Maeve Fairfax is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

Vermonters are learning how to weatherize homes and install heat pumps for free through Vermont Adult Learning’s Energyworks programs. 

Weatherizing houses saves the average Vermont household $1,000 per year, “which might be the differential of whether they can stay in that home,” said David Justice, Associate Director at Vermont Adult Learning. 

Vermont Adult Learning partners with a state program to help income-eligible Vermonters weatherize their homes. The organization intends to grow the green workforce, improve the lives of vulnerable Vermonters and help the state reach its climate emission reduction goals.

Low-income and unemployed Vermonters are recruited to participate in trainings, said Justice. 

“So we’re actually training people that live in poverty to learn weatherization and work for a company that weatherizes homes for people living in poverty,” he said. 

The organization chose to prioritize weatherization and heat pump installation partially due to the state’s climate goals, said Director of Workforce Development Kim Rupe Lennox. To hit the Global Warming Solutions Act 2030 targets, Vermont needs to weatherize 120,000 homes between 2020 and 2030. Energyworks was created to aid this effort while supporting vulnerable residents, Rupe Lennox said.  

The trainings are usually two weeks long and free, with stipends available to participants. The schedule is jam-packed and about half of the training is hands-on: at least one week of technical training and opportunities for participants to test their skills, said Justice. 

Crucial certifications — like CPR/First aid, OSHA 10 workplace safety and gender equity training — are offered to participants. EPA 608, a certification required for jobs involving refrigerants, is available to participants during heat pump installation trainings. Job readiness skills, like resume and cover letter writing and career planning, are incorporated as well, said Justice. 

The location and timing of the trainings are chosen carefully, and Vermont Adult Learning works with employers ahead of time to try to run programs in regions where there will soon be job openings, said Justice. 

Participants must be 16 or older, and the organization aims to recruit people interested in full-time employment, said Justice. Participants come from many backgrounds: some have just graduated high school, some have worked desk jobs and want to pivot to working with their hands, and some are trying to get back into the workforce, said Rupe Lennox. 

Josh Jakab took a heat pump installation training in Rutland last March. He had worked in construction and as a restaurant manager but was looking to work in a different trade. 

Jakab heard about the training through social media. He didn’t have his heart set on heat pump installation but decided it was worth a shot — especially because there was a stipend offered. 

During the training, he workshopped his resume and afterwards applied to multiple different jobs. He settled on an Electrical Apprenticeship Program at Omega Electric, a four-year program that offers a mixture of classes and hands-on experience, Jakab said.

Though he wound up in a different trade, Jakab thought having the OSHA 10 certification was helpful in getting his job. He thought the Energyworks training showed employers he had initiative, too. 

“I think the class at least… showed I wanted to learn something and could do something other than the bare minimum of showing up to work every day,” he said.

Some Energyworks participants are New Americans. Vermont Adult Learning has programming for English Language Learners, and this demographic of students has increased over 80% in the past 2-3 years, according to Justice. Now, over a third of all current students are learning English, he said. 

Many refugees who wind up in Vermont have experience in the trades but struggle to find employment because they don’t speak English, said Justice. 

Dana Sehovic, English Language Learner Instructor for Workforce Development, holds classes in advance of trainings, teaching participants English words related to their trade. This can help New Americans get better paying jobs, “and do something that they really love and are passionate about at the same time,” said Rupe Lennox.

These jobs usually start at $22 per hour with benefits, Justice said. The profession is tough because workers are out in the elements all year. But many take pride in doing a job that others would be unwilling to take on, and helping people stay in their homes, Justice said. 

Participants arrive with vastly different levels of experience, said Justice. Some need more instruction before they are ready to work, and are often directed to longer-term training programs. Others are ready to start entry-level jobs immediately and are usually referred to an employer partner willing to hire past participants. Some have the skills but can’t work because of other challenges in their lives, said Justice.

“A lot of our participants are in poverty and some of them are in unstable housing,” said Justice. 

Part of the organization’s role is “working with them to think about other services in the community that might be available to support them, and also what their plan B, C, D is should transportation or childcare fall through,” he said. 

After each training, participants fill out a survey. The feedback is usually positive. 

“A lot of times it was like, ‘Hey, I didn’t even know that I could do this. And here I am, walking away with the skillsets that I need and feeling really confident to enter the workforce within this sector,’” Rupe Lennox said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermonters learn how to weatherize homes through Vermont Adult Learning program.

BURLINGTON — Vermont’s dirt roads span 8,534 miles — more than the straight-line distance between Burlington and San Francisco three times over. They contribute to the state’s rustic charm, bring tourists looking for gravel biking and are beloved by rural residents.

