Brave new world
Steuben's dairy farms growing, changing
By DERRICK EK THE LEADER

PHOTO BY JASON COX/THE LEADER Larger, modern dairy farms like the Dickson farm in Bath seem to be where the dairy industry is headed.

Struggling mightily with rising production costs and a sinking profit margin, many local dairy farmers have gotten out of the business in recent years.

The ones that have stuck around have been forced to do two things: get more cows to milk, and get more milk out of those cows.

The Merry brothers' dairy farm, probably the biggest in Steuben County, is a good example of that. The four thirty-something brothers - Andrew, Edward, Tom and John - started in 1992 with three cows on rented land in Bath.

They now farm 2,000 acres and milk nearly 1,000 cows in a modern facility in Arkport designed for the cows' comfort, right down to the sand bedding. They carefully monitor the feed mixture and water intake, and employ a nutritionist and a veterinarian.

"I think every farmer out there, if they had their pie in the sky, it would be to milk 30 cows and enjoy the lifestyle," Andrew Merry said. "Not that we don't, but we want a comparable wage to our peers, and in order to do that, with the operating costs the way they are, we had to grow."

"We like to pay our help as much as we can afford. We don't want to deny them a good living and benefits," Merry continued. "We want to maintain a respectable lifestyle, and in order to do that, we have to milk more cows. And when the margin that we make on 100 pounds of milk gets smaller, then we have to step up the efficiency."

The Dickson farm in Bath is a similar operation, run by three brothers, Larry, Jay and Phil Dickson, who are in their 60s.

They milk 535 cows who produce about 4,000 gallons of milk a day in a parlor with automated milking and collection systems, a mechanical scraper to clean the floors and even a foot bath for the cows.

Each cow is tagged with a small device that tracks how long they are milked, how much they produce and other information. The data is fed into a computerized system.

"It's all about efficiency and profitability," said Phil Dickson.

Because of its size and efficiency, the Dickson farm has a relatively low production cost of about $13 to $14 per hundredweight, or roughly 12 gallons.

And yet Dickson said the farm was losing money at a rate of $41,000 a month last year, one of the worst on record for dairy farmers. Things are a bit better now, but that gives a pretty good indication of what dairy farmers nowadays are facing.

The breeding techniques, animal care and milking equipment in the dairy industry have been gradually evolving for the past century; that's nothing new. But efficiency is at a premium like never before.

The county's Cornell Cooperative Extension has a team of agricultural experts who help dairy farmers with recommendations on feeding and caring for the herd, raising crops, and handling their income and expenses.

Jim Grace, farm business management educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension, painted a pretty clear picture of what's been happening.

He said there were 29,600 cows being milked in Steuben County in 1975 and the average milk production was 1,272 gallons per cow for the year. Thirty years later, there were only 19,300 cows milked, but their average production was 1,956 gallons.

So that means that 10,000 less cows produced almost exactly the same amount of milk: a shade under 38 million gallons.

"We do absorb the need for the small dairy farms when they go out of business, but it changes things," said Phil Morehouse, director of the county's Farm Service Agency.

"A lot of people complain that we're going toward large factory or corporate farms," Morehouse continued. "There are dairy farms out West that have 5,000 dairy cows per barn. We have some in Steuben that are 500 to 1,000 cows and growing, but they're still family-driven farms. We still maintain the look and feel of rural America at this point."

But the smaller, older dairy operations are changing, too.

A few months ago, Jasper dairyman Carroll Wade shipped out his first batch of certified organic milk from his small, picturesque farm in the heart of Amish country, which has been producing "regular milk" for generations.

Wade can't use pesticides on his crops. He has to use only organic feeds and he has to allow them to graze freely in his pastures. He can't give them hormones to boost their milk production, and if he uses antibiotics to treat a sick cow, he can't use any milk from that cow until after its body is completely free of the antibiotics.

Wade's operation had to go through a stringent certification process by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is regularly inspected. Organic feed is much more expensive.

But it's all worth it, Wade said.

While organic is still only about 2 or 3 percent of the market, the demand for it has been growing by about 20 percent a year, he said. Organic milk sells for about $30 per hundredweight, double what he would get for "regular" milk.

On the retail side of things, a gallon of 2 percent milk is selling for $2.79 a gallon at Wegmans, while organic milk is $5.99.

Wade admits that he doesn't think there's a great deal of difference between organic milk and "regular" milk as far as taste or nutritional value.

"But if we can command those types of prices, then we'd be foolish not to go that route," he said.