Editor’s note: This commentary by Steve Morse, of Whitingham, is a letter he shared with his state representatives this past Town Meeting Day. Morse helps his son operate a 30-cow dairy farm in Whitingham. Along with the cows, Maple Hill Farm has a 750-bucket maple syrup operation, gathering sap with horses. They also sell hay, logs and firewood and raise Morgan-Percheron horses.
[I] believe you told us last year that you were going back to Montpelier and start a conversation about the inequity of Acts 60 & 68. I guess you did. We now have Act 46 — one more Band-Aid to a bill that was illegal and unconstitutional to begin with. I can’t imagine you and your colleagues believe you have the right to tell our friends in Halifax and Readsboro they should close their good little schools and merge with others.
Since we saw you last year, you and your colleagues have also created Act 64 to make it more difficult to operate a small farm in Vermont. To use real people as examples of these new mandates, let’s say Dana Dix’s granddaughter, Callie, would like to raise 100 laying hens. She might hope to sell at least $2,000 worth of eggs so she can buy her first car. Well, the state needs to know about it. She can’t stockpile a few wheelbarrow loads of manure beside her great-gramma’s barn that sits just across the road from here. The state says that’s too close to the road and too close to the brook. If she can figure out an acceptable spot to pile her wheelbarrow loads of manure, all well and good, but it can’t be in the same spot two years in a row. When she decides to recycle that manure as a soil amendment, she needs to get a soil sample taken, get the chicken manure analyzed and tell the state how much she applied, when and what purpose.
Believe it or not, there are still a few families in this valley with some farming and forestry heritage. I refuse to believe the legislators have a better idea of how to manage our private agricultural and forest land. The remaining few active farms in this valley, for the most part, have a farm or forestry heritage that goes back more than a century, not just a few years. I can guarantee they have not and will not pollute Lake Champlain. The huge farms in northern Vermont that may have polluted are already being helped and monitored to prevent such pollution. There was absolutely no need to punish the small farmer or the wanna-be farmer by threatening to suspend their current use privilege.
We are already being monitored by our consulting forester, the county forester, the Land Trust forester, and more importantly our neighbors. Why should we need a permit for work we are required to do?
Speaking of the current use program, I called you a few years back to try to explain how important it was, and still is, for the viability of our dairy farm. It needs to continue. You agreed to let me know if anything was about to change. It’s been altered at least three times since, and I haven’t heard from you. I try to keep up to date through the Vermont Farm Bureau and Vermont Woodlands Association. I know we farmers and loggers may not seem very important because we’re not in the ski business or second-home industry, but we do provide food, clothing and shelter for others, day in and day out.
The third bill, H.584 has to do with forestry. The supporters believe we should get a permit from the state if we are going to cut 20 cord of firewood or 10,000 feet of timber annually from our own land. We always need more than 20 cords for heating our homes and boiling maple sap. Our goal in satisfying our current use forestry plan is to harvest the wood and timber ourselves which amounts to more than 10,000 feet annually. We are already being monitored by our consulting forester, the county forester, the Land Trust forester, and more importantly our neighbors. Why should we need a permit for work we are required to do? The state would like to know what mill we sell the timber to and whose house it ends up in, being the final buyer. I would like to know just what the hell the state’s going to do with all this information.
If the state of Vermont has any hope of keeping a working landscape, the workers won’t get much done with both hands tied behind their backs. With all the laws, permits, oversight, fees, taxes and penalties coming from state and federal levels, we can’t function in a productive and economical way. It really tears me up when I try to remember the good things coming out of Montpelier in the last 20 years and realize the bad far outweighs them.
If it sounds like I’m fed up with our state of Vermont, now California is getting into the act. Soon it will be illegal for us to sell our maple syrup wholesale because it might end up in California. I say this because we’re still hanging onto our heritage and collecting all of our sap from zinc-coated buckets. These buckets are no longer considered food grade, but of course, plastic tubing filled with bacteria is. California has a zero parts per million threshold for lead in their food. With the most modern equipment, the best sugar makers can do is 40-60 ppm. The experts claim there is potential for more lead in our syrup made from bucket sap, but they are unable to prove it.
Thanks for letting me explain some important issues that concern Vermont farmers and forest industries. Less than 2 percent of the population is feeding the country, and we are not being heard. If you think our country has problems now, imagine it without farmers.
Ben Franklin said and I quote, “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.” We are not willingly giving up our freedom, it’s being stolen from us.