They are also particularly vulnerable to floods.

Runoff from any type of road can harm water quality, but Vermont has some 1,300 more miles of dirt than pavement — and that dirt is subject to easy erosion. 

With the state experiencing an increase in flooding, those old roads are hitting waterways and their ecosystems hard. 

And the state is pretty much stuck with them. “Putting in paved roads is very expensive, and we just don’t have that kind of funding in Vermont to want to do that,” said Jim Ryan, former manager of the Vermont Municipal Roads Program with the Department of Environmental Conservation.

But there are ways to improve those roads that reduce pollution and strengthen against floods. 

Like paved roads, dirt roads are essentially impervious, meaning they do not absorb water, said Beverly Wemple, a University of Vermont professor who helps lead the college’s Water Resources Institute. When it rains, water washes across those surfaces, eroding sediment and running into ditches or bodies of water.

Phosphorus likes to bind to sediment, meaning it gets swept away too. In excess, it fuels harmful algae blooms — as is the case in Lake Champlain, where runoff has deposited high levels of the nutrient. Large sections of the lake are on the federal impaired waterways list.

Phosphorus aside, those sediments can hurt aquatic ecosystems where plants and animals struggle to survive in water choked with dirt and debris. 

Wemple’s research helped bring attention to dirt road runoff at a time when Vermont was focusing more and more on water quality. 

A 2008 lawsuit alleging poor pollution control forced federal and state officials to revise plans for Lake Champlain. State lawmakers passed the Vermont Clean Water Act in 2015, anticipating stricter standards. Those came a year later when federal officials tightened limits on phosphorus in the lake. 

People wanted a better understanding of where the phosphorus was coming from.

Funded by the Lake Champlain Basin Program, Wemple studied the impact of Vermont’s transportation network on water quality.

Tropical Storm Irene hit while research was underway, allowing Wemple’s team to also see what happens to Vermont’s roads when they flood, she said. 

The study, released in 2013, proved erosion from dirt roads was a significant source of sediment in waterways — and confirmed phosphorus attached to the sediment was polluting Lake Champlain. It also included research on ways to keep water off roads and reduce runoff.

“That research essentially gave us the first piece … of scientific evidence of the importance of our road network as a source of pollutant transfer but also of the potential for some fairly straightforward practices to minimize that pollutant runoff,” Wemple said. 

After the new phosphorus regulations, the state created a permit program that set road standards for towns. It aimed to reduce erosion contributing to phosphorus pollution. The Department of Environmental Conservation runs the program. 

Towns must record the condition of their roads and key characteristics — such as whether they connect to water and whether they use storm drains, or ditches and culverts, for drainage. Over half the roads in Vermont connect to waterways, the state says.

The Agency of Natural Resources says open-drainage roads — those with culverts and ditches — are often gravel and produce the most phosphorus. Those roads are where the bulk of the standards are applied.

Towns must upgrade roads not up to code. For a dirt road, this usually means improving drainage: lining ditches with stones and vegetation to filter out sediment.

There are also improvements to the road itself. Crowning a road, or lowering the sides so the high point is in the middle, helps it shed water, as does removing berms and ruts that trap water. Another element: properly sizing culverts, the tunnels that allow water to pass underneath roads. 

“We were able to document that many of these practices are quite effective in both reducing erosion and making the transportation network more flood resilient,” said Wemple. 

Through the Agency of Transportation’s Better Roads Program, towns can apply for grants to cover projects.

Making improvements also helps protect from floods, said Ryan. Working as a deputy stream engineer in the aftermath of Irene, and doing “flood forensics” after the 2023 floods, he found that up-to-standard roads came away in better shape.

Where there was damage, the culprit was most frequently culvert size, he said. Often the issue stemmed from small culverts under driveways or over intermittent streams. In heavy rain, culverts have to handle more water than usual. If they’re too small, they flood or get blocked by debris, leading to a domino effect where one failed culvert takes out several others down the road, Ryan said.

Municipalities are slowly updating their roads. Ryan said Vermont towns have an average of 25 miles of roads running directly into waterways and are upgrading about a mile a year.  

Flood resilience can get a boost right away, but maintenance is ongoing. 

“There’s no finish line there. The road grader always has to go out and put a proper crown on the road, remove the grader berm, lower the road’s shoulders and clean out the ditches,” Ryan said.

His observations are set to be tested: Wemple just began a two-year study on the impact of the road permit program on flood resilience in 2023 and 2024.

“We hear anecdotally … that it looks like places where we’ve upgraded the storm water infrastructure on roads, there were fewer damages,” she said. “But we don’t have the scientific evidence to back that up yet.” 

