Shelburne Farms | Molly Webb

Molly Webb, Climate Action Advisor at Shelburne Farms, explores how the iconic non-profit farm is actively pursuing its Net Zero strategic goals by 2028. Discover how local initiatives—ranging from land carbon sequestration and innovative biochar application in dairy operations to electric cooking retrofits and geothermal heat pump adoption—are driving real-world climate action. Learn how these sustainable farm practices, renewable energy expansions, and nature-based solutions are directly integrated into community educational programming to inspire actionable environmental stewardship throughout the region.

transcript

Jennifer Green 00:00

Hello, Burlington and welcome to Net Zero Energy. I’m Jennifer Green, director of sustainability for the City of Burlington, where our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel usage. Today, we’re so happy to have Molly Webb with us. Molly is the Climate Action Advisor at Shelburne Farms. Molly has her fingers in a lot of different things and has so much to tell us about how Shelburne Farms is working towards its Net Zero Energy goal and its strategic direction. Molly, it’s so wonderful to have you.

Molly Webb 00:40

Thank you so much for having me.

Jennifer Green 00:42

And I think maybe Molly, before we talk specifically about Shelburne Farms and those goals, can you tell us a little bit about your background? You are a climate person.

Molly Webb 00:50

Yes. So I was born at the farm, you know, on in Vermont, but I’ve had a pretty international career. I started working in the dot com boom in Japan in 1999, and I made my way back to New York City. So I was a dot com boom. You know, the hype of the new internet was, was what I was interested in, but then I thought, I’ll always be chasing the hype cycle unless I really ground this technology knowledge I have in what goals I have personally, but also what I want to see happening in the world. So I moved to London in 2003 to do a degree in environmental policy. I ended up really focusing on science and innovation policy actually. So what do we, how do we create the world that we want as opposed to stopping bad things after they’ve happened? And so that led me to working in climate by about 2007. So I’ve been working mainly at the intersection of climate and digital since 2007, and then deeply got into energy in 2015, setting up my own organization, Energy Unlocked, to work with startups cities. So starting to get really focused in the place when you need to deploy solutions and the complexity of that. And so, and working with early stage, you know, if you’re trying to solve climate, you aren’t always taking an existing solution off the shelf, even if it exists, you’re adapting and innovating in how you apply it. So I got very interested in that. And then in the last three years in working with Shelburne Farms, I’ve been able to apply some of that learning and expand my knowledge as well into some of the earlier stage innovations that are happening in the nature, nature based solutions, as we would call them in climate. So yeah, it’s been a very interesting, I don’t say linear career.

Jennifer Green 02:53

Yeah. So, so three years, your focus, one of your many focus has been on Shelburne Farms.

Molly Webb 02:59

Yes. So in 2023, we had a new strategic refresh. And so one of the top goals in the strategic planning framework is now a climate action goal. So that involves us getting our operations to net zero in 2028. But also and that’s mainly scope 1 and 2 if you want to get technical about it, which we can talk about. And then also to bring that learning and experience for our visitors and, you know, bring that learning into our education programs. So it isn’t just let’s do our own calculus footprint internally. It’s about making that journey that we’re on. Part of how people experience the farm and how we help, you know, improve our own education programs.

Jennifer Green 03:52

But so you’ve mentioned education a little bit, but we know you’ve also got some tangible strategic goals, like expanding your renewable energy portfolio and reducing the use of internal combustion engine vehicles on the farm.

