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.
At 236 pages, the Draft Phase One Plan: Lake Champlain Total Daily Maximum Load (DPOP) is a monster. I am loath to read it in its entirety, first because the great bulk is a repetition of what we all have previously seen, and second, because this statement in David Mears’ cover letter captures my attention: “Agriculture is the largest source of phosphorus loading into Lake Champlain, estimated to be approximately forty percent of the total load. Reducing polluted runoff from farms is by far the most cost effective investment we can make in reducing phosphorus.” [Emphasis added.]
Having named the problem so plainly, Mears then reasserts the state’s inexplicable priorities: “The [Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC)] and AAFM [Agency of Agriculture, Farms and Markets] met numerous times with the farm community and other interested persons to develop a set of practical recommendations for reducing phosphorus into the lake.” [Emphasis added.]
Inexplicable because the word “practical” means the state leaves the conventional dairy protocol not just undisturbed but unchallenged. The authors of the DPOP will not, in other words, make changes to the paradigm the commissioner and the secretary have just identified as the proximate cause of the problem. They will reassert the Accepted Agricultural Practices rules (AAPs).
According to the DPOP, the AAPs were “designed to reduce non-point pollutant discharges through implementation of improved farming techniques rather than investments in structures and equipment, however … state law requires that these practices must be practical as well as cost effective for farmers to implement.” [Emphasis added.]
The DPOP asserts: “AAFM and DEC worked with the agricultural community in 2012 conducting meetings, focus groups, and discussions to recruit feedback on agricultural water quality improvement. Over 100 recommendations were submitted.” But the majority of these recommendations took as their starting point the inviolability of conventional agriculture. The conventional dairy farmer’s objective is not to remediate lake pollution: it is to produce as much milk as possible. To achieve this, dairy farmers work 24/7/365 and deploy all the technology available. That technology was designed without regard to its effect upon extrinsic systems, like water quality.
The state has policies in place to help dairy farmers achieve their goal. The state, suddenly mindful that it must meet its water quality standards — and obsessed with keeping the land open so Vermont will not “look like New Jersey” — now asks the farmers to mitigate the use of the technologies it has, with $60 million to $80 million a year in subsidies, been encouraging them for 50 years to use. But it will not be done; doing so removes the economic basis for farming conventionally. And the Legislature prevents the farmers having to do so.
Governor Shumlin was exactly right when he said Vermont “has spent a whole lot of loot on the lake and got nothing in return.” He was also right that “the solution is not to throw more of the taxpayers’ money at the problem” and right again that “it is time to come up with a plan that will deliver tangible results.” But he proffered no suggestion of what that plan might be.
Here is the farmers’ position. Conventional farmers and the Vermont Farm Bureau, which are joined by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, make the argument that Vermont farmers need artificial fertilizers, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, growth hormones, 1,000-2,000-head cow herds, high phosphorus concentrate feed, liquid manure and GMO seeds because the world’s population will soon top nine billion, and farmers must deploy every available technology to “feed the world.”
This is poppycock. Vermont’s farmers, who make barely 1 percent of the nation’s supply of raw milk and no material part of the nation’s meat, grain, fruit or vegetables, have no responsibility — nor any capacity — for “feeding the world.” Vermont is an island, surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by a vast agricultural desert. Vermonters spend 95 percent of their grocery money on imported food. Truth be told, Vermont farms for appearances; so if we are going to farm — and I strenuously advocate that we do — why must we pollute the lake and the atmosphere and decimate the local economy to do it?
Commissioner Mears and Ag Secretary Chuck Ross acknowledge “Agriculture is the largest source of phosphorus load into Lake Champlain” and they submit a plan to fix the problem by reasserting the AAPs. Here are the exquisite reasons why the DPOP cannot work:
1. The AAPs have been in effect for 19 years and if they had been “designed to reduce non-point pollutant discharges” they would surely have worked by now.
