Small organic dairy farms fight to stay in business

Farmers running small-scale organic farms say lax regulations have allowed large confined animal operations to dominate the industry, leaving smaller owners either barely squeezing out a profit or in most cases losing money. They are pushing back by appealing to consumers.

|
Charlie Neibergall/AP
A Jersey cow feeds in a field on Francis Thicke's organic dairy farm in Fairfield, Iowa, on May 8, 2018. As larger farms dominate the dairy market, small farms are going out of business.

Small family operated dairy farms with cows freely grazing on verdant pastures are going out of business as large confined animal operations with thousands of animals lined up in assembly-line fashion are expanding into the organic market.

Many traditional small-scale organic farmers are determined to fight back against the industry transformation by appealing to consumers to look closely at the organic milk they buy to make sure it comes from a farm that meets the idyllic expectations portrayed on the cartons. While the large operations say they're meeting US Department of Agriculture (USDA) standards for organic milk, the smaller farms say federal regulators under Republican and Democratic administrations have relaxed enforcement of strict organic standards for dairy farms, allowing confinement dairies to grow and put intense competition on a small family operated dairies.

"There's a higher authority than the USDA. There's a higher authority than the federal courts where we've litigated some of these issues. And that's the consumer. Their dollar has power," said Mark Kastel at the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute, a nonprofit public interest group focused on farm policy.

The dairy industry, like much of US farming, has trended toward fewer but larger farms since the 1980s when organic milk was available only at farmers markets or specialty grocers and the milk came from small-scale dairy farms selling to a local cooperative. Now organic dairy products are widely distributed by mainstream grocers and mass retailers including Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart. But much of those companies' store-brand milk comes from dairies with thousands of cows maintained in immense confinement operations.

Mr. Kastel says that style of farming is contrary to what the founders of the organic movement envisioned and what consumers believe they're buying. His group on Thursday is releasing an updated Organic Dairy Scorecard, which will rank 160 brands evaluated for their organic practices including quality of pasture, how frequently cows graze, and how often they're milked.

A spokeswoman for Aurora Organic Dairy, the industry's largest supplier to grocery chains such as Costco, Safeway, and Wal-Mart, said activists who believe organic food should come from only small producers are the primary critics inaccurately portraying large-scale organic production.

Sonja Tuitele said the company's farms have more than 10,000 acres of organic pasture for grazing and the farms exceed minimum requirements for grazing days and percent of diet from grazing.

The company has nine barns in Colorado and Texas with about 26,000 cows. The largest has 4,400 cows and the smallest, 900 cows. Aurora CEO Scott McGinty said in a statement released in April that the company maintains two USDA accredited certifiers for each farm.

"A second organic certification is a voluntary quality assurance step to ensure our farms receive more frequent inspections and measurement of compliance," he said.

Competition from large operations combined with plummeting dairy prices in the past four years has left organic dairy farmers either barely squeezing out a profit or in most cases losing money. It has accelerated the loss of smaller farms.

USDA reported in February that the number of US dairy farms, including organic and conventional fell nearly 4 percent last year from the previous year to 40,219. The number of dairy farms declined 32 percent in the last decade.

For Patti and Brian Wilson, the changing industry has soured the profitability at their 600-acre dream dairy farm in Orwell, Vt., they converted to organic 16 years ago. Milking their 50 cows has become unprofitable, said Ms. Wilson, who was an agronomist with the USDA before she began farming full time.

"We just put an ad out listing our herd for sale," she said. "It's been a slow decline, kind of a slow death."

Southern Iowa organic dairy farmer Francis Thicke's strategy is to work with other farmers to create the Real Organic Project, an effort to create an additional label that will be placed on packaging to tell consumers that the products meet traditional organic standards. A pilot project this year will have 50 farms with products carrying the Real Organics label.

In addition to meeting USDA certification requirements, they must meet the project's standards, including that produce has been grown in soil and not hydroponically and that animals have access to the outdoors.

Mr. Thicke, who has been in organic farming since the 1970s, walks among 85 docile Jersey cows on his 730-acre Radiance Dairy farm near Fairfield, Iowa, as they lounge under a grove of trees on a sunny summer day, casually walking and grabbing mouthfuls of thick green grass. He sells 2,000 gallons of organic milk a week in the form of milk, cheese, and yogurt to nearby restaurants, grocery stores, and a private college.

"Basically, it's just bringing organic back to the roots that the pioneer organic farmers envisioned," Thicke said of the Real Organics label effort.

This story was reported by The Associated Press. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Small organic dairy farms fight to stay in business
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2018/0810/Small-organic-dairy-farms-fight-to-stay-in-business
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe