Jordan Wirfs-Brock: A tale of two dairies

A Tale of Two Dairies
Note: I wrote this as a profile for my Reporting on the Environment class.

March 20, 2009

Near Eaton, Colo., separated by a one-mile stretch of dirt road, Jon Erickson runs two dairies: Lucky Quarter and R Patch O’ Heaven.

The former has 235 milking cows. The latter six. The former produces 400,000 pounds of milk per month. The latter 6,000. At Lucky Quarter, Erickson identifies cows by colored ear-tags with numbers, like 8002. At R Patch O’Heavem, he identifies them by names his children picked, like Dippy and Dreamer. Lucky Quarter is a commercial dairy. Except for the size, it’s nearly identical to every other dairy whose milk lines grocery store refrigerators. R Patch O’ Heaven is a raw milk dairy. It sells unpasteurized milk directly to customers.

Lucky Quarter is selling milk at a loss. R Patch O’ Heaven is making money. Not enough to make up for all the losses at Lucky Quarter, but enough to endure. Erickson and other small farmers rely on niche agriculture, like organics and agritourism, to make a living. Side ventures allow many farmers to continue growing conventional crops – Erickson also grows alfalfa and hay. Niche agriculture doesn’t just touch the people buying quail eggs or goat milk.

“It’s important in regards to food security,” says Madeline Schultz, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University.

For Erickson, producing raw milk isn’t about health or environmental sustainability. It’s about surviving the worst dairy market in decades.

***

At Lucky Quarter, a truck from a local distributor comes twice a week to drain milk from 10-foot-high refrigerated tanks and deliver it to dairy processing facilities like Meadow Gold or Leprino Cheese. There, it will be pasteurized then dried, cultured, powdered, bottled or turned into mozzarella. Erickson has no way of knowing for sure, because his milk is mixed with that of dozens of other dairies. At R Patch O’ Heaven, a two-minute drive away, Erickson pours the milk into half-gallon Ball mason jars, screws on plastic lids, labels them with sharpies – red for “cow,” green for “goat” – and loads them into the back of a Ford F-350 truck that his wife, Joy, drives to a specialty meat shop in Dacono, Colo. Erickson knows the names of the 125 people who will pick up the mason jars.

Commercial milk is pasteurized, heated to high temperatures for a few seconds to kill bacteria. According to the Center for Disease Control’s website, milk pasteurization “prevents an enormous number of foodborne diseases every day.” But the Westin A. Price Foundation, a raw milk advocacy group, claims pasteurized milk causes allergies, heart disease, and cancer. To them, raw milk is “real milk.” The Food and Drug Administration and the American Dairy Association say raw milk is unsafe, and could harbor dangerous bacteria.

Erickson prefers not to pick sides in this debate. “It’s almost demanding that the dairy industry take that stance,” says Erickson. “But I’ll bet you 90 percent of them drink raw milk out of their tank for their families.” That’s what Erickson’s family has always done.

Erickson lives on a farm his grandparents bought in 1941. His father built a dairy barn in the early 1950s that housed a commercial dairy until 1992, when Erickson moved the dairy a mile up the road. For 15 years the barn sat idle, filled with storage boxes. In 2007, Erickson’s wife and kids convinced him to start a raw milk dairy in the same spot where his grandfather used to milk 80 cows a day by hand.

“When we started the raw milk dairy, I said, wouldn’t it be nice if we had one of each breed? He said no,” recalls Joy. “Well, my husband’s mushy.”

They now have Jersey, Holstein, red Holstein and Guernsey cows. Twice a day, cows file into the barn three at a time. Erickson slings the milking apparatus – which looks like Scuba equipment – over his shoulder and carries it out to the barn. A grey cat hisses in the corner, then runs underneath a cow to lap up spilled milk. In the room next door, Erickson takes mason jars out of a Maytag washing machine and lines them up.

Lucky Quarter, the commercial dairy, operates 20 hours a day. The cows enter 12 at a time. A woman, wearing a white bandana decorated with pictures of smiling cows, sanitizes the teats with iodine and attaches the milkers, which hang in rows. As they pump, they twitch and jerk. The cows stare straight ahead, calm and quiet. In the back of the barn, Spanish music plays on a radio and a white board has a tally of the cows: sick/enferma, treat/curar, fresh/fresca, heat/celo and catch/agamar.

At commercial dairies, Erickson has seen manure and urine get sucked up into the milking equipment when a cow kicks it over. “That’s just repulsive to think about,” he says while walking through a herd of goats who nibble on his sweatshirt, “but I’d drink that milk anyway.”

The state Department for Public Health and Environment monitors the cleanliness of Lucky Quarter but doesn’t regulate raw milk production. In California and Connecticut, consumers can buy raw milk in stores. But in most states, including Colorado, it’s illegal to buy or sell raw milk. Consumers must purchase a share in a cow or goat herd directly from the farmer. The consumer – not the state – enforces quality standards.

