Editor’s note: VTDigger writer Anne Wallace Allen and photographer Glenn Russell spent time talking Nov. 11 with Jack and Anne Lazor at their home and farm for this story. Jack Lazor, who had cancer, died late Saturday.
WESTFIELD — Sebastien Latraverse was 13 the first time he visited Lyle Edwards’ 50-cow organic dairy. He took an immediate liking to farming, and started working side-by-side with Edwards, learning the business and filling in as a milker from time to time.
“I always lived for the weekends and summers where I could get out of the city,” said Latraverse, who grew up partly in Montreal, where his father was a lawyer, and in Jay, where his mother had a home.
Now 24, Latraverse is still as committed to dairy farming as he was at 13. He’s entered a partnership with Edwards, 68, that will allow Edwards to retire in five years and Latraverse to slowly take ownership.
That’s a scenario that agriculture groups would like to see repeated more often as farmers reach retirement age and farms go out of business.
In dairy, which makes up 80 percent of the farming in Vermont, the average age of a farmer is 60-plus, and an estimated 10% of the state’s dairy farms stop producing milk every year. The state has lost half of its dairy farms since 2002, and has only about 650 left now.
And there are other reasons farming is just more difficult now than it was 25 years ago, said Jack Lazor, who has operated Butterworks Farm in Westfield with his wife, Anne, for more than 40 years.
“We’re so much more regulated now than ever before, not only agricultural regulations but the Department of Labor,” he said. “They don’t make it easy for you.”
Competition in organic dairying has also become intense.
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“There’s a lot of organic brands out there that look like they were made by your next-door neighbor but are made in a big factory in Wisconsin,” Jack Lazor said. “They really know how to set up their packaging, and the marketing has changed.”
Farm transition is a public policy goal
The succession of farm ownership is different from that of another business because “the economics are pretty unique,” said Don Devost, a partner at Marble Trail Financial in Middlebury. Farms often hold a valuable asset in their land, and sometimes a retiring farmer can make more money developing that land than selling the farm, said Devost, whose parents were both farmers.
“And farmers typically have quite a lot of debt, more than other businesses,” he said.
Vermont groups such as the Intervale Center in Burlington, the Vermont Land Trust, the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, and the Northeast Organic Farmers Association in Richmond have been working in various capacities for years to sustain agriculture. They want to protect agricultural land from conversion to real estate development or other uses. There are also several national groups that help people get started in farming.
A conventional dairy farm isn’t generally considered profitable unless it’s milking at least 500 cows, said Sam Smith, a farm business specialist at the Intervale, which offers a suite of programs aimed at helping existing and prospective farmers.
But “to transfer a farm with 500 milkers is a really heavy lift for a young farmer. It’s just too expensive,” Smith said. “It’s a huge amount of debt, and most young people just don’t have that capacity.”
Demographics make succession a priority
The Vermont Land Trust estimates in the Agency of Agriculture’s 2020 Food System Plan that as many as 300 Vermont farms will change ownership between 2020 and 2025.
The organization lists succession planning as a priority. Many retiring farmers don’t have a plan in place to keep their land in agriculture.
“If we just let the market take its course in this moment in time, we may not have a viable farm economy within 10 years, or at least the shape and size and health of that farm economy would change dramatically,” said Nick Richardson, president of the land trust.
The Vermont Land Trust has been working for years to make sure that doesn’t happen. Among other things, the trust buys farms that are at risk of being developed and then works with prospective farmers to match them to properties they can operate.
The trust buys the development rights on the property and steers the new operator to business planning services through the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, which operates a farm viability program.
The goal of preserving farmland intact is something many people who love Vermont can get behind. Last year, the land trust raised $12.5 million in just three months for its new Farmland Futures Fund, which it uses to buy farms, Richardson said.
Nationally, groups like American Farmland Trust pursue the preservation of farms and ranches all over the continent. The group estimates that, in the next 15 years, one-third of the farmland and ranchland in the U.S. will change hands.
Transferring a legend
Years of work at succession planning have gone into Butterworks Farm, the site of a rotational grazing operation and an organic yogurt company that once had revenues in the millions.
