Organic Valley creates opportunities for Aroostook County dairy farmers

On a day when the entire state is being drenched with up to six inches of rain, a few dozen mixed Holsteins in Chase Organic Dairy Farm's milking herd pay no heed to the weather as they graze in a wide-open pasture bordered by a thick forest and distant rolling hills. Heads to the ground, their single-minded focus is the mix of legumes and grasses designed to keep both them and the soil healthy and productive.

“This is a dairyman's dream,” says Steve Getz, pool manager for Organic Valley's New England East Region, as he drives a country road running parallel to the 600-acre pasture of Vaughn Chase's farm in Mapleton, a small town in Aroostook County west of Presque Isle. “He's done haying for the year and is hoping not to have a killing frost for a few more weeks. Every day his cows are out grazing in the pasture is money in the bank for him. He's let his girls out and they're packing in all the lushest feed that's out there. They're bagging up. Those cows are in excellent physical condition. Their udders are nice, tight and even. This is a great herd.”

In his role as business agent for the Wisconsin-based organic farmers' cooperative milk pool in Maine, Getz has been quietly building a cluster of organic dairy farms in Maine's northernmost county who've contracted with Organic Valley to deliver their milk to the Stonyfield yogurt plant in Londonderry, N.H. Those efforts are beginning to pay off: 10 Aroostook dairy farmers are now Organic Valley members, with four farms currently on the truck, five in transition to being certified as “organic” and one just starting up.

At a time when Maine's conventional dairy farms continue to fold — the Maine Milk Commission reports 252 dairy farms are operating in Maine this year, down from 271 in 2014 and 305 in 2010 — Organic Valley's organic dairy pool in Maine has grown from 33 dairy farms in July 2014 to 44 farms today. Not surprisingly, a big driver of that growth is the farmer-owned cooperative's ability to pay reliable premium prices for organic milk — approximately $34 per hundredweight, with four additional quality incentives being available. That's almost double the $19.09 being paid for Class 1 conventional milk in Maine, according to the Maine Milk Commission's Oct. 15 price schedule.

There's a reason why both numbers are growing. Getz says demand for Organic Valley's milk is up 10% to 12%, with its Maine sales to Stonyfield being spurred by a U.S. yogurt market that is substantial and growing, with $9 billion in sales and average growth of 9% from 2010 through 2013. “They want milk made from cows eating grass and they want it to be 'chemical-free,'” Getz says. “Their choice of these products is also based on their desire to support small family farms. We connect with consumers.”

Aroostook County initiative

When Vaughn and Laura Chase's cows trek back to the milking barn from their mid-day grazing, they follow “laneways” the Chases installed with guidance from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The laneways ensure that the cows never have to walk through mud to get to fresh grass and they facilitated the creation of 10 separate grazing areas, or paddocks, that enable to Chases to move their cows around on the farm's 600 acres of pasture to optimize grazing.

“We take pasture management seriously,” says Vaughn Chase, whose father started the farm in 1935 and began shipping milk commercially in 1955, the year Vaughn was born. He says their milk at that time essentially was “organic” because the farm didn't use pesticides or chemicals in its pastures. They also rarely used antibiotics, largely because their grass-fed cows stayed healthy.

Both practices made it an easy decision for the Chases to seek official U.S. Department of Agriculture certification as an “organic” dairy farm in 2007. “It was a no-brainer for us,” he says. “The only thing hard for us at that time is that we didn't have a market.”

Initially that problem seemed to be solved in 2010 when MOO Milk was created as a partially farmer-owned collaborative marketing its own Maine-branded organic milk for higher prices than conventional milk. But the company struggled and eventually folded in July 2014, when processing equipment broke down and could no longer meet the company's needs. That left the Chases and 11 other MOO Milk dairy farmers scrambling to find new markets for their milk.

Less than a month after MOO Milk's closure, Organic Valley had signed up six MOO Milk farmers — including two Aroostook dairy farms, the Chases' 100-cow farm in Mapleton and Tom Drew's H.B. Farms in Woodland, just west of Caribou. For Vaughn Chase, the fact that Organic Valley is a farmer-owned cooperative representing 1,800 farmers in 36 states gives him confidence its Aroostook County initiative is sustainable.

“I love it. I always said Organic Valley would be my pick of a company to be with,” he says. “That's a really nicely run company that's thinking of farmers all the time. This fall they gave us a dollar raise [per hundredweight of milk]. It's a stable market. It's a paycheck you can count on week after week.”

'Death, taxes and hauling'

Getz says lining up the Chase Organic Dairy and H.B. Farms as milk suppliers last summer gave Organic Valley a modest but important entry into a region better known for potatoes and broccoli than its dairy farms. With a growing base of Amish farmers attracted by The County's relatively inexpensive land prices, Getz says Organic Valley saw an opportunity to satisfy increasing consumer demand for organic milk while also fulfilling its mission of building stronger organic farming communities.

“You can't help but be impressed by the quality of the land up here,” he says. “The challenge has been the economics of bringing their products to the market. The transportation issue is really the back story of our Aroostook County initiative. As an Amish farmer once said to me, 'If you live and farm in The County, the certainties aren't just death and taxes: It's death, taxes and hauling.' They get that. The Amish can farm up here in the traditional way, but they realize you also have to get your products to the market.”

