Vermont farming culture is vanishing
| ||
| | ||
 |
By Jesse Roman
“Congress bailed out the Wall Street banks because they were ‘too big to fail.’ If we don’t act now to support our dairy farmers, aren’t we saying they are ‘too small to matter’?”Vermont Rep. Peter Welch posed that question recently to news outlets around the state. His answer is clearly no, dairy farmers are not too small to matter. And you won’t find many people on Capitol Hill — or any other place, for that matter — who would disagree.
The dairy crisis is a human story of physical and financial sacrifice, of big corporations bullying the little guy, of the loss of an iconic and traditional way of life.
But when you remove those personal elements and look at it through a harsh capitalist lens, should we care that Vermont dairy farms are disappearing at a rate of one every five days?
Will the average Vermonter even notice if dairy farms continue to disappear? Have you?
Vermont produces only 1.5 percent of the national milk supply. Of that, only about 5 percent stays in Vermont.
Farms in California, Canada and the Midwest would be all too happy to fill the void, and consumers would barely notice a difference at the supermarket. The milk market is already oversaturated and experts agree production needs to be cut. Eliminating farms is the most effective way to do that.
Dairy economists see the writing on the wall and know most farms won’t survive this recession, which for months has pushed milk prices well below the cost of production. That trend is estimated to continue well into 2010, and that timetable will likely cripple most farms.
“It’s a personal preservation decision. Most farmers will probably decide they are better off getting out,” concedes Dr. Bob Parsons, a farm economist at the University of Vermont. “They have to preserve what equity they have in the farm, the animals, the equipment; they can’t continue to lose money.”
But what is Vermont losing?
Vermont’s landscape
When farmers talk about selling, people like Alex Wylie get nervous.
Wylie, a former dairy farmer, is the agricultural director at the Vermont Land Trust, whose goal it is to preserve the state’s working landscape.
The effort is a race against time. Since 1982, Vermont has lost about 400,000 acres of farmland, or 625 square miles. That is more than 7 percent of the state’s total land area, switched over from farming to something else.
“We are very concerned about what’s going on,” Wylie said. “I am hearing stories that are very dire. It’s sickening.”
What’s particularly troubling for the land trust, and for others who like open land, is that even as farms are folding at higher rates, the number of calls to the land trust office hasn’t increased.
“If you are conserving your property, you’re most likely going to continue farming or sell to another farmer,” Wylie said. “If the farming future doesn’t look so good, (farmers) hesitate to conserve.”
Selling an easement to the land trust means your hands are tied; the land can’t be developed. The move dramatically lowers the value of the land — helpful if you want to sell to a relative or another farmer — but also gives farmers a one-time financial boost in exchange for simply continuing to farm.
It’s a good deal if you have no intention of quitting anytime soon. However, when debts are piling up and the future is uncertain, why would you take any of your options off the table?
“For all that open land in Vermont, what is the alternative use if not used for dairy farming?” Parsons asks rhetorically. “Our seasons are not long enough to grow small grains or corn. We don’t have the season for high-yielding grains. … The answer is breaking it up for vacation homes. This area can only support so many organic veggie farms.”
Now, about 170,000 acres of Vermont farmland is conserved, according to Wylie, which is just less than 15 percent of the total farmland left in the state. That means 85 percent of it is still unprotected.
According to statewide surveys, “97 percent of Vermonters say they want to maintain a working landscape in this state, and farming is a major part of that,” says Roger Allbee, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Agriculture. “Without that working landscape, Vermont would be a much different place today.”
The loss of farmland to developers isn’t just an aesthetic problem; it could be an economic one, too.
“A big reason people come to Vermont is the rural character. That would change dramatically without working farms in the future,” Allbee said.
According to the Vermont Department of Tourism, about 80 percent of visitors to Vermont report participating in a “cultural/learning” activity. More than a third of those people visited a farm.
Of the 60,000 people who requested a vacation packet from the Department of Tourism last year, about 8 percent listed visiting a farm or trying specialty products (usually from farms) as one of the three activities they are most interested in doing during their trip.
“We have found that visiting farmers’ markets and farm touring have grown in popularity over the last 10 years,” says Greg Gerdel, chief of research at the Vermont Department of Tourism. “It’s impossible to quantify the impact of farms, but there’s no doubt they play a big part in how we see ourselves and are a big piece of our brand.”
