Today, both a sequel and a soothing.

The sequel is to yesterday’s post about Vermont agriculture, and the report suggesting that the farm of the future might be the small vegetable farm or value-added dairy, often selling directly to customers, or letting those customers come pick their own legumes and salad greens.

Not mentioned in yesterday’s post was that many of these farms are organic. They use no chemical fertilizer, no artificial pesticides or herbicides. By no means are all the small, innovative, farms organic. But many are. According to the “Vermont in Transition” report  by the Center for Social Science Research at St. Michael’s College there were 283 organic farms in Vermont in 2007.

Maybe more than that now. The trend has been for more growth in organic vegetable farms, small dairies (often making their own cheeses), and livestock operations. In recent years, more customers have been demanding – or at least preferring – organic foods, finding them both healthier and more flavorful. If organic is not the wave of Vermont’s agricultural future, it is certainly one of them.

And now, a specter is haunting the organic food world, an evil conspiracy conceived in corporate boardrooms and about to be snuck through Congress “in a week and a half…before people realize what is happening” as a bill that would “outlaw organic farming.”

At the behest, it seems, of the Monsanto Company, the large-scale manufacturer of herbicides and animal growth hormone. Proof of the connection? The husband of the chief House sponsor of the bill “works for Monsanto.”

In the words of one commentator, the Bill, H.R. 875 “is called the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, but a more accurate name is THE END OF MOM AND POP FARMING IN AMERICA 2009 aka DEATH TO ORGANIC FARMING.”

The death, even, of small family gardens if their owners sell a few tomatoes or a radish to the neighbors.

Such is the word that has gone forth over thousands if not hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of emails to people all over Vermont, all over the Northeast, and beyond. The word has been received by thousands of Vermonters and others who care about organic food, who want to support their local growers, and who are wary of  ”industrialized agriculture.” It has prompted them to act, to follow the email’s plea to “(g)et on that phone and burn up the wires. Get anyone else you can to do the same thing. The House and Senate WILL pass this if they are not massively threatened with loss of their position…. They only fear your voice and your vote.”

It’s all nonsense.

OK, there’s a germ of accuracy here. There is a bill, H.R.875. It is called the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. Its chief sponsor is Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat. She is married to Stanley Greenberg, the prominent Democratic pollster.

But Greenberg does not “work for” Monsanto, in the common sense of that term, meaning “employed by.” His polling firm,  Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, has done polling for Monsanto as well as scores of other major corporations and organizations including the Chicago Cubs and the National Basketball Association. Adrianna Surfas, DeLauro’s spokesperson, said Greenberg last polled for Monsanto in 1999.

A check of campaign finance records at Open Secrets.org indicates that Monsanto’s political action committee did not contribute to DeLaruo’s re-election campaign last year.

As to the legislation, it is not going to be passed by both houses in a week and a half. It is not likely to pass either house at all, or to emerge in anything like its present form from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

And if it were to pass in a week and a half or tomorrow morning and by the end of the year it would not outlaw organic farming, backyard gardening, or much of anything else, except perhaps unclean and unsafe food.

Which is a real problem, according to many officials and observers, starting with President Barack Obama. Just last month, hundreds of people were sickened by eating contaminated peanuts.

“The organic food program is under the (Agriculture Department),” Surfas said. “The food safety system as a whole comes under the (Food and Drug Administration ). This bill is focused on reforming FDA. This legislation has nothing to do with anything under USDA  jurisdiction.”

Surfas of course works for DeLauro. Steve Etka and Bill Deusing do not. Etka is the legislative director for the National Organic Coalition and Duesing is the Interstate council president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Both of them say DeLauro is a supporter of organic farming and her bill is not a problem.

“It’s a gross exaggeration,” Etka said of the on-line attacks on the bill. “It’s amazing how some of the myths about food safety can be blown out of proportion. It’s easy not to read the whole bill and just see little snippets.”

The furor started, Duesing said, when “apparently one woman down in Atlanta got everyone excited in the wrong way.”

The woman, Linn Cohen-Cole, who describers herself as an independent agriculture consultant, is also a columnist for an on-line outfit called Op-Ed News. It was apparently her column, dated March 9, that sparked the internet campaign against the legislation.

Both Deusing and Etka said some aspects of DeLauro’s legislation worried them.

