Editor’s note: James H. Maroney Jr. is a student at Vermont Law School. This is an open letter to Elizabeth Miller, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service.
I have downloaded the 2011 Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan. It is a monumental undertaking and I applaud your work and Gov. Shumlin’s order to ready Vermont for the coming effects of global warming on our future energy consumption. I have read only the section devoted to agriculture.
Everyone agrees dairy is important to Vermont and that it is — and has for decades been — in crisis. Dairy farming needs a new business model within which to operate. Ideally, Vermont agriculture should be, above all else, profitable and non-polluting. But how to make it so is both complex and controversial. I will not attempt in this letter to cover the whole subject. But your report suggests that Vermont dairy will benefit from energy savings achieved by the adoption of methane digesters and biomass generators. The proposition is probably true from an energy point of view; but it is fatally flawed from a dairy farming point of view. Here is my brief explanation.
In 1972 President Nixon asked Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz to do something about rising food prices. Butz responded by removing production controls in place since FDR, famously encouraging them to “plant fencerow to fencerow … to get big or get out.” They enthusiastically did so, and the following season, crop production surged and prices fell.
Falling prices was just what the president, consumers and food manufacturers all wanted but for farmers it was the beginning of a race to the bottom. To compensate for falling prices, dairy farmers have had to make more milk every year and sell it for less. Farmers achieve this by consolidating their neighbors, housing hundreds if not thousands of cows under one roof, replacing the cows’ natural forage diet with high-protein corn
supplements, spreading manure as a liquid in concentrations out of all proportion to the needs of crops, applying imported artificial fertilizers, petroleum-based herbicides to corn grown in the flood plain, milking them times times a day and injecting a cocktail of pharmaceuticals all to encourage maximum production. Consequently, the national milk supply is about 12 billion pounds in surplus over demand even as U.S. per capita milk consumption is in a steady, 45 year slide. The policy and its effects are still in place and since FDR Vermont has lost 92 percent of its dairy farmers.
Post-war farm technologies do indeed work as advertised. But they achieve their “efficiencies” by externalizing the true costs of soil fertility, weed control and labor into the environment. The consequence is overproduction, lower prices, more farm attrition, rural economic decay and lake pollution. These results are not simply regrettable side effects of the model: they are its fundamental precepts and the model cannot be applied without inviting them.
As mentioned above, your plan will marginally lower energy prices for farmers. But it will not make them profitable; it will not attenuate surplus milk production or farm attrition and it will not stanch lake pollution. The reason is that farmers have learned over generations that they must consolidate and expand in order to survive within the constraints of the conventional business model. What this means in practical terms is that progressive farmers will convert savings from methane digesters (if they materialize) to new capacity — more debt, larger barns, more cows, larger equipment, more land—and that means more milk production, which means lower prices, more farm attrition and more lake pollution. Ten years from now, fewer and larger Vermont farmers will still be selling a fungible commodity into an ever-expanding pool for lower prices. If the future of dairy farming is important to Vermont, your plan must disrupt this vicious cycle, not feed it.
The Secretary of Agriculture will refute the advice just provided but I would be pleased to meet with you at any time to explain why it is correct.