Wemple said people often ask, Should we just pave the roads?

One factor is uncertainty about which is worse for water quality. Wemple said there’s not much difference between paved and unpaved.

But there’s also what she called “the societal question.”

“Many of us in Vermont are quite attached to our rural landscapes and those unpaved roads,” she said. “And if we paved them, people would drive a lot faster. And we’d lose some of that rural ideal that we are really attached to.” 

Eric Barker lives on a dirt road in Underhill close to where he grew up. When he chose where to raise his family, a dirt road was a priority. 

“I don’t even think we looked at a single lot on pavement,” he said.

His driveway requires a lot of care, and his car has gotten stuck in the mud at inopportune times, but he said it’s worth it.

“I think you have to have the right vehicles, and I think you have to have the right mentality,” he said. He values the privacy his home allows for his family — and the sparse traffic. 

Dirt roads also draw tourism. Waterford resident Fritz Fay is president of Northeast Kingdom Gravel. The organization’s mission is to bring dollars to the Kingdom by mapping gravel biking routes and attracting tourists. 

The sport has exploded in recent years — and Fay said Vermont, with its sprawl of dirt roads, is ready made for it.

Big events and concentrated trails can overwhelm small towns, and locals often resent that, Fay said, but gravel biking is gentler. 

The NEK has witnessed that scenario in East Burke with the popular Kingdom Trails. Gravel biking brings in a few people at a time across multiple towns, Fay said. 

“It’s scattered, and that’s an advantage,” he said. 

The benefits go beyond drawing cyclists, though.

“If all these roads were paved, it’d be one less kind of unique thing to come to Vermont (for),” he said.

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify which state agencies run a permit program that sets road standards for towns.

Read the story on VTDigger here: When floods hit Vermont’s iconic dirt roads, runoff hits waterways.

Maeve Fairfax is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

ADDISON — A circle of volunteers appeared from the brush beside a field and slowly converged on a gaggle of Canada geese. They herded them into an enclosure, and the few birds that escaped the roundup were retrieved one by one. 

Canada geese molt their flying feathers in the summer, grounding them for a few weeks. That provides a window for state scientists — and volunteers like those at the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area recently — to keep tabs on the birds. 

During the season, the state tries to secure identifier bands on 1% of the nesting population of Canada geese, or 300-400 birds, the minimum experts say they need to estimate the population overall.

State officials have hosted a goose-banding day every year at the wildlife area since the 1960s, said biologist Andrew Bouton, who leads the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s migratory game bird efforts.

Data from the event is used to track the nesting population, sex ratios, how many juveniles survive to adulthood and details on birds killed by hunters, he said. 

The volunteers who turned out July 2 for this year’s edition were an eclectic group, wearing everything from head-to-toe camouflage to tie-dyed tank tops and jean shorts. 

“I know some of the folks here were hunters,” said David Sausville, who runs wildlife management for the department. “I know a lot of them are families with young kids trying to expose them to it, and then there’s folks that I know that are just straight conservationists, too, that enjoy being out in the land.”

The band is “basically a bracelet,” Bouton said. They aren’t fitted with any electronic trackers, but each has a unique number. Hunters who kill a goose with a band can report the number to a federal database. 

Officials can learn a lot about a goose from its number: when it was banded, how old it was then, if it was recaptured and, as Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore said, “a little bit of travel history.” 

The July 2 banding spanned two sites. The 60 or 70 volunteers split into groups and approached the first of what the biologists called the “goose roundup fields” from all sides. Some geese were on a pond nearby, so volunteers in a canoe flushed them out of the water and into the field. The others, already in position on land, herded them into a pen set up earlier.

The sun was hot and a lot of volunteers left early, so it was a smaller group that approached the second site. Carrying portable fencing, they formed a ring just outside the field and, after encircling the geese and guiding them into the right position, constructed a pen around the birds. 

They set up a shade tent, and biologists poured water on the geese to calm  and cool them, Bouton said. 

The geese proved difficult to handle — later, one even escaped from someone’s hold and sprinted away honking.

After the geese were corralled, volunteers carried them to another tent, where experienced banders recorded the sex of each bird and affixed a metal band to their leg with pliers. After all the birds were banded, they were released into the field. 

The final tally for the day was 73 new birds and 17 recaptured ones, average numbers for the event, Sausville said.

Vermont Fish and Wildlife keeps a close eye on the state’s Canada geese because the population is young — and exists largely because of human intervention. Dead Creek Visitor Center manager Amy Alfieri said the nesting population, including the birds banded at this year’s event, descends from geese in a decades-old program at Dead Creek. 

