Buckingham: Growing our future economy
This is a golden opportunity for Vermont. This bill would provide a huge boost for both the agriculture and forest products sectors by directly addressing the obstacles currently facing these important sectors.
Vermont Working Landscape Partnership releases recommendations for reinvigorating state’s rural economy
The Vermont Working Landscape Council developed this plan. Its sixteen members have deep expertise in issues pertaining to farm and forest enterprises and rural development in Vermont. Its report also identifies challenges and opportunities for the working landscape, trends for the future, and goals for the proposed policy changes.
Maroney: Working Landscape Plan would perpetuate Vermont’s farm problems, not solve them
The report is utopian and long on normative economics, which expresses value judgments about economic fairness or what the economy ought to be like or what goals of public policy ought to be. Words like “should,” “must,” “ought” and “need to” proliferate. The report is short on positive economics, which expresses economic reality.
Donath: Our working landscape, our future
Vermont’s working landscape shapes and defines us, just as we continually shape and redefine it. Although we sometimes may think that our countryside is unchanging, and wish it would stay as it is forever, it is ever evolving. We cannot take it for granted. Today, in the wake of decades of farm crises and the recent recession, Vermont is a troubled landscape, with challenges that endanger all that we value.
