by Sam Lincoln, via Substack

I was raised on a dairy farm in Randolph Center, surrounded by cultivated fields, pastures, and actively managed forests. It was not merely picturesque; it was a working landscape supported by a working economy. Randolph had sawmills, furniture plants, creameries, canneries, and equipment dealerships that processed local resources, created dependable jobs, and circulated money through the community. Today, most are gone.

Times have changed significantly. Manufacturing that once added value to Vermont’s resources has moved out of the state or country. Vermont had just over 3,000 dairy farms around 1980; today, fewer than 450 remain—a decline of 85 percent. Sawmills have followed a similar trend.

Vermont still produces milk, timber, food, and other commodities, but much of the infrastructure that transforms them into consumer goods has relocated elsewhere. Remaining businesses compete against operations that enjoy lower costs, simpler regulatory systems, and investments that aren’t matched here. Something has to change.

Change is inevitable. A culture willing to embrace change is necessary for adaptation, innovation, modernization, and long-term viability. Businesses must continually reinvest and keep pace; they otherwise eventually reach a point where the cost of becoming competitive again is simply too high. For a business—or an economy—settling into the status quo is often the beginning of the end.

Vermont still has abundant talent, but the barriers to business growth in our state have become extraordinarily high, complicated, and expensive.

The Legislature, for decades, has too often focused on preserving an image of Vermont rather than allowing its working communities to adapt. It threatens to turn rural Vermont into an economic museum—a place that preserves the appearance of an earlier working landscape while steadily eliminating the people and enterprises that actually make it work.

Vermonters who operate businesses, meet payrolls, and employ people, recognize that our state is in trouble. The backlash against Act 181– should be understood as a clear alert to policymakers that rural Vermonters feel threatened by their policies rather than supported. Property rights are at risk, economic opportunities are being suppressed, and longstanding concerns about overburdensome regulation and high costs have been too often dismissed.

Where I live in Orange County, we are not fighting sprawl. We are fighting to persuade someone—anyone—to invest in something that adds value, creates employment, strengthens the grand list, and bolsters working families in our communities and schools. A healthy community needs homes, workplaces, and businesses capable of supporting families—including farms, forest-based enterprises, contractors, manufacturers, repair shops, and enterprises not yet imagined.

I’m frequently asked why so many of our forest products leave Vermont—particularly for Quebec—before additional value is added to them. The answer is that Quebec and Canada have long treated agriculture, forestry, and natural-resource manufacturing as strategically important to their economy. Their governments have intentionally aligned forest policy, energy programs, financing, workforce training, research, transportation infrastructure, and other economic-development tools to help those sectors invest, modernize, and remain razor sharp in a competitive economy. That policy environment, combined with Quebec’s larger and more specialized processing capacity, helps explain why Vermont raw materials often cross the border before becoming higher-value products.

There is always hope for a brighter future in rural Vermont, but hope is not a plan. We need real reform at a larger scale than has previously been proposed. Vermont can either stand by and pontificate why we’re an exporter of raw materials we have an abundance of and an importer of finished goods, or we can take intentional steps toward restoring viability in the rural economy.

Land-use and environmental permitting must be modernized to be more predictable and understandable so investors can confidently create new industrial processing facilities. Protecting Vermont’s environment and encouraging responsible economic development are not opposing goals. The business community needs permitting programs that have clear rules and coordinated processes that can identify problems early on and help applicants find compliant solutions—quickly.

Vermont cannot sustain its working landscape by regulating the work out of it. Fields remain open because farmers can make use of them. Forests remain managed because markets exist for timber. Villages remain alive because people have jobs, homes, children in the schools, and reasons to invest in their communities. Profitable working lands businesses and landowners getting a positive return can more readily invest in environmental stewardship.

Rural Vermont does not need to be rescued from change; it needs freedom and opportunity to adapt to it. We can protect the qualities that make Vermont special without freezing our communities in time. When we vote in the general election this fall, we must choose between those who recognize the need for strategic growth in our economy to sustain our rural vitality, or those who only try to solve problems with regulation from an arm’s length away from the realities of the working lands.

Rural Vermont is our home. It must not be reduced to a museum maintained for the benefit of people who do not have to make a living here.

Sam Lincoln of Randolph Center is a multi-generational landowner, and the operator of a timber harvesting and excavation business. He has spent his life working in Vermont’s agricultural and forest economies.