Charting Rural Vermont’s Long-Term Priorities at the Intersection of Food, Climate, and Racial Justice Jonna Keith ‘20.5, Nick Nonnenmacher ‘21, Phoebe Oehmig ‘20.5 and James Peacock ‘21 ENVS 0401: Community Engaged Practicum Fall 2020, Middlebury College Advised by Professor Rebecca Kneale Gould and Diane Munroe with Mollie Wills, Grassroots Organizing Director, Rural Vermont Table of Contents Project Background 2 Project Methods 2 Policy Issue Background 4 Survey Results Demographics 7 Current Rural Vermont Priorities 7 Non-Legislative Policy Priorities 8 Organizing and Advocacy Strategies 9 Sentiment Analysis 10 Interviews Dan Brooks 11 Anonymous 12 Sam Bliss 13 Jake Kornfeld 14 Andrea Stander 14 Recommendations 15 Conclusion 17 Acknowledgments 17 References 18 Appendix 19 Rural Vermont 1 Project Background We stand at a historic moment. Attention to racial injustice has resurfaced in a new way, and the climate crisis has reached an unsurpassed intensity. The COVID-19 pandemic has unmasked longstanding inequities. In light of these current events and movements, our core focus this semester in Middlebury College's environmental studies senior capstone course, Community Engaged Practicum (ENVS 401), was to address systemic racism, economic inequity, and environmental degradation in Vermont. Our group partnered with Rural Vermont, a grassroots organization whose mission is to create "a Vermont local food system which is self- reliant and based on reverence for the earth."1 Rural Vermont works to cultivate a vital and healthy rural community and economy for citizens living, working, and connected to Vermont's agricultural system. Rural Vermont's goal is to support farmers and farmworkers. They highlight the need to take advantage of this historical intersection of voices and circumstances to amplify farmers' voices. In a recent policy statement, Rural Vermont voices, "the COVID-19 pandemic starkly highlights the vital need for resilient local food systems and brings to light the disparities and gaps in our current system."2 Therefore, Rural Vermont advocates for "an agricultural system that is scale-appropriate and built on equity, justice, dignity, and reverence for the earth."3 Our work was to support Rural Vermont in creating this vision. Currently, Rural Vermont is charting a vision for its programming and advocacy work for the next five to ten years. It outlines its future priorities by learning what is essential to its constituency through community surveys. Rural Vermont last sent a community survey to its constituency and stakeholders in 2018, primarily to small diversified farms and other parties concerned about Vermont's food system. Given the initiation of the visioning process and the current turbulence in Vermont communities, it seemed that a new survey was an excellent place to start our project. Rural Vermont asked us to help update the survey and analyze the resulting responses to determine where the group could best allocate time and resources. Our ENVS 401 team helped design, implement, and analyze this new survey, focusing on emergent policy priorities, long-term systemic change possibilities, and the perceptions of social and racial inequity in Vermont agricultural communities. Through a combination of an analysis of survey responses, interviews, and a results report for Rural Vermont, we demonstrated the relevance of our work in aiding Rural Vermont to create short-term and long-term resource allocation plans. We hope this work will contribute towards Rural Vermont’s ability to achieve its overarching goal of creating an autonomous local Vermont food system. Project Methods To help Rural Vermont achieve its goal, we created a survey to gauge Rural Vermont members' wants and needs. These survey results will help inform Rural Vermont on how to best allocate its resources. In the first weeks of the semester, we wrote a community survey for Rural Vermont to distribute to its constituency. Rural Vermont released the 2020 Policy Priority Survey to its mailing list on October 13th, 2020, making it available until November 3rd at midnight. Within those three weeks, 180 people responded to the survey. 1 Rural Vermont Vision https://www.ruralvermont.org/vision 2 Rural Vermont Policy + Organizing Update, May 2020 https://www.ruralvermont.org/s/policy-update.pdf 3 Rural Vermont Policy + Organizing Update, May 2020 https://www.ruralvermont.org/s/policy-update.pdf Rural Vermont 2 To create the survey, we relied on previous surveys to provide example questions and themes that we transcribed and further developed. After making necessary adjustments to mature the questions to be relevant for 2020 (for instance, referring to the legislative action Rural Vermont has recently taken), we modified and added questions pertinent to current events and the themes of our class. For instance, we asked how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected members, and we included questions on racial equity in Vermont as a central aspect of the survey. Most of the survey was multiple-choice questions, but we also provided space with open- ended questions for folks to add additional comments and thoughts.4 We developed this survey in collaboration with Rural Vermont staff. We exchanged drafts with our community partner, Mollie Wills, who, along with other staff members, provided feedback and ensured we were