This commentary is by James Maroney, a retired organic dairy farmer who holds master’s degrees in business administration and in environmental law and policy. He and his wife, Suki Fredericks, live on Oliver Hill Farm in Leicester, the third certified organic dairy in Vermont.
As everyone knows, movie scenes are not shot in sequence, which requires the editors to include someone whose responsibility it is to assure that events appear in their proper sequence in the final product, a job known as continuity.
Continuity seems like such a good idea, but continuity or self-imposed consistency does not seem to be a necessary feature of laws that emanate from representative government. The state can — and often does — pass laws that produce results in contradiction to laws already in effect. This is not really hypocrisy, as when opposing ideas emanate from a single body; representative government is not a single body.
I mention this because Vermont, a state that wishes to project an image of itself as green, levied a $21,000 fine against a dairy farm that houses 1,400 cows and plants 2,400 acres of corn right on the shores of Lake Champlain. The state regulates such farms and codified rules as the Required Agricultural Practices. Citing the RAPs, the Agency of Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Conservation found the Vorsteveld Farm allowed “runoff” from the farm to muddy the state’s pristine waters.
But the Required Agricultural Practices permit the Vorstevelds and others to farm conventionally — that is, with unregulated application of chemical inputs, and on this scale. Consequently, the state’s waters are not pristine and, in fact, the state knows — and has known for 50 years — that the leading cause of lake pollution is conventional dairy.
The state not only abides this contradiction, but it abides the Agency of Agriculture to engage in a disinformation campaign to assert that the state regulates farms to protect its water. It would seem that living within a self-contrived contradiction is an unavoidable feature of representative government and, perhaps, even of being human.
The Vermont Legislature has an overwhelming Democratic majority, which apparently does not prevent the passage of laws that conflict with laws Democrats have already put into effect. Consider, for example, the language in the Global Warming Solutions Act (2020), which Democrats recently passed over the governor’s veto:
“According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the climate crisis is both caused and exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions that result from human activity. The IPCC has determined that industrialized countries must cut their emissions to net zero by 2050. … A climate emergency threatens our communities, state and region and poses a significant threat to human health and safety, infrastructure, biodiversity, our common environment, and our economy. The state of Vermont (has) committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions …The state of Vermont will help accelerate solutions that address the climate crisis. By implementing climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience strategies, Vermont will also position its economy to benefit and thrive from the global transition to carbon neutrality and national and international efforts to address the crisis.”
The act, among other notable things, calls for the state to “prioritize the most cost-effective, technologically feasible, and equitable (greenhouse gas) emissions, reduction pathways, adaptation and preparedness; support industries, technology, and training that will allow workers and businesses in the state to benefit from (greenhouse gas) reduction solutions; support the use of natural solutions (inc. working lands) to reduce GHG, sequester carbon and increase resilience.”
Could anything be clearer? According to the Global Warming Solutions Act, conventional dairy is responsible for 16% of Vermont greenhouse gas emissions, and that does not include the diesel fuel or petroleum-based products the industry is dependent upon, which number was concatenated into the state’s total transportation fuel use. So, conventional farming and the Global Warming Solutions Act are contra-indicated. They cannot both exist at once.
Yet, when it came time on Dec. 1 for the climate council to submit preliminary recommendations, the council had not thought of anything farmers could or were willing to do to meet the goals of the Global Warming Solutions Act. Virtually nothing.
How did the Democrats, who wrote the law, fail to appoint similarly minded people to the climate council, whose job was to implement it?
Here is the short answer: Representative government is capable of saying one thing and doing another. Here is an inescapable fact: converting the conventional Vermont dairy industry to organic is the only pathway for Vermont to meet all these goals. But the council did not entertain the idea or even suggest that our diary industry move toward organic farming. Discontinuity!
Meantime, in a seemingly unrelated action, the Governor’s Task Force for Revitalizing Vermont Dairy held its final of 15 meetings at which its recommendations were read. There is, the task force implicitly admitted, a set of unfavorable circumstances that vex the dairy industry, which is what occasioned the governor to convene this task force.
There was scant if any mention over six months of deliberations of meeting greenhouse gas emission targets attributable to Vermont conventional dairy. Never mind that little man behind the curtain: The Dairy Task Force’s recommendations boiled down to a commitment to the status quo. And since the members were not inclined to upset the status quo, and, like the climate council, gave nary a thought to organic farming as an alternative, they recommended that we all ignore that conventional farming is empirically frustrating Vermont’s environmental laws and simply carry on as if none of that mattered.
Vermont is in other words not only comfortable within its self-contrived contradictions, it is comfortable even up to the present ginning up narratives to protect the conventional dairy industry.
The contradiction I speak of is on glaring display in Aerie Point Holdings LLC vs. Vorsteveld Farm LLP. The state, which in this case sympathizes with the defendants, previously fined the Vorstevelds for incidental infractions even though the Vorstevelds are virtually farming in compliance with the Required Agricultural Practices; if there is pollution coming off the farm. it is because the RAPS were not written to protect the lake but to shield conventional dairy farmers from the kinds of regulations that would.
The problem is not, in other words, attributable to a little “runoff” here or a little “brown puddle” there. It is attributable to, in this order:
- The state permits conventional farmers to import 600,000 tons of calcium- and phosphorus-rich conventionally raised grain to feed their cows without concern for where those nutrients not taken up by crops and ingested by cows finally go.
- The state permits conventional farmers to import 40,000 tons of artificial petroleum-based fertilizer and God knows how many tons of phosphorus-rich petroleum-based herbicides to grow corn on 90,000 acres of Vermont land, mostly along our rivers and streams, to produce a product that is already in surplus and therefore of no value.
- The state permits conventional dairy farmers to house more than one cow for every 3 acres under management, on which that cow’s feed is harvested and her manure is spread.
Not one of these practices is mentioned, let alone regulated, in the Required Agricultural Practices or in Act 64, Vermont’s so-called “Clean Water Law.” The problem is, plainly put, that the state permits conventional dairy farmers to deploy a methodology that pollutes by design, not incidentally — that is, one incident at a time — but systemically, all conventional farms all the time.
The problem is that the state enacts regulations intended on their faces to control lake pollution attributable to agriculture while ignoring empirical evidence collected over 50 years that clearly indicates they do not.
This is a brazen lapse in the continuity of our laws that exploits farmers, pollutes the commons, cheats taxpayers and imprudently degrades one of the most valuable things Vermont has: its brand.
