Editor’s note: This op-ed is by James H. Maroney Jr., a law school student, who is a former farmer.
The Otter Creek Basin (Basin 10) Plan has been published. Secretary Deb Markowitz and Commissioner David Mears, whose signatures appear at the bottom of the report, propose a menu of urgent-sounding state actions for addressing a rising — not a falling — trend in lake pollution due to stormwater runoff, agricultural runoff, urban development and inadequate or antiquated effluent treatment plants.Agricultural runoff is the second greatest source of water pollution in Vermont, amounting in most areas to 50-60 percent, (higher in the Basin 8 Missisquoi River), mainly due to infusions of phosphorus and nitrogen, i.e., artificial petroelum-based fertilizer, manure and milkhouse wastes.
Except for the timid suggestion that livestock should be restricted from waterways and that “cropland susceptible to annual flood inundation and adjacent to waterways adversely impacted by excessive nutrients and sediment should be priority areas for this project” there is nothing new in the plan and certainly nothing that will have a material effect on this problem.
For those Vermonters who, after 30 or more years and the expenditure of $140 million in taxpayer money, were hoping for regulations that had some teeth, it is disappointing to read that the state continues to rely upon “Best Management Practices” and “Accepted Agricultural Practices.” We are also disconcerted to read that the state will continue to rely upon voluntary compliance instead of prescriptive regulation, upon nutrient management plans (which are ineffective, especially if they focus exclusively upon manure but silent upon the application of 95 million pounds/year (VAAF&M) of artificial NPK fertilizer almost all of which is applied to river bottom land in Addison and Franklin counties), upon riparian buffers and setbacks, measured in short feet instead of in acres, upon “peer advisory groups” and “assistance and education for farmers.” All these measures — all — have been in effect for three decades. They are empirically ineffective, they have cost taxpayers a great deal of money and they have delivered noresults. Not disappointing results: no results.
I recognize that the state is unwilling to burden an already beleaguered industry. But the current policy, which has spent $140 million to adapt the lake to conventional dairy farming instead of issuing regulations that would adapt conventional dairy farming to the lake (and the law), is empirically not helping farmers.
I recognize that the state is unwilling to burden an already beleaguered industry. But the current policy, which has spent $140 million to adapt the lake to conventional dairy farming instead of issuing regulations that would adapt conventional dairy farming to the lake (and the law), is empirically not helping farmers: They are continuing to overwhelm their markets with larger and larger supplies of cheap milk; they are continuing to ask the state and federal government to flout the classic laws of supply and demand, to subsidize a product made here that benefits the world’s most prosperous demographic i.e., dairy product consumers in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey; they are continuing to fail at the rate of 5 to 8 percent per year; they are continuing to do all this by deploying a methodology that was designed to externalize the costs of soil fertility, weed control and labor, that is, by dumping the residues of millions upon millions of pounds of relatively inexpensive, industrial chemicals into the lake.
Is it not time to repeal the “Accepted Agricultural Practices” rules, which condone these practices and unavoidably invite these results? Is it not time for Vermont to come into willing compliance with the Clean Water Act and its own water quality standards? Is it not time to incentivize our “struggling” conventional dairy farmers to convert to a paradigm that makes a profit, producing organic milk for which demand is growing 20 percent per year and that, in the making, does not require them (or even allow them) to pollute the lake? Is it not time to pull out of this profligate, mid-20 century industrial farming paradigm that serves no Vermont interest? (Keeping Vermont’s fields open is a very poor justification for lake pollution: if open fields were the goal, the state could pay farmers to bush hog their fields for far less than it costs to prop up a failing dairy industry.)
Might it be a good idea to bring Vermont’s signature industry into agreement with the state’s “green” image? Might the Agency of Agriculture and the Agency of Natural Resources leave off with the deception that current policies are working or that they can ever work? Might we instead investigate a new approach to these two, generations-old, closely related problems (farm attrition/consolidation and lake pollution) both of which would yield quickly to the same relatively inexpensive medicine?
Even if you do not particularly care about farmers, the state’s “brand” or lake pollution is it not time to stop pouring tens of millions in good taxpayer money after bad to achieve virtually nothing?