“Our big concern is always anything that drives toward a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Etka.”I don’t think the DeLauro bill does that, and she certainly does not intend for it to do that.”

So will everybody now calm down?

Probably not. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this kerfuffle is how it illustrates, yet again, how the Internet empowers some (probably) well-meaning but ill-informed zealots to confuse a great many other (definitely) well-meaning citizens to get into a tizzy over nothing.

The anti-establishment tendencies, healthy up to a point, that motivate some in the “alternative” agriculture” community are likely to resist mere factual accuracy. As Steve Etka put it, analyzing his own followers, “folks that go into organic farming often see themselves supporting an alternative approach to agriculture that has not traditionally been supported by the USDA, where the corporate model ahs been dominant. So they see themselves as having to fight against that model.”

Even, sometimes, when it isn’t there.

A little mopping up before we get to the meat (and also the milk) of today’s exercise.

First of all, the Rev. Craig Bensen’s name was misspelled in a recent post. Apologies to him.

Second, a reader writes in to let us know that Tim Donovan, the newly named chancellor of the State College system (and now the head of the Community College of Vermont, not, as earlier stated, Vermont Technical College) said on a radio program that he doesn’t think the proposed merger of the State Colleges and the University of Vermont “will go anywhere.”

That could be significant because the proposal came from Gov. Jim Douglas, and at least some members of the State College Board of Trustees got the idea that Douglas wanted Donovan to get the Chancellor’s job. But assuming this reader’s report is accurate, Donovan doesn’t seem to be doing the governor’s bidding here.

Finally (in the mopping-up department) some readers continue to be confused about registering and commenting because (they say)  WordPress, our “publishing platform,” saddles them with long passwords that are hard to remember.

The complaint seems justified. But you know what? You can change your password to something easier to remember. You have to register first, and accept the password created for you. But then just go to the end of any post and click on “comments” (it says either, “no comments” or gives the number of comments). Right below the words “Make a comment,” the site will tell you that you are “logged in as [whoever you are]”

Click on your name. Up will come “Your profile and personal options.” Scroll down almost to the end of that page and you will see where you can change your password.

Okay, enough of this fru-fru. Let’s get to something real, something that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should have.

The “Vermont in Transition” report by the Center for Social Science Research at St. Michael’s College has not exactly been ignored by the state’s news media since it came out in December. In fact, Vermont Public Radio’s noontime “Vermont Edition” program recently devoted a whole week to it.

But neither has the report gotten as much attention is it deserves. No surprise here, really. First of all, the report is long. Quite long.  Fourteen chapters taking up a total of 160 pages (not including appendices) chock-full of graphs, tables, and lots of words. As with all such reports, more words than needed, though, in fairness, this one may be relatively less verbose than many of its counterparts.

Add in the fact that reporters might have been intimidated by the space or time required just to explain who did this report. It was that outfit from St. Mike’s, yeah, but it was done for Council on the Future of Vermont, which in turn is a “project of the Vermont Council on Rural Development,” which is in turn a “proud member of the National Rural Development Partnership.”

Who and what are all these outfits? How do they get their money and what’s their point?

All questions that will be dealt with here one day.

Meanwhile, there’s probably another reason the report got relatively little attention. It doesn’t contain hot-stuff big news because it refuses to be simplistic. Unlike the many reports that have a more obvious political bias, this one neither screeches that everything in Vermont is going to the dogs nor proclaims how wonderful (but put-upon) the state is. It accepts nuance, as though conducted by scholars trying to figure out what’s going on, rather than activists with an agenda.

That’s its virtue. Its flaw is that it might be a bit too politic, refusing to state outright the conclusions to which its own data and information lead.

Take Chapter Six, the one about agriculture. Most of its findings will not surprise anyone who has been paying even minimal attention to what’s been happening on the Vermont farm front. Dairy dominates, amounting to 77 percent of the state’s agricultural product. In fact, “no other state has a single commodity that accounts for such a higher percentage of its total agricultural sales,” the report found.

That’s good. “Lots of desirable synergies…come with geographic concentration of production.” But it’s bad. It’s too many eggs in that basket.

