Editor’s note: This open letter to Roger Allbee, the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, is by James H. Maroney, Jr., an art dealer and former organic dairy farmer who lives in Leicester.
Dear Secretary Allbee:
I have been reading the Annual Reports and Recommendations of the Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council from 2003 to the present and I find no concise statement of the council’s mission or any straightforward roadmap for achieving it. Worse, the 2009 Annual Report contains unresolved policy positions and inherent contradictions that make the Council’s recommendations unachievable.
As you know, American agriculture has changed dramatically since the end of World War II. Food and fiber productivity soared due to new technologies, mechanization, increased chemical use, specialization and government policies that favored maximizing production. These changes allowed fewer farmers with reduced labor demands to produce the majority of the food and fiber in the U.S.
But these gains were accompanied by previously understated social and environmental costs. Prominent among these are topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, continued neglect of the living and working conditions for farm laborers, increasing costs of production, and the disintegration of economic and social conditions in rural communities. We see exactly these results from conventional agriculture in Vermont.
Consequently, most if not all “conventional” modalities are today regarded as unproductive if not outright dangerous and forward-thinking agricultural economists and policy advisors have repudiated artificial fertilizer and petroleum-based agriculture in favor of practices that produce better quality food, that are less destructive to the environment, that draw no more resources to the farm than they return to the ecosystem, a farming system referred to as “sustainable.”
The authors of the collected Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council Reports seem almost to have gone out of their way to avoid using the word “organic,” giving favor instead to “sustainable” and “local,” implying in the process that the terms are interchangeable if not synonymous. They are neither: conventional agriculture, even if it grows food for local consumption, is ruinous to farmers and to the environment. It is not “sustainable” from either point of view.
“Sustainable” does not mean having the determination to lower costs in a difficult economy in order to farm.
The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Market’s Web site for its “Keep Local Farms” initiative is an especially egregious offender in this regard, stating in many places that Vermont dairy farmers, simply by virtue of being local, deserve consumer support, that they are stewards of Vermont’s unspoiled landscape, that they make an important contribution to the state’s strong agricultural economy and even that they are sustainable.
“Sustainable” does not mean having the determination to lower costs in a difficult economy in order to farm. Ventilated animal housing, manure conversion into methane and heat exchangers for energy efficiency and by-product feeding are not examples of “sustainable” agriculture let alone “totally green.” They are examples of the efficiencies that expanding, conventional dairy farmers have been deploying for three decades to boost milk production and put their neighbors out of business, which is exactly the formula for low milk prices, resource degradation, farm attrition and lake pollution.
The author of this site is either misinformed or intentionally misleading your readers. The site co-opts the term “sustainable” and misappropriates the term “fair trade” seeking to prolong a methodology that is demonstrably untenable, that empirically pollutes the lake and that makes little or no food for local consumption. It will confuse the public and will not advance honest efforts to promote sustainable agriculture. It unapologetically describes the agriculture Vermonters would love to have, not the agriculture Vermonters have. The site should be rewritten to reflect the bare facts about Vermont agriculture, why it struggles and what must be done to save it.
Intentional or not, I detect a similar theme running through the Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council’s Reports that is perhaps at worst disingenuous; but it is also at best unproductive.
I presume that the Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council’s purpose is to:
• Shift Vermont agriculture to a sustainable model
• Arrest conventional agriculture’s contribution to lake pollution
• Raise the quality of food produced on Vermont farms
• Provide an economic justification for growing food for local consumption
If Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council’s mission comprises these goals, there are three conceptual flaws contained in the 2009 Annual Report, page 2, II: Priority Recommendations, 1.1 through 1.3 that will make them unattainable.
Conventional agriculture was adopted because it lowers costs and boosts yields. Sustainable agriculture yields less food that costs more to produce and is more expensive to buy than conventional food.
1.1: Address Gaps in Food System Infrastructure.
The “gaps in Vermont’s food system infrastructure” exist because the cost of producing food in great quantities industrially is significantly lower than the cost of producing sustainable food locally, by hand. The Council’s recommendation to “support multi-farm distribution, processing and storage initiatives,” appears to ignore the wide disparity in cost of production in favor of willing it out of power. These facilities would grow up of their own accord if the economics were conducive to their emergence. Either that or “support” must mean subsidization. Nothing else will bring them into existence.
1.2: Create a Unified Vision, Policy Platform and Action Plan to Develop and Coordinate Vermont’s Food System.
Vermont’s agriculture system and de facto policy has been and remains predominantly conventional and unsustainable. Conventional Vermont farming is on the very brink of total collapse; yet its practitioners cling to the modality while Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch pander to their desperate hope that the government will help conventional dairy farming continue to overproduce its markets. They will not.