Molly Webb 04:08

For Shelburne Farms, we obviously have farming that we’re doing. We have a dairy. We have have to mow and manage our landscape. We have forests that we manage. We have businesses on site like the, in, so we’re cooking food for people. We have a market garden. So that I like to think of that complexity as our superpower in a way, because if you have a challenge with one building or one sector, you can look to other sectors. So for our Net Zero Energy goal, that means we’re looking at what we sequester in land and fields. We’re also looking at what we emit in our livestock and dairy operations, what we’re Consuming in our buildings. And if it’s fossil fuels, there’s certainly emissions associated with that. So for us, increasing our electrical electrification, the use of electricity as opposed to fossil fuels, that fuel switching, then being able to increase renewables to meet those needs. We have worked with Green Mountain Power before to make it possible to have more solar on site, but also off site. We are also electrifying some of the cooking. And so the coach barn is a new facility really, completely retrofit in, you know, maintaining the historic character, but also it has electric cooking. So we can now facilitate, you know, hundreds of people coming to have conference or for our education programs, which is fantastic. We didn’t have that before. And it’s all net zero. It’s difficult with the vehicles to go fully electric, as we know, but we’re doing what we can. And for some of the buildings, we’ve really already been able to switch over to heat pumps, and there’s still a ways to go. So I’d say I were a couple of hundred tons still away from our goal. We need to increase renewables. We need to address the farm, barn heating and in future cooling needs. And that’s difficult because the farm barn is, has so many things happening. It’s kind of the heart of the offices and the education programs and where, as you said, people drop their kids off at camp and, you know, we have all that happening in that place. So how do we. And that building is very hard to insulate. So we’ll, we’ll have a challenge with that. And also in the dairy, we, we certainly are looking at a whole range of options. We’ve started using biochar in the dairy, as a manure pit cover. That has been a whole journey started by my dad, Marshall Webb back, you know, many years ago. And then Sam Dixon, the dairy manager, has been keeping that going, expanding, you know, better understanding how we integrate that to our operations.

Jennifer Green 07:05

Can you tell us what biochar is for those of us that don’t know?

Molly Webb 07:09

Some people have said biochar is just charcoal with a purpose. I don’t know if that’s a good definition. What it means is that, it’s sequestering carbon because when trees or other biomass degrades, it releases CO2. The pyrolysis process of making biochar captures what would have been emitted into a material. And that material can then be put in the ground. And people say you can sequester for hundreds, if not a thousand years. And we’re interested in when we apply it in our operations, does it additionally reduce carbon or methane? Another course, potent greenhouse gas. And then what it might do in the fields in terms of increasing yields or other benefits.

Jennifer Green 07:56

So you’ve talked a little bit about nature based solutions. Can you talk a little bit about nature based solutions in the context of Shelburne Farms?

Molly Webb 08:02

Yes. So our net zero goal is does not include offsetting. Right. So we’re trying to do everything we can on site. We are very we benefit from the fact that for. Since the founding of the current iteration of Shelburne Farms, the nonprofit, we have been doing pretty much grass based dairy since the beginning. So for decades. And we’ve also been managing our forests in a in line with sort of Vermont best practices. Which means that we’re our forests and our soils are already sequestering a lot of carbon. So we’re in a really good place. It also makes it hard to do a lot more in our soils. So that I mentioned biochar, I don’t think we can improve our soil carbon sequestration anymore. Really what we look at, we have a tool called comet. It’s mainly meant for larger farms, but we’re customizing it where we can, so we can measure what’s going on with our forests and our lands, our landscape, and how we’re sequestering. And then on the other side, we just measure the inputs to those buildings and those vehicles, right? So what do we purchase in terms of gas or propane or whatever. And that, and then we account for that. So that’s what we’re looking at is the balance of what we’re pulling out of the atmosphere in terms of CO2 equivalent. And then what we’re producing.

Jennifer Green 09:30

Let’s talk about food because when we think about Shelburne Farms, we also think about, bread and cheese and at the end, just delicious food. Can you tell us about food production and how that fits in with your climate action plan?

