Local Farmer Ralph McNall's Photo In Free Press

Article & Photo from the June 14, 2006 issue of The Burlington Free Press

Ralph McNall (center) of Fairfax, president of the St. Albans Co-Op, attends a meeting for dairy farmers and state officials called Tuesday by Gov. Jim Douglas, at the Waterman Building at the University of Vermont.
(RYAN MERCER, Free Press)

Governor will convene emergency summit on dairy farming

By Candace Page
Free Press Staff Writer

June 14, 2006
Fairfield dairyman Harold Howrigan fanned out a dozen snapshots Tuesday on a meeting room table. A broad river nearly filled the frames -- but the "river" was no river at all. May's torrential rains flooded acres of meadow, where next winter's feed for Howrigan's cows is spoiling.

"It is honestly a disaster," he told state Agriculture Secretary Steve Kerr. "Over 20 inches of rain in my dooryard between May 10 and June 10."

It was the weather and milk-price disaster that Kerr and his boss, Gov. Jim Douglas, had come to address.

They told a meeting of the Vermont Dairy Task Force that they will convene an emergency dairy summit this month to identify quick, short-term steps to help the state's farmers deal with a financial crisis. Douglas said he would like to have relief programs in place by the end of July.

"Some immediate action is necessary," Douglas told the farm group, saying the state will look to Washington to provide weather-disaster assistance to farmers. Beyond that, he said, "We have to be as self-reliant as Vermonters always are."

Trouble in the farm economy galvanizes policymakers because the state depends on its dairy farms not just for the direct income they generate, but as the distinctive ingredient in Vermont's rural landscape and its image among tourists.

Nevertheless, it's not clear how big a difference the state can make in stemming the flood of red ink that threatens to drown some farms.

Many of the problems -- low milk prices, high production costs and bad weather -- are mostly or entirely beyond government's control.

Douglas said he would not rule out any idea. Asked if he would consider direct state subsidy payments to farmers, he repeated that he was ready to consider every idea.

Tuesday, he formally asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to designate Vermont a disaster area, citing a preliminary survey that put crop losses at $20 million, a figure that is expected to rise. If USDA agrees, farmers would be eligible for low-cost loans.

Also Tuesday, Vermont's three-member congressional delegation wrote to President Bush, urging him to drop his opposition to $1.5 billion in assistance to farmers nationwide to cope with rising energy costs.
Replanting, re-replanting

Howrigan figures his sons will have to replant one-quarter to one-third of their 220 acres of corn. Some fields have been planted twice and must be replanted yet again, if and when the soil dries out.

Destruction of a high-quality first crop of hay was particularly hard to accept, Howrigan said. A cow's milk production is greatly dependent on the protein and other nutrients in the hay she eats. Hay harvested after its peak or after flooding has lost much or all of its nutrient value.

Weather has been the last straw for most farmers:

The price farmers are paid for the milk has dropped 20 percent in the past year, from $1.28 a gallon to $1.03 a gallon. For the average farm producing 200,000 gallons of milk a year, that's an income loss of $50,000.

"An average farm in Vermont only nets $25,000 to $40,000 in a decent year, so farmers are going to be working for nothing this year," said dairy economist Bob Wellington of the Massachusetts-based Agri-Mark cooperative.

Fuel and fertilizer prices have skyrocketed. For example, farmers spent about $125 an acre last year to plant an acre of corn, estimated Jim Bushey of Bourdeau Brothers farm supply in Middlebury. This year the cost rose to $150 an acre. For a farmer planting 200 acres of corn, that's an additional $5,000 cost.

Constant rain in May and early June drowned the first planting of corn in many fields and delayed the harvest of first-cut hay. Farmers will replant their corn and cut the hay, but corn yields may drop and much of the hay will be nutritionally worthless.

"We're looking at wartime costs of production, Depression prices for our milk and we're going to be feeding some of the worst roughage we've ever fed," Howrigan said.
Wanted: Fresh ideas

Wellington said it's possible that northeastern states could agree this summer to add a premium to the price of drinking milk, perhaps bringing farmers another 4 or 5 cents a gallon.

"It's not going to solve the problem, but it could help," he said. Such price-raising efforts have foundered in the past because New York, the biggest market, has resisted. New York may be more open to the proposal than in the past, he said.

Rep. David Zuckerman, P-Burlington, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and a vegetable farmer whose fields were flooded last month, was in the audience.

"The only reason to hold this summit is if we're ready to consider ideas well outside the normal box," he said. "This crisis is well beyond past crises."

Cabot dairy farmer Jackie Folsom, president of the Vermont Farm Bureau, applauded the summit as a way for Vermont to consider "what could we do for farms that we are not doing."

She said she hoped an idea of Zuckerman's would be on the agenda.

Last year Zuckerman introduced a bill calling for a 1 percent addition to Vermont's hotel-room tax. He estimated the tax increase would raise about $3 million to support individual farms through grants for conservation, construction and the like.
Calling it quits?

Beneath the sense of urgency at Tuesday's meeting was the unspoken fear that more and more farmers will simply call it quits.

"We're seeing farmers go out in every state where we have members, and it's happening at the highest rate I've seen in 25 years," Wellington said. About one-third of Vermont's 1,200 dairy farms belong to Agri-Mark.

At the state Agriculture Agency, dairy director Byron Moyer said Vermont has not seen an accelerated rate of farm auctions in 2006. Thirty-two farms have stopped milking cows since Jan. 1, about 3 percent of the state's dairies.

Contact Candace Page at 660-1865 or e-mail cpage@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com