At 5:30 p.m. on Monday, the last of Intervale Center’s volunteers were packing up, closing out an all-day effort to harvest as much of the farmland as possible before they are flooded.
The fields, which are leased out to seven different small to medium-sized local farms, sit on Winooski River in Burlington and are expected to be inundated with additional rain overnight, according to a National Weather Service projection.
Patrick Dunseith, the center’s land manager, said that farms had been working to harvest their fields all weekend since receiving the first flood alert. On Monday, some 50 to 100 volunteers had come out to help in a last-hour attempt. “A lot of folks showed up,” Dunseith said. “It’s the silver lining of it.”
They salvaged what they could, prioritizing root vegetables, as well as any full-sized lettuce and cabbages. But crops that had just begun sprouting flowers and setting fruit could not be saved, he said.
What does survive the floods will likely have to be scrapped due to the increased likelihood of disease, Dunseith said, adding that the financial impact is “going to hurt” the farms.
But he estimated that fall plantings that haven’t been yet transplanted from the greenhouse and many shorter succession crops could still be planted after the rains subside.
“There’s still plenty of season left,” he said. “But it’ll kind of be up to the farms as to whether it’s worth it to try to push through that or not.”
