Vermont’s Sacred Cow: Regenerative Small Farms or Toxic Mega-dairies?

By Bill Schubart

Dairy cows have been the icon of Vermont’s pastoral countryside for 150 years, but today’s mega-dairies don’t reflect the tradition of small dairy farms that once dotted our pastoral landscape.

When I got my first job on a dairy farm in Morrisville in 1957, there were over 10,000 dairy farms sprinkled among the hills and soil-rich river basins in Vermont, milking an average of 18 cows daily. Our neighbors, Gladys and Volney Farr, had 28 “girls.” Each had a name and most knew their own oak stanchion when it came time to come in for nighttime milking. Volney hand-milked and poured the buckets through a dairy filter into large milk-cans that he delivered daily in his pickup to the Morrisville creamery for processing into fluid milk.

People drank fluid milk in those days. When Dad took the family to Paine’s Restaurant just outside of town, Mrs. Wolfe, the waitress, deposited a large glass pitcher of milk on the table. Today it’s water. Milk fell out of favor with the health-food crowd – though that has since been debunked – but milk never returned as the ubiquitous family drink, replaced largely by sugary sodas that ballooned body sizes and caused diabetes in succeeding generations.

Today there are some 114,000 cows on 440 remaining dairy farms. This number includes some small-scale regenerative dairy farms producing for the local market, but most cows are in industrial dairy farms milking hundreds or even thousands.

A young friend, who commutes daily to her job, passes through an industrial dairy farm milking some 2,400 cows stalled in massive barns. Fed dry hay and grains, the cows are never on grass and spend their four years confined in small pens, milked robotically thrice daily, “freshened” (artificially inseminated) annually, and then slaughtered when their milk production drops in the natural cycle of aging. 2,400 cows produce 20,000 gallons a day.

A year after the passage of the Agricultural Act of 2014, revising commodity price-supports and crop-insurance programs, the U.S. government spent $24.7 billion in direct and indirect subsidies. Subsequently, the dairy industry received $43 billion in 2016 and $36.3 billion in 2017. In 2018, 42 percent of revenue for US dairy producers came from some form of government support. Is this farming or welfare shoring up a dying market?

Today’s milk market is divided into four segments: commodity fluid milk, organic fluid milk, premium markets such as yogurt, butter, cheese, ice cream, and finally, dry (commodity powdered milk and dry whey). On average Americans drink 37 percent less milk than they did in 1970. Where possible, the 14 percent surplus milk gets dumped onto international markets but with limited success. Some milk and excess whey are dumped legally onto fields and may drain into nearby waterways.

So much for the market economics supporting Vermont’s sacred cow; now let’s look at the damage.

Industrial dairy in Vermont relies heavily on row-cropping of corn to feed its 114,000 cows. It is almost impossible to grow the corn needed to feed them without the use of weed-killing herbicides such as glyphosate, atrazine and dicamba, all of which are legal though subject to “restricted use” in Vermont. All three are known to be detrimental to human health.

Paraquat, which has recently been linked scientifically to the genesis of Parkinson’s disease, is also legal, but subject to “restricted use.” Chlorpyrifos is now banned in Vermont, but atrazine and Syngenta’s paraquat, banned in the E.U., are still used here. The E.U. allows regulated use of dicamba and glyphosate.

Do you associate large piles of used tires with farms? They are often used as weights to hold down large tarps covering chopped corn or feed grains stored in bunker silos. Recycling old tires cost from $4-12 per tire and more for large tractor tires. Some farms simply bury the tires. Tires are a major contributor to microplastics and breakdown into such when buried. So, not only do we poison our soils with chemicals, we further pollute them with microplastics which then appear in our food.

The final nail in the coffin of industrial ag is the issue of humane treatment of animals.

Cows typically have a natural lifespan of 15 to 20 years, but in the dairy industry, cows are often slaughtered around five years old when their milk production declines. Cows are not on pasture, eating their natural diet – grass, not corn. They’re confined for their short lives in small pens running from 30 to 40 square feet. Freshened yearly, gestation is about the same as humans. “Bob calves” (males) are slaughtered shortly after birth for pet food while heifers (females) are nursed for a short while then removed to calf sheds to mature and be added to the milking stock.

So much for humane treatment of animals.

On a good note, Vermont is seeing growth among its local, regenerative farms producing dairy, livestock, fruit, and vegetables, all consistent with best environmental and humane practices. In 2024, there were some 700 such local farms producing largely for farm stands, local farmers’ markets, and local retailers.

To support humane, poison-free, regenerative farmers, we will need to address the fact that healthy, environmentally sound agricultural crops and livestock cost more to produce and thus will cost more to buy.

Given the false economy and toxic environmental impacts of industrial dairy in Vermont, isn’t it time to let the industry collapse under its own weight while shifting our state and consumer financial support to the emerging regenerative local agricultural community that lives light on the land and provides us with safe food? In 2024, Vermont’s own Sweet Rowen Farmstead in Glover won the prestigious award for best produced milk in Vermont. Vermonters benefit by consuming naturally raised produce, free of big ag poisons.

To this end, Vermont’s version of SNAP, 3SquaresVT, helps local people needing food assistance to source and buy healthy food produced by local Vermont farmers.

So, for another column, why did Governor Phil Scott turn over the list of 65,000 Vermont SNAP, 3SquaresVT, recipients to President Trump? (tinyurl.com/ScottSNAP)