If Vermont farming would survive and reemerge in a new, profitable form, it must move to a sustainable model. The Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council must make clear to conventional farmers that this is their only hope: The Council cannot simply call up a “unified vision” for agriculture without forcefully acknowledging that the prevailing system relies upon surplus production, which is the main driver of low milk prices, that the methodology comprises the very mechanism driving farm attrition and lake pollution and that because it is practiced widely, it is outside our control and broken beyond any hope of repair. Consumers must be made aware that conventional dairy farming ships surplus product here to be sold at such low prices that it is unavoidably attractive. Conventional food, it must be stated, enjoys a powerful cost advantage over locally raised, sustainable food. Sustainable agriculture cannot get a foothold in Vermont unless and until the Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council repudiates the prevailing paradigm and educates both the farmers and the public about its true social and environmental costs.
1.3: Identify New Methods For Increasing Access To Local Foods For Vermonters of All Income Levels, While Still Providing Farmers With A Fair Price.
The author of this statement has either misunderstood VSAC’s purpose or conflated two otherwise worthy goals that contradict each other.
For decades, the U.S. government has arranged things so that food here and elsewhere in America is produced in surplus to keep consumer prices low. Patently, Vermont farmers cannot make a profit or even meet costs practicing unsustainable methods even as they acknowledge that the methodology pollutes the lake.
Conventional agriculture was adopted because it lowers costs and boosts yields. Sustainable agriculture yields less food that costs more to produce and is more expensive to buy than conventional food.
Providing sustainable local food for Vermonters in lower economic classes would require subsidizing the differential cost of conventional and sustainable food. Growing sustainable local food for Vermonters in higher economic classes will entail convincing them to pay the difference. The phrase “still” providing farmers with a fair price implies that Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council knows that sustainable food prices are high and must somehow come down—but not too far—to allow lower income Vermonters to buy it.
These goals are contradictory and cannot be achieved at once. Vermont farming cannot be sustained by lowering the cost of food.
If the Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council wants to encourage local production of sustainable food, arrest lake pollution and return our farmers to profitability, it must decouple conventional agriculture from sustainable agriculture, divide lower income Vermonters and middle to upper income Vermonters into two groups with different needs and abilities to pay, target the middle to upper income group and unequivocally acknowledge the following facts which could become the basis of sound policy:
1. Conventional Vermont agriculture produces mountains of cheap food
2. Conventional Vermont agriculture is responsible for 50 percent to 60 percent of, and continues to contribute to, phosphorous pollution in Lake Champlain
3. Conventional agriculture is empirically unprofitable in Vermont and beyond parochial control
4. Conventional Vermont agriculture is not “sustainable”
5. Conventional Vermont agriculture produces little or no food for local consumption; 97 percent of food consumed in Vermont is grown out-of-state
6. If conventional Vermont agriculture were to suddenly disappear tomorrow, the supply of cheap food made at a loss by farmers in other states and shipped for sale to Vermont grocery stores would continue uninterrupted
7. Sustainable Vermont agriculture poses no threat to the supply of cheap conventionally produced food available in Vermont stores
8. Sustainable Vermont agriculture is not as “efficient” as conventional farming
9. Sustainable Vermont agriculture does not pollute the lake
10. Sustainable Vermont agriculture is not remotely close to producing any significant portion of food purchased for local consumption
11. No democratically elected official will enact a policy that raises the cost of food for consumers, who comprise 99 percent of constituents, to help farmers, who comprise 1 percent of constituents, even if that policy cleans up the lake
12. It is not the duty of Vermont farmers to produce food at prices that would make it “accessible to Vermonters of all income levels”
13. The production of local, sustainable food can only take root if middle and upper income consumers agree to pay a higher price in the marketplace
As Vermonters, we are all justly proud of our agricultural heritage and ninety-seven percent of Vermonters told the Council on the Future of Vermont that they support farmers. Perhaps they do not know that there are two competing systems of farming in Vermont and that if they truly support farmers, they must distinguish between them and make a choice. Clean water for 600,000 Vermonters is a moral imperative, not a choice. Raising the cost of food to solve the problem of lake pollution is the elite choice but, as a practical matter, doubling a family’s food budget to achieve it in these economically challenging times most certainly is not.
Consumers of all income levels have been reluctant to support local, sustainable food because they perceive its cost as too high. Consequently, Vermont farmers do not produce much sustainable food. But they have no incentive to grow conventional food either: our farmers are losing millions in the cheap food conventional farming economy.
The Vermont Sustainable Agriculture Council must recognize that the chief obstacle to the success of sustainable food in the market place is the availability to “Vermonters of all income levels” of its cheap alternative. VSAC must recognize that to succeed, middle and upper income consumers are called upon to support sustainable agriculture by paying a higher price for their food. To help them adjust to it, VSAC must state clearly that the problem is not that sustainable food is too expensive, it is that conventional food is deceptively too cheap. The VSAC cannot achieve success by failing to make clear its preference: conventional agriculture makes cheap food but pollutes the lake and sustainable food costs more because it does not. The VSAC must repudiate all forms of conventional agriculture in Vermont, provide undivided support for sustainable agriculture and absolve farmers of responsibility for feeding “Vermonters of all income levels.”
Sincerely yours,
James H. Maroney, Jr.
