Op-Ed: Act 181 is ending small farms and most Vermonters don't even know it
February 18, 2026 | By Neil Ryan
Rural Vermont is more than a “forest block” as defined by planners via GIS maps and rulemaking. Rural Vermont is a human institution created by generations of men and women who loved the land and their way of life.
I am a third-generation Vermont farmer who has called three different farms in three Vermont towns home. Each of those farms would be impossible under Act 181 and the emerging Act 250 revisions. Most Vermonters have no idea what’s coming.
My family started farming in Starksboro in 1981 with a dairy cow and a tent on an abandoned hill farm. My grandparents raised Highland cattle and Christmas trees, and built for multi-family living. My aunt and uncle created Highland Sugarworks – pioneering specialty glass bottles for Vermont maple syrup and helping establish organic standards for the industry. They didn’t have to spend thousands navigating bureaucratic mazes. They simply did the hard work of farming.
Under Act 181, this never would have happened. The multi-family housing would require navigating new Tier 2 and Tier 3 designations. The road would trigger the 800-foot rule. The diversified operation would run afoul of restrictions on accessory farm businesses.
Starting out 20 years ago as a young farmer, I homesteaded on affordable land in Roxbury. I built a road, constructed a barn on the footprint of a 140-year-old foundation, and drew water from a prior generation’s stone-lined well. Under Act 181, a young person could not do this. Act 181 ends opportunities for the next generation to homestead on the only affordable land left to them.
Today, I raise beef cattle on 200 acres in Corinth and Orange that the regional planning commission designated “Rural – Conservation: Land set aside to protect natural resources” without my input. This land – slated for Tier 2 and Tier 3 restrictions – was Gov. Deane C. Davis’s boyhood farm. Ancient roads through the farm connected to a Norwegian commune, a brick kiln, and the early 20th-century Maplewood Hotel with its bowling alley and swimming pool. My land has three vestigial sugarhouses, stone sheep pens from the 19th-century sheep boom, and barbed wire fencing from when milk was shipped to the creamery.
Planners call all of this a “forest block.”
This is the profound ignorance at the heart of Act 181: distant planners with computer models decided they know better than the people who work the land. They see static categories – “forest blocks,” “habitat connectors” – drawn on screens. I see 200 years of human stewardship creating a biodiverse mosaic of field and forest.
Beginning December 31, 2026, any construction in Tier 3 areas – including potentially a single-family home – will require Act 250 permits. Want to build a house for your children? Prepare to spend thousands of dollars and wait a year or two to hear “yes” or “no.”
The accessory farm businesses that keep small farms viable? Farm stays aren’t clearly exempt. Events require permit review. Processing farm products could leave you in violation if 51% of a batch of applesauce came from your neighbor’s apples.
The mathematics are brutal: Small diversified farmers cannot afford the permits, the time, the lawyers, or the uncertainty.
Act 181 creates exemptions in Tier 1A and 1B areas, making it easier for corporate developers to build housing. The burden of restriction falls on rural landowners least able to bear it. We’re being asked to subsidize development goals with our property rights while being denied the opportunities the wealthy enjoy.
This is cultural genocide through regulation. Rural Vermont culture – the knowledge of working with land, the social patterns of multi-generational continuity – is being driven to extinction. When you make it insurmountable for new people to start farms, you break the chain of cultural transmission. When you lock rural land into regulatory categories, you erase human history and treat rural people as a problem to be solved.
Vermont had 3.3 million acres of farmland in 1925. Today, we have a little over 500,000 acres. Act 181 makes it harder to farm.
What legislators must do
Repeal Act 181 or amend it radically.
Exempt working farms enrolled in Current Use from Tier 3 restrictions.
Repeal the 800-foot road rule or raise the threshold to prevent actual sprawl, not farm access.
Restore full Act 250 exemption for all accessory farm businesses – stays, events, education, processing.
Require landowner consent before Tier 3 designation – make it opt-in, not imposed. Provide compensation for regulatory takings.
Extend timelines and improve notice. Many landowners don't even know their land has been restricted.
Ground decisions in reality by walking the land before mapping it; the current draft maps are inaccurate.
What Vermonters must do
Contact your legislators now. Ask your representatives: Do you want farms in Vermont or a playground for the wealthy? Do you want rural communities with young people and families, or further rural decline?
Attend Land Use Review Board hearings.
Demand to see if your property has been mapped as Tier 3.
The final Tier 3 rules aren’t due until September, but jurisdiction begins Dec. 31. Most landowners don’t know what's coming. By the time they do, it will be too late.
Small farms are a way of life that has sustained Vermont for generations and could sustain it for generations more if we act now.
Please help us pass this land down to the next generation with its possibilities intact.
Neil Ryan is a third-generation Vermont farmer and consultant helping brands and nonprofits tell their stories in Corinth. Contact your state legislators at legislature.vermont.gov. Learn more about Act 181’s impacts at act250.vermont.gov.