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Mr. Giard Goes to Montpelier: How a Farmer Has Fared in His First Year as a Senator

photo by Ed Barna Harold Giard

Tuesday June 20, 2006

By Ed Barna

    Harold Giard can’t recall the first time he went to the barn to help his father with the cows, but as far back as he can remember, he expected do his share of the work.

Now that he Sen. Harold Giard, D-Bridport, representing Addison County and Brandon, he is glad that he grew up on a farm and has the work ethic of a former  dairyman. Both in the barn and in the State House, he has found in his first year, there are plenty of demands to fill an 80-hour work week, if not more.

But legislative work is in his blood, he said in a recent interview, as much as dairying, which he only abandoned when the last round of low milk prices in 2003 made it seem futile to continue. Now he feels the time has come to use his inside knowledge of how farming works, and doesn’t work, to inspire changes in the system--changes he believes are critical to the survival of family dairy farming in Vermont.

“There is only one word to describe the current situation: crisis,” he said, referring to the combination of milk prices again below the cost of production, high fuel costs that also impact the prices of milk hauling and fertilizer, and drenching weather that has made it impossible for farmers to cut their costs by growing good crops of hay and corn. “It’s bad, and it’s going to get worse. And worse.”

Giard’s earliest years may be a blur, but he won’t forget the summer day when he was home from St. Michael’s College with a friend, earning some money by scraping paint off a barn. Talking to keep from getting hopelessly bored, they got onto the subject of the upcoming state elections in November.

“For some reason, we decided he would run for the Senate and I would run for the House,” Giard said. “He didn’t and I did,” and “I won by the landslide of 15 votes.”

Right away, he got a lesson in old-time Vermont values from his defeated opponent. Asked whether he would demand a recount, the man said, “Do you know anyone who doesn’t know how to count?”

“I always figured I owed him an indebtedness,” Giard said. “That showed character, and I never forgot that.”

Giard loved the House of Representatives, and the work of representing the interests of the area (since redistricted) of Bridport, Cornwall, Salisbury and Leicester. He was a Democrat, but an in-the-middle sort of Democrat, his mother being a Democrat and his father a Republican.

“The House is really the people’s House,” he said. “It’s made up of almost every walk of life, it runs the whole gamut of Vermont’s spectrum of people.”

“That’s a great thing and a wonderful thing,” Giard said. And “it’s still the same” as it was before he needed to go back to Bridport and take over the family farm.

The first thing he did when he came back to the State House in January was to go sit in the well of the House and reminisce. “Then the bell rang for the Senate,” and a short walk later, he found himself in a very different world, not just a different place.

“Everything in the Senate is based on relationship,” he said. Very quickly he was informed that he was a freshman and needed to know his place in that complex web of connections.

Advice from the other, more experienced Addison County delegate, Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Middlebury, was very helpful, he said. But probably the best single piece of wisdom came from a lobbyist: “You have two eyes and two ears and one mouth. Use them proportionally.”

Knowing more now about how the 30 Senators operate, Giard is more forgiving of what many people see as the egoism of politicians. In that high-pressure, intensely interpersonal environment, you need something to keep you going, he said, and maybe a degree of personal ambition gives someone the motivation to put in all those hours and exercise leadership and get the job done.

Being a Vermont Senator is a specialized job, Giard said, and a freshman legislator has to learn that job’s specialized skills, such as making sure to ask others for help rather than going it alone. Then you have to work, and work hard.

There are only three members of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Giard said, and he’s one of them. He knows how farmers are hurting now because he had to give up in 2003 despite trying every good method of feeding and breeding and cow management he could learn about.

Though a freshman, Giard succeeded this year in getting approval for a committee to study the impact on farmers of hauling charges--which they have to pay both for what is shipped to them and what they ship to processors. He’s like to know why processors are shrinking the size of their packages (no more half gallons of ice cream, it’s 28 ounces now), thus cutting demand, at a time when farmers must pay 15 cents per 100 pounds of milk to promote greater demand.

“If you think health care is bad, you should study agriculture,” Giard said. State legislatures like Vermont’s need to exercise the leadership that isn’t there now and change the system so farmers get enough pay to survive, or else agriculture will remain a game of “the last farmer left standing.”

Someone is making money, but it isn’t the people working 80 hours a week on the land, Giard said. “The money is there, and we need to go after it.”

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