Letters to the Editor (6/14/23)

Missing Monument

[“How Now?” The Dairy Issue, May 31]: How and why would one write so much about the dairy industry in Vermont and not even mention Monument Farms? Its products are widely available around Vermont and have been around since the 1930s. It processes and bottles all of its products one-quarter mile from the farm and is overall very transparent about how it treats the herds and runs the business. All of this information is easily available on its website, and it truly deserved to be highlighted in the Dairy Issue.

Nora Bodner

Burlington

Organic Is the Answer

[Re “‘Get Big or Get Out,'” May 31]: Fabulous that you are taking on the plight of cow farming, but why no cost analysis? How much does it cost (land, animals, vets, feed) against potential earnings (selling to processors, self-processing, farmstand, grocers, animal sales)? While acknowledging differences in mortgages and philosophy, ultimately we want to justify why milk and butter are so expensive while being told the price is depressed. I was also glad to see that two valid solutions for waste were presented: biodigestion and regenerative farming. These should just be policy in the state.

Ultimately, James Maroney has the best idea of them all: Long live the Organic Republic of Vermont!

Zach Leinen

Colchester

Farming in Connecticut

[Re “‘Get Big or Get Out,'” May 31]: I am a longtime dairy farmer who left milking in 2022 after 50 years of milking my own herd of Holsteins. I made the switch to rotational grazing in 1995. We still have about 30 heifers that are rotationally grazed. I believe we were one of about six dairy farmers to do this and the only one for years that moved fence twice a day — until some smaller herds that process their own milk joined me in the past 10 years or so. The past five years have been a dairy disaster, especially since COVID-19 and the quota system enforced upon us. I probably will have enough heifers calving later this year, but with my age and the milk price forecast, I’d be crazy to continue.

The secret to farming in Connecticut has always been a wife with a good job or if your land has a bank on it named “gravel bank.” We chose agritourism 24 years ago with a corn maze. It quite literally saved the farm.

I liked your article, as it spoke volumes about what is wrong with the dairy farm industry across the U.S. Too much “get big or get out.” As far as organic milk is concerned, the science and caring about animals in me would never allow me to not use antibiotics. I just couldn’t sit by and try quack homeopathic remedies instead of drugs that really work. Hopefully you’ll continue to update this story as there are fewer but larger of us to write about.

Jerry Grabarek

Preston, CT

Offensive Headline

In Alison Novak’s attempt to be cute with the title of her article [“Physical Education,” May 24], she did a disservice to physical education professionals across the state — teachers who day after day do their best to accommodate for students’ differences and teach for inclusion and acceptance. I notice it was not called “Special Education,” mostly likely because it would have caused a backlash. The title Novak used is no less offensive.

May this letter serve as a teachable moment.

Marie Froeschl

Essex

Editor’s note: Reporters don’t typically write the headlines for their stories; editors do. Novak did not write this one.

See Me

The article [“Queer and There: Vermont Towns Swell With Pride Events in June,” May 31] seems to do a good job of illustrating a fundamental shift in Pride month that your non-LGBTQ audiences may not be aware of. Lately, it feels to me that Pride is not really for gay or lesbian people anymore. True, there is nothing that explicitly states this exclusion, but it’s pretty obvious when you’re actually a gay or lesbian person. To use your article as an example, the word “gay” is used six times throughout the entire three-page article. The word “lesbian” fairs even worse, with only one mention. However, the words “trans” (15) and “queer” (18) were used a total of 33 times.

Let me be clear: I believe trans and queer folks have as much of a right to Pride as any other letter in the LGBTQ acronym. And shouldn’t we be including all the letters equally? Gay marriage might be legal, but gays and lesbians still need our community support, too! In general, it’s hard to feel included in the LGBTQ scene in Vermont when there are no full-time gay bars here (the last one in the Burlington area was canceled in 2017), the Pride Center of Vermont rarely offers gay or lesbian programming, and what few pockets of underground gay spaces may have existed before the pandemic are pretty much gone.

So please excuse me if I, as a lesbian Vermonter, don’t feel very “proud” in Vermont this month. It doesn’t seem like there is much left for me to be proud of.

Anna C. Vann

Essex Junction

A Case for ‘It’

[Re Feedback: “Language Evolves,” May 31; “Grammar Advice,” May 17]: Moving from “he/she/they” to “they” laudably advances gender equality but unfortunately sacrifices numerical precision. This will lead to a mix of mistakes and contorted language in much of what we do and transact. Think of a legal procedure: Was the bank robbed by Willie Sutton or the Beagle Boys? There is a better, win-win solution here: Use “it” for singular and “they” for plural. “It” maintains number sense and is perfectly gender-neutral. It is even neutral for humans/animals, earth/other worlds and matter/antimatter. True wide-spectrum neutrality.

Robert Herendeen

Burlington

‘The Old Way’

[Re “Forced Out: Vermont’s Initial Round of Motel Evictions Previews What’s in Store for 2,000 More People,” June 7; “State Announces 28-Day Extension for Some in Motel Housing Program,” May 26, online; “No Vacancy: Burlington Braces for More Encampments as Motel Program for Homeless People Winds Down,” May 24]: Seven Days‘ excellent series of articles on Vermont’s stupefying homelessness situation prompted me to a bit of nostalgia.

As a young adult in Vermont in the early 1960s, I was unaware of any “homelessness problem.” The canny Republican farmers who ran the state back then had long placed the issue directly into the hands of local taxpayers. However, at that time, Vermont was in the throes of transferring responsibility for caring for the state’s destitute individuals from each town’s “overseer of the poor” to a new, statewide professional welfare system. Advocates for the old system argued that the new welfare establishment would become a bloated, depersonalized and expensive bureaucracy, which has happened, and that huge, unforeseen problems would arise.