accurately representing Rural Vermont. The focus of our ENVS 401 class materials, readings, and partner choices highlighted the need to bring greater awareness towards racial and economic inequities. Rural Vermont is working to bring these inequities to the forefront of what it does, using them as a lens to view the policies it supports. Therefore, we determined early on there should be an emphasis on racial equity in the survey. Adding the section on "Racial Equity in Vermont" to the survey addresses these crucial conversations about social and racial equity that we deliberated on during our ENVS 401 class discussions. We did this to help Rural Vermont plan how to engage with and take more leadership roles in creating justice. This choice allowed us to draw attention to and educate respondents on these issues' relevance and significance. For the distribution of the survey, we used Google Forms as our primary platform. Still, we created paper copies to ensure that technology was not a barrier to participation. The Rural Vermont staff prepared a background document on Rural Vermont’s policy stances, which was provided to survey respondents to remind and update them on the critical issues presented (further information in the Policy Issue Background section).5 Rural Vermont approved the survey, and it was released on November 3rd. During the three weeks the survey was open, we scheduled follow-up interviews. Mollie suggested interviewees from those who indicated an interest in a follow-up conversation. We scheduled interviews based on availability and our own assessments of the conversations we wanted to prioritize. During the interviews, we explored the survey's themes in a deeper, more personal capacity. We conducted a total of five interviews via Zoom or telephone. Our goal was to capture direct narratives of personal histories, values, and concerns regarding Vermont's food system. We were particularly interested in hearing suggestions as to how the food system can be improved. We shared these observations and suggestions with Rural Vermont, allowing them to immediately utilize our work to address its food systems goals. In this final report, these interviews serve to supplement our data collection with a qualitative narrative dimension and present Rural Vermont's agricultural stakeholders through a holistic and human lens. The interviews provide valuable insight into how Vermonters view the intersections of food, race, and climate. After the survey closed on November 3rd, we analyzed the collected data and visualized our results to clarify the immediate needs of Rural Vermont's constituency. This data analysis involved creating bar graphs using R (version 3.6.2), an open-source programming language used for statistical computing and graphic creation. We produced graphics using the ggplot2 4 Pew Research, 2020 https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/u-s-survey-research/questionnaire-design/ 5 Rural Vermont 2020 Community Survey Background Information https://rb.gy/buxqb2 Rural Vermont 3 package and conducted a textual analysis with the tidytext package. Within the tidytext package, we used the Bing Lexicon to conduct "sentiment analysis" on the survey's open-ended questions. Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining or emotional AI, systematically identifies, extracts, quantifies, and studies whether the underlying sentiment of a piece of writing is positive, negative, or neutral.6 Additionally, we produced several supplementary graphics outside of R: we employed both Google Earth Engine and QGIS software to create a map of survey respondents throughout Vermont (Figure 10). Furthermore, we used Microsoft Excel to generate the pie chart of survey respondent roles (Figure 11). Finally, we produced word clouds (Figures 14 and 15) using wordclouds.com. Van Barth, a photographer and fellow Middlebury student, allowed us to use several of his beautiful images depicting Vermont farms to amplify our report and Story Map. The final step of our project was to finalize our ArcGIS Story Map as our final deliverable to Rural Vermont. We incorporated our graphics into this Story Map, along with many images provided by various interviewees. Here is a link to it: https://arcg.is/1Sbb89. Policy Issue Background Below, we summarize essential information regarding issues Rural Vermont has been working on in the past few years. Rural Vermont wants to understand how its constituency feels about these issues to plan its short- and long-term goals. Anti-GMO work Rural Vermont has most recently become involved as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed by the Center for Food Safety against the Trump Administration's Department of Agriculture's GMO labeling rules, which preempted Vermont's GMO labeling law in 2016. Childcare, eldercare, and other "non-agricultural" issues Rural Vermont recognizes the importance of caring for children and elders as a fundamental aspect of household and farm economics. This issue is often overlooked as a problem within the agricultural community. Earlier in 2020, Rural Vermont was the lead author on a policy brief on childcare and the needs of the agricultural community published as part of the VT Sustainable Jobs Fund and Agency of Agriculture's Strategic Plan for Agriculture. This brief highlighted the need for childcare options for farmers and farmworkers, the