This article by Alex Hanson was first published May 27 in the Valley News.
NORWICH — The Upper Valley Land Trust is negotiating leases with two farmers who plan to graze animals and grow forage on farmland surrounding the home of the Norwich Farm Creamery.
The lease arrangements, which the Hanover-based land trust announced this week, run counter to the plans of the creamery’s operators, who have said they want to start their own dairy herd and recently filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the sale of the buildings they lease, which are owned by Vermont Technical College. The creamery’s five-year lease ends June 30.
“These are farmers we know pretty well,” Jeanie McIntyre, the land trust’s president, said in an interview.
One, John Hammond of Cornish, plans to graze some of his Devon cattle on the property, which consists mainly of forest but includes four pastures on the same side of Turnpike Road as the creamery, as well as pasture and cropland across the road.
Hammond said two of the four pastures he looked at seem suitable, and he plans to bring cows and calves to them once calving season is over and once he’s had a chance to ensure the fencing is secure.
“I called up Jeanie and inquired,” Hammond said of the Norwich land. “I had been looking for some pasture.”
Hammond has worked with the land trust and other conservation groups, and he pastures some of the rare livestock breeds he raises, which include Suffolk Punch draft horses and used to include Cleveland Bay horses, a rare British breed. He sold his stock of Cleveland Bays to an Amish man in 2019, which financed his purchase of the Devons, small red cattle that appear on the Vermont state flag.
The other parcel, across Turnpike Road, will be used as pasture and to grow hay by Tinkhamtowne Farms, which is owned by Lyme Center resident Bret Ryan, who raises beef, lamb and goats on land in Lyme and Thetford. The land in Thetford is conserved through the land trust.
At one point, the land trust planned to buy the entire Norwich property from Vermont Technical College, which had been given the land to start a kind of demonstration farm. In 2015, the college partnered with Norwich Farm Creamery, a business started by Chris Gray and Laura Brown that planned to use milk from cows pastured on site to make artisanal cheeses and other products. The college ended that program in 2017, and the property has been mired in conflicting claims since then.
The land trust took ownership of 350 acres of the property in a settlement with the college in 2018. Norwich Farm Creamery, which sits on a separate parcel of more than 5 acres, has been producing dairy products with milk from Billings Farm in Woodstock. And the nonprofit Norwich Farm Foundation, which supports the creamery’s plans, has a long-term vision for all of the land to establish a dairy herd, make value-added dairy products and run farm education programs.
“We’ve been trying for three years to have a conversation with the Upper Valley Land Trust,” Kate Barlow, a member of the farm foundation’s board, said Thursday.
Instead, she said, the land trust is leasing to for-profit farms based out of town and out of state.
“We are perplexed by it,” Barlow said, adding that the entire situation “shouldn’t be complicated, but it’s really complicated.”
In a written statement, Chris Gray said he felt the farmland could be put to better use.
“As a farmer, the UVLT plan seems minimally productive,” he said. “A small herd of milking cows, such as we propose, will produce far more food than even a large herd of beef cattle. Value-added dairy is the most productive and financially viable solution for this farm.”
Norwich Farm Creamery was one of many farm operations to submit proposals to the land trust to use the farmland, McIntyre said. “We found, at that time, there were other alternatives that were more compatible with our mission” and “had a greater impact at a lower subsidy cost.”
The leases, which have been written up but not signed, McIntyre said, will require the farmers to make improvements to the land, such as spreading lime on fields that haven’t seen any in several years and repairing fencing.
“I think that most folks would acknowledge that leased land for agriculture,” unless it’s very fertile bottomland, is “a labor of stewardship and careful resource use, not tremendous financial return,” McIntyre said.
The land trust has conserved a lot of farmland, but most of that land stayed in the hands of the farmers who work it, McIntyre said. The land trust’s ownership of the Norwich parcel, which it calls the Brookmead Conservation Area, has put it in the unusual position of picking who will do the work.
Elsewhere in the country, that model of land trust ownership has become predominant, McIntyre said. Land trusts often want to exert more control over how land is used: for example, to grant farming opportunities to minority farmers, to encourage small farms or to support production of vegetables in an area that has few local produce options.
That’s less true in the Upper Valley. “We live in a region of individual owners that have, for the most part, wonderful stewardship histories,” McIntyre said. “We have not felt that we have needed to intervene with that.”
The Norwich pastures and hayfield were in demand. Hammond said that, once he expressed interest, he visited with Gray.
“I really didn’t want to get in the middle of what was going on with the creamery and VTC,” he said.
The creamery has filed suit against the college and the Vermont State College System, contending that the college did not contract with the creamery in good faith and later went back on the deal they had struck.
While the creamery’s suit goes forward, the Norwich Farm Foundation is planning to make its sixth offer to the college to purchase the creamery property, Barlow said.
