Tunbridge
Corey Chapman and his wife, Ann, are digging a new manure pit to improve drainage in the barnyard and expand manure storage for the farm, which they purchased last September.
A Tunbridge friend, Matt Loftus, is digging the hole and Corey Chapman plans to pour the concrete himself. His young sons enjoy playing in the soil, as do his friends and neighbors, many of whom have offered a helping hand.
“It’s like a great big sandbox out there,” Corey Chapman said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Dairy cows producing organic milk are required to spend time outside every day regardless of the weather, and last winter — the Chapmans’ first on their own farm — Corey Chapman noticed his Holsteins were developing foot problems from walking in the muddy barnyard.
The pit, which Chapman expects will be completed in 90 days, will hold manure from the barnyard and barn, as well as milkhouse waste, preventing feces from the farm’s 50 cows from leaching into the nearby First Branch of the White River.
By modernizing the 204-acre farm’s infrastructure in this way, Chapman hopes it will be viable decades into the future. The Chapman family includes five children between the ages of 13 months and 13 years old.
“We’re struggling now so that maybe later on they don’t have to,” said Corey Chapman, who also farms 200 more acres in Tunbridge not owned by his family.
The Chapmans’ project comes as the Vermont Agency of Agriculture is finalizing new requirements regarding soil practices to prevent erosion and the management of manure and other fertilizers, all in an effort to improve water quality around the state.
The so-called “required agricultural practices rule” — expected to take effect in the late fall or early winter — stems from Act 64, which Gov. Peter Shumlin signed into law in 2015. Vermont lawmakers were forced to act when the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew its approval of the state’s water cleanup plan for Lake Champlain as the result of a 2008 Conservation Law Foundation lawsuit. The suit alleged that a 2002 plan to reduce the levels of phosphorous in Lake Champlain was insufficient, and the court agreed.
The agency’s required agricultural practices are intended to guide farmers in making management choices to prevent agricultural runoff from entering waterways. State officials say 40 percent of the phosphorus load in the lake is from agricultural sources.
Nitrogen and phosphorus found in manure and other fertilizers that make their way into the region’s lakes and rivers can cause problems. High levels of phosphorus contribute to algal blooms in Lake Champlain, and too much nitrogen traveling down the Connecticut River to Long Island Sound can drive down oxygen levels below those necessary to sustain most animal life.
Some farmers — including Chapman — have taken nutrient management planning courses and made infrastructure investments in advance of the rule coming into effect.
“A lot of my fields touch the river,” said Chapman. “(We’re) trying to do all we can do.”
Though many agree that clean water ought to be a priority, some farmers say they feel the new requirements are a top-down solution, and they question whether the rule will make a difference in water quality.
Dairy and vegetable farmer David Bone brought a jar of water from a stream near his Ryegate farm to a hearing on the Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s draft rule at Vermont Law School in South Royalton last month.
To preface his comments, Bone took a sip from the jar.
“We’ve been farming on the property for 115 years now and I can do that, drink my water,” Bone said. “So I don’t appreciate when the state starts making me feel like a criminal and they start telling me I have to do this and I have to do that.”
Bone described the agency’s new rule as “a bill of attainder.”
“If you want to come after me for something I’m doing illegally … come at me, but use the due process of law,” Bone said. “We’re not the problem, small farmers, we are the solution.”
Some farmers said the timing of the most recent comment period, which ended on July 7, made it particularly difficult for farmers — in the midst of their busy season — to participate.
“The timing is pretty bad,” said Bethel farmer Lisa McCrory. “It would be a lot better if we had extended this process into the fall and winter. There would be a lot more interaction where you could get a rule put in place that could actually be functional, whereas this one has — at this point — a lot of flaws.”
The schedule of the hearings on the draft rule — which were held between June 21 and 29 — was set by the Legislature through Act 64 and the Administrative Rule Procedures Act, Ryan Patch, a senior ag development coordinator with the Agency of Agriculture, said in a telephone interview. This past session, the Legislature extended the time originally given to the agency to make the rule from July 1 to Sept. 15, he said.
Under the rule as proposed, state officials anticipate 1,500 small farms will be required to go through a certification process, prepare formal nutrient management plans, attend education workshops and be subject to state regulation, Patch said. By including these additional farms, 94 percent of the state’s dairy cows, 76 percent of all livestock and 93 percent of all corn grown for silage would fall under the state’s purview, Patch said.
In general, Chapman, the Tunbridge dairy farmer, said he’s glad the rule will broaden the state’s oversight beyond dairy farms. If it winds up in the river or lake, he said, it “doesn’t matter what kind of poop it is.”
McCrory, who raises organic chickens, turkeys, pigs, dairy cows, flowers and vegetables on Earthwise Farm and Forest with her husband, Carl Russell, said the rule seems to lose sight of what she sees as the ultimate goal: healthy soils.
She walked around her farm one morning earlier this month and watched eight pigs dig in the soil of a forested area she is working to convert to pasture.
“Those little snouts do an amazing job,” she said.
While pigs can be raised indoors, in that case McCrory would have to manage their manure. In this case, they fertilize the field as they dig and feed.
McCrory said she loves record-keeping because it allows her to measure improvements in land productivity over time based on management practices. But, she said, there is no data to support the additional paperwork the new rule would require of many small farmers.
“I wish that (the rule) was done better so that it was something we could all buy into,” she said.
McCrory was one of several members of the board and staff of the advocacy organization Rural Vermont who spoke up during the South Royalton hearing.
As a group, Rural Vermont members said the rule should go further to encourage land use practices that would rebuild soil, rather than simply discourage practices known to increase erosion and runoff.
