This commentary is by James H. Maroney Jr. of Leicester, a former farmer who has a master’s degree in environmental law and policy from Vermont Law School.
Huzzah! Gov. Phil Scott just announced that Vermont has vaccinated 80% of its people against Covid and consequently he has lifted the restrictions he imposed for the last 15 months on restaurants, theaters, bars and schools, etc. Mr. Scott worked hard to make Vermont the safest state in the union and he is justified in predicting that more people will soon be coming here to vacation and to live.
No question, the governor is onto something. But he should now extend his Covid strategy to envision how a scrupulously clean lake and atmosphere would attract even more people to Vermont, a goal he has stated repeatedly.
He might, for example, get fully behind the Global Warming Solutions Act, which he once vetoed but is now law; he might also get behind compliance with the Clean Water Act (1972), which he, his predecessors and the Vermont Legislature have stubbornly refused to do for fear of upsetting Vermont’s conventional dairy farmers.
Most people know that conventional dairy is responsible for roughly half the pollution in Lake Champlain, which makes compliance with the Clean Water Act difficult if not impossible. Actually, agricultural pollution falls just outside the reach of the act, not because its authors did not know about it but because politicians in farming states feared that regulating the use of fertilizer and herbicides would reduce farm yields and farm income.
But the use of these toxic substances would so boost farm yields that farm income has fallen precipitously, driving farm attrition and calls for more government farm support.
Most people also know that the Vermont dairy industry has required state support in the millions every year; many will have read State Auditor Doug Hoffer’s recent report in which he says that to keep Vermont dairy afloat the state spent $28 million over the last decade. Unfortunately, the auditor’s report stopped short of detailing what benefits such support was supposed to provide and it did not venture to explain why state support for conventional dairy and allocations to clean up the lake actually work at cross purposes.
Yes: In the face of decades of steady lake pollution and steady farm attrition, Vermont actually permits rather than regulates its 34 largest dairy farms, in keeping with the above absurdity.
Mr. Scott has an unprecedented opportunity to break with this tradition. The University of Vermont Gund Institute just released a report that suggests reducing phosphorus in Lake Champlain would have an enormous benefit on tourism, real estate, and human health.
Focusing on Missisquoi Bay — a phosphorus hotspot at Lake Champlain’s northeastern end — the study estimates that eliminating phosphorus inputs to the bay would benefit local tourism by $28.5 million and property sales by $11.2 million between now and 2050. That’s $39.7 million in benefits over the period of 29 years or about $1.3 million per year.
The report does not quantify the cost of cleaning up Missisquoi Bay but it notes that conventional dairy farmers are “cash-strapped” because the state has imposed on them the financial burden of phosphorus reduction. The report’s authors, therefore, decided to “examine the cost-effectiveness of interventions designed to reduce phosphorus”; that is, weigh the costs against the benefits. Good idea!
But regrettably, the Gund’s authors accepted as their point of departure the necessity of Vermont’s 450 remaining conventional dairy farmers to farm conventionally — that is, with the methodology that pollutes the lake. They did not ask what the cost of converting them to organic would be, or what level of phosphorus reduction the state could expect from converting them to organic, or what benefit converting them to organic would have on the farmers’ and the state’s economy.
Incontrovertible facts
Inexplicably, the Gund report overlooked the incontrovertible fact that conventional Vermont dairy farmers cannot compete on cost with dairy farmers in Midwestern and Western states. They overlooked the incontrovertible fact that Vermont dairy farmers cannot stop polluting the lake while farming conventionally. They overlooked the incontrovertible fact that the importation of rail cars full of calcium and phosphorus-rich grain, herbicides and artificial fertilizer is integral to conventional farming and they overlooked the incontrovertible fact that the importation of such substances is the proximate cause of overproduction, low milk prices, ever-rising farm attrition and undiminished levels of water pollution, not just in Vermont but all across the nation.