Molly Webb 09:44

Yes. We have our own market garden, which links to what we’re putting on the plates of the guests at the inn, what we’re bringing in to feed people when they come for programs. What we have at the visitor center, we are organic farming. And Josh, who’s Carter, who’s our manager of the Market Garden, is wonderfully articulate about this. But he will say, you know, I, I am working on the soil and everything else comes from that. So if we have really good soil, we produce food. And, and our soils are, as I was saying, already sequestering quite a lot. It doesn’t mean there could, couldn’t be more that we could do, particularly in terms of the quality, you know, run off to the lake and other environmental challenges. So when we are thinking about the farm and food, I think the main net zero challenge is really the dairy. I don’t want to put all the blame on the dairy, but it’s certainly an earlier stage of, of us thinking collectively, you know, around the role of how we feed ourselves. Certainly there’s a lot of push for consuming less meat, for instance. And we can see that our own thinking, you know, if you have a larger herd, you can do things like methane digesters, which are a technology that would allow you to capture, that challenging greenhouse gas, methane. But for our size, which is a herd of about 90 or 100 cows, it’s difficult to do. It’s too expensive to do that. So do you reduce a lot or not. And so we want to keep producing cheese. We do believe that there is a way to have a food system that includes dairy as part and also be climate aligned. But again, that we’re I do think for the next couple of years, there’s a lot of opportunity to think about what does the farm of the future look like? It’s difficult to produce food all year round that from legumes. Say, you know, you might need some animals as part of this food system. So what does that look like? I think that’s a huge area for us to explore with partners. So again, that’s really where UVM and other partners were really open to having those discussions.

Jennifer Green 12:03

How local can you get? Your cows are right there. I mean, you’re not importing anything. There aren’t any byproducts that you’re bringing in to produce what you ultimately sell. So it is sort of keeping it as local as possible.

Molly Webb 12:15

Yeah. And I think some would say that’s unique to Shelburne Farms. Not every dairy can operate from, you know, we produce we have the cows, they’re eating the grass. They we milk the cows, we make the cheese, we sell the cheese. That vertically integrated business is not what every farm can achieve.

Jennifer Green 12:35

And Molly, let’s talk a little bit about the buildings. You referenced, the farm barn. It’s a what, 1880.

Molly Webb 12:41

1890? Yeah.

Jennifer Green 12:43

1890. I mean, this is a challenge that we face in Burlington as well and honoring the historic integrity of a big, beautiful building and electrifying at the same time is is is tough. So I appreciate your working at chipping away. And for folks who haven’t had a chance to wander in, what a fabulous space and all geothermal, I understand.

Molly Webb 13:05

Yeah, we were able to go fully geothermal heat, heat pump technology in that building. I think that will be challenging to do in the farm barn, but it’s been an interesting journey. We’re we’re not making these decisions on our own. We have architects, engineers. We have, you know, our wider community board members, many others who are really weighing in and encouraging us to engage as widely as we can on what solutions look like for the farm barn. And we have heated that building in the past with wood chips and that we’re now that system was over 20, 30 years old, and we now need to look at replacing that. We also know that if we choose to go fully electric in the farm barn, the question we’re always asked is, well, how are you going to use this building so we can make sure we insulate it? And, and everything is, you know, suited if we wanted to electrify fully, otherwise it would just not work really in that space. And so given that we’ll have to make some short term decisions. We’re definitely in a process of that. I don’t think there’s a right answer. That’s the crazy thing about doing this. There’s no one answer. That is the silver bullet for everyone.

Jennifer Green 14:27

I certainly feel hopeful talking to you, knowing that there are people on the ground who are wrestling with these challenges in a place like Shelburne Farms.

Molly Webb 14:34

I would just add one last thing, which is when people come to the farm, I want them to feel hopeful, but it isn’t because we have all the answers. It’s because there have been a lot of people who’ve come together, both you know, my Family and partners and neighbors who’ve come together to try and solve problems every day. Because it wasn’t necessarily the case. It wasn’t a done deal. That Shelburne Farms would be what it is today. It’s certainly the outcome of the next 10, 20 years is certainly not certain either. And so it’s really about feeling hopeful that we can make it happen together every every day.

Jennifer Green 15:13

Molly, it’s been such a pleasure to have you again. We so appreciate all your work and the work of your family to keep Shelburne Farms not only alive, but thriving and a place of innovation and hope for the future.

Molly Webb 15:24

Thank you so much for having me.

Jennifer Green 15:28

Thank you again for listening to. Net Zero Energy from Burlington Electric Department. If you have any questions about this show or what bed offers regarding rebates or technical support, look for us at burlingtonelectric.com or call us at 802-865-7300. We’re here to help you on our mutual path to Net Zero Energy.

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