Ashlyn - Brattleboro, VT

“My name is Ashlyn Bristol and I run Rebop Farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. And when I first moved to this state, I moved her to be a farmer. I knew that I wanted to farm, and I was young, and didn’t know quite how, so I interned for other people trying to learn how. But one of the things you find out really quickly when you work for other farmers is how farmers don’t have money, and don’t really have money to pay people when you’re a small farm. Many people do, and find ways to do that, and I feel, it’s like moving the earth to be able to do that, it’s sort of a feat. But anyway, where I was working and what I was doing, I had a health emergency, I was 23 and needed to get onto insurance really quickly. I had moved from a state, I didn’t have support from my parents, and had moved from a state that didn’t have healthcare, and I really quickly needed to move so that I could go to the doctor within the month. And I was able to get on state health insurance, because I was at the point that I was making negative money trying to farm. I was working full-time, wasn’t offered healthcare at the place I was working, and trying to farm in all of my free time. There was no downtime for me and there was no extra money. But because I had lived here for a year, I was able to get on state Medicaid, and I was able to get the healthcare that I needed, but it was very timely, the procedure that I needed, and it was pretty prohibitive to what I was doing. If I had gone into debt, and gone into healthcare debt, I would not be able to be farming now, I think. It took me 10 years to buy a farm and be able to be running a farm business, that is making ends meet. And every step along the way was pulling, it was like pulling money from a rock. It was deeply impossible. If I had had one more ounce of debt I might have given up. Farming is so improbable. Having anything else that stops you from being able to achieve the goal of having a financially viable farm, it’s one thing that’s going to stop young people from farming, it’s going to stop people from being able to continue to farm, it is one of the most essential pieces of living here and farming here was being able to access healthcare. I am incredibly lucky that I am life partners and farming partners with someone who came to farming as a second or third career after he had built equity in a home he had purchased elsewhere and had worked other careers, but we are farming because I spent my youth building technical skills, building the knowledge base we needed to be able to make our farm run. I feel incredibly lucky that he came up with the financial resources that we were able to move into expanding our farm and feeding more of our community, but it feels like a stroke of luck that not everyone gets. And everyone, if they want to farm, we should be allowing people to move into farming without all of these roadblocks, and I think that healthcare is the biggest one I can name. Healthcare and farm access, but they’re right there beside each other; they’re equally difficult”.