And maybe it’s worse because the future of dairy farming in Vermont seems bleak. This is one of those conclusions the report never states. But it points out all the changes that have been going on for years: fewer, but bigger, farms, an aging farm population, so much concentration that 12 percent of the state’s dairy farms produce almost half the milk. That’s not just in Vermont, either. Nationwide, huge new dairy operations in the West account for more milk production, even as production goes up faster than demand, and “the rate of structural change is likely to accelerate.”

That sounds as though it’s pointing to a future in which only a few Vermont dairy farms survive, and maybe they survive only through government subsidy.

This is a word the report does not try to avoid, acknowledging that Vermont dairy farmers have been getting federal subsidies for more than 70 years, including almost $10 million in 2006 alone.

As the report points out, the trouble with the likely demise of dairy farming has little to do with milk. In fact, if Vermont stopped producing another drop of milk tomorrow, the impact on the dairy market would be minimal or non-existent. Dairy farming is more important to Vermont than is Vermont to diary farming.

No, the real problem, the report notes, is that in Vermont the economics of farming transcends farming; one reason so many tourists come to the state is to see all those vistas created by farms nestled among the forests. But beyond that, farming in Vermont is not simply a matter of economics at all. The farm and the farm community are central aspects of the warp and woof of life in the state. Without them, the look, the pace, the feel, the sense of community would be different.

The good news, according to the report, is that as dairy diminishes and consolidates, more farmers are growing other crops and raising other beasts.  There are, the report said, 800 more non-dairy farms than there were 25 years ago. They are raising beef, turkey, and eggs. They are growing hay, corn, apples, and nursery-greenhouse plants. And many, of course, are tapping maple trees. Vermont remains the country’s biggest maple-syrup producer.

Most of these farms are small, the report said, and it was careful not to predict that they could take up the slack left by the likely decline in dairy farming. But it noted two positive trends: an increase in direct sales via Community Support Agriculture plans or “pick-your-own” fields; and more “value-added” operations such as farms that raise cattle, sheep, or goats and use the milk to make cheese right on-site.

What the report did not mention – perhaps because it was about agriculture, not politics – is that the dairy industry still dominates the public discussion about farming in this state. All those vegetable farms and orchards may get a lot of ink in the features sections of the newspapers. The milk guys have the clout in Montpelier.

(More on the other 13 chapters in the St. Mike’s report over the coming weeks.)

Here’s a suggestion: how about before proclaiming that Gov. Jim, Douglas came down on the wrong or the right “side of history” this week, everybody pause and await a little…history.

Who tends to make her own decisions at a time of her own choosing.

Not that Douglas’s decision to announce that he would veto the gay marriage bill does not need analysis. But the analysis could use a little humility. How this will all play out in the end will be known in the end, whatever and whenever that is. Not before.

To begin with, there is no reason not  to accept the governor at his word when he says he genuinely opposes the bill. Contrary to what may be public opinion, politicians do have real values, feelings, and predilections. So when Douglas said, “like President Obama and other leaders on both sides of the aisle, I believe that marriage should remain between a man and woman,” he probably meant it.

(As, it seems, does the President. Yes, it’s the safer political opinion, but according to several reports from folks close to the White House, Obama means it).

But sincerity is in no way inconsistent with calculation. To the contrary, it is common for people – and not just politicians – to conclude that what is in their interest also reflects their values.

In this case, it is easy to see why killing the bill – or at least doing his best to kill it – is in Douglas’s political interest.

First of all, most Vermonters who are so pro-gay marriage that they might vote against him on this issue alone are going to vote against him anyway. They tend to be Democrats and liberals, who don’t vote for any Republican, even this one.

Sure, lots of Republicans and conservatives favor gay marriage. For one thing, lots of Republicans and conservatives are gay, and some of them want to get married. No doubt  some of them are plenty miffed at the governor right now. But miffed enough 19 months from now to vote for a Democrat? A few (perhaps the gays who were hoping to get married) but not many.

So in making his announcement Wednesday, Douglas was angering (mostly) his political foes. But he was placating his political base. In Vermont, unlike most of the rest of the country, the anti-gay marriage side is the minority. But it is not a small minority, and it is mostly Republican. Incumbent office-holders do not like to displease their base.

Because doing so threatens to create the one thing incumbent office-holders hate most – a primary.

