Shoppers who buy local and organic milk can rest assured that their buying habits do have a positive impact on local economies. But sometimes, positive isn’t not enough.
“The dairy crisis has touched everyone in the industry,” according to Steve Young-Burns, CEO of Pastureland Dairy Cooperative in Minnesota, “even organic dairy farmers. It’s easy to think organic and local are economically secure, but not in this situation.”
The U.S. dairy crisis, which ravaged farms in 2009 and shows signs of continuing well into 2010 (more here), is a result of record low prices paid to farmers for milk. Young-Burns says the price per hundredweight (that is, one hundred pounds of milk, the unit of measurement in the dairy industry) is currently fifteen dollars for conventional milk on average. For organic milk, it’s roughly twenty-three dollars per hundredweight.
In both cases, those prices are well below the farmers’ estimated cost of producing milk, and that’s a real problem.. As Young-Burns put it,”If financial sustainability isn’t part of the picture, the whole thing falls apart pretty quickly.”
Why are farmers receiving less than it costs to produce their milk?
“It’s all perception of the crisis and what consumers will pay on the retail end. Processors and big manufacturers ultimately set that price,” Young-Burns said, “and even organic milk can’t escape these economic busts.”
Pastureland, a co-op of four small, grass-fed, organic dairy farms in Minnesota, is known locally for its award-winning cheeses and especially its gourmet butter. But to make that organic butter, milk has to be extracted, and that milk must then be sold as “skim” to an organic milk processor. With the U.S. dairy industry in complete downfall, it’s been difficult to find buyers for that milk.
“We were selling to Kalona Organic [in Iowa],” Young-Burns explained, “but they can’t take our skim milk because their sales are down.”
Worse, some big food manufacturers turned away from organic foods in favor of “all-natural,” and stopped buying as many organic ingredients from organic farmers (like skim or dehydrated milk). With the industry in full retreat, normally reliable partners had to ditch small operations like Pastureland who couldn’t produce at such low prices.
“We took four pay-price cuts [in 2009], and ended the year just before Christmas by losing our milk contract,” Young-Burns said.
The U.S. economy as a whole is showing signs of life, but the outlook for 2010 is sobering for Pastureland and other dairy farms. Conventional farmers have told Fair Food Fight that their market may not recover until late summer, and organic dairy farmers have made similar predictions. For Pastureland, it’s all about finding someone to buy that skim milk – and the clock is ticking.
“We are less than one month away from the cows being on grass and the traditional start to the pastured-butter season, and we still have not found an outlet for our skim. We have four or five good options, all of which may still work out by May 1, but they may not,” Young-Burns said. “The suspense is killing me.”
The ray of hope in this story is that a diverse, Minnesota dairy market provides Young-Burns’ hope that a milk buyer will turn up for Pastureland.
“Thank god small producers out there are still fighting,” he said. “Thank god Crystal Ball, Castle Rock, and Cedar Summit are holding [big processors'] feet to the fire. Without them, there would be less competition, fewer buyers, and fewer truly sustainable producers to create a market for ourselves.”
Young-Burns also credits strong sales of Pastureland’s butter and cheese with buying him time to find a skim milk buyer.
“Luckily, we have great support from our local consumers and that may make the difference for our farmers,” Young-Burns said. “The more people who buy Pastureland butter, the better off our co-op will be to rewrite the rules and make this all sustainable for our partners up and down the supply chain.
“Because if it ain’t sustainable,” Young-Burns said, “it ain’t sustainable.”
i work at a Mpls. co-op and we’ve been out of Pastureland butter for a little while. Consumers have been asking customer service often about it’s availability. We hope to have it back soon. I enjoy your butter and no avacado can replace that love. It’s nice to have more info for the customer. thanks.
Thanks for this. I was wondering how PastureLand was doing after reading the Strib story on farming losses in 2009.
With the growning awareness of dairy intolerances/allergies and knowing that calcium can be obtained in spinach & broccoli, both of which are readily avaiable across the country, maybe cow’s milk isn’t the thing to keep producing in mass quantities.
The difficulty many people face with the body’s ability to digest such a complicated protein as casein indicates that while milk was once the go-to beverage for “strong bones & body” the downsides are become more obvious and seem to outweigh the yumminess of milk.
Does milk still have a place on our table? Well, clarified butter certainly has it’s health benefits, along with a high smoke point and yogurt (with little sugar of course) is definitley a good source of probiotics, but other than those two things, I can’t argue for it as anything other than a once-in-a-while treat (can you say CHEESE CAKE?!)
I’ve even replaced cream cheese with avacado slices and the results are sublime.
Good luck milk farmers. I think you’re going to need it.
Maybe if you all switched to organic produce farming, you’d help get the price of organic fruits and veggies down so more people can afford them (myself included).
From “growing awareness” to undoing a whole industry, eh? That’s a mighty big jump. Got any numbers to warrant you asking dairy farmers to bag their whole operations?
Digestibility of milk is not the problem here, but to stop dairying would certainly solve our skim milk problem. Your choice for us would be “Small dairy farmers unite – stop selling milk altogether!”? Not the kind of support we were looking for.
Anne Mendelson’s “The Amazing Story of Milk” has some terrific information about milk in general, and the digestibility of milk in its various forms – fluid, fermented, cheese, butter, etc.http://bit.ly/csHDal.
Hey! Pastureland and another local grass-only operation, Cedar Summit, produce the kind of milk that humans have consumed since the advent of dairying. There are plenty of us who are able to handle dairy just fine. Multiple tests on people who claim to have lactose intolerance show that it is often overstated, but even so, butter has very little lactose and can have none if you clarirfy it.
It is not clear that the land Pastureland grazes is best used for crop farming – not all land can easity support being plowed every year. The grasslands of the USA supported huge herds, while crop farming has nearly destroyed the land in only 150 years. Better to eat pastured dairy and meat than rip up the land and sent the nutrients down the Mississippi.
Two months later, and still no Pastureland butter on the shelves. =( Next time I go shopping I’m picking up a couple jars of the CSF cream and making my own. I’ve tried other butters and they’re just not the same!!