Editor’s note: This commentary is by James H. Maroney Jr., who has a master’s degree in Environmental Law & Policy from Vermont Law School and is a former farmer.
Addison Independent articles about lake pollution and agriculture deluge readers of late and it would not be surprising if they were confused. Emerson Lynn’s Community Forum (July 28, 2014) correctly states that over half of lake pollution is attributable to agricultural runoff, but he writes “Don’t Just Blame Farmers;” the “real culprit” is political; i.e., pollution is not my doing, it’s somebody else’s. He proposes, as does the story on the front page “Farmers Say New Regulations Not Needed,” that existing regulations, if enforced, if funded and if given many, many years to take effect, would stanch the problem.
I agree the fault is not the farmers’ but surely it is not political or public commitment: the Vermont Legislature has allocated, through Current Use and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, $60 million to $80 million per year for the last 40 years to “save agriculture and protect the lake,” not to mention, since that is failing, another $140 million over the last 10 years to “Clean and Clear,” which also failed. Lynn says, and the farmers agree, that what we need is not more regulations but better enforcement, which will require more political commitment and more tax money. And that is where public confusion comes in; we obviously haven’t found the true cause, it’s getting very expensive and the EPA wants a real solution this fall.
I am determined to keep this short but we need to go back to before World War II, when Vermont had 11,200 dairy farmers, all farming organically. After the war, farmers were encouraged to apply cheap, toxic chemicals instead of hiring expensive labor for mechanical weed control and crop rotation for soil fertility. The new technology worked: it doubled yields and halved costs. Things were going great in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. But soon everybody was using the new technology and the individual’s advantage disappeared. Production surpassed demand, driving prices down and hundreds of farms out of business. Worse, the residues from those chemicals, which we were told would be applied in minute concentrations and dissipate harmlessly, were showing up in the lake. The state became concerned about farm attrition and the lake but much more about development encroaching on farmland. So it enacted a spate of laws and rules to “help” farmers by relieving them of property taxes and exempting them from environmental laws. The result is more production, lower prices, more farm attrition and more lake pollution.
But there were once 10 times more Vermont dairy farmers who housed twice as many cows and lake pollution was not a major problem. What else could it be? Conventional farming with state support for it!
Whom shall we blame for this? Surely not the farmers; the introduction of modern farming after World War II made New England agriculture broadly unnecessary and for those who continued to try anyway, punishingly uncompetitive. We can’t really blame consumers, who buy the cheapest milk in the case irrespective of whence it comes or how it is produced. We can’t blame the Legislature, which allocated to conventional agriculture (and to clean up the lake after it) perhaps $2 billion — $50 million a year for 40 years — of the taxpayers’ money for which it got more milk, more farm attrition and more lake pollution. So the “real culprit” must be the regulations: the Memorandum of Understanding (1993) with transferred responsibility for water quality from the Agency of Natural Resources to the Agency of Agriculture; the state’s Land Use Regulations (1967), which exempted farming in order to save it; the Accepted Agricultural Practices (AAP) rules (1995), which were not written, as they appeared to intend on their face, to reduce pollution attributable to agriculture but to shield the conventional dairy industry in order to save it from the kind of environmental regulation that would have reduced pollution. It is, in other words, not the regulations per se; it is their agenda.
Suppose for a moment you were the Secretary of Agriculture and you had these two growing problems, farm attrition and lake pollution, and you had to solve them both. But because taxpayer money allocated in support of farms increases lake pollution and because taxpayer money allocated to meet water quality standards would interfere with conventional agriculture, both problems increase. You have a Hobson’s Choice; conventional agriculture and lake pollution are one and the same and you would rather defend the status quo than have the legislators or the taxpayers discover this.
Consequently, Lynn believes, as do many people, that manure is the problem. But there were once 10 times more Vermont dairy farmers who housed twice as many cows and lake pollution was not a major problem. What else could it be? Conventional farming with state support for it! Consider: the AAPs, which have been in effect for 20 years, permit the importation of 80 million pounds of artificial NPK fertilizer, the lion’s share of which is applied to cornfields along our rivers and streams; they permit these cornfields to stand bare nine months of the year, making them susceptible to erosion not to mention a carbon generator; they permit the housing of thousands of cows under one roof, which concentrates their manure in one place making it prohibitively expensive to properly distribute; they permit the importation of thousands of tons of high protein feed supplements, which are rich in phosphorus. Vermont’s Land Use Regulations and Act 250 both exempt farming; they defer to the AAPs, which permit use of the very same substances the state taxes its citizens to clean out of the lake. The state is actually allocating $60 million to $80 million year to “save farming and protect the lake” while it is supporting the very force driving farms out of business and polluting the lake.
I understand why Vermont dairy farmers farm conventionally: they are desperately trying to survive. And Vermont desperately needs its dairy farmers. But were the state with that $60-80 million to support them in transition away from conventional agriculture, we would all win, the beleaguered taxpayers, the long-suffering farmers and the unhappily polluted lake. Yet, Commissioner of Environmental Conservation David Mears and Secretary of Agriculture Chuck Ross persist in trying to preserve the status quo. They have just submitted to EPA another plan, also intended on its face to “reduce pollution from agriculture in Lake Champlain.” The plan cannot achieve that goal; it relies for its attainment of water quality on the AAPs, which are in place to provide safe harbor to conventional farming, the problem’s proximate cause. Lynn says Secretary Ross is trying to decide what to do; he might think about the state’s blind and increasingly expensive support not for farmers but for the paradigm that has ruined 93 percent of them, that, by design, externalizes its wastes into the lake and that by his agency’s historical complicity has squandered billions of taxpayer dollars on two problems that get worse daily.
