The Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy heard an update Friday on Vermont’s developing concentrated animal feeding operation program, with state officials, stakeholder facilitators and environmental advocates describing a regulatory transition that remains unsettled on several major fronts.

The discussion centered on how Vermont will bring its farm water-quality rules into compliance with the federal Clean Water Act while coordinating work between the Agency of Natural Resources and the Agency of Agriculture. The testimony made clear that the hardest issue is not whether farm runoff should be controlled, but how Vermont will define compliance, who will enforce it, how farms will pay for required infrastructure, and how long farms will have to comply.

Abby Naja, ANR’s CAFO program manager, said the agency’s report was prepared in response to Act 67 and focused on five areas: establishing a Clean Water Act-compliant CAFO program, aligning it with existing agricultural water-quality programs, creating long-term regulatory clarity, identifying technical and financial resources for farms, and reviewing approaches used in other states.

Farmers Asked for Clarity, Time, Funding and Consistent Inspections

Mira Downey of the Consensus Building Institute said the stakeholder process included farmers, technical service providers, environmental petitioners, state agencies and other participants. Meetings were held over roughly three months, including side meetings with environmental groups and agency planning teams. Downey said farmers emphasized the need for an ongoing stakeholder group to advise implementation and provide regular feedback as the program develops.

Farmers also raised concerns about the lack of clarity between ANR and the Agency of Agriculture. Downey said there was strong sentiment from farmers that unclear agency roles made it difficult to know whether they were in compliance, what to expect from inspections, and what it means to be in good standing with the state.

That uncertainty matters because the cost of compliance could be substantial. Naja said production-area improvements may be required to meet federal CAFO standards. Under the Clean Water Act framework, dirty water from production areas may need to be collected, diverted, stored or treated up to a storm-event standard. That could include manure storage, runoff controls, clean-water diversion, engineering work and other capital improvements.

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ANR Says It Is Not Trying to Go Beyond Federal Standards

Sen. Seth Bongartz asked whether ANR intended to expand beyond federal law. Kevin Burke of ANR said that was not the agency’s intent, adding that the agricultural community had specifically asked the state not to go beyond the federal standard. Burke noted, however, that Vermont’s existing agricultural rules already include some provisions that exceed the federal baseline, such as winter spreading restrictions.

Naja said the federal requirement does not automatically force every non-discharging farm to obtain permit coverage. Rather, discharging farms are the key concern. She said farms subject to CAFO rules will need to operate, manage records, maintain storage capacity and meet federal requirements.

For small farms, Naja said Vermont has not yet defined what would make a farm a “significant contributor” requiring CAFO designation, and ANR is not proposing to begin inspecting small farms as CAFOs at this stage. Burke added that if a problematic discharge from a small farm were reported, the state would still investigate and determine what corrective action was needed.

The Numbers Matter for Vermont Farms

For dairy farms, the key dividing lines are numerical. Federal CAFO rules classify operations with 700 or more mature dairy cows as large CAFOs. Operations with 200 to 699 mature dairy cows fall into the medium category if they also meet discharge-related criteria. Smaller operations can still be designated as CAFOs if regulators determine they are significant contributors of pollutants.

Vermont’s farm-size system does not map perfectly onto the federal CAFO structure. State law defines a “small farm” for certification purposes as land with 10 or more acres used for farming, below the animal-count ceiling for medium farms, and meeting animal or crop thresholds set by rule.

In plain terms, a Vermont dairy farm with roughly 50 mature cows may be large enough to fall into the certified small farm universe under state rules, while a farm around 200 mature cows moves into the medium-farm range. A farm with 700 or more mature dairy cows is in the federal large-CAFO range. That means the farms most exposed to the CAFO transition are not backyard-scale operations; they are larger commercial farms where production-area runoff, manure storage and stormwater controls can become major engineering and financing issues.

Other States Already Have More Established CAFO Systems

New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Maine were discussed as comparison states during Vermont’s review. Their programs show that CAFO regulation is not unique to Vermont, but Vermont is still working through program structure and agency coordination.

New York says it has roughly 500 CAFOs, mostly dairy farms with 300 or more cows, and first issued a CAFO general permit in 1999. Cornell’s Pro-Dairy CAFO guidance says New York considers non-discharging dairy farms with 300 or more cows to be medium CAFOs, while farms with 700 or more cows are large CAFOs.

Wisconsin requires livestock operations with 1,000 or more animal units to obtain Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits. The state says 1,000 animal units equals about 715 milking cows. Smaller operations can also be required to obtain permit coverage if discharges create CAFO status.

The comparison matters because Vermont is not inventing CAFO regulation from scratch. The federal structure already exists. What Vermont is still sorting out is how to translate that structure into a state system that farmers can actually understand and comply with.

Environmental Groups Back Continued Stakeholder Work

An environmental stakeholder told the committee that Lake Champlain Committee, Conservation Law Foundation and Vermont Natural Resources Council participated in the stakeholder process. He called the process productive and said the groups plan to submit a letter for the record. He also urged support for language in S.323 to continue the CAFO stakeholder group and authorize ANR to hire a third-party consultant for inspector training.

He said the stakeholder group was intentionally farmer-heavy and should keep meeting quarterly, likely beginning in the fall, to work through implementation problems as the program develops.

What Vermont Farmers Should Know

The most important takeaway for Vermont farmers is that this is not just a paperwork issue. The sharp edge is production-area runoff. If water contacts manure, feed storage, animal lots or other dirty production areas and reaches waters of the state or the United States, the farm may face federal-style CAFO requirements.

Farmers should also understand that medium and large farms will be the easiest for regulators to classify numerically. For dairy, that generally means the 200-cow and 700-cow lines are the numbers to watch. Small farms are not currently the focus of ANR’s CAFO buildout unless a specific discharge problem is identified.

ANR officials said compliance schedules may need to run five to ten years for some farms, depending on the farm-specific fixes and available funding.

The unresolved questions are practical: what exactly must be built, who signs off, how much money is available, how inspections will be conducted, whether ANR and Agriculture speak with one voice, and whether farmers are given enough time to fix real infrastructure problems without being punished for rules that are still taking shape.

For now, Vermont’s CAFO transition appears less like a crackdown and more like a forced modernization of runoff regulation. But for farms facing major capital costs, uncertain standards and split-agency oversight, the distinction may not feel especially comforting.

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Dave Soulia | FYIVT

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