2. The conventional farm modality was designed to lower costs and boost production by externalizing its wastes into the lake. This is not an accidental side effect of the protocol to be managed; it is the protocol’s fundamental, economic precept.
3. The AAPs permit the importation of high phosphorus feed supplements and artificial NPK fertilizer, 80 million pounds per year of which farmers (golf course managers, gardeners, etc.) apply to Vermont land, most of it along our rivers and streams.
4. Ipso facto, the AAPs were designed to protect the dairy industry from regulation;
5. Effective measures are not admissible because they are not “practical.”
Agriculture is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gases in the U.S. (18-25 percent) before transportation and after only heat generation. The major contributor of GHGs from agriculture is the extraction from deep in the earth of carbon, in the form of petroleum, and its release into the atmosphere as CO2 during combustion in farm tractors and from fertilizer plants; it is the formation and release of nitrous oxide (N2O), which accounts for 84 percent of global N2O emissions. N2O — a far more stable and 300 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 — is a consequence first, of the application of synthetic, petroleum-based NPK fertilizer to agricultural fields and second, to the gas escaping off cropland conventionally left bare nine months of the year.
If, as the DPOP says, conventional farming is the proximate cause of lake pollution, DEC and AAFM need to change conventional farming. And since farm attrition and lake pollution have not subsided one bit since the state has been subsidizing conventional agriculture with one hand while trying to protect the lake with the other, DEC and AAFM need to dramatically change conventional farming.
I scanned the DPOP looking for words or phrases that would indicate DEC and AAFM are aware of this contradiction: sustainable (14 appearances), organic (10), carbon (10), petroleum (8), nitrogen (7), toxin (5), herbicide (2). The authors used not one of these terms — none — to describe a conventional farming practice that should be stopped or, in the case of sustainable, adopted. The following terms did not appear even once: legume, weed cultivation, stocking rates, pharmaceuticals, protein concentrate and global warming.
Taxpayers might well ask why, over the past 14 years, the Legislature has appropriated $140 million of their money to clean up the lake while permitting the importation and use of the very substances/practices that are polluting the lake; why, in 1967, the Legislature exempted agriculture — by far the state’s largest land use and notoriously its largest polluter — from land use regulation; and why, in 1993, the Legislature shifted responsibility for Vermont water quality away from the ANR and gave it to AAFM; why AAFM proposes to increase inspections to ensure farms are following the AAPs when farming according to the AAPs is the root of the problem, to wit: over the time these policies have been in effect, lake pollution attributable to agriculture has steadily increased and Vermont dairy farms have dwindled from 4,729 to 900, a loss of 80 percent.
Governor Shumlin was exactly right when he said Vermont “has spent a whole lot of loot on the lake and got nothing in return.” He was also right that “the solution is not to throw more of the taxpayers’ money at the problem” and right again that “it is time to come up with a plan that will deliver tangible results.” But he proffered no suggestion of what that plan might be. The DEC and AAFM are asking for money; the Legislature is proposing to raise taxes to “throw more money” at the problem.
Is there, by any chance, a more environmentally sound way to farm that will actually reduce pollution from agriculture entering the lake, that does not require taxpayer support and that gives farmers an incentive to keep the land open? There is, and here is my prescription:
1. Revoke the MOU that gave responsibility for water quality to VAAFM and give it back to ANR.
2. Repeal the broad exemptions provided to agriculture in Vermont’s land use regulations and in Act 250.
3. Bring the AAPs up for judicial review.
4. Make all Vermont agricultural subsidies (Current Use, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, Vermont Land Trust, sales and income tax exemptions and abatements) contingent upon being, or in the process of converting to, certified organic, which imposes production control, favors forage over grain-based rations, does not permit artificial hormones, fertilizers or pharmaceuticals, does not permit GMOs and can withstand a First Amendment challenge because — thanks to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy — the National Organic Program is already codified in federal law.