According to the most recent industry data, about 14 million people visit the state each year, and spend more than $1.5 billion here. More than 55 percent of tourism revenue comes from summer and fall months. Visitor spending supports more than 37,000 jobs, about 12 percent of all jobs in the state.
Direct impact
While there are indirect economic consequences to the loss of dairy farms, grain dealers, tractor dealers, hardware store owners, veterinarians and others will tell you there are also people affected directly by the farmers’ plight.
“The optimism of the people who walk through our doors is tied to the milk price,” says Tom Wood, a former dairy farmer, now the sales manager at Riverside Tractor and Equipment in Berlin.
While the store has a diverse customer base, many of the non-farmers who visit the store do a lot of business with dairy farmers.
“A lot of the peripheral people who are tied to the dairy industry, I can tell by the way they’re spending money that they’ve been impacted — many have curtailed their spending,” Wood says. “As dairy goes, so does the local economy. The first thing dairy farmers do when they get money is spend it. They are always at the local hardware store or at the dealer getting parts. But now they are in survival mode, just buying essentials like food, electricity and diesel.”
“The real economic impact if dairy farms go out of business is if cows leave the state … you lose that part of the economy,” said Parsons, the UVM economist. “The farm equipment, the feed and the fuel supply sectors. If farms disappear (in great numbers), you may have to drive 100 miles to get a John Deere part. … Feed dealers operate on volume; once the volume is gone, they’re gone.”
In Vermont, the climate is not suited to grow the type of corn, soy oil and canola oil mixtures needed to supplement cows’ diets, so most farmers have to buy feed. On average, a farmer spends about $1,100 per cow per year on grain and supplements, Parsons said.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are about 140,000 cows in the state, making grain a $154 million-per-year industry in Vermont.
But now and in the foreseeable future, farmers just don’t have the money to buy things like grain — at least not as much of it.
“The cash is not there,” Parsons says. “They cannot afford to buy inputs, and you can only borrow so much. It’s a rolling snowball and nobody knows how to stop it.
According to the Vermont Department of Agriculture, revenues for the average farmer in this state will drop almost $108,000 from last year.
In Lamoille County alone, the total drop in income from last year to this on the county’s 42 farms is a staggering $4.5 million.
Statewide, 2009 farm revenue will be almost $113 million less than in 2008.
Those discrepancies are huge enough to have significant implications for the economy as a whole. The Department of Agriculture estimates that, when the book is closed on 2009, the state’s economy will have suffered to the tune of $225.5 million — all due to a sharp decline in milk prices and farm revenue.
“I spend about 80 hours of 120 per week working on this issue, and my time has only increased,” says Allbee, the agriculture commissioner. “This is an issue that keeps me up at night.”
A farming culture
Tom Wood says he has no regrets about trading in his dairy farm for a job selling Kubota tractors at Riverside Tractor and Equipment in East Berlin. He said he stopped farming about 10 years ago, and “I’m glad I did.”
“It doesn’t take Nostradamus to figure out you’ll walk away with better health and more retirement” if you give up farming, Wood says.
Still, it’s clear he’s more than a little sympathetic to the plight of the customers who walk into his store. And he, like many Vermonters, seems saddened by the passing of one of Vermont’s most iconic industries. It’s not just about the sad personal stories of financial turmoil, or the thought of disturbing the open landscapes; it’s about the culture that farming has shaped.
“When I was a kid, no matter where you lived, you could find a farmer within walking or biking distance and ask if he needs help haying or with other odd jobs on the side. There was always the opportunity to work if you wanted to work and get paid for it,” Wood said. “Now these teenage kids have nothing to do but sit around and play video games.”
When Wood ran his farm in Enosburg, he paid his kids and their friends $6 an hour, “gave them lunch, worked ’em hard and got the haying done.”
Now, he says — with the number of Vermont farms cut by more than half in the last 20 years — the only connection most kids have with the dairy industry is the lukewarm milk at the lunch counter.
“They are further away from the product and further away from the problem,” he says. “Now, if you walk around the street, you can’t find anyone who knows much about dairy farming. Twenty years ago, you could run into at least one person who has wrapped their arms around a 90-pound hay bale.”
No comments:
Post a Comment