Earlier this month, many Vermont farmers found themselves in a familiar position, devastated by floodwaters, and some of them for the second or third time in a year. And growers who depend on their land for food security are now in an even more precarious position.
That includes those involved with New Farms for New Americans under the Association of Africans Living in Vermont. That's a Chittenden County organization that provides land to immigrants and refugees to grow crops appropriate to their cultural traditions.
At the farmland, there are several greenhouses lined up, and then beyond those are large plots of land. And there's berry bushes and amaranth and a whole lot of mosquitoes.
After last summer's flooding, they took action to make their land at the low lying Intervale Center in Burlington more climate resilient.
Host Mary Williams Engisch spoke with Alisha Laramee, the New Farms for New Americans program manager, at the Intervale Center. This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Mary Williams Engisch: The farmland here, a year ago, was fairly inundated with floodwaters. First of all, how are you feeling after this year's rain event and flooding, a week and a half ago? How are the farmers feeling? And yeah, I guess, what comes next?
Alisha Laramee: Well, as you can see right behind me, there's two farmers that are already back here. And this is sort of indicative of what everybody's trying to do is that it's still the middle of the summer, there's still crops that people can grow and harvest. So I think there's a sense of, "Well, what else do we do? This is all we know, this is what we've grown up doing. This is, this is what we do on the weekends with our family. This is our recreation, this is our community."
So in one sense, it's like, just being at the farm, just looking at the garden is part of the process of both mourning and healing all at the same time. And then once you get into the muscle memory of hoeing, and you just lose yourself in that. So I think — I can't speak for other farmers, necessarily, but I've had conversations with people and they've said, you know, they're curious, they want to learn, they're asking us for like, "What's, what do we have left? What time do we have left?"
You know, I think people aren't willing to give up. And where else are people supposed to go? And as some people will say, like, this is the best soil. It really is. And so we want to be here no matter what, even if there is a flood and some people gave me a thumbs up when they saw the flood. So like, "Oh, this is great." OK. I think it just, and I think people have a different perspective on risk. And, you know, our approach has been education, education, education — like, put the knowledge in the hands of people in terms of what we understand in terms of the soil tests that we're doing and, and then let people make decisions for their family.
Mary Williams Engisch: After last year's flooding, new farmers for New Americans started implementing measures to lessen the impact of flooding on the Intervale farms. What were some of those measures? How did they fare during this month's flood?
Alisha Laramee: There's no one fix to climate change. And so we're not trying to solve this, nor do we think we can solve it in any one process. So we're looking at this in multiple ways, all at the same time. And I think that's the only way forward is that we have to be thinking about our farming practices, growing crops that that will mature in a shorter amount of time. We put in an orchard, we have blueberries, we have crops now that are perennial. So while it's not a fix, it's focusing on a new kind of agriculture for the communities that we work with.
We've been studying the hydrology of the river, we've been looking and remapping the farm and looking at different ways to restore the riparian buffer next to the river at the, our other farm location in the Winooski Valley Park District. And we're trying to look at the flood, but in the larger context of like, what's happening is that everything is so unpredictable. So, how can we continuously have crops for people to to harvest? What are what are crops that are going to be resilient to a flood?
The Burmese farmers, they grow Roselle and water spinach, spinach, and taro and all of those things are incredibly resilient. We've also seen the okras doing well in the flood.
So we have to be thinking about different strategies that we can implement, both in terms of making the landscape around us stronger. And at the same time, we're also interested and saying that, you know, moving out of the floodplain is not necessarily the solution. And it's not the problem, farming in a floodplain. But the problem is actually much larger than us. And it's gonna just really require I feel like a lot more community engagement across the board.
I think we're at a point now where some of the surrounding towns outside of Burlington might have access to land that is drier. It's an opportunity for us to all start working together to say, you know, maybe it makes more sense for some of the farmers, if they so choose, to grow in the community where they live and not be commuting here.
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