Costs killing Maine farmers Levant woman invites delegation to forums on struggling dairy industry

LEVANT – Dairy farmer Brian Call doesn’t have a fancy milking parlor. He hand-carries the portable milking machine to each of his 30 cows, wiping their teats with pages ripped from an old telephone book. “Another way to save money,” he comments.

It’s backbreaking work and it never stops. Call’s barn is as it was when his grandfather used it: wooden stanchions, no automatic waste gutters, no computer chips in his cow’s ears. This is farming the way it has been done for generations on the Call farm – since 1820 – and, at least for Brian Call and his wife, Joan Gibson, it appears to be headed for extinction.

“The saturation point has been reached,” Gibson said this week. “The enormous prices now for fuel and fertilizer and grain are just going to push family farms over the horizon, and quickly. America won’t even hear the thud.”

Picture this, Gibson said. “I stand in a vestibule. On one side is a huge, growing demand for local organic goods, swelled by millions of consumers, yearning and beckoning for affordable good food. On the other side is a gaunt weary farmer, surrounded by decaying buildings, run-down land, another long day of drudgery and the only hope of compensation the sale of his heritage: his land, as he bites his arm off to feed himself. This is the reality of dairy farming in Maine. It’s brutal.”

The couple, who soon will dip into retirement savings to keep their farm afloat for one more year, are organizing a statewide meeting of farmers and state and federal officials to come up with long-term, sustainable solutions to what Gibson calls the crisis in Maine’s small farming community.

Gibson has invited Maine’s congressional leaders to join farmers and other dairy industry representatives at the Mystic Tie Grange in Kenduskeag at 1 p.m. Wednesday, May 14, and to a follow-up meeting at the same place and time on May 28.

In her letter to the congressional delegation and Maine’s dairy industry members, Gibson wrote, “People need to be concerned that small farms and small businesses are closing their doors, as they are the backbone of our economy and they fuel rural communities. We are becoming ghost farms and ghost towns, the end of an era and the start of a vacuum to be filled by monopolies, a form of economic totalitarianism.”

By telling her family’s personal financial story, Gibson hopes solutions will be found to save Maine’s small, family farms.

“I will tell you that we realize no profit from our dairy farm, nothing,” she said.

Call printed last month’s accounting on the back of an insurance bill in his barn. His revenue, the price he was paid in March for his milk, was $2,194. His expenses easily surpassed that: $2,666 for grain, $78 for fuel (a low amount, he said, because they weren’t working the fields last month), $340 for electricity, $150 to the veterinarian and $120 for breeding services.

This year, for the second summer, Gibson will grow and market organic vegetables to augment the milk check.

“We work for nothing and we live like hell,” Gibson said. “No insurances, no money for repairs, a huge unpaid grain bill, and we wonder how we will get the hay out of the fields this summer – diesel is almost $5 a gallon. If one of us needs hospitalization or nursing home care later, our farm will be attached and sold. Paying for groceries is always an exercise in strong-armed finance. My husband sells some junk or a calf or cuts wood after working 16 hours, and we get the money that way.”

The couple estimates they are losing $2,000 to $3,000 a month in operating expenses. They had zero income for 2007. “We live in abject poverty,” Gibson said, despite their only debt being two tractor payments. “We’ve been good, hardworking farmers who are fiscally responsible who work very long days and are fighting constant fatigue. We’re being crushed alive.”

Gibson said the goal of the meeting is to discuss the pressing issues at hand and to bring forth solutions and strategies. Some of these include misdirected funding that isn’t aimed at small farmers, monopolization of resources by large farms and big businesses, reinstatement of antitrust and fair trade practices laws, over-the-top unprecedented oil gouging, immediate emergency relief needed for small dairy farmers, more cost-based milk pricing that flexes with market changes, increasing U.S. agricultural sector growth, damaging imbalanced import-export quotas, and the effect of these influences on national food supplies and security.

Gibson has included a tour of her farm after the meeting.

She said she was driven to gathering farmers together after repeated failed attempts to obtain federal and state help.

“In both the past and recently, I’ve touched base with every federal and state agricultural agency for grants and other forms of help, and there is nothing available for small farmers,” she said. “However, I understand the USDA has a new farmer-processor grant program where one Maine blueberry farmer recently received a $150,000 grant to market blueberry dog biscuits. How is grant money used to market blueberry dog biscuits adding to national food security?”

Gibson said Maine’s small farmers need grant money to rebuild their infrastructure to allow them to stay in business. “We are producing food for the American people, not their pets. Priorities are clearly askew and the taxpayer needs to have faith in a credible national food security program that puts tax dollars where they’ll be the most effective.” She said the forum could help initiate practical ideas that could keep small dairy farmers in business.

“We need a strategy to move forward and implement solutions before the barn doors permanently close,” Gibson said. “There is a way to continue farming and make it strong, but different camps need to come together, dialogues need to come forward, and resources need to be tweaked and reallocated – less talking and more doing.’

“America is dying in our arms,” she said, “and we don’t need to let this happen.

“I want to do my part. I want my farm to continue another 200 years, this time in prosperity, not in gaunt want. I believe in my heart that people can work outside of greed and a personal, self-centered focus. People need to be awakened and motivated, and the good in them made active.”

For information about the Kenduskeag farm forum, contact Gibson at 884-7117 or juanagibson@juno.com.

A similar event is being sponsored by the town of Farmington and will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Monday, April 28, at the West Farmington Grange on Bridge Street. The contact person there is Jo Josephson of Maine Farmland Trust at 778-2021 or josephson@gwi.net.

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