Several New England states are urging consumers to chip in and save the region’s dwindling dairy farms, which are struggling with record-low milk prices.
Agriculture officials and farmers in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts have launched a program called Keep Local Farms to stop a trend that has seen New England lose two-thirds of its dairy farms since 1990. Organizers say they hope to appeal to consumers’ growing taste for local foods, pitching dairy products from anywhere in the six-state New England region as local.
“It would mean a real change to our landscape in New Hampshire and all of New England if we were to lose a significant part of our dairy industry,” said Lorraine Stuart Merrill, New Hampshire’s agriculture commissioner and a dairy farmer.
As part of Keep Local Farms, organizers set up a Web site for people to make contributions, which will be divided among farmers, and are urging universities and other institutions to charge a little extra for dairy products in their cafeterias, with the proceeds going to farmers. The University of Vermont is the first to sign on.
Organizers also hope within the next year to launch a co-branding effort that would put labels on local dairy products and ask consumers to pay premiums for the locally made milk, cheese and other dairy goods.
Officials, who launched the project this week, pointed to a sad irony in which consumer demand for local produce is taking off when the largest part of New England agriculture is withering.
Many dairy farmers say they have left the region because a highly complex federal pricing system has failed to keep pace with costs. The pricing system, which dates from the 1930s, sets a national floor price that farmers are paid for their milk, then tweaks it to respond to supply and demand in the market and different costs faced by farmers in different regions.
Farmers are getting about $11.40 per hundred pounds of milk, down from $18.72 last year, officials said, attributing much of the change to declining exports amid the global recession. Put another way, farmers are getting 97 cents for a gallon of milk that costs $1.80 on average to produce. Some stores price milk at $5 or more per gallon.
In July, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would temporarily raise the price paid for milk and cheddar cheese through its dairy price support program. Kelly Loftus, spokeswoman for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, said that hadn’t had much of an effect on the prices farmers get for fluid milk so far. (AP)
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Reader response:
“It is time to stand up for our farms! I am saddened to see the farms slowly disappearing, I love to buy local and sometimes have a hard time finding them in the store, we need to really make a strong statement to all the stores that we will not buy from them unless they use local farmers. The market in Chicago is hurting our farmers and we helped them once, we can do it again! Remember Farm Aide!” — Patricia Bruhn, Pebbles GraphicsÂ