In 1956, the state trapped 44 Canada geese, clipped their wings, then released them into a 70-acre enclosed area around the creek. By 1960, they were nesting. Canada geese have strong homing instincts and usually return to the place they were born to raise young. Now around 300 goslings are born in the Dead Creek area each year. 

Once the nesting population was established, more migrating geese started to stop by Dead Creek. Between 2,000 and 5,000 migratory Canada geese come to the area each fall, according to the state.

And it is no accident. “The area was designed as basically a waterfowl management production area,” Sausville said. In the ’50s, dams were built with mechanisms to control water levels and used to create open water and wetland habitats, he said. 

At the time, a lot of Vermont’s wildlife was threatened, and there was a push to re-forest the land and bring birds — particularly game species — back in. 

Much of the work at Dead Creek was done by World War II veterans, who had developed engineering and construction skills in the military or studied conservation on the GI bill, said Sausville. 

“This is the original wetland creation story in Vermont,” Moore said. 

Water levels in the area are periodically lowered to expose mudflats and allow plants to grow. The areas are flooded again, and the plants provide a food source for waterfowl, said Alfieri. 

Some fields in the management area are leased to farmers who grow food like corn and alfalfa, which help attract waterfowl, she said. 

The state’s target nesting population of Canada geese is 24-25,000 birds, Sausville said. 

That number is based on what the environment can handle but also on what he called Vermont’s “cultural carrying capacity,” or how many geese humans are willing to coexist with. 

“I’m sure that the biological carrying capacity is actually higher than that, and the landscape could hold more of them,” he said.  

Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area is about 3,000 acres, and 400 of those serve as a refuge, meaning no hunting is allowed and no one can go inside. But there are five hunting blinds in other parts of the area that allow hunting on a limited basis.

Controlled hunting has been allowed in Dead Creek since 1974. Permits are available through a lottery for several days in October and November. Limits for how many geese can be shot per day are announced each year. 

“We’ve been consistently right around 7,000 waterfowl hunters statewide for many years,” Sausville said. 

Doug Smith of Addison, who came to the July 2 event, is one of them. He has been hunting in Vermont since the 1970s, both within and outside of the Dead Creek area. He said he’s been a regular at the event over the years. Many of the state workers there seemed to know him.

“The trouble is, if you hunt the same area quite often, the geese aren’t going to go there anymore,” he said, explaining his strategy of rotating to different hunting spots. “They’re not dumb.”

Part of the state’s continued focus on the Dead Creek area is due to its role within the Lake Champlain flyway, Moore said. That’s a section of the larger Atlantic Flyway, the path most birds take when migrating along the East Coast. Moore said her agency has used money from the Environmental Protection Agency to buy poor farmland and convert it to wetland habitat for migratory birds. 

The end goal, she said, is creating a connected block of protected habitat in the Otter Creek watershed, of which Dead Creek is a part.

“Projects that are at the intersection of some of our water quality goals for Lake Champlain and create habitat is this serendipitous win-win,” Moore said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: The art of herding geese — and why Vermont does it every year at Dead Creek.

Maeve Fairfax is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

Vermont’s farmers are growing crops that better suit the state’s warmer and wetter climate — and branching into products that provide income even when traditional crops fail. 

Since 1900, annual temperatures in Vermont have increased by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit and annual precipitation has increased by 21% over the same span, according to the state. The changes have forced agriculture to adapt in sometimes surprising ways. 

Now that winters are milder, it has become commonplace for Vermont orchards to grow peaches. Nick Cowles owns Shelburne Orchards, and 35 years ago, he saw a bedraggled peach tree at a hardware store and bought it on a whim. Since then — especially in more recent years — peaches have become a lucrative addition to his business. 

Peach trees like rain, and so the increased precipitation in Vermont does not bother them. Historically, temperatures posed a problem for peach-growing.

“It takes around 15-17 degrees below zero in the winter to kill the bud, and it used to be that there would be a stretch in the winter that we would get those temperatures. I figured we would get a peach crop maybe every third year,” Cowles said.

Now, he said, “it’s rare that they freeze out.” 

Innovation is also making Vermont a more peach-friendly place. 

Farmers have used new technology to develop more cold-hardy peach varieties, Cowles said, and he now has trees that ripen at different times so that the picking lasts longer and brings in more customers. 

In Ferrisburgh, Erik Andrus has turned his hayfields into rice paddies. 

His Boundbrook Farm uses the rice-and-duck farming technique, a pesticide-free method in which ducklings are released into rice paddies. They control weeds and pests — and provide fertilizer. 

