Despite calls from health professionals worldwide to curb the use of farm-animal antibiotics, Vermont’s conventional dairy industry — dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – continues to use the antimicrobial drugs extensively, including non-therapeutic uses to prevent diseases caused by the animal confinement and concentration. After numerous records requests and analysis, including eight years of antibiotic violation data obtained from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, we found a rising trend with on-farm antibiotic violations, a lax regulatory environment, and no plan – or even goal – to address the problem.

Vermont’s nonorganic dairy industry is all but ignoring the dire warnings from the World Health Organization to reduce overall antibiotic use in food production, a leading cause of antibiotic resistance, which makes the drugs less effective when necessary to combat human illnesses. While the WHO has called for a complete halt to using antibiotics as a prophylactic in food production– preventing rather than treating animal diseases — Vermont’s dairy industry, with the support of VAAFM regulators, continues to allow healthy cows to be routinely treated between lactations.

These are harrowing times for the nearly 1,500 migrant workers laboring on Vermont’s largest dairy farms. These farmworkers, predominantly from Mexico, are forced to live in the shadows, where their farm bosses harbor them in exchange for long hours, low wages, and cheap housing. It’s a human rights stain on the state, allowing these migrant workers to live and be treated this way. And it continues because there’s a whole lot of “looking away” from the deep-rooted ugliness of this system, which has been described by human rights advocates as “close to slavery.”

Worse than looking away, with its implicit acceptance of the exploitation, is the complicit role Vermont’s dairy industry giants are playing to maximize their profits on the backs of this cheap labor. As the state’s near-billion-dollar-a-year ice cream and cheese corporations – Ben & Jerry’s and Cabot Creamery – continue to pay less than the cost of production for its dairy supply, Vermont’s remaining 700-or-so dairy farms are forced to cut costs at every opportunity, particularly when it comes to labor. Gone are the days when these farm jobs were filled by neighbors and community members, as the danger, speed, scale and filth – coupled with poverty-level wages — has made it impossible to attract local workers.

The world’s largest meat and dairy corporations could become the planet’s worst climate polluters within the next few decades. At a time when the planet must dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, these meat and dairy giants are driving overconsumption by ramping up production and exports, despite public commitments that some of them have made to tackle climate change.

Ben & Jerry’s and its parent, European food giant Unilever Plc, have engaged in deceptive marketing by misleading shoppers into thinking they’re buying an environmentally friendly treat. According to a lawsuit, the ice cream is made from milk sourced from the same kinds of farms as most other dairy products and the final product contains the pesticide glyphosate.