LEE LIGHT: When he was lieutenant governor working for Snelling he made some gestures that sounded like maybe he really understood issues affecting family farms and whatnot.  But early on it became clear that that wasn't a priority.  He's been governor for 11 years and we've lost a lot of farms, and we've also been a state that hasn't fought against the bovine growth hormone factory farms.  I don't even think it's an issue for him.  He has a commissioner of agriculture that hasn't bucked that trend towards bigger agriculture.  The Agriculture Department he never fully funds; he's always cutting the budget.  In a state where farming is so much part of our identity and there's so many people who move to Vermont or live in Vermont that want to farm on whatever scale, that there should be a lot more interest in the Agriculture Department and he's just not there.  I mean yeah he goes and taps the maple tree and shows up at Dairy Festival, but as far as really fully supporting an agriculture community, he doesn't.  And I don't think he's that different from the world in general, because family farms are sort of like a romantic notion.  But I think in the long run we'd be far better off with family farms than factory farms, and [with] rural communities where people have a sense of community. 

QUESTION: Has he done anything positive for agriculture?

LEE LIGHT: What he'll say is that he strongly supports the North East Dairy Compact.  Well that was the simplest thing for any politician to hang their hat on.  But it was not really enough of an increase in pay to really keep people in.  And the same thing happened here on our farm.  We farmed and our son came on the farm to farm with us and we farmed with us for about ten years...  The problem with low milk prices is that the next generation sees it as like, am I going to work as hard as my parents and not make any money and never have a vacation?  So the younger generation doesn't want to continue to do it unless they put up those big million dollar operations where there's thousands of cows and the cows never go outside and it's a whole different form of agriculture.

QUESTION: What would be two or three things that Howard Dean could have done?

LEE LIGHT: I think the state of Massachusetts does pretty good as far as what farms they have left.  And one of the things they have in Massachusetts, it's a land trusting program like we have here in Vermont.  What happens here in Vermont is they'll give a farmer "x" number of dollars and that land is tied up forever.  It can never be subdivided and built on; it always remains the same.  But what they do in Massachusetts is they do it for, it's on a generational basis with twenty-year increments, and a farm can apply for that money and it's a smaller amount of money, but what that money does is it modernizes, makes places more efficient.  They'll bring in a team of experts to help the farmers figure out a plan of how to go forward and then at the end of that 20 years if the next generation comes out and wants to renew it there's a new source of money.  Because when you get all that money all one time here in Vermont, what happens is that close to 40 percent of the money goes for taxes so that's gone.  And then what the farmer does is they take that money and they reduce their debt because they've been farming at a loss.  And then they'll farm, maybe they'll be okay for a while, but as long as the price of milk is lower than what it costs the farmer to produce, they're going to wind up back in that same black hole, where they can't make enough  money to keep the thing going and will eventually go out of business...

And then the other thing that I'd like to se have happened is come to the realization that it's not absolutely necessary for Vermont to remain a dairy state.  Vermont at one time...had relied on sheep...

I think that we're at another crossroads in our agricultural history where the government should say, okay we have these small farms that are capable of producing beefalo, pork, like Hollister Hill, farms that we should have people working in our Ag Department--and they do, don't get me wrong, they do--but they could be doing so much more as far as research, as far as coordinating things.  You always hear that they don't have money to do this, they don't have money to do that, and if we're going to replace dairy agriculture or supplement dairy agriculture there's got to be money in the Agriculture Department to do it.

QUESTION: Anthony Pollina was raising some of these same issues.

LEE LIGHT: I got involve in agricultural politics because of Anthony, and Anthony and I worked very closely together for many years at Rural Vermont.  That was the organization that Anthony founded.

Bob and I feel that agriculture's really, really important, and Howard Dean doesn't pay any attention to it.  It's not even a cabinet position, and I think it should be. 
 

HAROLD HOWRIGAN, interviewed by phone in July 2002, stated, "Gov. Dean has been probably one of the most stalwart defenders of agriculture that I have known."  Howrigan lauded Dean as a "champion" of the Northeast Dairy Compact, which provided stable prices milk prices for farmers for a little over four years (it went into effect in July 1997 and sunseted in September 2001).  He also praised Dean as a strong defender of the current use program, which taxes agricultural land for its use, not its possible development value.
 

Editor's note: These Vermont dairy farmers seem to have a dry New England sense of humor.  For example, Question: "Are you a big dairy farmer?"  Howrigan: "Oh about 5'8."