This commentary is by James H. Maroney Jr., a resident of Leicester.
There is a bill before the Legislature to strengthen the Right to Farm Law, the intent of which was to protect farmers from nuisance suits brought by neighbors who object to noise and/or pollution generated in the course of doing the farm’s vital work — that is, producing our food.
But Vermont agriculture does not produce “our food.” It produces barely 1% of the nation’s milk supply and a vanishingly small part of the nation’s supply of meat, vegetables, fruit and fiber.
The Right to Farm Law’s genesis is a mid-20th-century mindset that regarded farming as conservation. Ensconced in this mindset, the Legislature enacted dozens of laws designed to keep farmers on the land by exempting them from sales and property taxes, labor laws and liability from nuisance.
Sounds good! Except farmers applied the savings to pay for new capacity, sending more milk to markets already saturated and more poison into the already polluted lake and atmosphere. These laws have never been scrutinized, so they’re all still in effect.
The undeniable result is a severely polluted lake, an existentially polluted atmosphere and a dairy industry reduced from 11,200 farms in 1945 to only 650 today, an attrition of 94%. Clearly, allocating taxpayer dollars to programs designed only on their faces to “save farming and protect the lake” has failed to do either.
Yet, the Legislature is still captured by the fantasy. The roughly $35 million Act 64 allocated to reducing the 45% contribution to lake pollution from “agriculture” is spent on projects like planting trees, collecting old tires, cover cropping, restoring wetlands — all good ideas. But they have nothing to do with — in fact, they distract our attention away from — preventing conventional farmers from importing toxic, petroleum-based substances and applying them to their fields.
In January 2022, the Task Force to Revitalize Vermont Dairy issued its report. The report does not mention the Global Warming Solutions Act, intended to reduce in-state greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2025, 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. These targets are not only mandated, they are backed by the empowerment of ordinary citizens to sue the state if it fails to meet them.
The Legislature covertly acknowledges it has been trying unsuccessfully for 60 years to reduce lake pollution from conventional dairy; it surely knows that the 2015 TMDL tasked conventional dairy with reducing its contribution by a whopping 66%, and it presumably knows that in seven years, dairy has achieved but 11%. (Vermont spent $254 million 2015-21 to get a 38-ton reduction of phosphorus in Lake Champlain. Not nothing, but just 16% of its 200-ton target.)
The Governor’s Report on the Future of Vermont Agriculture (February 2022), which came out a couple of weeks ago, is replete with words such as robust, vibrant, strong, vital, dynamic, resilient, sustainable, high quality, innovative, profitable and my favorite: Vermont agriculture is making a shift to “climate smart” practices in order to achieve an “ever-more symbiotic relationship with the environment.”
The ostensible purpose of this report was to extol Vermont farming and to put forward a plan for its future. But this report is not a plan; it is part of a disinformation campaign. The Report on the Future of Vermont Agriculture calls dairy the “backbone of our rural economy,” but in what economic skeleton can an operating loss of $1 to $6 on every hundredweight of milk it produces be construed as its backbone? Why won’t the Legislature acknowledge the dismal results of its farm and lake pollution policies?
There is but one mention of pollution, disingenuously listed as one of many “long-term threats to the state’s natural and working lands” — that is, not something Vermont agriculture is contributing to but something Vermont agriculture is hard at work protecting us from.
There is but one mention of organic in a case study to illustrate how “logistical and infrastructure barriers have prevented farmers from expanding sales across the Northeast.”
Notably, there is no mention of the Global Warming Solutions Act, or of fossil fuels, or of conventional farming’s substantial dependence on products made from them. Most astonishing, this report is signed by not only the Secretary of Agriculture, but by the Secretary of Commerce and Community Development.
Why does the Legislature not ask the Secretary of Agriculture to explain why he thinks the taxpayers pay him and his staff to gaslight them?
