Vermont Public is independent, community-supported media, serving Vermont with trusted, relevant and essential information. We share stories that bring people together, from every corner of our region. New to Vermont Public? Start here.

© 2024 Vermont Public | 365 Troy Ave. Colchester, VT 05446

Public Files:
WVTI · WOXM · WVBA · WVNK · WVTQ · WVTX
WVPR · WRVT · WOXR · WNCH · WVPA
WVPS · WVXR · WETK · WVTB · WVER
WVER-FM · WVLR-FM · WBTN-FM

For assistance accessing our public files, please contact hello@vermontpublic.org or call 802-655-9451.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

'It's The Dairy Farm Sewer': Neighbors Say State Is Failing To Regulate Agricultural Pollution

A person stands on some asphalt on a lake shore.
Elodie Reed
/
VPR
Laurel Casey stands for a portrait at the spot where a gully ends and the shore of Lake Champlain begins. Often when it rains, Casey sees manure-laden water flow right past her house and straight into the lake.

Laurel Casey counts herself as a casualty of farm pollution.

Her small, lakeshore house in Bridport has been damaged by runoff from the farm fields above her. She said she’s had trouble renting out a camp on the property because the bay just feet away is often choked with potentially toxic blue-green algae. And she blames the algae blooms for the sore throat and diarrhea she experienced all summer.

But the last straw came this fall, when a pile of foam "like a bathtub for a giant" clogged a gully next to her house. The brown foam was a visible and smelly sign that diluted manure was running right by her front door.

Casey shot https://youtu.be/aC2jyKfIJPU","_id":"00000179-c81d-d4c2-a579-fddf3eab0000","_type":"035d81d3-5be2-3ed2-bc8a-6da208e0d9e2"}">https://youtu.be/aC2jyKfIJPU">video of the foam and alerted state officials. It wasn’t the first time.

https://youtu.be/aC2jyKfIJPU","_id":"00000179-c81d-d4c2-a579-fddf3eab0000","_type":"035d81d3-5be2-3ed2-bc8a-6da208e0d9e2"}">https://youtu.be/aC2jyKfIJPU">(On mobile? Click here to see the video).

“I’ve been talking to them for five years now," she said. "And they come down, and they check out the farms, and say, 'Well, they’re within their limits.'"

“There aren’t any regulations," she added. "There's very few regulations."

That’s the crux of the frustration Casey and others who live near large farm operations in Addison County have with state. They say they’ve seen the lake get worse over the years from farm waste that fertilizes the algae blooms. And, they add, usually no one is held responsible.

About 14 miles north of Laurel Casey’s house, a half dozen people gather in Roy Shea’s expansive lakeside home on Button Bay to tell their stories of living with water pollution. Shea, a retired business owner, has become a bit of an eco-warrior. He’s turned out at state meetings to castigate officials for what he says is their failure to hold polluters to account.

“It’s hypocrisy — it’s blatant hypocrisy how the state of Vermont presents itself as the greenest of the green,” he said. “And they let this happen. And again, they continue to let it happen.”

A bunch of different photographs on a table depicting dirty water.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
A group of neighbors along Button Bay have taken photos of agricultural runoff entering Lake Champlain.

Shea spread across a table color photos showing plumes of dirty water flowing into the lake. Other pictures taken this spring and summer depict nearby parts of the lake covered by a dense blanket of blue-green algae.

Tom Spencer lives just down the road. A former dairy farmer, Spencer, now in his 70s, has since developed housing on 30 acres of land his ancestors first worked two centuries ago.

“When I was a child swimming in this lake, we never saw algae,” he said.

And now, he said, his life savings are tied up in his lakeshore home.

“It’s a major part of my assets," he said. "And why would someone want to buy a house in front of basically a sewer? It’s the dairy farm sewer."

A person sitting in a chair in front of a desk.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
Tom Spencer is a former dairy farmer, and now a lot of his assets are tied up in the 30 acres of Ferrisburgh farmland his grandfather once farmed. Spencer has since developed it into housing, and he's concerned about property values as blue-green algae blooms in Lake Champlain.

Deb Hartenstein also lives nearby, in a place that her family bought in 1999. She’s sailed on the lake for years, and she said she’s never seen it this bad.

