This commentary is by Gaye Symington of Jericho, president of the High Meadows Fund, which is merging into the Vermont Community Foundation at the end of this year. Earlier, she was a state legislator for 12 years, including four years as speaker of the House.
For 16 years, the High Meadows Fund has supported farm and food systems as well as climate and community resilience. This work has led me to believe that addressing the way humans have treated the environment and addressing the way humans are treating each other are inseparable challenges.
Addressing environmental challenges requires respecting the interconnectedness of natural and human systems.
I recently listened to a 2020 interview with Emily Davis by the Grassroots Environment Fund. As the former water quality specialist at the Windham Regional Commission, Emily guided the Green River Watershed Alliance’s efforts to build appreciation of how activity in one area of the waterway affected other parts of town.
Emily began that work apprehensive about how the Guilford road crew might view her. But riding through the town in their trucks and listening to their stories about responding to storms and flooding made her rethink their role in caring for the watershed and people who live in it. She realized road crews are at the frontlines of climate change.
Emily cautioned, “We need to stop defining whose relationship with a place is more valid than the other’s. … Everybody has a valid and appropriate and really special relationship with their landscape and that should be celebrated. We need to release the paradigm of shame and blame about who’s doing what and who’s causing what and instead operate from a place of empathy and compassion. As issues come up, working from that place of honoring and supporting each other is going to be so much more effective … than if you start from a place of blame and correction.”
Her observations are echoed in Vermont Dairy Farmer Voices, a recent report summarizing interviews with dairy farmers and advocates who work with dairy farmers: “… Farmers described occasions in which policy leaders paid close attention to academically credentialed soil scientists and water quality experts but discounted or disregarded the lifelong empirical experience of working farmers and what they have learned through their use of a variety of strategies to increase soil fertility and reduce water quality degradation.”
Nonfarmers tend to blame current farming practices for blue-green algae blooms in Lake Champlain. But those events are typically less directly associated with current farming practices than with legacy-phosphorus washing into the lake or warming lake temperatures that exacerbate algae blooms, in part fed by legacy phosphorus in lake sediments.
The decades-ago farm practices that loaded the soil with phosphorus were encouraged by government agencies, universities and farm lenders, contributing to farmers’ skepticism when “experts” show up at their farms now. And the heavy storms and warming lake temperatures driven by climate change can be attributed to all of us, not just to farmers.
“Some farmers referred to their sense from the public that there is a ‘wrong’ way to farm and many outsiders and consumers are sure of that, though they would never farm themselves. Vermonters and visitors alike have a strong love and preference for ‘pretty, traditional, grazing’ dairy farms, a preference that leaves aside the myriad nuances that exist when history, current reality, the economy, and sound land stewardship are considered.”
In the interviews that back up the report, farmers talk of being attacked for being farmers irrespective of the individual practices on their farms. I might consider those stories over-stated were it not for a personal experience.
For a little over a decade, my husband raised cattle and sold 100% grass-fed beef. One day a passing car stopped, photographed his Agency of Natural Resources-permitted streambank protection along the Mill Brook, and sped off, spurning the backhoe driver’s effort to start a conversation.
Later the same day, a friend who was on a Lake Champlain citizens group emailed me photos, asking if I knew the farm in Jericho that was doing this work, as this situation had been added as an emergency item on their agenda that evening.
I assured her I did know the farm, I had seen the permits for the work on our kitchen table, and the photographer could have seen them too if he had bothered to stop to talk with the backhoe operator before jumping to conclusions.
The Dairy Farmer Voices report suggests we would have a better chance to achieve what both farmers and water quality advocates want — fewer algae blooms, healthier soil and more viable farms — if we could acknowledge our shared values, offer humility about the complexity of the challenges and experts’ past mistakes, devise tools for measuring farm-specific soil health, and center farmers’ knowledge and experience in discussions about farming.
This is, I think, what Emily is saying when she urges that we let go of shame, blame and the need to correct each other and instead operate from a place of empathy and compassion.
If we honor what we each bring to the work of building soil and vibrant farms, we might be more hesitant to jump to conclusions about what a “good farm” looks like, more respectful of the stresses farmers balance, and more attentive to the complexity of building healthy soil while also growing food.
