click to enlarge - James Buck
- A cow at Maille's Dairy in Shelburne
Sometimes the most obvious stories are the hardest to spot. That was one of the lessons gleaned from the 2015 movie Spotlight, about the team of reporters at the Boston Globe who exposed the systematic abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in Massachusetts.
For decades, the scandal was right under the paper's nose, but nobody saw it. Or wanted to see it. Turns out the myopia was worldwide.
Following the Globe's example, at Seven Days we regularly ask ourselves: Are we missing something that's right in front of us? Could a local topic be so sacred as to make us blind to it?
That challenge gave rise to our 2018 "Give and Take" series, about the proliferation and outsize economic impact of Vermont's nonprofit sector. Then came the "Our Towns" issue, in which we took the temperature of ailing rural Vermont. In 2019, guest writer Kate O'Neill spent the entire year reporting "Hooked," a six-part project showing how the national opioid epidemic was ravaging the Green Mountain State. Last year, we spent nine months and 12 stories explaining Vermont's housing crisis in "Locked Out," which covered everything from mortgage rates to mobile home parks.
Which brings us to ... cows, the Jerseys and Holsteins dotting Vermont's verdant hills as well as her tote bags and coffee mugs. We've grown numb to the news of Vermont dairy farms giving up and selling out. The slow and steady countdown is easy to tune out.
But is the decline inevitable when, right over the U.S.-Canadian border, milking operations are thriving? What would the state be like without this labor-intensive ag enterprise? And what, if anything, is likely to replace it?
Meanwhile, shouldn't we, the media, make a greater effort to call attention to it?
The stories in this week's issue of Seven Days explore the state of an agricultural practice that has become synonymous with Vermont — the good, the bad and the by-products.
Instead of covering the topic in a multipart series, we decided to give it special-issue treatment. That allowed editorial staffers — in almost every department — to weigh in.
To provide necessary expertise and context, we called on freelance writer Kirk Kardashian to report and write the anchor story. He's a longtime Seven Days contributor who lives with his family in Woodstock and authored the 2012 book Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm.
We spent months planning and orchestrating this endeavor — and thousands of dollars on freelance fees, photography, illustrations, meals and mileage. All of our ambitious enterprise projects require that kind of investment.
We hope you appreciate this one and consider the questions it raises while contemplating the best place to eat your next creemee.