Vermont food system produced about $11.5 billion in 2022; dairy remains dominant

Jake Claro, Farm to Plate director at the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, told the Agriculture, Food Resiliency, & Forestry session that the 2022 data show the food system generated roughly $11.5 billion in economic output across production, processing, distribution and retail. “This gives you a sense of the breakdown of, you know, $11,500,000,000 of economic output that’s happening across the food system in Vermont,” Claro said.

The presentation said production and processing account for about $4.3 billion of that total; farm-gate sales were listed at roughly $1 billion and food manufacturing at about $3 billion. Wholesaling activities were reported near $3.6 billion, with retail and food service contributing a further roughly $3.5 billion. The data presenter cautioned some manufacturing subcategories remain suppressed in the public dataset.

Why it matters: the numbers show the food and agriculture sector’s large footprint in Vermont’s economy, the continued prominence of dairy and the rise of certain non-dairy sectors that may warrant targeted support.

The slides showed employment resilience: more than 63,000 people are employed in food-system jobs, a 9.4% increase since 2009 and an 8.4% increase in the last three years. Claro noted a roughly 10% employment drop between 2019 and 2020 tied to COVID-19, with retail accounting for 90% of the pandemic-related losses. “Employment in the food system is pretty resilient,” he said.

Sector breakdowns in the presentation showed about one-third of food-system employment is in farm operators and hired farm labor, 12% in food manufacturing and 4% in distribution. County-level farm-gate sales were concentrated in Addison, Franklin, Orleans, Orange and Chittenden counties, though the presenter said every county had seen sales increases from 2012 to 2022.

The commodity picture remains heavily weighted toward milk: dairy represented roughly 60% of farm-gate sales in the 2022 census. Maple syrup crossed $100 million in farm-gate sales in 2022 and saw an increase of about $54 million from 2017 to 2022, while vegetable sales grew about 70% and poultry-and-egg sales nearly doubled over that same interval.

Abby (role/title not specified) highlighted the diversification in the state’s production and noted the farm-count and business-count trends: farms are a plurality of establishments but have declined nearly 11% since 2012, with dairy accounting for roughly half of that drop. She also said the state’s 444 dairy farms recently lost more than 20 farms in a single month, underscoring ongoing churn in the sector.

The presentation also flagged limitations in available data. Claro said some beef-processing figures were suppressed in the census release and that changes in classification (for example, how veterinary services are counted) affect comparisons across years.

Ending: the presenter described this session as the first of two parts and said the material is intended to provide a data foundation for continued policy conversations about where to target programs, investments and technical assistance.