Lucas Farrell and Louisa Conrad operate Big Picture Farm, a goat dairy and confectionery.
TOWNSHEND-We wake each morning 50 yards from our barnyard in Townshend. From our window we watch the hills change with the seasons - crocuses pushing through thawing soil in April, red maples igniting in October.
In just a few weeks, our goats will begin giving birth, the first kids spilling into the late-winter light. Our daughters, 9 and 5, are growing up here, learning the rhythms of land and animals the way we have.
For 16 years we have owned and operated Big Picture Farm - a goat dairy and confectionery. Our forest is enrolled in Vermont's Current Use Program. Our fields are working pasture. This land is not speculative acreage. It is our livelihood, our retirement, and - we hope - our children's opportunity.
This month, after eight hours at Town Meeting, one quiet statistic stayed with us: Last year, Townshend recorded roughly three to four times as many deaths as births.
That number sits beneath nearly every challenge this valley faces. Our towns are aging. Young families struggle to stay. The tax base thins a little more each year.
Every piece of legislation right now should be measured against a simple question: Does it make it easier or harder for working families to build a life in rural Vermont?
It is against that question that we want to describe what is quietly unfolding in the current revision of Act 181.
* * *
Much of the attention around Act 181 has focused on its most visible provision: easing regulatory burdens in designated downtowns, reducing the friction that has slowed housing where infrastructure already exists. Those goals are important and long overdue. We support them.
Less noticed is Tier 3 - a parallel process expanding Act 250 jurisdiction across wooded rural towns throughout the state, mapped according to ecological corridor data. The draft maps are publicly available at act250.vermont.gov. Most people whose land falls within Tier 3 have no idea.
We didn't fully understand the implications ourselves until we started thinking carefully about what we hoped to pass on.
Over 16 years, this farm has been many things - a goat dairy, a cheese operation, a caramel confectionery, a venue for weddings and adventure dinners and wine tastings, a farm stay where people come to spend a few days close to animals and the rhythms of working land.
We have followed the land and the market and our own instincts, pivoting when we needed to, adding what made sense, letting go of what didn't. That capacity to evolve is not incidental to our survival here. It is the reason we are still here.
We don't know yet what our daughters will want to do with this land one day. We daydream about it sometimes - re-establishing the old maple taps and sugarhouse that partly burned before our time, building trails for cross-country skiing, planting a Christmas tree farm, developing a more intentional lodge.
Some of those ideas will never happen. Others might. The point is not any specific plan. The point is the freedom to imagine, to respond, to adapt - to hand our daughters a living farm rather than a stunted one.
* * *
When Louisa pulled up the Tier 3 map and traced our woodlot, that freedom is what she saw being taken away.
Under the current draft, our woodlot falls within the mapped area. Each of those future decisions would run through Act 250 review - separately, expensively, uncertainly. The land will still be theirs. But the ability to use it thoughtfully, to adapt it to their lives, will have narrowed considerably before they ever get the chance.
This is not an abstract concern. The wooded parcels along rural roads - many of them recently timber harvested, modestly priced, the lots that actually show up within reach of a young family or a working couple trying to buy into a rural community - are precisely the ones the Tier 3 methodology targets.
The corridor mapping looks for intact forest on both sides of roads. Those are the affordable parcels. Our friends and neighbors own these kinds of lots. They are the entry point into rural landownership for the workforce this valley desperately needs. Under Tier 3, that entry point will get significantly more complicated.
A neighboring family's land sits just outside the Tier 3 boundary. There is a technical explanation: Their connectivity block is classified as "priority" rather than "highest priority" in the underlying fish and wildlife dataset - a distinction that is real within the model but invisible on the ground.
We are not suggesting their land should be treated differently. We are saying ours shouldn't have to be. Their children will inherit that land without the same regulatory burden ours will. That difference - drawn by a line neither family can see or easily explain - will compound over generations.
When Louisa finally put the map down, she said: It was already hard to imagine how young families were going to stay here. This is going to seal their fate.