lack thereof being a significant barrier to farming for young families in particular. Through this, Rural Vermont made recommendations to policymakers about the need for affordable and accessible childcare options for farmers and farm workers. Climate change mitigation, adaptation, transformation, and climate justice Climate change is a lens through which Rural Vermont views all its priorities, present, and future. One stance Rural Vermont has taken is that regenerative agriculture is a good strategy to mitigate climate change; therefore, Rural Vermont advocates for this to be reflected in climate change policy. As a member of La Via Campesina7 Climate Collective, Rural Vermont takes seriously the disproportionate impacts of climate change and how some communities suffer more 6 Hu and Liu, 2004 7 La Via Campesina is an international organization which advocates for, amongst many other things, family farms and sustainable agricultural practices. Find out more at https://viacampesina.org/en. Rural Vermont 4 than others. Rural Vermont believes that its work to build resilient communities and agricultural systems will help us withstand extreme weather and natural disasters that result from a warming climate. Recently, Rural Vermont chaired the Farmland Access and Stewardship Working Group in the Farm to Plate Network to work on agroforestry and ecosystem services payments. Rural Vermont hopes that promoting sustainable agricultural practices can help reduce farmers' contributions to this global crisis. Corporate farmland investment As part of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) Corporate Land Grab Working Group, Rural Vermont is devoted to preventing investment in corporate farmland. A recent example of this was this past summer when Rural Vermont found that the Vermont Pension Investment Fund had committed $100 million to organizations linked to massive land grabs, ecological destruction, and promotion of agribusiness expansion. With ActionAid USA, allies in Brazil, the NFFC, and NOFA-VT, Rural Vermont hopes to determine how this happened. Rural Vermont's goal is to develop strategies for preventing what they consider to be problematic investment strategies in the future and to encourage divestment from corporate farmland investments. Dairy pricing and governance (just and equitable) Currently, the international dairy pricing system strips farmers' control over their product and perpetuates farmer debt. Rural Vermont believes dairy farmers should have access to making a just transition away from farming or should be supported in drastically changing their business models so that they can remain economically viable. Rural Vermont believes that these farmers should receive adequate support to pursue Rural Vermont's vision where all farmers and farmworkers have just and dignified livelihoods and work the land in ecologically sound ways. Rural Vermont offers ongoing advocacy, guidance, and support to the dairy community, hoping to address dairy farm workers and dairy farm owners' needs. Farmland access and succession Rural Vermont chairs the Farmland Access and Stewardship Working Group at the Farm to Plate Network. This group brings together organizations and individuals to collaborate on and explore solutions to farmland access and succession. In particular, Rural Vermont is currently seeking opportunities to support projects led by members of BIPOC and immigrant communities related to changing the systemic inequities in farmland access and ownership. Healthcare In the 2018 survey, healthcare was identified as a top concern for Rural Vermont's constituency. As a result, Rural Vermont has organized healthcare roundtables with farmers to learn more about how this issue impacts them. They have also started an audio testimonial project, Healthcare Starts at the Farm, where farmers share stories about access to healthcare, the lack thereof, and how it intersects with their farm and life. Rural Vermont is collaborating with VT Legal Aid, the Vermont Workers' Center, NOFA-VT, and others, to pursue universal healthcare for all. It believes this is a decisive intersectional issue that can help achieve transformational systemic change. Its work on this issue has led them to be the lead author on the Healthcare brief for the Strategic Plan for Agriculture in Vermont. This experience revealed to Rural Vermont 5 Rural Vermont how non-agricultural issues, like healthcare, affect farmers. Therefore, this is another lens through which Rural Vermont should consider agricultural policy. On-farm composting/poultry foraging Recently, Rural Vermont, with Poultry Farmers for Compost Foraging (PFCF), a group of farmers who have poultry foraging on food scraps, has been working on the full implementation of Vermont's Universal Recycling Law. They hope that this law may soon allow farms to compost food on-farm without obtaining a solid waste permit. Rural Vermont and the PFCF formed the Don't Waste Food Coalition in 2019, with a desire to promote food residuals as a poultry forage, composting component, and soil enhancement. Much of this work has sadly been halted by the pandemic. On-farm slaughter After the 2018 survey, Rural Vermont was able to extend the on-farm slaughter law until 2023. They have organized slaughter and meat cutting workshops to ensure that the Vermont agricultural community is better aware of