The direct relationship between Erickson and his customers is what lets him charge $7.50 per gallon for the milk in mason jars when he’s losing nearly $0.60 on every gallon of milk piped from the tanks at his commercial dairy.

***

“I need two metal tops,” Erickson says. “One gal that comes, she likes the metal tops.”

Erickson and Josh Rush, a local farmer who helps out two days a week, pack the mason jars into coolers and load them into the back of the F-350.

“There any milk for my pigs?” Rush says.

“Yes,” says Erickson, who’s wearing a brown “Got Dairy?” T-shirt.

“Happy pigs today.”

In addition to pigs, Rush raises chickens, goats, hay, corn, cucumbers and onions on his 150-acre farm. He sells garlic on eBay for $10 a pound.

“You name it, I grow it,” Rush says.

This kind of variety is common for small farmers. The Tedford family runs a 160-acre farm near Fort Lupton, Colo. They grow alfalfa, chickens, and specialty game birds.

“Small farmers really need to focus on finding a niche,” Justin Tedford says, “so that they can continue to farm.”

Tedford says that because game birds are a luxury item, sales have suffered recently. Rush has also seen a decline in his products. Which is why diversity is so important for small farmers. When the market is bad for grain, it could be good for livestock, and vice versa.

Small farming is expanding. According to the USDA’s 2007 Census of Agriculture, between 2002 and 2007 there were 118,000 new farming operations with less than $1,000 in sales. The average size of new farms is 201 acres, compared to 418 acres for established farms. Many new farmers are coming from a non-agricultural background.

“A lot of raw milk producers aren’t traditional farmers,” says Erickson. “They decided to jump into the livestock business, and I admire that.”

For Erickson, farming isn’t just a way to make a living: it’s a lifestyle.

“It’s a different way of thinking about what’s the good life,” he says.

***

Joy sits behind the wheel of the F-350, getting ready to head out on the hour-long drive to Dacono. They have so many customers the milk won’t fit in the back of the family car anymore. Outside the truck, a dog – she’s half coyote, Joy says – licks a block of ice.

“The commercial dairy farmer does not like the raw milk dairy farmer,” Joy says.

John Johnson, Erickson’s neighbor, owns the largest dairy barn in Colorado. He milks 800 cows an hour. Erickson recalls Johnson once told Joy, “Hey, what’re you guys doing with this raw milk, you’re a bunch of traitors. She said, John, for what we do, and for what you do, it’s not even a drop in the bucket.”

Of the more than 9 million cows in the US, two-thirds are in dairies larger than Erickson’s. And every one is struggling. The slumping economy has slowed the export of dairy products, causing a surplus that sent prices plunging. Currently, milk sells for $10 per 100 pounds, half of what it sold for a year ago. In the dairy industry, where profit margins have always been slim, farmers can’t recoup their production costs, says Bill Wailes, head of animal science as Colorado state University.

“Nobody – no matter how big, how efficient – is safe from it,” Erickson says. “January and February were pretty much rock bottom.” In January, Johnson’s dairy filed for bankruptcy.

Lucky Quarter also suffers. “I’m not even sure if we got $30,000 or $40,000 a month,” Erickson says. He used to gross twice that per month. “We’ve got bills hanging out there that we can’t pay.”

It’s difficult for dairy farmers to adjust their budgets. They establish feed contracts months in advance. Many are still paying high prices from 2008’s grain shortage.

“They are pretty much price takers,” says Wailes. “They don’t set what they need to have for their product.”

But in the raw milk business, Erickson doesn’t take prices: he sets them. If the cost of feed goes up, he raises the cost of the milk. And his customers are willing to pay.

“The clientele…I’d describe them as being out in left field,” Erickson says. “These people put a high priority on specialty meat and dairy products. They don’t have to worry about paying for groceries.”

***

On the way to a his children’s school 20 miles east, Erickson points out the unmarked line where irrigation ends. To the west, sprinklers stand on ready fields. To the east, “Well, there’s nothing out there,” says Erickson. He pauses. “There used to be nothing here.”

Erickson has watched suburbs grow towards his farm. Having a nearby population center gives Erickson direct marketing opportunities, but it also threatens the future of farming.

“That urban-rural interface is a tough deal,” he says, and it’s just one of the many complexities farmers face.

In the house where Erickson grew up, he sits with his father, Bill, at a table covered in stacks of paper. As they discuss immigration laws, emissions regulations and water rights, they both remove their glasses and grasp the stems in their fingers. Erickson and his father disagree on some things, like the profitability of the raw milk dairy.

“No matter how thin you make a pancake, it’s got two sides,” Bill says. But he’s glad his son chose farming. “I’m real proud. Agriculture is still a way of life and not just a way to make a living.”

For Erickson and other small farmers, niche agriculture isn’t simply a way to weather difficult economic times.

“We do this because we choose it,” Erickson says. “We choose it because we enjoy it.”