Coalition discusses CT farmland resilience

HARTFORD — Farmers, advocates, and public officials peppering the political scale gathered over lunch Wednesday, Nov. 13, to discuss the future of Connecticut farming at the Working Lands Alliance (WLA) annual meeting. The perspective they seemed to share: the conditions for farmers and farmland are critical, and they signal a need for strategies beyond traditional preservation.

“One of the things I’m focused on this year is resiliency,” said U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) in a speech at the meeting. “We’ve had some devastating storms in Connecticut that really hurt our farms [...] and we have to be clear about the fact that the systems of support that we have today are just not sufficient.”

Murphy emphasized the mounting impacts of “climate shock” while other speakers highlighted the difficulties of farmland access, an aging farmer population, and a dearth of federal support for small and mid-sized farms.

While the litany of challenges may look unique in 2024, Connecticut farmland has faced precarity for decades. WLA was formed in 1999 to address the rapid loss of farmland to burgeoning development in the Connecticut River Valley.

At its inception, the idea was to keep farmland preservation at the forefront of policymakers’ agendas through cooperative lobbying efforts.

“This group of advocates came together and said, we need to make the farmland preservation program in the state more nimble and have more funding,” said Chelsea Gazillo, WLA director and American Farmland Trust (AFT) senior New England policy manager.

Today, that group has grown into a broad-based statewide coalition.

The breadth and vitality of this coalition was on display at the meeting, as Gov. Ned Lamont (D) shared laughs with Keith Bishop, the fifth-generation farmer of Bishop’s Orchards in Guilford, whose apple cider adorned the meeting’s luncheon tables.

Lamont, who recently oversaw a State Bond allocation of $9.39 million to farmland preservation efforts, underscored the importance of Connecticut’s agricultural heritage.

“I want young people in particular to remember that this is what Connecticut is and was: a great farming community,” said Lamont, who hails from a Connecticut farming family himself.

As Lamont and other commenters noted the growing pressures of real estate prices and weather events – “[Connecticut] went from floods to fires in the course of literally three months,” said Mason Trumble, deputy commissioner of the CT Dept. of Energy and Environmental Protection – keystone speaker Julia Freedgood argued for solutions that do more than conserve land.

Freedgood, a senior fellow and senior program advisor for AFT, drew from her new book, Planning Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems: From Soil to Soil, emphasizing the need for “a new policy paradigm” that takes an active role in planning more resilient food systems.

“There has to be a vision of the future, and there has to be a way to manifest that future,” she said.

For its part in that vision, WLA proposed a number of policy priorities for the 2025 state legislative cycle.

Gazillo highlighted two in particular: increase the Community Investment Act fee, a real estate transaction fee that supports dairy farm viability, and direct state money to a number of farmland access programs, including down payment assistance for historically marginalized and first-time producers.

“We’re optimistic,” said Gazillo of WLA’s initiatives, though she noted that the upcoming transition in national governance could mean a loss of federal support for farmland protection.

Still, Gazillo maintained that “true change” happens at a smaller scale.

“I still think we can get a lot done at the state level, I still think we can get a lot done locally, and I would just encourage us to not lose hope,” she said.