This commentary is by Loralee Tester, executive director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce.
In 1989, the Galick family sold its farm in West Haven to The Nature Conservancy. The family believed this well-established organization would protect the generations of labor they had given to the land they loved.
The conservancy now plans to demolish it. The farmhouse, cow barn, creamery, sheep barn and machine shop are all slated to be torn down, even though some of the buildings date back to 1850.
The conservancy knew what it had. It requested a barn preservation grant in 1997, at which time the farm was listed on the State Register of Historic Places. The conservancy then went to Vermont taxpayers for help. It accepted a state barn grant for the dairy barn in 2001, another for the field barn and a grant for the farmhouse in 2007.
So the conservancy did not neglect these buildings in the beginning. It invested in them and asked the public to invest in them. The organization has told me it has no other option but to remove the buildings now, and that may very well be true. However, as any homeowner can attest, if routine maintenance isn’t conducted, a property will ultimately reach the point of no return. The real question is why it stopped maintaining a property it asked the public to help preserve.
The Nature Conservancy reports roughly $10 billion in total assets. Last year it paid a single fundraising firm $11 million, and its chief executive officer earns close to $1 million. I run a small nonprofit in the Northeast Kingdom, and I work with businesses large and small that manage to fulfill their missions on tight budgets. An organization with $10 billion in assets can afford building maintenance.
I don’t think this is a one-time situation. It’s a predictable result of how Vermont has chosen to define conservation.
In 2023, the Legislature passed Act 59, which set a goal of conserving 30% of Vermont by 2030 and 50% by 2050. Under the law, land qualifies only if it’s permanently protected through deed restrictions, a conservation easement or outright purchase. That excludes roughly 2.5 million acres enrolled in Vermont’s Current Use program, which are all the working farms and managed forests that make up so much of this state. Leaving the program comes with a penalty, and in my experience, very few landowners opt to do so.
The current inventory shows that 27% of Vermont is conserved; however, when land in the Current Use program is included, the figure is closer to 70% by my calculation. Vermonters have been conserving land all along; we simply are not giving them credit for it.
Meanwhile, the people doing that work are going under. In 2016, Vermont had 838 dairy farms. As of early this year, there were 414, and four processing plants are closing in 2026. Dairy keeps more than half of our farmland open — the fields and red barns on most of the tourism brochures that come through my office. Visitors spent $4.2 billion here in 2024, and they came, in part, for the working landscape. We are selling the view while the farmers who maintain it are losing their farms.
Who is actually gaining from this current definition? The land that counts toward Act 59 is held through easements and acquisitions that large conservation organizations hold and raise money around. Several of those groups pushed hard for this bill. The Nature Conservancy, the Vermont Land Trust, Audubon Vermont and the Vermont Natural Resources Council all testified in support, and together they reported hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying spending during the 2023-24 biennium. Yes, this is how the system works, and there is nothing illegal about it, but what is happening is that organizations with paid staff are the ones that are shaping the policies that define our state, while the farmers, loggers, selectboard members and small-business owners are busy keeping the economy running and counting on our government to do what is right.
I keep coming back to the question of what this policy is intended to accomplish that we are not already doing. And who is Vermont for? I’d like to say it’s for anyone who wants to make a life here, but right now it’s becoming harder and harder.
There is no one I know in this state who is against conservation. It’s part of why we live where we do, and this region is what it is, not because of Act 250, but because the culture of working lands that defines rural Vermont has been created and maintained by those of us who make our lives here. It is becoming almost impossible to make the economics work anymore, and policies like Act 59 will continue to create disparities, inequities and unaffordability. Vermont is not only here to be a park for visitors. It is a beautiful state where many of us still want to have a chance at a prosperous and peaceful life. Remove the people, and you’re conserving an idea of Vermont that no one is left to maintain.
Beware of policies that affect entire regions without getting their buy-in. Consider for a moment whose voices are helping to craft those policies, and ask how it will affect all of us: our children and the future generations who feel that they need to leave in order to have a chance at a successful life.