conducting safe and legal on-farm slaughters. Recently, increasing the number of animals allowed to be slaughtered on-farm in this law has been seen by Rural Vermont as a possible way to alleviate backlogs in slaughterhouses during the pandemic. Payment for ecosystem services, soil health, and water quality Driven by Vermont's ongoing challenges with protecting and improving water quality, primarily as related to agriculture, this is an issue Rural Vermont has been engaged with for the last 6 years. Since the 2018 survey, Rural Vermont has pursued a legislative policy to link soil health, water quality, and "payment for ecosystem services." Along with NOFA-VT, VT Healthy Soils Coalition, and the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, Rural Vermont has had multiple successes in the last year on this issue, has also been invited to join the Farm and Water Coalition. This group identifies and addresses significant disagreements and points of contention between environmental and agricultural stakeholders. Pesticide use reduction In the 2018 survey, pesticide use was one of the issues of most concern for respondents. Since then, Rural Vermont has convened a coalition of organizations that shares information with one another and develops shared goals and means of accomplishing them. As a result, this coalition succeeded in passing legislation that made neonicotinoid pesticides unavailable to anyone who is not a "certified applicator." Sadly, the pandemic has also halted this work. Racial equity For the past 35 years, equity and justice in our food system have been deeply ingrained within Rural Vermont's work. Committed to being an anti-racist organization, Rural Vermont is continually determining how best to devote its resources to be not only an ally but rather an engaged accomplice in the liberation movement. Rural Vermont desires to help achieve equity and justice to work towards our collective liberation and repair of our communities. Rural Vermont leaders are clear that they approach this work with deep humility and are open to learning how they can do better. They seek knowledge from many allies and friends, such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, about the history of black land ownership and loss, the Rural Vermont 6 context of historic racial inequity in the United States, and how to move forward. At the same time, the country suffers from deep systemic racism. For instance, Rural Vermont is currently working to create an anti-racist policy for its bylaws. Rural Vermont also promotes racial justice education and training for its staff and board members. Furthermore, it advocates for racial equity in legislation by promoting bills that address reparations and land loss. Raw milk Raw milk regulations and restrictions have been a priority for Rural Vermont for nearly two decades. Due to raw milk producers' complaints that current regulations make it challenging to produce and sell raw milk, Rural Vermont is surveying raw milk producers to determine the legislative priorities for improving raw milk laws. Taxation and regulation of cannabis, based on justice and equity Based upon the 2018 survey results, Rural Vermont attended regional meetings and submitted testimony about equitably and justly moving towards this marketplace and system. Rural Vermont recognizes that a bill on this issue would be the primary opportunity for affecting this future market. They believe this market will help repair the systemic racism and damages that have occurred due to the criminalization of cannabis and will be an essential financial opportunity for struggling farmers. Rural Vermont has also begun an alliance of agricultural organizations. It has been working on messaging to the public, press, and policymakers, ultimately hoping to develop an intersectional coalition of agricultural and racial justice organizations to formulate a just and equitable bill in 2021. Survey Results Introduction to Survey Results Our survey asked people to prioritize two different sets of policy issues: those issues that Rural Vermont is currently engaged within a formal legislative capacity and those issues Rural Vermont is engaged with or exploring working more on outside of a formal legislative campaign. These policy issues are ones both in and beyond formal legislative campaigns. In addition to Rural Vermont's current areas of interest, we understood what organizing and advocacy strategies respondents prioritized. Furthermore, we asked if respondents perceive racial inequity as a problem in their community. We also asked respondents about their relationship with Rural Vermont and why they value Rural Vermont. Finally, we asked respondents to provide their demographic information. Demographics Figure 1. Distribution of survey respondents in We had 180 people respond to our survey, Vermont. Generally, respondents are spread evenly representing all fourteen counties (Figure 1). Matched throughout the state. Notably, there is clustering around the Montpelier and Burlington areas. This to population density, the largest concentration of may be explained by the population density of respondents were from Burlington and Montpelier. Of those locations. Rural Vermont 7 those who responded, 64.6% were Rural Vermont members. For analysis, we divided the respondents into five classes, which breakdown as follows: 26% of those