The yogurt business declined when the Greek yogurt trend bloomed in 2008, and is now down to four employees. The Lazors, who sold the development rights to much of their property 20 years ago, graze 85 head of cattle in the summer, with 500 acres of field and forest on their home farm in Westfield and more land on several plots nearby and in Troy.
Anne and Jack Lazor are legends in the New England organic farming community. They were awarded NOFA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 and were the first organic farmers to be inducted into the Vermont Agriculture Hall of Fame. Mother Earth News called Jack Lazor’s 2013 book, “The Organic Grain Grower,” “the best resource we’ve seen for small-scale grain growers everywhere.”
Even before the yogurt side of the business started to decline, the Lazors were thinking about the future. They attended an employee ownership conference in 2006 and also tried to find a group of people who would be interested in running the farm as a cooperative.
In 2013, Jack Lazor was diagnosed with cancer. His condition became very serious this summer, and he died late Saturday. He was 69.
In an interview at the farm Nov. 11, the Lazors said they wanted to make sure the farm and the soil they had labored over for years would be handled with care. They started working with advisers to create a succession plan that would allow their daughter, Christine, and her husband to take over.
That path was rocky, said Jack Lazor. A year of family therapy later, the family decided to hire a manager, Erica Wilson, who has an MBA and had been working at Jay Peak Resort. She started at Butterworks Farm in September 2019. Now Christine and her husband are deeply involved with operating the farm, and Wilson manages the financial side of the farm business and yogurt business.
No lack of young farmers
Things have gone a little more smoothly for Lyle Edwards, who also briefly considered leaving the farm in the care of his daughter before he decided to enter into a partnership with Latraverse.
He feels lucky to have watched Latraverse grow as a farmer and to trust him with the place he’s worked to improve since 1999.
“The farmer has a lot of emotional commitment into the place and it’s hard to all of a sudden let someone else take over basically your life’s labor,” Edwards said. “You’ve been in it every day.”
It’s not that there’s a lack of young people who want to farm. Smith, Edwards and the Lazors have met plenty of people who wanted to try farming, but didn’t have the tenacity, skill, or money to get started or stay at it.
Edwards said he’s lucky that Latraverse has the passion, the mechanical skills and the formal training that farming now requires. Latraverse graduated from McGill University’s agricultural program, held several internships and then worked on farms in Canada before entering the agreement for a five-year transition plan with Edwards. The farm owns 50 acres and leases 80 more, all in Westfield.
“If you’re coming onto a farm, you have to have some kind of financial background or schooling or something,” Edwards said. “You can’t come along thinking you’re just going to be milking cows. He learned the financial part of running a business at McGill.”
Not just dairy
Both Smith and Richardson see diversification as another element that is critical to agriculture in Vermont.
While he said the land trust supports dairy, “it’s not good for the viability of Vermont’s agricultural economy overall that it’s 80% anything,” Richardson said. “I’d love to see us get to 70% or 65%, not because the dairy economy is shrinking, but because we’re building other diversified farms around it that help make the system function.”
Dairy farmers have struggled with low milk prices for years, and dairy cooperatives are lobbying in Congress for various mechanisms to raise them. But higher milk prices won’t save farming, Smith said. He doesn’t think dairy farming is a long-term sustainable business model in Vermont, where small farms are competing with giant milk operations in other states.
“It’s just not working for the scale of farmers we have here in the state,” he said. “We have to look at what other business models are appropriate and also have the financial potential to be viable.”
Organic dairying is one way of adding value to fluid milk, he said. Vermont also excels at grass-based livestock production, for meat or for dairy, and at tree fruits and vegetables in areas that are relatively near markets, he said. During the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for Vermont produce has increased sharply, in many cases outstripping supply.
“If we think about it in that way, those are the types of businesses we want to try to promote,” Smith said.
Drawn to farming
Latraverse said he loves the lifestyle of farming, where he can take steps to improve the business every day.
“You’re always building on what you did yesterday, and every day you can find something new to do better and more efficiently,” he said. “I like the challenge of it.”
He also likes the variety of the work, and he has several classmates from McGill who do, too, with a similar commitment to farming. But he doesn’t know many people his age who have been able to farm without a family connection to an agricultural business.
“I think if it was a more lucrative business, a lot more kids would want to come in,” Latraverse said. “I couldn’t not do it.”
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