Late last year, Regeneration Vermont requested and obtained the records associated with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s “emergency” order to suspend the ban on spreading manure on snow, including documents that pointed to an apparent cover up of the extreme environmental damage that resulted from this order. As we say in this excellent piece from Vermont Public Radio: “If snowing in November can’t be handled by our industrial dairy industry, we really need to wake up.”

Below is an excerpt from the report by VPR’s John Dillon on an Addison County resident who is documenting the farm runoff damage in the area — runoff that is directly threatening Lake Champlain.

Manure Heads Into The Lake: Neighbor’s Video Spotlights Farm Runoff In Addison County

By John Dillon/VPR

The state is investigating an Addison County farm for violating water quality regulations after it spread manure last month that flowed directly into tributaries of Lake Champlain. The case is among several farm pollution cases now under investigation by the state.

This latest investigation was prompted by the farm’s neighbor, who videotaped the extensive runoff.

Eben Markowski grew up in Addison County, in the heart of Vermont dairy country. He said you didn’t need a weather forecaster to know that the bright sun and warm temperatures on March 14 would melt the snow that covered the fields near his house in Panton.

But he didn’t expect to see the field covered with a lake of liquid manure. He documented the scene in short videos.

“You can see right there, manure was spread yesterday on top of the snow,” Markowski said in one video that he took. “It’s all melting now in the hot sun.”

Markwoski then pointed his camera at a brown stream that ran under a road culvert, and then toward Lake Champlain less than a mile away.

“All of that manure, flushed into this water, running under the road in this current right here,” he said.