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.