Former Rural Vermont board member Lindsay Harris, who worked for the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation’s Water Quality Division, now the Watershed Management Division, before becoming a dairy farmer 10 years ago, also said she feels the new rule could go further.
“We need to be climbing Mount Everest and we’re climbing Mount Philo,” Harris said in an interview at her Tunbridge farm earlier this month. “(We) can’t even swim in the lake anymore.”
As she spoke at Mountain Home Farm on Bicknell Hill Road, Harris transferred buttermilk produced by eight Guernsey milkers from a stainless steel pail to plastic bottles for distribution to stores in the Burlington area.
To be compliant with USDA regulations while bottling buttermilk on such a small scale, Harris uses a simple pump connected to a plastic tube leading from pail to bottle in her milk room.
As she operated the pump by pressing a foot pedal, filling each bottle, topping it with a plastic cap and then moving on to the next, she reflected on the Agency of Agriculture’s new water quality rule.
Harris and her partner, Evan Reiss, purchased their 191-acre farm in 2013. When searching for a farm in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, Harris said, they intentionally sought property away from floodplains to avoid associated water quality issues.
Harris’ 22-head herd is grass-fed. Half of the farm’s 60 tillable acres are pasture and the other half are hayfields, she said. The cows rotate to a different field every 12 hours, a technique which she referred to as “a really powerful management tool.”
Under the proposed rule, Earthwise Farm, Mountain Home Farm and other farms of their size — using between four and 10 acres of land for farming, with fewer than 50 dairy cows and fewer than 50 acres cultivated in vegetable or field crops each year — would not be required to go through a certification process.
Harris criticized the rule for being “one size fits all.” Rather then set the guidelines based on the number of acres cultivated and the number of animals on a farm, “I’d rather see rules based on practices,” Harris said.
She said she would like to see the state move toward encouraging regenerative practices that clean water, sequester carbon, protect pollinators and build soil.
Instead, she said, the rule simply expands on existing requirements for large and medium farms and would ask farmers who are currently out of compliance to make investments of time and money in expanded manure pits, new fencing and formal nutrient management plans.
Harris said it’s unclear whether the current standards have reduced farms’ impact on the state’s waterways. She questioned whether broadening the same approach would be successful.
Through existing permitting programs, the state has worked with 150 medium and large farms, Patch, the agency official, said. In doing so, the state has made sure that infrastructure, including fences and manure pits, on those farms are up to state standards.
State officials aim to improve monitoring of the impact of the regulations in the future so they will know whether what they require of farmers makes a difference to water quality, Patch said. The agency will have additional people to assist in this work paid for by the state’s Clean Water Fund, created as part of Act 64, he said.
The agency is set to respond to all comments received during the comment period — including the suggestion that more be done to incentivize regenerative farming practices — by Sept. 15, Patch said.
During the South Royalton hearing, farmers lauded the agency’s efforts to include some elements of flexibility in the rule to accommodate differences among farms and conditions, but questioned how that flexibility would be applied.
Some sections of the new rule, which will require more farms across the state to plant cover crops by early fall to avoid runoff, gives the agriculture agency the ability to approve management strategies not specifically outlined in the rule.
For example, the new rule indicates decisions about exemptions — from when fields should be planted in cover crops to when manure spreading can occur — will be up to the secretary of agriculture. In the absence of an exemption, fields would be required to be planted in cover crops by Oct. 15 and manure spreading is not allowed between Dec. 15 and April 1. Generally, manure spreading is not allowed on saturated or snow-covered fields.
East Montpelier dairy farmer Richard Hall, of Fairmont Farm, said he hoped exemptions would be made on a consistent and efficient basis.
With property in both East Montpelier and Craftsbury, Vt., Hall’s farm includes 1,400 milkers and 3,600 tillable acres. On that scale, Fairmont Farms is already subject to state oversight.
He said his farm has worked with the agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service to put in place soil conservation practices such as cover cropping and no-till cultivation methods — to grow crops while minimizing soil disturbance.
One year, Hall asked state regulators for an exemption to spread manure in November while there was snow on the ground. State officials never came out to look at the East Montpelier fields, but said it would be OK to spread in Craftsbury without an inspection, he said.
Patch said he could not comment on specific cases, but he did note that medium-sized farms are treated differently than large farms. Regulators could not grant exemptions for manure spreading on snow-covered ground on large farms — such as Hall’s East Montpelier farm — but they could grant exemptions for medium farms — such as Hall’s Craftsbury site. “The agency looks to enforce the rules universally across the state,” Patch said.
As a result of what seemed to him to be arbitrary enforcement, Hall said, he is concerned about how the agency will manage the new rule.
“I question whether the ag agency has the ability to be our advocate and also regulate us,” he said.
There are separate divisions in the agency devoted to marketing and agricultural resource management, said Patch. In addition, the overall goal of those working on the enforcement side is to bring everyone into compliance with the rule to improve farm efficiency, productivity and profitability, he said.
Some farmers seem resigned to the change.
Though Barnard dairy farmer Paul Doton acknowledged that the economic impact of the new rule on already-strapped small-scale dairy farmers is unknown, he said. “They are what they are.”
Doton has helped bring the region’s farmers together to form the Connecticut River Watershed Farmers’ Alliance, so that the eastern side of the state will be represented in water quality discussions and have access to money that may be available for associated on-farm improvements.
He noted that it took decades for phosphorous to become a problem in Lake Champlain, so it would be unreasonable to expect a quick fix.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at 603-727-3213 or ndoyleburr@vnews.com.
