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.)

Tags: Dairy farms

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 12:17 am and is filed under Blog Info, Farms & Forest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.