Editor’s note: This commentary is by James H. Maroney Jr., of Leicester, who has a master’s degree in environmental law and policy from Vermont Law School and is a former farmer.
The blue-green algae blooming in Lake Carmi presents Vermont with an unusually good opportunity to face up to an inconsistency between what the Vermont Legislature has been taxing the people for programs it says are intended to “reduce” lake pollution — programs that go back 50 years — and what it has actually been doing.
In 1961, when the Interstate Highway System was extended into Vermont, Gov. George Aiken said it would “spark the greatest development Vermont had ever seen.” But shortly came the realization that development was a threat to Vermont farms. Never mind that by 1961 Vermont farms were already compromised by the widespread adoption of conventional farming, which had destroyed their economy: the prevailing attitude was that Vermont did not want to “look like New Jersey.”
So in 1967 – that is 50 years ago — increasingly anxious about development, the Legislature enacted land use regulation, sold as a measure to help Vermont farms, which is why on its very first page, Vermont Land Use exempts farming, its largest land use. Back then, 4,729 Vermont dairy farmers housed 204,000 cows, which produced as much manure as 6.5 million people. In 2017, Vermont has fewer than 900 dairy farms housing about 135,000 cows, or 66 percent as many as in 1967. Yet these 135,000 cows produce 44 percent more milk than in 1967, and only as much manure as 4.3 million persons, virtually all of it applied “untreated” to corn land in, or adjacent to, the flood plains. Be that as it may, land use regulation did not meet its stated legislative intent so …
In 1978 – 40 years ago — again saying it was acting to “save agriculture and protect the lake,” the Vermont Legislature enacted “Use Value Appraisal,” i.e., Current Use. Obviously, state subsidization for property taxes would be popular and today Current Use has 15,000 properties enrolled, covering 2 million acres, or a third of the state.
In Michigan v. EPA 2006 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that “No regulation is appropriate if it does more harm than good,” yet Current Use, which costs the taxpayers $55 million per year, or about $2 billion since its enactment, didn’t make a dent in lake pollution or farm attrition and the data bear this out: In 1978, at the initiation of Current Use, Vermont had 3,382 dairy farms while today there are fewer than 900, an attrition of 73 percent and lake pollution is higher than ever. So …
In 1987, the Legislature created the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, to “relieve pressure on our valuable agricultural lands” and to “maintain the essential characteristics of the Vermont countryside.” Since its inception, VHCB has spent approximately $860 million from private and public sources to pay for the “conservation” of 390,740 acres of agricultural and recreational lands. The program has not met its stated objectives: In 1987, Vermont dairy farms numbered 2,771 while today they number fewer than 900, an attrition of 70 percent. And VHCB has failed to stanch lake pollution, which has empirically increased every year since then. Thirty years later the program is still in effect, so …
In 1996 the Legislature promulgated the Accepted Agricultural Practices Rules (AAPs), which were intended to “reduce” pollution attributable to agriculture. But like all its predecessors enacted for the same purpose, the AAPs scrupulously ignored what it was exactly that conventional dairy was doing that pollutes the lake. Consequently the AAPs, including the much-ballyhooed winter spreading ban, did not “reduce” water pollution from agriculture, so …
In 2016, the Legislature enacted Act 64, which included a mandate to the Agency of Agriculture to replace the AAPs with the Required Agricultural Practices Rules (RAPs). The new rules require farmers to file nutrient management plans, which are supposed to inform farmers of how much fertilizer and manure they can apply to their fields. But the RAPs impose no limit on the importation and application of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) fertilizer because the prevailing opinion among non-farmers and legislators is that the problem is manure. One might well ask how manure can be the problem when today Vermont dairy farmers house 66 percent as many cows as they did a generation ago and lake pollution has risen every year. Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain!
Here is a list of Vermont’s efforts going back 50 years to “save agriculture and protect the lake:”
• Land Use Regulation (1967)
• Act 250 (1970)
• Vermont Land Trust (1977)
• Use Value Appraisal (Current Use) (1978)
• Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (1987)
• Act 200 (1989)
• Lake Champlain Special Designation Act (1990)
• Vermont Milk Commission (1991)
• Accepted Agricultural Practices Rules (1995)
• Act 115 10 V.S.A. § 6025(d)(5) (2004)
• Act 183 Sec. 1. 24 V.S.A. § 2790(d) (2006)
• Farm to Plate, Sec. 35 10 V.S.A. chapter 15A § 330 (2009)
• Act 142, VWLEIP, Sec. 1 6 V.S.A chapter 207 § 4603 (2010)
• Act 138 Water Quality Remediation & Implementation,(2012)
• H.586 Small Farm Certification Sec. 1 6 V.S.A. § 4858a Act 64
All these laws, to pay for which roughly $2 billion of the taxpayers’ money has gone up the flue, have empirically failed to achieve their legislative intent, most conspicuously in Lake Carmi, because the Legislature prefers the symptoms of the problem to its cause. And since conventional farming is the major cause of farm attrition and lake pollution, since conventional farming is the prevailing farm modality, since the Legislature and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Farms and Markets are blind to the harm conventional farming does to the economy, the environment and to the farm industry itself, the Vermont Legislature is still with one hand feeding the problem it blithely taxes it citizens with the other to stanch.
Any industry that seeks to scale up must import additional resources. More milk, like more cars or more furniture, does not come out of thin air; it comes from adding resources.
Vermont conventional dairy is no different. The industry has been steadily ramping up production since the 1960s by importing additional nutrients on increasingly fewer, increasingly larger farms. The state of Vermont implicitly and explicitly supports the practices listed below without bothering to notice that they all correlate with rising lake pollution, which the state insists it is trying to clean up.
As the number of farms in Vermont decreased, lake pollution increased.
As the number of cows in Vermont decreased, lake pollution increased
As the number of cows per farm in Vermont increased, lake pollution increased.
As milk production per cow in Vermont increased, lake pollution increased.
As total milk production in Vermont increased, lake pollution increased.
Last week, the Agency of Agriculture, with the complicity of the Agency of Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Conservation, announced that they had drained a million gallons of phosphorus-laden water from a little pond that feeds into Lake Carmi. This was, they all said, an indication of their commitment to clean water. But they did not ban the application of artificial fertilizer to the lands along our rivers and streams. They did not ban the stocking of farms with more than one cow for every acre of land under management on which that cow’s feed is harvested and her manure is spread. They did not ban the importation of high-phosphorus feed supplements, which farmers feed to their cows in order to force them to produce more milk than Federal Milk Marketing Orders markets can absorb. The agencies of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Conservation did not, in other words, stop the problem at its source.
Vermont has normalized lake pollution because 50 years ago it justified lake pollution on the pretext of helping agriculture — and agriculture was the antidote to development. The results today are unambiguous: Agriculture is walking on it uppers and lake pollution rises before everyone’s eyes every year. The secretary of Natural Resources and the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation should take stock of what the taxpayers pay them and their staffs to do. They have no justification for accepting a polluted lake because they have no justification for subordinating natural resource protection to conventional dairy.