Under the old system, each town would help support a “poor farm” or poorhouse where those able would grow their own food or do other productive work. The overseer would, ideally, know everyone in town and would thus provide for the truly destitute.

But under a new crop of Democrats in power — president John F. Kennedy and Vermont governor Phil Hoff — the old system was deemed unfair and stingy, and hence we are where we are today. Yes, there are many smart and compassionate people working on behalf of the homeless, but homeless camps, street beggars and an aggressive pro-housing development lobby are features of the new Vermont.

Could we ever, at least in part, return to the old way? Just an idle thought from a superannuated dreamer.

Andy Leader

North Middlesex

Review ‘Renewable’

Thank you for continuing to publish information about Vermont’s sources of energy [“Electric Avenues,” April 12]. It’s really time for everyone to start becoming increasingly aware of the details of the bind we’re in. Have you considered a weekly column dealing with Vermont’s energy situation?

One thing that became obvious to me as I read the article is the overuse of the word “renewable” — 36 times. Everyone uses it. It really is time to put the old terminology aside. The discussion has moved on, and using this term is confusing and inexact. The discussion going forward should be entirely about the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. There are plenty of renewables that produce copious greenhouse gas emissions. The source of the emissions doesn’t really matter to the atmosphere, renewable or not. What matters is that we reduce the rate of emissions.

We see it in legislation and rulemaking; we see it in the energy industry: renewables, renewables — without taking into consideration that the issue is not renewability but rate of emission. For instance, biomass for electricity is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions but technically renewable. Renewability has nothing to do with global warming. Rate of emission is all that matters now.

Phillip Merrick

Burlington

‘Living Near Solar’

[Re “Electric Avenues,” April 12]: It is frustrating but not surprising to see opponents of the proposed Shaftsbury solar project raising the same old misleading complaints about renewable development — that it threatens Vermont farmers, forests or habitat. These complaints are raised almost any time a project is proposed, regardless of whether it is a 20 MW proposal or a much smaller 500 kW proposal that would cover only a few acres. Are these legitimate concerns or just convenient excuses for people who would rather get their electricity from somewhere else so that they don’t have to see how the sausage is made?

Vermont has close to a million acres of primary agricultural land and 4.6 million acres of forest. Inevitably, renewable energy projects will impact some of this land. But the force that is really putting this land at risk is sprawling residential development. The University of Vermont estimates that residential sprawl consumes 1,500 acres of forest annually. The Farmland Information Center estimates that we are losing another 1,700 acres of agricultural land for this purpose annually. When it comes to preserving farmland and forests, building 6,000-square-foot homes on 17-acre lots is a much bigger threat than something like the Shaftsbury solar project will ever be.

Refusing to build renewable projects in Vermont means that massive natural gas power plants in disadvantaged communities throughout New England keep spewing pollutants into the air those communities breathe. Some people may not like living near solar, but living near those plants can literally take years off your life.

Jonathan Dowds

Burlington

Dowds is the deputy director of Renewable Energy Vermont.

Status Quo Is Costly

I appreciated your in-depth coverage of the obstacles to solar development in Vermont [“Electric Avenues,” April 12], but I’d like to challenge you to look deeper into an aspect of it that the story dismissed with a single sentence: “Those who claim solar should just stick to already developed properties, such as rooftops or parking lots, need to realize that those projects often don’t pencil out.”

If we value our forests and our farms (not to mention our future), surely it’s worth our while to make it worthwhile to host solar panels elsewhere. Might these projects actually pencil out if we consider the costs of letting the climate crisis escalate? Are the pencilers factoring in the economic boost of keeping our energy dollars in state or the health benefits of cooling down paved areas with solar canopies as summers grow ever hotter? Are they considering scenarios in which public transit solutions could reduce parking needs so we can straight-up convert that space to solar arrays? What if we combine these projects with worker training programs?

At this stage of climate crisis, we don’t have the luxury of choosing not to have more solar panels; we need to put them somewhere. Letting financial profit be the single determiner of viability is one of the reasons we’re in this climate mess to begin with. In my experience, people who say that a solution is too expensive don’t realize how costly the status quo is. It’s time to start penciling outside the box.

Marisa Keller

Montpelier

The 600,000-Ton Question

Apropos of Kevin McCallum’s excellent overview of Vermont’s energy future [“Electric Avenues,” April 12], recent recommendations to the Vermont Climate Council and Gov. Phil Scott call for the profitable transformation of Vermont’s wood-chip power plants, McNeil and Ryegate, into negative-emission power and storage stations. These plants emit more than 600,000 tons of CO2 per year, based on estimates by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They can be profitably renovated with federal support to reduce emissions by 600,000 tons and remove 600,000 more tons per year from the sky at same time. A similar plan for Vermont Yankee is financially attractive and will create more jobs, profits and climate benefits than a nuke plant there — something industry advocates still seek even while the nuclear waste crisis is getting worse.

Vermont gets two-thirds of its power from Hydro-Québec and Seabrook Station, both of which are environmentally problematic. We can source it at home instead by using solar power and hemp. Hemp removes CO2 from air faster than trees via photosynthesis. Single-pole tracking photovoltaic systems can be aligned to make farming easy without sacrificing agricultural land to fixed solar arrays. Farmers can harvest sunlight, hemp and food simultaneously. CO2 from burning hemp fuels in plants or engines can be captured and reused for vital products and to keep CO2 out of the air, thereby enabling proven negative carbon emissions. Carbon offsets will apply.

Jim Hurt

Woodstock

When Milk Goes Sour: Dairy Farming Has Long Shaped Vermont. Does It Have an Expiration Date?

Dairy farming occupies three-quarters of Vermont’s working agricultural landscape and has been a leading industry since the 19th century. Its impacts are all around us:…