Williston
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AUGUST 1, 2024
WILLISTON’S NEWSPAPER SINCE 1985
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New American farm ‘growing up’ in Williston BY JASON STARR Observer staff
It’s a Tuesday morning in July, with mid-summer heat and humidity just starting to ramp up. Theogene Mahoro is breaking into bags of chicken feed for a flock of hundreds of chickens on the 5-acre Mountain View Road farm he and his wife bought in 2022. In the distance to the north, his wife, Hyacinthe Mahoro Ayingeneye, is working in the vegetable garden. Soon a Nepalese American and his son pull their car into the gravel driveway behind the couple’s home. There are no signs marking their arrival at Mama’s Farm, but the farm’s base of customers, primarily from Vermont’s New American community, are already in the know. They call ahead with their goat, vegetable and chicken orders, and Mahoro temporarily stops tending to the farm to run to the house and fulfill them. Mama’s Farm is sandwiched between a U.S. Department of En-
ergy solar panel research center and Trinity Baptist Church. The Maharos purchased it two years ago with the help of multi-orga-
One of the chickens in the flock at Mama’s Farm. OBSERVER PHOTO BY JASON STARR
nizational grants, including funds from the Vermont Land Trust. Rwandan refugees who arrived
in Vermont in 2005, the couple got their start in Vermont agriculture at the Pine Island Community Farm in Colchester. That farm, a former dairy operation, was purchased and conserved by the Vermont Land Trust in 2013 and, partnering with the Association of Africans Living in Vermont (AALV), became a goat farm serving mostly the New American community. The Mahoros’ exit from Pine Island coincided with the Vermont Land Trust selling the farm to its original goat farmers, a Nepalese family that now operates it as Dhaurali Goats. “I worked there seven years,” Mahoro said. “It was good, but we wanted to separate out.” But navigating the tax liability associated with taking a business grant from multiple nonprofit organizations — most likely confusing even for U.S.-born citizens — created an unexpected stumbling block for the Mahoros. They learned after filing their income see FARM page 8
Theogene Mahoro tends to his chicken flock Tuesday at his farm on Mountain View Road.
DAML adjusts to new library law
Privacy enhanced for 12-16-year-old patrons BY INDIRA BUSH Special to the Observer Vermont’s public and school libraries are under a variety of new requirements with the June passage of Act 150, which enhances privacy for teenage library patrons and creates more rigorous standards around free
speech, anti-discrimination and civil rights issues. The policies enforced by Act 150 came out of ideas formulated by the “Working Group on the Status of Libraries in Vermont,” which was created in 2021 through Act 66. The group talked to librarians, trustees and experts around the state and country, and put forward its findings in a report to the Vermont House and Senate committees on education, leading to the
“Librarians were really sort of pleading for a little more support around loitering and harassment.” Sen. Martine Gulick Burlington
OBSERVER PHOTO BY JASON STARR
crafting and passage of Act 150. One change Williston residents may already have noticed is the age up to which parents or guardians have access to their child’s library records has been changed from 16 to 12 years of age. With this change, librarians have been talking to younger teenage patrons about their preferences for their parents’ access to their accounts. For Williston’s Dorothy Alling Memorial Library, im-
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plementing the change was made simple because the library keeps age information on young patrons. Librarians added a popup message on their computers to remind them to check in with teenagers about how they want to handle the change. When patrons aged 12-16 check out material, they are asked if they would like their parents removed from their account to no longer be notified about materials they check see LIBRARY page 8
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