At first glance, it seems absurd even to consider the possibility that Jim Douglas – who is all that stands between the Vermont Republican Party and annihilation – could lose a primary. But here are two scenarios under which it just might happen:

1-A really competitive Democratic primary leaving only the most conservative voters to choose a Republican ballot next year;

2-A really un-competitive Democratic primary inspiring thousands of Democrats to meddle in the GOP primary to vote for the challenger, who’d presumably be easier to beat in the general election.

Then there’s scenario three: not a primary but an independent challenger from the right in the general election. Sure, this is the state in which the so-called religious right is probably weaker than anywhere. Still, incumbent office-holders dislike third-party challenges almost as much as they abhor primaries.

All this is speculation. If Douglas and his advisors have been talking of such matters, no word of the discussions has leaked out. Nor is there any evidence that the anti-gay marriage faction has transmitted any political threat to the governor.

But perhaps it didn’t have to. Craig Benson, head of the anti-gay marriage organization Take it to the People, said (by e-mail message), that to his knowledge “no one credible was saying that Douglas would be challenged in the Primary.”

But, Benson added, ” every once in a while …a ‘bad’ choice by a top Republican does bring out a strong Primary Candidate or GOP split-off party or coalition. Douglas knows this VT political history. No one should ever make the mistake of assuming that Douglas and his team have not fully (explored) all the possibilities on the table before a choice is made.”

There is another reason to suspect that the governor carefully calculated the potential political benefit of his veto threat. The reason is that he probably understands the personal price he might be paying.

To understand that price, it’s necessary to undertake a quick look at Douglas’s political prospects beyond the governorship, and  a very abbreviated assessment of his six years as governor.

His prospects , though he’ll only be 58 this June, are dim. Absent some unlikely political tsunami, he couldn’t beat either Sen. Patrick Leahy or Sen. Bernie Sanders. Even with this move to the right, he’s still far too moderate (just look at how he’s cozying up to Obama) to get a cabinet seat in a Republican administration, if there is one.

So governor of Vermont is what he’s going to be and how he’s going to be remembered. And at the risk of  inspiring opprobrium from the state’s liberal commentariate, one has to say that it’s hard to avoid judging his governorship a success.  It has been free of scandal (not counting his penchant for putting political operatives on the public payroll; but that’s a common and relatively inexpensive abuse). It has been competent. It has been steady. The state pays its bills and has a high credit rating.

But the Douglas years and the Douglas Administration have been neither inspiring nor innovative nor audacious. They have trod no new paths. Douglas’s de facto campaign motto is “Vote for Me. I Won’t Do Much.”

Not a bad motto. Perhaps a governor who doesn’t do much is better than a governor who tried to do a lot. Especially in a state with a gung-ho Legislature. One need not be a conservative Republican to suspect that this state is better off because some of the proposals of the liberal Democrats who run the Legislature never became law.

The essential fact here is that what Douglas did this week is how he will be remembered. He has no other legacy. Improper though it may be to say out loud (this is something reporters often say in private), in making his announcement Wednesday, Douglas determined what will follow the first comma of his obituary (may it not be printed for years), which will start something like, “Former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, who stopped his state from becoming the first to enact same-sex marriage without a court order….”

He must know this, and he must know that it could put him on that “wrong side of history.”

Or maybe not. Right now, a substantial majority of Americans oppose gay marriage. According to one recent poll – by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life -it’s a 59-to 32 percent majority. But that’s only because the margins of everybody over 35 are so huge – two-to-one for respondents in their 40s and 50s, even higher for older folks.

But it isn’t that younger people are overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex unions. They’re split. The younger they are, the more likely they are to be in favor. Maybe, then, teenagers under 18, who are not polled but who will be of voting age in a few years, are even more pro-gay marriage, so in another 15 or 20 years, the majority will be on that side.  Adding to that suspicion is that another fast-growing segment of the population – the college educated -  are also more evenly split, with younger college graduates most likely to be in favor. There is even some indication that the country is getting less religious, especially in the Northeast and most especially in New England, where about a third of the people report themselves un-churched or religiously indifferent.

But then, some people tend to get more conservative as they get older. Some of them even get more religious.

The right side of history, this being a democracy, will probably end up being the side where most of the people are.  Whether Douglas ends up on that side remains un-knowable. What is indisputable is that he has chosen his side.