Small dairies go under as milk prices sink again

LISA RATHKE

Asso­ci­ated Press

PLAINFIELD, Vt. — The MacLaren broth­ers are third-generation dairy farm­ers, but they will likely be the last in their family.

After work­ing all their lives on the hill­side farm in Ver­mont that their grand­fa­ther bought in 1939, ris­ing to milk cows at 3 a.m., even in bliz­zards and sub-zero tem­per­a­tures, they decided to call it quits, auc­tion­ing off their roughly 200 cows and equip­ment rang­ing from stalls and hoof trim­mers to trac­tors and steel pails.

The sale marked the end of the last dairy farm in Plain­field — a small town that once had sev­eral dozen — and the 14th dairy farm to go out of busi­ness in Ver­mont this year. A few small dairies have opened, but over­all, the num­ber of farms con­tin­ues to drop in a state long known for its milk and cheese. Farm­ers say they can’t make ends meet when milk prices are low and feed and fuel costs keep going up.

“The day of the small farms, I think, is gone,” said Steve MacLaren, 54. “A lot of peo­ple are going to hold on as long as they can, but we decided not to. Why strug­gle on it any longer?”

Eco­nomic issues aside, the MacLarens are tired of being tied to the farm seven days a week. They plan to keep the land and grow feed — corn and grass for hay and silage — on more than 500 acres.

“No mat­ter what, you’ve got a sick cow or a cow hav­ing a calf, you’ve gotta be around whether it’s 1:00 in the morn­ing, or it’s what­ever time, you’ve got to take care of them,” said Michael MacLaren, 48. “But if you’ve got a trac­tor break down, you can walk away from it. It’s just a long hard grind, and I decided I’d like a change.”

While the num­ber of dairy cows in the U.S. hasn’t changed much, the num­ber of dairy farms has been drop­ping as small farms either go out of busi­ness or con­sol­i­date to become more com­pet­i­tive and cost effective.

The num­ber of dairy farms nation­ally has dropped from nearly 92,000 in 2002 to less than 70,000 in 2007, accord­ing to the last agri­cul­tural cen­sus, which is being updated this year.

That’s not the whole pic­ture though. The num­ber of small farms, with 100 to 199 cows, fell from about 11,000 to about 9,000 dur­ing that time, while those with more than 1,000 cows grew from about 1,300 to almost 1,600.

The shift has affected states like Ver­mont and Wis­con­sin, which have strong dairy­ing his­to­ries, but tend to have smaller farms than other major milk-producing states like Cal­i­for­nia and Texas.

Wis­con­sin has lost nearly 200 herds so far this year and now has about 11,600.

The farm clo­sures are likely to con­tinue with milk prices expected to keep falling this summer.

“It’s a dying busi­ness,” said Ron Wright, owner of Wrights Auc­tion Ser­vice in Derby. He expects to do twice as many auc­tions this spring as last — eight to 10 auc­tions in Ver­mont and one in New York.

The U.S. had been grad­u­ally los­ing dairy farms for decades, but then milk prices plum­meted dur­ing the reces­sion and fuel costs soared in 2009. Ver­mont lost 52 dairies that year, while Wis­con­sin lost 519.

Prices have rebounded since, although they are expected to sink again to as low as $16.50 per hun­dred pounds this sum­mer, said Diane Both­feld, Vermont’s deputy agri­cul­ture secretary.

“It will be a very dif­fi­cult year,” said Both­feld, who expects the auc­tions to continue.

The loss of small farms hurts local economies and the many busi­nesses that rely on them, such as feed and trac­tor deal­ers and vet­eri­nar­i­ans, she said. It also could be a prob­lem for Ver­mont tourism, which is closely tied to bucolic images of the state’s moun­tains and dairies, although Both­feld said she thinks much of the land will stay in farming.

Ver­mont watched the num­ber of its dairies drop in the past 20 years from 2,272 to 977 this May. At the same time, its milk out­put has stayed rel­a­tively the same as sur­viv­ing farms grow. In the past five years, the aver­age dairy size has grown from 125 to 135 cows in Vermont.

“To suc­ceed in farm­ing it seems like you really have got to diver­sify or go big,” said Jen­nifer Lam­bert, 26, of Wash­ing­ton, one of the few new dairy farm­ers in Vermont.

She and her hus­band have leased his uncle’s farm, where they pro­duce organic milk, which com­mands a higher and more sta­ble price than con­ven­tional. They also grow live­stock feed and picked up a $7,500 seeder at the MacLaren’s auc­tion on May 16.

“It’s very dif­fi­cult to get started in this,” said Jesse Lam­bert, 30, of the invest­ment. They can’t afford to buy the farm — or bor­row the more than a half mil­lion dol­lars to do it — so were lucky to lease it, he said.

The MacLarens didn’t watch as their cows were led one by one into the auc­tion ring, where bid­ders sat on bales of hay. Michael MacLaren said he and his brother will miss the ani­mals some.

“But you make the deci­sion and have the courage to go through with it and you do it,” he said. “That’s the way it’s gotta be.”

Posted by AP News on May 25 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.