Ag day count: Dairy farm tally dwindling

AUGUSTA – Displays in the State House Hall of Flags on Agriculture Day Tuesday touted Maine’s bounty. Blueberry juice, Maine potato chips, smoothies made with Maine-produced milk, artisan cheeses and vegetarian wraps made with organic produce tempted legislators to take time from politicking to eat.

At the same time representatives of the state’s agriculture industries let legislators know just how the state’s farms are doing. One of the most telling signs, a yellow sticker on the Maine Dairy Industry Association display, gave lawmakers something besides food to munch on.

It read: “358 farms.” It covered up last year’s number of Maine dairy farms: 390. The year before that, it was 420, and in the 1950s, it was 1,000.

The same display showed that the amount of milk produced in Maine has remained nearly stable.

“It is amazing to think that a single cow can produce 60,000 pounds of milk in a year,” Galen Larrabee, a Knox dairy farmer and MDIA member, said. Larrabee attributes that type of production success to good farm management and incredible strides in genetics.

“But it won’t be much good if there is no one to farm,” he said. “The average age of Maine’s dairy farmer is 59 years old.”

In many cases, there is no family member lining up to take over those farms. Even with apprentice programs offered by the Maine Department of Agriculture and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, those wanting to get into farming in Maine find it simply out of their financial reach, Larrabee said.

“Could someone take over our farm in Knox? No way,” he said. “We have more than $580,000 just in equipment, and there isn’t a bank that will touch you unless your cows are already paid for. At $14 per hundredweight [as the payment for milk] it just doesn’t cut it.”

Maine has a lot going for it in attracting new, young farmers, he said.

“If you go west, there’s not a single farm under 400 cows. If you are looking for a small, family farm, Maine is the place. We also have the largest percentage of organic milk farms, which is attractive to new farmers,” Larrabee said.

In addition, Maine is “way ahead of everyone else” when it comes to state help for farmers. Larrabee praised the state’s Dairy Stabilization Program, known as “the tiered program,” which provides payments to dairy farmers when the price of milk drops below a certain level.

But for Maine to continue to provide milk for its own people, “we need some creative thinking,” Larrabee said. The MDIA is looking at cooperative fuel purchases and pursuing a closer working relationship between the various milk cooperatives to help pressure changes in milk pricing on the federal level, he said.

The state needs to investigate just what happens to the profit when the price of milk to the farmer drops and it remains the same, or higher, in the supermarket, he said.

“Somebody other than the dairy farmer is getting that money,” he said.

Maine is a perfect state for dairying, he said.

“Our land is marginal. It works for dairy,” he said. But as the number of farms continues to dwindle, so will Maine’s milk supply.

“You can eventually buy milk from other states, but you are going to pay for it,” Larrabee said. “We work hard in Maine, very, very hard, to put the best quality product on the shelf.”