Vermont farms are still recovering from flooding as they enter the growing season
BERLIN, Vt. — Hundreds of Vermont farms are still recovering from last July’s catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events as they head into this year’s growing season.
Dog River Farm, in Berlin, Vermont, lost almost all of its crops during the July floods. The farm removed truckloads of river silt and sand from fields before another round of flooding in December washed away more precious soil, wiped out the farm’s garlic planted in late fall and left more silt and several giant holes in a field, owner said George. Gross on Wednesday.
“We had 15,000 heads of garlic – we had bulbs growing here, which is a significant amount of retail dollars,” he said, pointing to a patch of field. “And now they’re gone. They are somewhere along the Winooski (River).”
Goat farmers Jeremy and Jennifer Leather lost straw bales near the river that were washed away during the July floods and others were saturated and unusable, Jeremy said. Their hay also became filled with silt which they are still cleaning up. They had to buy feed to supplement what the goats eat, which was expensive and challenging, he said.
A grassroots fundraising campaign called Dig Deep Vermont announced Wednesday that it is distributing its first grants to 32 farms to help with some of those expenses. It estimated that farms statewide suffered about $45 million in losses due to the flooding, extreme weather and persistent rain.
“The urgency around the need for forage and access to fields for spring planting has reached a critical level,” said Jackie Folsom, president of the Vermont Farm Bureau, who said the campaign is being extended.
While the grants, ranging from $200 to $1,800, won’t complete the farms, they will hopefully help pay some of their expenses, said Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Anson Tebbetts.
“So maybe it’s going to put fuel in a tractor, maybe it’s going to buy seed, maybe it’s going to buy fertilizer, maybe it’s going to pay for supplies. That’s the purpose of these private donations,” Tebbetts said at a Statehouse news conference. “It won’t cover everything, but it will give farmers a little bit of hope and it will hopefully pay a few bills.”
The losses are huge due to the severe weather, he said.
“They’re in the millions of dollars, whether it’s crop loss, equipment or debris that needs to be removed from the fields,” Tebbetts said.
Sand and silt cover the fields and some parts of Route 2 on the 35-mile stretch between Montpelier and St. Johnsbury have not harvested corn, Folsom said.
“The sludge, they’re going to have to dig it up and remove it. And unfortunately that is at the expense of the farmers, because they cannot throw it back into the rivers, they cannot place it at the end of the fields as a buffer. They need to remove that silt before they plant anything,” she said.
Many of them will also have to test their fields for contamination.
Gross said he doesn’t know what the season has in store, but for now his anxiety level will be very high until harvest is completed in mid-to-late November.
“That’s a long wait and a lot of work to do hoping you get a payout, but that’s farming,” he said.