at the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at UVM Extension. “Many of the small-scale specialty crop growers don’t have insurance—either they aren’t eligible or they choose to risk it because the process of getting insured is more costly than the coverage they can receive.”

For many, the Tropical Storm was an eye-opening experience in that it exposed Vermont farmers’ vulnerabilities to the expected impacts of climate change, such as increased flooding.

“Irene really brought to light the risks, since we hadn’t had a major flood like that in many years,” said Diane Bothfeld, a Deputy Secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets. “A concern about ‘adulterated’ harvest has prompted farmers to think about what they plant and how they plant it.”

For some farms, like Evening Song, the extent of the storm’s damage was so severe that they decided to buy land at a higher elevation, where yields are significantly lower but flood risk is nil. Other farms, like Intervale Community Farm in Burlington, are making much smaller adjustments, such as siting new greenhouses on the few acres of their 60-acre fields that were not flooded during Irene. Intervale, the first Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Vermont, enlisted volunteers to begin harvesting crops from their fields two days before the Tropical Storm but still lost about a quarter of their 2011 revenue to the flooding and had to cancel their winter CSA.

However, when we asked Andy Jones, the manager of Intervale, if he would do anything differently next time, he was hesitant: “It’s hard to balance. We want to be prudent and not ignore the potential disaster, but at the same time, the costs of over-preparing are significant as well, since it means taking plants out of the fields prematurely.”

According to Deputy Secretary Bothfeld, who herself grew up on a Vermont dairy farm, planting crops with a quicker turnaround may make sense in areas prone to flooding. So does increasing riparian buffers, or vegetated areas next to water sources that help to stabilize banks while filtering pollution and providing wildlife habitat. Irene illustrated the difference that land use can make during flooding events. In one juxtaposition, the town of Middlebury, which has ample floodplain access, was mostly spared from flooding while nearby Brandon, whose development has left little space for the river to swell, suffered much more damage.

After Irene, conservation easements under the Vermont Land Trust and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Authority were elevated as a way to pay farmers to keep land directly adjacent to the riverbank unplanted and let natural vegetation, such as alders and willows, grow back. On the other side of the coin, riprap, or rock structures designed to keep rivers in their beds, are beginning to fall in favor since the structures often serve only to deflect a surging river from one farm to another.

Increased flooding events are not the only climate change impact farmers in Vermont are contending with, though. As average temperatures increase, the ranges of pests move northward and more invasive species are appearing in Vermont. More frequent hailstorms may shred leaves and pelt crops. And records show that maple syrup producers are tapping their trees earlier and earlier in Vermont.

“The growing season has definitely changed a lot,” said Deputy Secretary Bothfeld. “It’s May 24^th, and farmers have already cut their first cut of hay. Even in my lifetime, it used to be the first or second week in June.”

According to Marli Rupe, a liaison between water managers and farmers at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, some Vermont farmers have been able to take advantage of warmer temperatures and a lengthening growing season by planting new crops. Many daughters and sons of Vermont farmers are now going to college before returning to run their family farms, with new ideas, such as a mobile app that helps farmers track their nutrient management program. Soybeans and sweet potatoes, which have historically been grown in warmer climes, are now moving into the state—and are sometimes planted by unlikely entrepreneurs.

“Because dairy farmers own equipment like seeders and cultivators, they can do things like plant 10 acres of sweet potatoes,” Rupe said. “The ability to diversity has been a major change in Vermont agriculture for the last 20 or 30 years, and climate change may continue to fuel that entrepreneurial spirit.”

However, when it comes to weathering big storms, even young farmers like Beauchamp and Fitzgerald often turn to something more traditional: community. After Evening Song was swept away by Irene, the couple held a ‘support raising’ potluck and party in their barn. Neighbors donated items to auction off and placed checks or bills in a donation jar while their children played in the rocks of the new riverbed.

“Resilience is non-linear and messy,” Beauchamp told us. “[The damage] was so painful that, immediately after, it was difficult to integrate the new reality. We had this bounty of support after Irene. Then people transitioned back into their own lives. It was easy for me to feel throughout the process that we were failing. Eventually we transitioned to—how are we going to make this happen?”

Beauchamp and Fitzgerald spent months driving along every back road in town, looking for land for sale. It took another year, and a very hard winter, but in January 2013, the couple used the money the community raised to purchase their new, higher ground. It’s the beginning of their second first summer of farming in Cuttingsville, and their Swiss chard is hibernating under the hay.