Like many farmers in Vermont, Bill Suhr didn’t set out to be a landlord. But when Suhr bought a plot of land in Shoreham to start Champlain Orchards in 1998, he quickly learned that in order to have workers, “you have to have housing,” he said.
Today, Suhr hosts as many as 50 workers from Jamaica who come to help harvest about seven million pounds of apples each year. As his orchard has grown, Suhr has had to find more space for his workers to live — a challenge in this rural corner of the state.
In 2023, he bought a property down the road with a structure that once served as a cheese plant for Cabot Creamery. It was habitable but needed significant renovations.
Six workers shared a single bathroom and took turns using the small kitchen. The electrical wiring was dated, and the building lacked a fire escape. Suhr faced a dilemma common to many cash-strapped farmers around the state: He needed to make critical housing renovations for his workers but didn’t have enough money to pay for them.
Luckily for him, a state program had recently been created to address that very dilemma. Since 2022, the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board has allocated more than $5.6 million in state money to fund a farmworker-housing program administered by Champlain Housing Trust.
The program offers two options: repair or replacement. Farmers can apply for a loan of up to $30,000 to cover the cost of repairing existing housing. Every year that the home houses farmworkers, 10 percent of the loan gets knocked off. After 10 years, it’s completely forgiven.
For housing that is beyond repair, farmers can borrow up to $120,000 to build something new. The first $30,000 can also be forgiven, and the rest is interest-free and doesn’t have to be repaid until the property is sold or refinanced.
The program launched after advocates and researchers sounded the alarm about the dismal living conditions of some Vermont farmworkers — and the barriers that farmers faced in making necessary improvements. Just four years in, the initiative has already paid for 74 repair projects and 15 home replacements. It has improved living conditions for about 360 of the roughly 2,000 workers who live in employer-provided housing on Vermont farms.
Farmers have been able to fund a range of projects, including building new, energy-efficient homes; replacing septic systems; repairing roofs; renovating kitchens; and constructing bathrooms.
“I say to farmers, ‘If you have a house that’s deficient in some way, I want to know why you’re not joining this program,” said Dan Baker, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont who has helped spread the word. “We try to make it as easy as possible.”
Baker’s research on migrant workers helped spark the conversation that led to the housing program.
In 2016, he surveyed 173 migrant dairy workers, and more than a third reported that their housing conditions caused them moderate or extreme stress. They described sharing beds and sleeping in shifts, sometimes in makeshift bedrooms above milking parlors, and chronic mold and pest problems.
The problem emerged amid the consolidation of Vermont’s dairy industry, which gave rise to larger farms that need more workers. About 1,000 migrant workers from Mexico, most of them undocumented, now make up the bulk of the dairy industry’s labor force. Farmers, meanwhile, need to provide them with a habitable place to live. For some with a spare farmhouse or mobile home, that wasn’t a problem.
But others tried to make do with structures never intended to be inhabited.
“One of my contributions was to say and document with evidence that there was a real issue on some farms but not a lot of stress on the majority of farms,” Baker said. “That enabled us to focus on those farms with issues without alienating all the farms that do provide good housing.”
Meanwhile, workers and advocates were also speaking out. In 2014, farmworkers walked off a Ferrisburgh dairy to protest their living conditions — a cramped trailer with a leaky roof in which four workers lived without enough space to stretch out their legs while they slept. Sewage pouring out of the faucet was the final straw.
Migrant Justice, an advocacy group for migrant workers, helped organize the walkout and got the word out about the living conditions that dairy workers endured.
State lawmakers took notice, and the legislature heard testimony from both dairy workers and farmers. In 2021, a study commissioned by the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board gauged what it would take to bring farmworker quarters up to the standards of rural rental properties.
The study largely confirmed what Baker had found: While most units needed small or moderate scale improvements costing less than $50,000, about 75 to 100 dwellings needed major renovations or to be replaced outright.
Last Thursday morning in Shoreham, Suhr pointed out the improvements he was able to make to his workers’ home, a two-story beige farmhouse with a view of rolling green hills. A $30,000 loan had helped him install a second bathroom, new electrical wiring, a fire escape, and a new fridge and stove.
The house felt overcrowded before, said Orva Waldron, 39, an assistant cider maker who has been coming to Vermont from Jamaica since 2022 on a temporary visa. Now, he said, it’s “significantly better.”
But there’s more to do. While the loan helped fix up half of the house for 10 workers, the rest of it needs additional improvements to safely accommodate 20 more temporary employees who Suhr hopes to house there.
He has been approved for a second loan to make repairs, but the cost will far exceed $30,000, he said. Until he can save enough to cover the rest, that side of the house is “on hold,” he said.
Many women and children have moved to farms in recent years, increasing the need for more space and privacy for couples and children.
“Even though the money has been a huge help, farmers often have to supplement with their own money or find other funding because the loans don’t cover the full costs of repairs or replacement,” said Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice.
The repair program has helped farmers meet the housing quality standards set by Migrant Justice’s Milk With Dignity program, which seeks to improve conditions for workers on participating dairy farms. In exchange for agreeing to the program’s standards for pay, safety and housing, farmers receive a premium for their milk.
Despite significant progress toward those goals, problems with farmworker housing persist, Lambek said. It’s difficult to gauge precisely how widespread issues are today, as farmworker housing on dairy farms is not regularly inspected and “no systematic evaluation of the quality of farmworker housing in the state exists,” according to the 2021 report.
In 2024, Migrant Justice administered a survey of 212 workers on farms outside the Milk With Dignity program. It found that about half had safety concerns related to their housing. A third reported structural and privacy concerns.
“The state’s investment in repair and replacement has made a difference,” Lambek said, “but not nearly enough to address the issues.”
Housing needs on farms are rapidly changing. Dairy workers were once almost exclusively single men. But many women and children have moved to farms in recent years, increasing the need for more space and privacy for couples and children.
CHT is still accepting applications for the program. To finish the projects in the pipeline through 2027, Julie Curtin, director of homeownership at Champlain Housing Trust, said the program would need nearly $1 million more than it has in hand. She hopes the state housing board will approve the money, which would go toward fixing another 15 homes and building three new ones. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Better Shelter | A state program has improved living conditions for hundreds of farmworkers across Vermont”
This article appears in July 1 • 2026.
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