12 Apr Laughing Child Farm: How Conserved Land Grows Sweet Success
Farmland Conservation & Viability
Laughing Child Farm
How conserved land, strategic investment, and VHCB’s working lands programs turned a rented 39-acre parcel into Vermont’s largest certified organic sweet potato operation.
Ten years ago, Tim and Brooke Hughes-Muse were farming 39 rented acres in Pawlet’s Mettawee Valley and trying to figure out if they could make it work. Today, Laughing Child Farm is Vermont’s largest certified organic sweet potato operation — harvesting 600,000 pounds a year, employing four full-time workers and 36 seasonal harvesters, and supplying co-ops and retailers across four states from September through May.
Getting from there to here required more than hard work and a good crop. It required a coordinated set of investments that made the land affordable, the business viable, and the farm permanent. That story is worth telling in full.
The Challenge: Land Costs and the Beginning Farmer Gap
Vermont farmland is productive, scenic, and increasingly expensive. For beginning farmers without inherited land or significant capital, the math is hard. The land that makes the most sense to farm — well-established parcels with good soils, existing infrastructure, and agricultural history — tends to carry price tags that reflect development potential as much as agricultural value.
Tim and Brooke knew what they wanted to grow and where they wanted to grow it. What they needed was a way to access land at a price that left room for a farm business to actually function.
This gap — between the cost of Vermont farmland and what a beginning farmer can realistically afford — is one VHCB’s working lands programs were designed to address. In Pawlet, that’s exactly what happened.
“We didn’t have a penny to our name or any equipment. I was trying to quit farming, but Brooke said, ‘I like this place, and I want to be married to a farmer.’”
Tim Hughes-Muse, Laughing Child Farm
Making the Land Accessible: Conservation as a Farm Tool
In 2014, Vermont Land Trust’s Farmland Access Program — funded by VHCB, the federal Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program, and private foundations — made the purchase possible. By selling a conservation easement on the 39-acre property, the land became affordable for Tim and Brooke to buy, while being permanently protected for agricultural use.
The conservation easement is the mechanism that makes this work. The development rights are sold, which lowers the purchase price to reflect agricultural value rather than development potential. The land stays in farming hands, and the protection is permanent — written into the deed, lasting beyond any single owner or generation.
In 2025, VHCB funded conservation of an additional 30 acres of adjacent cropland that Tim and Brooke had been leasing for years. Once that purchase closes, 69 conserved acres will comprise Laughing Child Farm — sitting alongside 192 acres of forestland conserved by The Nature Conservancy, forming a substantial connected block of protected land in the Mettawee Valley.
“We have been aspiring to own a farm for 11 years, and now our dream has come true.”
Tim Hughes-Muse
Building a Viable Farm Business
Owning the land was the foundation. Building a business on it was the next challenge.
Tim and Brooke had settled on certified organic sweet potatoes — a crop with real market potential in Vermont’s short growing season, where locally grown organic sweet potatoes are in demand from September through winter. But identifying a crop and building a profitable operation around it are different things.
Through VHCB’s Farm and Forest Viability Program, the Hughes-Muses worked with business advisor Sam Smith to develop a comprehensive farm business plan. That planning surfaced a specific bottleneck: without proper climate-controlled storage and processing infrastructure, the farm’s capacity to scale was limited and labor costs were unsustainable.
A VHCB Business Plan Implementation Grant funded the storage facility. Processing time for 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes dropped from three hours to 45 minutes — a 400% gain in efficiency that changed the economics of the whole operation.
“When we came across sweet potatoes, we thought it could work, but we weren’t really sure about the business part of it. So we looked for outside help. That’s when we got in touch with VHCB.”
Tim Hughes-Muse
What the Farm Produces Today
Sweet potato harvest at Laughing Child Farm, Pawlet, Vermont.
Laughing Child Farm now operates at a scale that reflects more than a decade of compounding investment and commitment.
The farm supplies co-ops and retailers across Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York from September through May. Four full-time workers and approximately 36 seasonal harvesters are paid living wages of around $20 per hour. Thirty acres are in active sweet potato production on conserved land.
A quarter-mile of the Mettawee River is protected with a 25-foot buffer zone, reducing runoff and erosion. City Market’s produce manager, Margaret Kane, described the farm’s effect on the regional food system plainly: Laughing Child Farm has “completely changed the landscape of local sweet potatoes in Vermont,” allowing City Market to phase out non-local organic sweet potatoes in winter entirely.
“Laughing Child Farm has completely changed the landscape of local sweet potatoes in Vermont.”
Margaret Kane, City Market Produce Manager
Conserved farmland in the Mettawee Valley, Pawlet, Vermont.
One Investment, Many Returns
The Laughing Child Farm story spans more than a decade and involves multiple programs, partners, and phases. Tracing it back, what you find is a coordinated set of investments that each reinforced the others: land access enabled farm ownership, farm ownership enabled business investment, business investment enabled scale, scale enabled employment and food supply, and permanent conservation ensured the land stays in production for the generations that follow Tim and Brooke.
The conservation easement protects the Mettawee River corridor. The conserved farmland sits adjacent to 192 Nature Conservancy acres, contributing to a larger connected landscape. The farm employs people at living wages in a rural community. It feeds thousands of families across the region with locally grown organic food. And it demonstrates, concretely, that protecting Vermont’s working landscape and investing in the farmers who work it are the same act.
As VHCB’s dual goal mission holds: housing and conservation, working lands and community vitality, access and permanence — these are not competing priorities. In Pawlet, they were the same investment.
One investment in Pawlet returned affordable land access, a permanently protected working farm, a thriving rural business, year-round employment at living wages, watershed protection along the Mettawee River, and a local food supply reaching four states. One investment, many returns. That’s VHCB’s multiplier mission — and Vermont’s.
Learn More
Laughing Child Farm is one of dozens of working farms supported through VHCB’s Farmland Conservation and Farm and Forest Viability programs.
Want to learn more? Check out our 2025 Annual Report.
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