Editor’s note: This op-ed is by James H. Maroney Jr., who has a master’s degree in Environmental Law & Policy from Vermont Law School and is a former farmer.
In his editorial “Granting Farm Workers Drivers’ Licenses is the Right Thing to Do” (Addison Independent, 4/25/13) Emerson Lynn expresses a commonly held notion that to do so is “Good for Farms.” Please consider another perspective on that question.
When in 1984 my wife and I bought our working Leicester dairy farm, we acquired 850 acres, 300 cows, a shed full of outdated equipment and four workers, among them a family of illegal Mexicans, who had been here for three or four years and wanted to stay. Husband and wife both worked on the farm so, in keeping with the custom at the time, we provided housing for them, their four sons and a niece.
Mario and Maria were Mormons, who had been sent here via Salt Lake City to look for work. They were good, hardworking people and I could always rely upon them to be where they were supposed to be. They never complained about their working conditions, their pay or their housing. We helped them hire a lawyer (we paid the lawyer) because INS was trying to deport them. Finally, in 1986 they qualified for green cards under the Bush-Kennedy amnesty program and we all breathed a sigh of relief. One month after their papers arrived, they were packed and loaded into their car and on their way to southern California. I do not begrudge them this response, but it did open my eyes a bit.
I have no difficulty with Mexicans working in Vermont or with giving them driver’s licenses. But the idea that we must do this to keep our large conventional dairy farms afloat is a canard: they are here because Vermont is an easier path to citizenship than Arizona, New Mexico, Texas or California.
Let’s look more closely at the “saving our dairy farms” part of the issue.
Illegal workers do not come here to help our farmers get their product to market. They come here to gain entry into the United States. Invoking their willingness to work temporarily on our struggling dairy farms as justification for giving them driver’s licenses makes many people feel better about how federal and state policies exploit dairy farmers, their workers and the environment.
U.S. dairy farms produce about 200 billion pounds of milk/year, which is 12 billion pounds more than consumers demand. It is that surplus that lowers their milk prices, which, with operating costs steadily rising, is why dairy farms have dwindled from four million after World War II to fewer than 50,000 today, an attrition rate of 98 percent. It is that surplus that prevents those farmers, who remain, from paying their workers higher wages. This oversupply of milk is so vexatious to the domestic milk market that the U.S. government must subsidize exporting it to other countries, where it ruins the economics of local dairy farming.
Facilitating illegal workers for U.S. dairy farms only prolongs the surplus, which prolongs low milk prices, which prolongs farm attrition and the overuse of petroleum-based artificial fertilizers and herbicides that conventional agriculture applies to produce the surplus in the first place, the residues from which flow in huge quantities into the lake. To help you see it from this perspective, if U.S. dairy farmers did not have an immigrant labor force, they would be forced to reduce production, which would raise milk prices, which would reduce dairy’s reliance upon fossil fuels and stanch farm attrition and lake pollution in Vermont. This has nothing to do with illegal Mexican workers or driver’s licenses: It is classical economics.
Our elected officials support conventional farming because they want to keep milk production up so that prices for consumers and manufacturers, who comprise 99 percent of constituents, remain depressed. But the price government pays to achieve this dubious objective is unsustainable.
The Vermont Legislature allocates $23 million-25 million per year to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, half of which goes to the purchase of conservation easements bought, with taxpayers’ dollars, principally from farmers enfeebled for two generations by agricultural policies that keep production up and prices low. The Legislature wrote the statute creating the VHCB partly to “save farmland,” but empirically, it is not: since the creation of VHCB, in 1987, the number of Vermont farms has fallen by 60 percent. This attrition is not all attributable to VHCB: since 1940, the number has fallen by 93 percent.
The state has other programs to arrest farm attrition that do not work. The Legislature provides $50 million in tax breaks for Current Use, and I don’t know how much for income and sales tax exemptions or abatements. On top of that, in the name of saving agriculture, Vermont has spent $140 million over the last 10 years on programs intended to clean up the lake. Yet, in compliance with Vermont’s Accepted Agricultural Practices rules, conventional farmers (and gardeners, golf course managers, home owners, etc.) apply 80 million pounds of artificial fertilizer to corn ground, most of it along rivers and streams or actually in the floodplain, to feed cows that are already overproducing their markets. Spectacularly, that $140 million produced no results: Lake pollution attributable to conventional agriculture was higher in 2012 than ever.
I have no difficulty with illegal immigrants or with providing them with driver’s licenses. But let’s be honest: Vermont farming entails dirty work, long hours, scant wages and substandard housing. Illegal workers do not come here to help our farmers get their product to market. They come here to gain entry into the United States. Invoking their willingness to work temporarily on our struggling dairy farms as justification for giving them driver’s licenses makes many people feel better about how federal and state policies exploit dairy farmers, their workers and the environment. But, with another amnesty bill looming in Washington, I wager that 30 days following its passage, our illegal workers will again be gone. Conventional dairy farmers will again have to wring a living out of the spate of ineffective programs Vermont has enacted to “save” them, while looking for yet another subsidy to reconcile the effects of overproduction, low prices, rising costs and farm attrition.
If Vermont really wants to “save its farms,” the Legislature must put in place policies that give farmers a sound economic reason to farm. It should repeal the exemption for farming in our land use regulations and in Act 250 that permit the application of the conventional paradigm, the root cause of overproduction and farm attrition. It should revisit whether the beneficiaries of the taxpayer funded VHCB, the Land Trust and Current Use, all intended to save farms, should not also repudiate conventional farming practices. And it must repeal the Accepted Agricultural Practices rules because the empirical data show clearly that the conventional paradigm prevents these programs from achieving their statutory purposes.