who responded identified as farmers, followed by eaters (23%), homesteaders (15%), gardeners (11%), and service providers (7%). Farmers are those who provide what they produce for others, often as their livelihood. Homesteaders grow food to at least partially sustain themselves and their families. Gardeners are more hobbyist food-growers, growing food for the experience or to promote their ideologies. Service providers offer services to others, such as advocating for policy change or running a food pantry. Finally, eaters are everyone else who participates in the food system. Additionally, 10% of our respondents identified as coming from a socially disadvantaged community. Current Rural Vermont Policy Priorities Respondents highlighted pesticide use reduction, ecosystem services, and on-farm slaughter as the top three policy issues with which Rural Vermont is legislatively engaged (Figure 2). For the full distribution of the priority of current policy issues, please refer to Appendix A, Section I, Figure 1 at the end of this report. We learned from the survey that people prioritize Rural Vermont's efforts to reduce pesticides in the agriculture industry. 88% of survey respondents fully support Rural Vermont's work addressing the issue. Pesticide use reduction was also ranked as the first priority for 44% of survey respondents (the highest percentage received by any issue). Additionally, 18.3% of respondents ranked it as their second priority, and 17.8% ranked it as their third priority. The second highest priority issue was the payment for ecosystem services, soil health, and water quality. This was 38% of the respondents' first priority issue, although 69% of respondents indicated that they fully support Rural Vermont's work on ecosystem services payment. Furthermore, 23.3% of respondents ranked ecosystem services payment as their second priority, while 21.1% of respondents ranked it as their third priority. The third-most priority issue was regarding on-farm slaughter. 35% of respondents ranked this as their first priority, 20% of respondents ranked this issue as their second priority, and 14.4% ranked it as their third priority. Additionally, 77.2% of respondents indicated that they fully support Rural Vermont's work on this issue. Finally, it is essential to note that respondents could rank more than one issue as their top priority. To control for the number of respondents who ranked each priority, we also produced graphics that averaged the priority of each of the issues Figure 2. Top three current policy issues. In this graphic, longer (Appendix A, Section I, Figure 4). The bars indicate higher priority. analysis shows that, on average, pesticide use reduction, ecosystem services, and on-farm slaughter were survey respondents' top priorities. Rural Vermont 8 Non-Legislative Policy Priorities The top three policy issues that Rural Vermont is engaged with or exploring working more on outside of a formal legislative campaign that respondents prioritized are isolated below (Figure 3). For the full distribution of the priority of current policy issues, please refer to Appendix A, Section I, Figure 2 at the end of this Figure 3. Top three non-legislative issues. In this graphic, longer bars report. indicate higher priority. The most supported issue was climate change mitigation strategies, as it had the highest average priority rank from survey respondents. The figures show that 57.2% of respondents ranked climate change mitigation as their top priority, 12.8% ranked climate change mitigation as their second priority, and 4.5% ranked it as their third choice. Sixty-three respondents indicated that they would be interested in joining Rural Vermont's efforts relating to climate change mitigation. 83.3% of respondents fully supported Rural Vermont's work with climate change mitigation. Economic equity was the second-highest priority issue in this section of the survey. The figures show that 28.9% of respondents ranked economic equity as their first priority, 22.8% ranked it as their second priority, and 15% indicated it was their third priority. Additionally, 75% of respondents indicated that they fully support Rural Vermont's work on this issue. 55 respondents indicated that they may be interested in joining Rural Vermont's work on economic equity. Scale appropriate regulations were the third-highest priority issue. Scale appropriate regulations reject a "one-size-fits-all" approach to governing agriculture producers. Such regulations would allow for small, mid-sized, and direct market agriculture operations to comply with state regulations while also allowing their business to flourish. 27.8% of respondents ranked this issue as their first priority. 18.3% of respondents ranked scale-appropriate regulations as their second priority, and 11.7% ranked this as their third priority. Additionally, 65.6% of respondents (118 respondents) indicated that they fully support Rural Vermont's work on this issue. Finally, it is important to note that respondents could rank more than one issue as their top priority. To control for the number of respondents who ranked each priority, we also produced graphics that averaged the priority of each of the issues (Appendix A, Section I, Figure 5). The analysis shows that, on average, climate change, economic equity, and food access were the respondents' top priorities. Rural Vermont 9