Farms all shook up over milk
Northeast dairies are under pressure as major companies look west for organic product
SEARSMONT, Maine — Glendon Mehuren II’S Faithful Venture Farm, 35 miles east of the state capital of Augusta, looks as tranquil as the farms pictured on cartons of organic milk.
But things have been rough since August. That’s when Mehuren got a certified letter from Horizon Organic, which had been buying his milk for 16 years. It said it was terminating his contract in a year. Horizon delivered the same letter to 88 other organic dairy farms from Maine to New York.
In December, Horizon gave all of the affected farmers a reprieve, extending their contracts until February 2023 and paying a bit more for the milk. But the future for small dairy farmers in the Northeast still appears difficult.
For the past 20 years, organic milk offered a lifeline for small farms in the Northeast, allowing them to stay afloat while milking 100 cows or fewer. Now those farms are facing trouble because there is a lack of milk processors in the region and a glut of milk from huge organic dairies in Western states.
One December morning, Mehuren rattled off the names of the many nearby dairy farms that had failed over the past few decades. The farms that survived expanded, hoping that volume would offset low milk prices, he said.
“Milk prices were very low in the early 2000s,” he said, and many small farmers felt the only options were to grow or die. “Then the organic deal kind of came along.”
That gave smaller farmers a third option. Mehuren earned organic certification for his farm and dairy herd and began selling milk to Horizon in 2005.
Since then, organic milk has grown to account for more than 5% of the nation’s milk market, and it is dominated by big businesses. Horizon Organic is owned by the French corporation Danone. Stonyfield Organic, the yogurt-maker in New Hampshire that buys organic milk from New England farmers, is owned by Lactalis. And the farmer-owned cooperative Organic Valley, based in Wisconsin, now has more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Meanwhile, bottling became consolidated in larger milk plants outside New England.
“If you go to a grocery store in Maine, there is Horizon milk on the shelves, and, yes, Horizon is picking up from 14 producers in Maine,” said Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. “But the milk that’s on the shelves may be coming from Colorado, it may be coming from Ohio, it may be coming from Virginia.”
Chris Adamo, the vice president for government affairs, policy and partnerships at Danone North America, said several factors contributed to Horizon’s withdrawal from New England.
“The Northeast region provides a number of continuing challenges to pick up and transport milk to the processing facility we use in Western New York,” Adamo said in an emailed statement.
As Horizon withdraws, another challenge for organic dairy farmers in the Northeast is competition from larger farms.
One company, Aurora Organic, has 27,000 dairy cows on four farms in Colorado and Texas, according to its website — the equivalent of about 500 small New England farms. Alexander called such operations “factory farms.”