* * *
The broader pattern is visible to anyone who pulls up the public maps at the same scale.
Townshend's working rural land is blanketed in Tier 3 corridors. Woodstock - one of the most sought-after and expensive towns in Vermont - shows minimal coverage despite an equally rural and forested landscape. Stowe - Vermont's most developed resort community - shows almost none.
The regulatory weight does not follow development pressure. It follows intactness. And intactness, in Vermont, increasingly maps onto the towns that couldn't attract wealth, not the ones that chose to resist development.
The Tier 3 map, in this sense, is not a map of ecological risk. It is closer to a map of rural economic fragility, recast as a conservation opportunity.
And Act 250, the instrument now being extended across that fragility, is not a light touch. Even when a project receives approval, the process introduces time, legal exposure, cost, and uncertainty.
* * *
It is worth being precise: Agricultural and forestry operations remain exempt from permitting, even within Tier 3. The concern is about future flexibility - the ability to build, adapt, and plan for succession.
For a well-resourced developer, regulatory friction is a manageable cost. For a family farm or small rural enterprise, it can be a genuine barrier.
A farmer friend put it plainly: "My woodlot is my 401(k)."
In rural Vermont, land is often a family's primary asset, borrowing base, retirement, and succession plan all at once. In high-demand markets like Stowe, regulatory friction gets absorbed - there is enough development pressure that buyers accept the burden.
But in slow-growth towns like Townshend, where demand is thin and buyers have alternatives, reduced flexibility shows up directly in what a parcel is worth: a lower appraisal, a smaller borrowing base, a harder succession. Land economics research is clear on this.
For decades, Vermont has built effective conservation through partnership - Current Use enrollment, conservation easements, working lands programs - pairing ecological goals with economic incentives rather than mandates. A third of Vermont's entire land area is enrolled voluntarily.
Yet the Tier 3 maps were built without overlaying that data - publicly available, updated monthly, and simply not consulted.
A parcel stewarded under an approved forest management plan for 30 years is treated identically to one with no stewardship history at all. The mapping is blind to the very behavior Vermont's conservation programs have spent decades trying to encourage.
The Legislature is being asked to expand regulatory jurisdiction over thousands of Vermont landowners on the basis of half a map.
* * *
If the specific concern is fragmentation from new access roads punching through intact corridors, Act 181 has already addressed it. Also embedded in the legislation is a new jurisdictional trigger taking effect July 1: Act 250 review for new road construction over 800 feet, or combined road and driveway over 2,000 feet - targeting precisely the infrastructure behavior that poses the clearest corridor risk.
The fragmentation problem has a targeted answer already in the legislation. The full Tier 3 overlay adds sweeping regulatory burden without a clear accounting of what it adds that the road rule does not.
If the Legislature determines it needs to go further - not just preventing fragmentation but actively rewarding the stewardship that keeps corridors intact - Vermont already knows the shape of a better instrument for that, too.
In 2023, the state created a Reserve Forestland subcategory within Current Use - a tiered incentive specifically for ecologically sensitive forests. The corridor situation calls for exactly the same logic extended one step further: a wildlife corridor tier offering stronger tax relief for landowners whose parcels fall within mapped corridors and who commit to corridor-compatible stewardship.
If the concern is permanence, the incentive can deepen over time and the penalty for withdrawal can scale with tenure - the program becomes stickier the longer a landowner is in it, without ever requiring a permit.
Rather than imposing new costs on the fragile rural communities that have been doing the conservation work all along, this approach compensates them for the public good they are already providing. It sends revenue toward the communities the maps reveal as economically fragile, rather than adding burden to them and devaluing their land.
In most states, the strictest oversight falls where growth pressure is highest.
In Townshend, the dominant pressure is not fragmentation. It is the quiet arithmetic of 37 deaths and 12 births last year.
We are trying to remain intact as communities as much as landscapes. If we overlook those communities, then who are we conserving Vermont for?
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at voices@commonsnews.org.