Just a few miles from South Burlington’s busy commercial shopping district, what’s left of the farmland in the city limits has long been under unrelenting development pressure. One patch of farmland that could have succumbed drew the attention of a small group of local organic farmers, the City of South Burlington and a consortium of conservation organizations. Together, they were determined to save the 360-acre property.
Last month, nonprofit farming trust the Agrihood Collective, the city and the Vermont Land Trust did just that. The groups conserved the Auclair Farm in a complex transaction that involved five major funders, three parcels and two other farms.
The buyers will keep the fields, located on Cheesefactory and Hinesburg roads, open for farming and will restore wetland, forest and riverbank habitat. The city plans to develop several miles of public recreational trails.
About 13 acres near the Edgewood neighborhood housing development will be the home of a shared agricultural hub run by the Agrihood Collective. Those plans are five to 10 years in the future, depending on funding. The collective hopes eventually to build 48 to 60 units of farmworker housing, a commercial food processing and storage facility, a cooking school, and infrastructure for collectively owned equipment.
The land deal checked all of the boxes to qualify for the South Burlington Open Space/Conservation Fund, which is financed by a voter-approved penny on the property tax rate. City manager Jessie Baker said the Auclair property presented an opportunity to address the housing crisis and “honor the city’s agricultural tradition” while also aiding climate-related goals for creating connected, walkable neighborhoods.
A third party, Dirt Capital Partners, an investment firm dedicated to regenerative farming, purchased the property in 2020 for $3.67 million and held it in conjunction with the Vermont Land Trust until the collective and conservation partners could secure financing. Of the total purchase price, about half a million dollars covered the agricultural value of the land. The remaining $3.17 million paid for a conservation easement that represents the fair market value had the property been offered for development.
The city put up $915,000; the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board and the U.S. Department of Agriculture invested about $1.9 million; and Dirt Capital forgave $362,500 of the debt.
“Credit goes to the farmers for doing something no one else is doing in the state.” Stacy Cibula
Stacy Cibula, ag director at the housing and conservation board, said the property, a former dairy farm, is one of the last big farms to be conserved in Chittenden County. Over the past 30 years, the county has lost 35 percent of its arable land to development. The Agrihood Collective farm is part of a larger conservation puzzle in the area that includes easements on private land, Brownell Mountain and Shelburne Pond. Cibula said the project also stood out because the collective represents the first time in Vermont that two or more farms have formed a nonprofit to share resources.
“Credit goes to the farmers for doing something no one else is doing in the state,” Cibula said.
Corie Pierce, an owner of nearby Bread & Butter Farm, saw “for sale” signs sprouting on the nearby Auclair property in 2017 and decided she had to try to save it from development. Pierce and her business partner, Brandon Bless, didn’t want to own it outright, but they needed more land for their cattle. They were already stretched thin by debt from their 2009 purchase of a 143-acre organic beef, pig and vegetable operation that straddles the Shelburne-South Burlington line on Leduc Farm Road.
“We knew we would never have this kind of proximity again,” Pierce said. “That 360 acres was right there, and we decided to go for it.”
Pierce couldn’t afford to buy the land, but she thought a group of farmers could swing it with support from conservation organizations. Owners of three other farms in South Burlington and Shelburne — Killeen Crossroads Farm, Common Roots and Sisters of Anarchy Ice Cream at the Fisher Brothers Farm — began meeting to compare notes. It became clear that they were all under daunting financial pressure, in no small part because of the challenges of farming in Chittenden County, which has the highest land prices in the state.
As solo operators, each farm struggled to retain workers because of the county’s high housing costs. The owners also realized that each business was too undercapitalized to invest in equipment or infrastructure that could make their operations more financially sustainable.
Carol McQuillen, the founder of Common Roots, a food education and equity nonprofit that manages 22 acres of vegetable production for local schools and food banks, said it was clear that collaboration — not competition — could be their secret sauce. They looked at a collective model in Wisconsin and a national nonprofit, the Agrarian Trust, for inspiration. They invited Vermont Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts to one of their meetings. He became a catalyst for the collective concept, encouraging them to work together, McQuillen said.
Soon, they agreed that sharing land, equipment, worker housing and commercial food processing infrastructure could be mutually beneficial. “If we can’t sustain our workforce, it’s a failed experiment,” McQuillen said. They formed a nonprofit agricultural trust with a food education mission and the unique collective financial model.
The first order of business was to buy the land. Pierce didn’t have to do much arm-twisting to solicit interest from conservation funders. Bread & Butter Farm is a community-supported agriculture enterprise that offers educational programs for children and hosts a popular monthly Burger Night. It also helped that South Burlington’s planning department already had the Auclair Farm on its conservation wish list. The Vermont Land Trust had identified the property as a top priority because of its prime agricultural soils, central location and intense development pressures, according to Britt Haselton, the trust’s conservation program director.
But even so, the cost was prohibitive, and the sellers could only wait so long. In 2020, Dirt Capital and the Vermont Land Trust acquired the property while the partners sought funding.
Since then, Common Roots and Sisters of Anarchy have dropped out of the collective because of shifting priorities. McQuillen, of Common Roots, hopes to rejoin the group once she has established a year-round farm market, café and culinary teaching kitchen near the intersection of Allen Road East and Spear Street.
Killeen Crossroads Farm has been all in from the outset. Owners Breana Killeen, a nutritionist, chef, EatingWell alum, and senior editor at Food and Wine; and her husband, Kieran Killeen, a professor and associate dean in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont, bought 20 acres near Bread & Butter in 2019. In 2020, they started to plan a wholesale vegetable operation for the restaurant market and a community-supported agriculture program.
Today, the Killeens’ farm has two full-time farmers, 1.5 acres of vegetables, 175 laying hens, 10 cows, and 1,000 turkeys, Cornish game hens and chickens. Breana’s mother, a retired pathologist, makes the jellies, jams and pickles sold at their farmstand. In addition to holding down full-time jobs and running the farm, Keiran and Breana are raising 4-year-old twins.
Breana, whose father is Chinese, specializes in Asian veggies. Her dream is to found a cooking school, in part to take the angst out of preparing all those vegetables — such as shiso, mizuna and bok choy — that appear in the weekly mystery basket.
“People love CSAs until they are overwhelmed by CSAs and at midweek the fridge is still full of vegetables,” Breana said.
Still, she sees the Burlington area as the perfect market for the farm and cooking school. That’s because, she said, nutritious food is “not a fad here; it’s a way of life.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Planting a Food Hub | In South Burlington, the Agrihood Collective, a cooperative effort to conserve farmland, will also create housing for workers”
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This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
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