The state and the dairy industry both deny these incontrovertible facts, preferring to see lake pollution not as systemic but as an incidental occurrence by a few rule breakers or sloppy farmers.
But the Gund report’s authors chose to ignore 60 years of data that would have supported an affirmative answer to the null hypothesis: Is conventional farming the proximate cause of lake pollution, low milk prices, farm attrition and rural economic decay? The Gund report’s authors chose not to ask this question. And denying that dairy is the leading cause of lake pollution is the rough equivalent of denying that Covid is the cause of the recent pandemic.
I wrote Mr. Scott a letter in January 2019 in which I explained how Vermont might reap an even larger benefit from converting all our conventional dairy farms to organic. At a cost of about $35 million a year for three years, the state could convert an industry losing $60 million a year from operations and costing the taxpayers another $35 million a year in lake cleanup costs into an industry that would cut its contribution to lake pollution by half and make about $78 million a year in profits.
Gov. Scott undoubtedly wants Vermont’s dairy farmers to survive and to prosper and to stop polluting the lake. But he did not answer my letter and, while he clearly understands the benefits to our economy of getting Covid under control, the governor has not yet imagined how many more people a clean lake and a clean atmosphere would entice to come live and work here.
It doesn’t seem like much of a leap really. Surely he knows the state spends $80 million a year on dozens of programs all intended on their faces to ‘“save agriculture and protect the lake.” Surely, he knows that these programs have been in effect for over a generation and surely he knows they haven’t had any effect. In fact, they were not projected to have any effect for 25 years. That’s right: Over the next 25 years the Vermont Legislature will spend $2 billion on dozens of programs hoping for benefits no one has ever projected, let alone quantified.
The UVM report authors have done somewhat better. They venture that the new Payment for Eco Services program, which, in exchange for lowering their phosphorus inputs, would pay dairy farmers a few thousand dollars annually to compensate them for a $3 to $4 loss per hundredweight for their 20 million hundredweights of milk, or $60 million a year. The new payment program, in other words, takes a baby step toward what the state wants (an unquantified level of phosphorus reduction) and offers the farmers a little more money for doing essentially the same as they are doing now.
Without a doubt, the payment plan will fail because, like the Clean Water Act, the program does not disrupt the conventional dairy protocols and the required agricultural practices do not restrain the things conventional dairy does that pollute the lake.
Nota bene: Dairy farming is not the problem. The problem is conventional dairy farming. The solution is staring Mr. Scott’s Task Force to Revitalize Vermont Dairy in the face: The farmers must change their modus operandi so they can stop losing money, stop polluting the lake and stop charging the taxpayers for programs designed not to accomplish these results but to just prop them up.
Here’s how it would work
Here’s how redirecting half the $70 million now allocated in Act 64 to convert the industry to organic would work. Any of the 360 of Vermont’s remaining conventional dairy farmers milking fewer than 200 cows — the practical limit for compliance with the pasture requirement of the National Organic Program — would be eligible to apply to the state for monthly payments equal to the difference between the prevailing conventional price and the prevailing organic price.
At a cost of approximately $105 million over three years, this program would cut lake pollution by half and put the farmers who join soonest on the path to profitability. Vermont would be well on its way to compliance with the Clean Water Act and the Global Warming Solutions Act and well on its way to a sustainable dairy industry.
And the 620,000 people of Vermont who are not dairy farmers or farmers’ dependents would be well on their way to accruing the economic benefits projected in the Gund report, not just to communities around Missisquoi Bay but everywhere in the state.
How many more people do you suppose are out there who would choose to live in a state with a squeaky-clean environment than there are who would choose to live in a state that permits — and for decades has permitted — industries to pollute the lake and the atmosphere, hoping for some yet-to-be-quantified and never-to-be-realized economic benefit? I would guess tens if not hundreds of thousands in the former against a few thousand in the latter. Call your representative and give him or her your guess.