“I think I lost track this summer, of the number of times I'd throw my bathing suit on, towel, walk down the steps, thinking I'm gonna [swim]," she said. But after looking at the water, she would decide: “Not today. Not gonna jump in."

And Mark Berger is a part-time Vermonter, a physician from Texas who bought a home here, because, he said, he fell in love with the state and what he calls its “Vermont brand” of a clean, pure environment.

“Over the last 16 or 17 years we’ve been up here, we’ve noticed incredible deterioration in the quality of life around the lake,” he said.

Berger and the other lakeshore property owners gathered at Roy Shea's house are directly affected by water pollution. But they said a worsening Lake Champlain is everyone’s problem. Tourist revenue will continue to decline if the water stays dirty, they said, and they also point out that hundreds of thousands of people get their drinking water from the lake. This includes the city of Vergennes, which draws its water from nearby Arnold Bay.

“If you live in the lake and around these large industrial farms, all we are are the canaries in the mine, but all of us are in the mine,” Berger said.

Two people stand together with serious faces with a lakeshore in the background.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
Mark and Katia Berger stand for a portrait outside their lakeshore home. Both are concerned about the level of water pollution from farm runoff, and Mark wrote a letter to state leaders outlining those concerns.

Berger wrote a detailed letter to state leaders this summer outlining his concerns.

“And I got absolutely no response, no response whatsoever," he said. "This and other things that all of us have experienced over the years really makes us believe that politicians, the people who make the laws, chose to turn their heads from the problem."

State government divides oversight of farms. Vermont's agriculture agency regulates activities on the land, like manure spreading and nutrient management plans. The Agency of Natural Resources is supposed to take over when pollution leaves the farm and enters public water.

But the result can be a bureaucratic quagmire where enforcement cases are delayed, sometimes for years.

A case in point is the Vorsteveld farm, a 2,100 acre operation in Panton that currently milks about 1,000 cows. Neighbors blame the Vorstevelds for serious manure runoff and water quality problems.

A farm exterior with cows behind a fence.
Credit John Dillon / VPR
/
VPR
Vorsteveld Farm in Panton.

And Deb Hartenstein said it doesn’t seem like the state has done much about it.

“The word encroachment keeps coming up in my head,” she said. “And the lack of control, and the lack of  sense of responsibility that these agencies want to assume.”

Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore is familiar with the complaints.

“This is clearly not the way we want to be doing business,” she said. "And we are making a number of changes regarding our compliance and enforcement activities.”

State records show a number of complaints against the Vorstevelds over the years, including allegations that they drained or altered wetlands in 2016 and 2017. The state also investigated reports in 2018 and again this year alleging the Vorstevelds allowed manure-laden water to flow off fields, into ditches and toward the lake.

Despite multiple inspections and a fat digital file of photos and site visit reports, the alleged violations have not led to penalties. Moore said the cases are still open, but added she’s not satisfied with how they have stalled.

A person at a podium.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
Vermont's Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore, seen here during the signing of a clean water bill in August, said she is dissatisfied with how the state has handled allegations of dairy farms polluting waterways.

“The timing of this is not acceptable from my perspective, and I’m working with the team to put in place a different set of systems to ensure we move more quickly,” she said.

But there’s an irony here, because in many ways, the Vorstevelds are doing just what the state wants when it comes to reducing pollution on their farm.

On a recent, snowy afternoon, Hans Vorsteveld — one of three brothers who own the place — sat in his cluttered office right off the milking parlor. Shelves were stuffed with paper and tools. A white five gallon bucket overflowed with empty vials of cow medications, and someone had spray painted graffiti on the walls.

But if the Vorstevelds have spent little on office décor, they have invested heavily in the latest field and crop technology.

“We’re probably doing the most environmental friendly farming that you can do,” he said.

A person in warm clothing stands in a messy office.
Credit John Dillon / VPR
/
VPR
Hans Vorsteveld.

He ticked off the innovative management practices designed to minimize runoff:

"We do no-till, so we don’t till the dirt. We put cover crops on after we take the corn off. And in the fall, in the clay ground, we inject manure. So it’s in the ground. And we tile our fields so there’s hardly any runoff.”

These are all practices the state supports, and in some cases, helps pay for. Vorsteveld, whose father brought his family here from the Netherlands, is clearly proud of the progress. He said the farm has less environmental impact than it did 10 years ago.

