Despite Vermont’s water quality crisis, largely the result of industrial dairy farm runoff, the state’s regulators continue to allow farmers to install tile drains in fields that would otherwise be too wet to cultivate.
It’s a particularly egregious practice in the wetlands of Addison County, on the banks of Lake Champlain, where these drains are acting as superhighways of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and residues (pesticides, manure-based pathogens and antibiotics).
The video below was taken in a tile-drained GMO cornfield in Addison County (June 2019) by our CAFO Watch team, less than 1500 feet from Lake Champlain, where the gushing water is headed. If Vermont is serious about its water cleanup, we must first turn off the pollution spigots, like these tile drains.
