It’s not new news anymore, but…
(The Vermont Milk Co.) formed by farmers who were seeking stable milk prices and added value for their product has shut its doors…
…Board member Sam Burr told The Burlington Free Press that the company was forced to close this week because of insurmountable debt.
Against my admittedly bare bones impression of their business model, I remember a few years back questioning its long-term viability. Maybe without the economic downturn it would’ve worked, but we’ll never know. It was clearly in trouble before the bottom fell out of the economy.
Anyone inclined to celebrate because Anthony Pollina bugs them shouldn’t. This endeavor was not Anthony Pollina – although he was obviously a huge part of it. But even that’s beside the point. Pollina has bugged me relentlessly over the years for a variety of reasons, but the fact is he was trying to do something good here. Trying to make a difference. It what he always does, what we try to do here, and the news of the VMC’s collapse has no silver lining. Sure, there were things about the operation that gave me the creeps – such as its anonymous bailout during the Pollina gubernatorial campaign – but it was without question a force for good… just not a force built to survive.
What its collapse will be is fodder for those who feel that the very nature of the market makes it impossible to do any meaningful, systemic good within it. I think this is a deceptively simplistic path to go down – in its way, as deceptively simplistic as some of the assumptions behind troubled endeavors such as the VMC; that one can avoid the downsides of capitalism simply by getting into business and choosing not to be greedy and playing by your own rules. Of course, the realities of a complex system like our economy are largely immune to being influenced by our personal (often way too easy) dogma, no matter how dearly it is held.
But at the end of the day, Pollina & company were trying to think outside the box. Much like his Progressive Party itself is an attempt to think outside the box. And when such outside-the-box attempts fail, there’s the added downside of feeding cynicism and making it even harder for the next outside-the-box idea to get traction, at least for a while.
I don’t know what the next creative idea will be – either for Vermont farmers, or any other demographic in dire straits. I do know that we have to find ways to encourage this sort of creativity, but we need to be smarter (and less dogmatic) about it – and that means not only challenging what we may see as a hostile system or status quo, but challenging our own easy assumptions and ofttimes-seductively-simple solutions as well.
John,
Thank you for bearing the responsibility for reporting this terrible news, and for showing respect to a great Vermonter, Anthony Polina. I do not know Anthony well, but he has helped me appreciate local food production like no one else. He is so liberal, he scares me. He sounds communist when he talks about labor unions. But, sort of like the shock of hearing Bernie Sanders for the first time, Anothony has a way of growing on me and making sense at my deepest levels. My family calls me communist, so I guess you can see my problem.
WE NEED TO MAKE VERMONT BETTER
There is only one thing we can do that matters about the failure of the Vermont Milk Company. We can keep doing our best to make a difference in Vermont, improving the qualify of our democracy and creative economy, now under siege by a certain small group I will not name, except to say it is led by James H. Douglas. We must oust that man. The phrase has been used, but it stands like new: “failure is not an option.”
PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS MAKING VERMONT BETTER
You have been running an important front in public communication relatively alone for awhile now. You have set a great example for those of us new to the game.
It might feel like we are in a state that has lost its creative spark. It is unfortunate that Richard M. Nixon’s should be the one to have scooped the phrase, “silent majority.” Except for occasional elections, the majority of Vermonters are silent. Hard to see creative spark in silence.
But oh those elections, they mean everything! How about those 2006 US Congressional elections, where Karl Rove condescendingly declared possession of “THE math” of the polls, as if the rest of us were too dim to grasp? Look what happened, and now our country is on a better path since, actually working our way through the banking collapse, instead of theorizing why we should do nothing.
2010 VERMONT ELECTION DETERMINES PATH FOR NEXT 10 YEARS
In Vermont, only about once every 10 years do we have a chance to select a new governor. I will save my comments on James H. Douglas for another time. For now, I will stick with thanking you for bearing the grievous burden of documenting the demise of the Vermont Milk Company. The silver lining is it gives us a failure to make our successes all the more important and gratifying when they come.
PROMOTING CREATIVITY IN VERMONT
I am not talking about the arts. I am talking about a creative democracy, one that works better than what was possible when our founding fathers worked out the basic principles, before the days of modern instant communications. Of course our democratic processes should be redesigned to take advantage of these decision-improving devices.
For what it is worth, I predict big success for the creative kind of Vermont you and I happen to want, come November 2010. My confidence comes from knowing writing like yours is what the silent majority of Vermonters is looking for. I think we can spread the word even better, and let people know this information spells “get a new governor.”
If that makes you uncomfortable, recheck the end of your diary starter: “challenging our own easy assumptions and ofttimes-seductively-simple solutions as well.” If we are comfortable for long, we know we are doing the wrong thing. 🙂
Looking forward, to an extent, to your creative criticism. 🙂
Best regards,
Dan
interesting article
http://www.grist.org/article/s…
Vt Milk Co makes a really good contribution here. And they make good yogurt and ice cream, too.