PES: Draft Small Farmer Group Proposal Available
It’s been three years since the Payment for Ecosystem Services Working Group picked up their legislative charges. The group is running out of time, recommendations to the legislature are due by January 2023 and in many ways the direction of program development is still undecided. The group started its process with a vision for a paradigm shift regarding how agriculture is valued in Vermont. At Rural Vermont, we are advocating that PES in Vermont rewards land stewardship that greatly benefits ecosystems AND that these rewards have a meaningful economic value to the farm. Over the past year, the working group has explored how to anchor payments to measurable outcomes (such as soil health or carbon sequestration) through measurement, modeling or observation. It’s desirable to find direct scientific links between land stewardship and ecosystem services, but these approaches will create more work for farmers. Effectively, they would be compensated for the additional work they will be doing to create measurements and records rather than cashing rewards for the actual beneficial land stewardship. In addition, farmers and working group members identify existing shortfalls like a lack of knowledge of existing programs, a lack of overlap and coordination between state and federal programs, the need to duplicate paperwork to enroll, limited amounts of cost-share funds, and limited technical assistance to implement conservation practices with a need to train more staff.
Now, the Small Farmer Group organized by Cat Buxton, that Rural Vermont is part of, developed and shared a draft programmatic proposal that is based on combining and advancing existing programs. The group envisions an online platform that streamlines all program enrollment. This approach aims to ease access to existing programs while also investing into conservation planning through more technical service providers. More efficient technical assistance would support farmers transitioning to advance their land stewardship. The program would issue payments for ecosystem services based on tiered stewardship levels.
The PES Working Group took a poll earlier this week on all programmatic options currently on the table. While there’s neither a clear winner nor a decision made at this point, a majority of the members expressed a preference to assess how to combine existing programs and or how to enhance them instead of issuing a new stand alone program. As a next step, the PES WG is planning to gather more feedback prior to settling on recommendations in November.
Save the date! We look forward to hearing from you, join our next virtual Rural Vermont Quarterly Member Forum on 12/14/22 from 7-8:30pm to share your thoughts on Payments for Ecosystem Services.
In the meantime, check out the Small Farmer Group DRAFT PES proposal: