James Maroney: Conventional farming precludes clean lake

James Maroney: Conventional farming precludes clean lake.
I am very glad I attended yesterday’s Extension meeting, in which you and your colleagues presented to Middlebury area farmers what the agency expects them to do in order to comply with the RAPs [required agricultural practices].
But you gave those in attendance the impression that the agency does not expect their actions to have any effect on the problem.
The adjustments to the prevailing business model you described yesterday might reduce the problem slightly, but they cannot possibly get anywhere near the 35 percent reduction target the TMDL indicates is required.
We don’t, in a word, need the milk: why must our farmers pollute the lake farming as if we did?
But seed, fertilizer and diesel fuel, labor, planting, harvesting, and storing corn costs money, and the value of the extra milk feeding it admittedly produces must exceed its cost.
And yet, as every Vermont dairy farmer knows all too well, the FMMO [Federal Milk Marketing Orders] markets are awash in surplus milk, which is why their paychecks are so low.
How does your suggestion to farmers that a few adjustments to their protocols will attain a clean lake and permit them to continue to push for maximum corn and milk yields, make any sense to anybody?
We don’t, in a word, need the milk: why must our farmers pollute the lake farming as if we did?
But the Legislature, which, in 1993, inexplicably gave responsibility for attaining its water quality standards to the Agency of Agriculture, has yet to acknowledge that Vermont cannot attain the goal while encouraging conventional farming.

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