“We don’t like washouts," he said. "We like to keep our soil — we work hard to get fertile soil. And it’s always the best soil that washes off, because that’s the finest particles. So we want to keep that. We want to keep that more than the people that are worried about the lake, because that’s our livelihood.”

Vorsteveld said he isn’t worried about the lake, nor does he think the farm is responsible for any pollution.

A telephone pole in front of a snowy field.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
Hans Vorsteveld said complaints from neighbors about his farm's activities intensified after he and his family cut trees down on the edge of this field to install tile drainage.

“I’ve been swimming in the lake every year, and there’s been algae blooms in it every year,” he said. “It’s fine. It never bothered me a bit. I’ll dive right in, I’ll go swim, and then I’m out beyond it.”

He’s also a bit defiant about his neighbors. He said the complaints got louder when he and his brothers cleared trees lining a section of road in order to install tile drainage in the field.

“It was just a waste of land with nothing on there but shrubbery,” he said. “We cut ‘em all down in about two hours… But it’s not like I’m in their land cutting their trees down. They could have bought the land. It was for sale.”

Vorsteveld said he thought the various environmental complaints were resolved. He added that the agriculture agency just inspected his farm under its large farm permit program and found no problems with runoff.

“If we do have a problem, we do try to fix it,” he said.

And, of course, this farm is not the only one in southern Addison County with water quality problems.

Poop on yellow lines in a road.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
Manure is seen along Lake Road in Bridport.

In Panton, the Allendale Farm spread hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid manure on melting snow last spring, which then flowed into streams and nearby Lake Champlain. Agency of Natural Resources enforcement staff said recently they could not prosecute because the agriculture agency gave the farm verbal permission to spread the manure.

Moore said she’s not happy with how that case turned out. But she chose her words carefully when asked about the oversight shared between her agency and the agriculture agency.

“Anytime you have two agencies that have a charge that can and does at times overlap, there’s both a tension and a friction,” she said. “I think some of these field-based practices and manure spreading concerns are right at that nexus, or right at the intersection of our two jurisdictions.”

A gully leading down to two buildings.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
This gully, which Laurel Casey said she had to replace two culverts in to accommodate the manure-laced water that flows through it, carries runoff right by her lakeshore home and the cabin she rents out on her property.

Back in Bridport, Laurel Casey is at the exact center of the problem. Her doublewide has been damaged by heavy flooding from the fields belonging to Iroquois Acres, the dairy farm uphill from her property. Diluted manure sometimes runs by her front door. She said she felt sick much of the summer and suspects bad water and algae blooms were to blame. She’s also worried she won’t be able to rent her nearby cabin in the summer because the lake is too dirty for swimming.

Without that rental to supplement her Social Security income, she said she may have to move. She wants the cows to move instead.

“Obviously, we can’t have cows this near to our water supplies anymore,” she said. “I don’t want them to go out of business, it’s just can we move the cows and the manure away from our water supplies.”

Moore said she was disheartened when she saw thehttps://youtu.be/FBFsCJkq4Wc"> video of the foam at Casey’s place, and that the state is close to taking action against the neighboring farm for improper manure spreading.

Stephanie Ouellette, whose family owns Iroquois Acres near Casey, said she had not yet heard back from the state.

"We have been here for generations, and we want to be good neighbors, and we want to do the right thing, and we think we are," she said. "We do care about the lake — we want what everybody else does in cleaning up the water."

A person standing with cows.
Credit Elodie Reed / VPR
/
VPR
Stephanie Ouellette said Iroquois Acres in Bridport is willing to work with the state because the family farm wants what everyone else wants: clean water.

Moore said she believes farms have really stepped up to improve water quality. But she said they need to be even more vigilant.

“Really small quantities of phosphorus can be damaging to our waterways,” she said. “It’s not enough to be 95 or maybe even 98% accurate, you need to be 99.99% accurate. When we’re talking about phosphorus pollution in our waters, we’re measuring things in parts per billion.”

Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message or get in touch with reporter John Dillon @VPRDillon.

We've closed our comments. Read about ways to get in touch here.

John worked for VPR in 2001-2021 as reporter and News Director. Previously, John was a staff writer for the Sunday Times Argus and the Sunday Rutland Herald, responsible for breaking stories and in-depth features on local issues. He has also served as Communications Director for the Vermont Health Care Authority and Bureau Chief for UPI in Montpelier.
Latest Stories