Addison County economic report

Vermont Business Magazine, Sep 01, 1998

Highly fertile at their best, these clays are locally famous for their boot-swallowing and tractor-miring properties. (One type, known to scientists as Vergennes clay, is actually in a Soils Hall of Fame.) This year, in the few good working days available, farmers had the choice of putting in corn seed or chopping hay.

The results: a lot of half-size corn, not nearly "knee high by the Fourth of July," and a lot of hay that went past its prime, into the flowering and seeding stages where protein content dives and the plant material becomes woody and less digestible. The other typical sight this year is corn that is green on top but has yellow leaves near the bottom, a sign that repeated rains have washed too much nitrogen out of the soil. There was so much fertilization work needed that farmers banded together and brought former Vermont crop-duster Dick Quesnel back from his new base of operations in Michigan to do top-dressing.

There is a place along Route 7 in East Middlebury, in the Middlebury River flood plain, where every year a seed company does test plots and posts about 10 signs in a row indicating that such and such a variety is in this or that test strip. This year, in July, the company yanked the signs: the pitiful, struggling corn was no advertisement for anything except the perils of planting in flood plains.

And that was before the Flood of 1998, which concentrated its downpour on Bristol, Lincoln, and the Granville-Warren area on the other side of the Green Mountains. Roads, bridges, houses, the Lincoln town library, crops -- the total damage, enough to earn a federal disaster area designation, has been estimated at $17 million. (See related story in the Construction & Development section of this issue.) Farmers around the county, contemplating their losses, have-been well aware that in some areas along the New Haven River basin, fellow agriculturists were losing chunks of their fields or having mud spread over what they had hoped to harvest.

But an unlikely source of help came to the rescue: the free market system. With both the Northeast Dairy Compact and the federal milk pricing system getting affirmations in the nation's courts, a hot summer that created a run on dairy products helped push milk prices per hundredweight above the $15 figure, which many consider a benchmark for the dairy industry to pay its costs and make a profit.

At the Agri-Mark Cooperative (which is running neck and neck with the St Albans Co-op for he lead among Vermont member dairy organizations). economist Robert Wellington said the forage crisis seems to have been averted by the boost in prices. There is abundant feed in some other areas of the country, and dairy farmers will now be able to buy it, he said.

Another plus for the county, Wellington said, is the Agri-Mark-Cabot cheddar cheese factory in Middlebury, where about 60 employees use state-of-the-art production lines to turn out massive quantities of Cabot brand cheese. Quality milk helps make the cheese stand out, but what really makes the difference is the presence o expert cheese-makers, he said.