The farm mostly grows cold-tolerant rice varieties from Japan, which sits at a similar latitude to Vermont, but has recently started to grow loto rice from Italy. 

The farm once accidentally planted Koshihikari, a variety of Japanese rice poorly suited to the cold. It did eventually mature, but not until October, which Andrus said was “a little bit of a nailbiter.”

Floods and droughts appear to be striking Vermont more frequently, but the rice grown at Boundbrook Farm is fairly immune to both, Andrus said. 

The plants can be underwater for two days without being harmed, and the grains are protected by a husk that means they won’t be contaminated by pollution from floodwaters. Because the varieties can be planted in floodplains, they can get water even during droughts. 

Andrus said “flood-prone bottomlands” are the best places to create rice paddies. Vermont has many such areas, and rice could represent a path forward for farms impacted by flooding. 

He works as a consultant at Cornell University, where a team of researchers is studying rice-farming techniques in the Hudson Valley. They are also offering workshops and creating resources for farmers. 

But nothing like that exists in Vermont, and acquiring the tools, seeds and knowledge to create and manage a rice paddy without help is unrealistic for most farmers here. 

Andy Jones, the manager of Burlington’s Intervale Community Farm, said it has become easier to grow crops that like it warm: peppers, eggplants, melons, sweet potatoes. 

The member-owned farm has also seen increased yields of cold-weather spinach, lettuce and kale grown in unheated greenhouses in the winter. The flip side is that, for several weeks in the summer, the farm has had to stop growing some of those crops because it gets too hot. 

Precipitation is becoming more intense but also more inconsistent. An increase in dry periods means more irrigation is needed, and bigger rainstorms mean plants get wet and stay wet, leading to an increase in diseases, Jones said. 

Climate change has hit Intervale Community Farm particularly hard because the entire farm sits in the floodplains of the Winooski River.  

Jones said that they are used to floods, but “what’s been changing is the magnitude of the flooding.” Tropical Storm Irene and the flooding events of 2023 and 2024 devastated the Intervale area. In 2023, Jones estimates the farm lost 80% of its crops. 

In response, the farm is doing more succession cropping, or planting and harvesting the same crop multiple times. Its farmers plant crops that take little time to mature, so that if there is a flood, they have new ones ready quickly. 

The farm has been renting fields at another farm in Hinesburgh to plant slower-growing crops. It’s also moved a lot of crops into hoop houses and to higher elevations to keep them dry. 

In spite of the flooding, Jones believes the farm is there to stay. 

“The Intervale has been in agriculture for more than a thousand years, and that’s not going to change,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 90% of American farms take in $250,000 or less per year, which usually doesn’t leave much profit. A failed crop can mean disaster for a small farm. 

For apple trees, thunderstorms pose a special danger, particularly ones that include hail. Cowles, from Shelburne Orchards, said that hail can “in five minutes just wipe out a whole year’s worth of work.” 

After losing 80% of his main crop, McIntosh apples, to a frost last year, he decided to buy crop insurance, which has provided some peace of mind. But that does little to address the increasingly unpredictable nature of farming. 

“You used to be able to think seven generations ahead, but right now, really if you can even make it through the next couple years it will be good,” he said. 

Many farmers are adapting to the uncertainty by diversifying their products. Since 2016, University of Vermont entomologist Margaret Skinner has been studying saffron farming in Vermont. The spice sells for $20-75 per gram, according to the state, and grows in or out of a greenhouse. 

It ripens later than most other crops, meaning farmers have more time to devote to saffron’s tedious harvest. 

Vermont’s warming is too subtle to impact saffron’s growth. And even if erratic weather makes harvests less consistent, saffron has an advantage: longevity. It lasts two or three years if dried properly, Skinner said, and farmers can count on it to bring in money when other crops fail. 

Vermont saffron is also appealing to customers because it is niche. As Skinner put it, “People are really into local cool crops.” 

The cool crop factor also applies to Boundbrook Farm’s rice. The farm sells to specialty retailers, restaurants and consumers who pre-order it from an email list.

Cowles said the novelty of fresh peaches in Vermont made them a coveted commodity, as is the experience of going to an orchard to pick them. Shelburne Orchards’ peaches are so popular that some customers sign up in advance for pick-your-own days to ensure the pickers don’t outnumber the peaches, Cowles said.

The orchard also distills its Dead Bird Brandy from those pears and apples. 

“We bottle it after nine years, and that’s income that comes in regardless of whether we have a failed crop or not,” Cowles said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: The surprising shifts climate change is bringing to Vermont farms: rice paddies, peaches and saffron.