Getz says Organic Valley's Aroostook milk run initially was subsidized by the cooperative's other Maine milk pool farmers, most of them located in central Maine, who agreed to reduce the price they received per hundredweight of milk by 25 cents to help pay the cost of sending a milk truck up there every other day. “For Maine dairy farmers The County is a special place, even if they haven't been up here themselves,” he says. “Through the cooperative they've invested out of their own pockets to bring a stable market up there, while also increasing the size of our Maine dairy pool.”

The hauling support by the cooperative's non-Aroostook dairy members ended this summer. An additional $1 per hundredweight hauling charge being paid by the Aroostook dairy farmers, reflecting the distance from the Stonyfield processing plant in Londonderry, N.H., will be reevaluated as the milk run's tanker nears its 7,500-gallon capacity, Getz says.

Two Amish families in East Hodgdon, southeast of Houlton on the border with New Brunswick, are now part of Organic Valley's Aroostook milk run: Stephen Petre, whose farm was certified organic in July, and his neighbors, Steven Wolf and his son Asher, who completed their transition to organic production last month. As many as 10 others, including an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania who recently moved to The County, have expressed interest in becoming Organic Valley members.

Getz isn't surprised.

“People aren't blind,” he says. “When they see our milk truck going back and forth every other day, they know something is happening. Maine is a very big state. But it's also a very small state: People know each other, particularly in the dairy industry. The first question — 'Is Organic Valley coming up here?' — we've already answered. The obvious next question is 'Will we stay?'”

For Petre, the arrival of Organic Valley's milk truck in The County last summer was reason enough to tell his feed company, “Sell me organic feed. I'm transitioning.” He's confident the cooperative will stay.

Originally from an Amish farming community in Tennessee, Petre says he was drawn to Aroostook County by the availability of “good soil at reasonable prices.” He eventually found what he was looking for in East Hodgdon, where he bought a 500-acre farm in 2012. He briefly entertained raising sheep, then thought of raising garden vegetables as a small truck farmer before settling on dairy farming. Both his grandfathers, he says, had been dairy farmers in Tennessee.

“I didn't want to start milking and just exist,” he says, describing how he had visited Amish dairy farms in New York state to learn from them the best way to succeed in the notoriously challenging dairy industry. The first thing he discovered is that 75% of them were Organic Valley producers who embraced organic over conventional dairy farming. “They said, 'Hey, it can be done. It's possible. It takes effort, but you can do it.'”

They also advised: “Get Organic Valley up there. You need a stable market.”

Since completing his transition to organic this summer and becoming an Organic Valley supplier, Petre now sees his farm as being on the path of sustainability. “They send a truck up here every other day, they pay me well, it's what I was looking for,” he says.

The economics of hauling

After checking in with Petre, Getz stops by an Amish dairy farm across the road run by Steven Wolf and his son Asher. He points out an area where trees had been cut back as well as a rocky gravel turning area the Wolfs had installed to improve access for the Organic Valley milk truck backing up to the farm's milk storage area. “This is about economics,” Getz says of the turnaround area. “The milk truck can't get stuck here. If it gets stuck, say, in winter time, it has a cascading effect on the rest of the route.”

It's toasty warm inside the Wolf family's home. Small children shyly check out their visitors, then go back to playing. An older girl, wearing a dress and white bonnet, comes up to her father to sit on his lap. Cold rain pelts the window as Steven and Asher anxiously wait for Getz to tell them the results of Organic Valley's final quality check of their farm's milk. The news is good: They're able to join the milk run to Stonyfield.

“In Maine, we have a possible future in dairy farming,” Steven says soon after hearing that news. “When I say 'future,' I'm thinking about the next generation more than I am about my own self.”

From his vantage point, which often includes stints behind the wheel of a 7,500-gallon tanker that makes the Aroostook milk run every other day, Jesse Haskell sees first-hand the impact Organic Valley's initiative is having in The County. A fourth-generation dairy farmer and third-generation milk hauler from Palermo, he says the milk-hauling company started by his grandfather in 1949 — M.A. Haskell & Sons — hauls milk from 58 organic and 30 conventional dairy farms in Maine.

That's roughly 35% of Maine's dairy industry, and Haskell knows all too well just how challenging it is for all the farmers, particularly those tied to conventional markets in which milk prices are often lower than the typical production costs for feed and fuel incurred by Maine's small-size dairy farms. With slim to non-existent margins, it doesn't take much to push a farm over the edge.

Earlier this fall, in an effort to attract and retain drivers who were being lured by non-dairy trucking companies' offering better benefits, Haskell says he reluctantly raised his milk-hauling rate for two small regional routes with volumes too small to make them profitable, affecting eight dairy farms in Waldo County and southern Maine who couldn't afford the higher cost. He's now shopping for health insurance that would be affordable to offer as a benefit for 30 drivers. “It's helped already,” he says of the impact improving the benefits package is having on retaining skilled drivers.

With three of his trucks devoted to hauling for Organic Valley's Maine milk pool — each able to hold up to 66,000 pounds of milk — Haskell says the growing cluster of organic dairy farms in The County is building that milk run's volume, putting it closer to capacity and improving the overall economics of the route.

“It's an extremely bright spot in Maine's dairy industry, at least from where I'm sitting,” he says, acknowledging he's got a vested interest in seeing the Aroostook initiative succeed. “I've appreciated the opportunity Organic Valley has given me and my family. They've been committed to us. They've stuck with us. It's a team effort.”