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Focus on more dairy farmers, not just more dairy cows
April 14, 2003

Dave Minar runs Cedar Summit Farm near New Prague and is a member of the Land Stewardship Project. Here are his thoughts about how to strengthen the dairy industry in Minnesota.

New Prague, Minn. — I have been a dairy farmer in Scott County for almost 35 years. My wife Florence and I produce milk using a herd of about 160 cows on 300 acres. According to some experts in the industry, our farm is too small to be competitive financially.

However, we are not only competitive, we are also doing something that is all too rare in rural areas -- attracting our children back to the farm. In recent years, three of our children have come back to join our farming operation.

This and other developments make us positive about the future of dairying in this state. We really think there is a future for well-managed farms owned and operated by family farmers.

Don't get me wrong. Everything isn't rosy. Dairy farmers are leaving the business in record numbers. The problem facing farmers today is caused by low prices and a focus on increasing production, instead of increasing profit.

However, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture's response has been to promote the kind of outside investment that will only increase milk production, and thus lower prices. Specifically, the MDA is pushing a "livestock friendly" initiative that would make it attractive for counties to ease restrictions on large-scale livestock operations.

For a county to be declared "livestock friendly," it must remove all limits on how large individual livestock operations can be. That means even the lowest animal size limits -- 1,000 dairy cows, for example -- would be considered unfriendly to livestock development. Keep in mind that 96 percent of dairy herds in this state are less than 200 cows.

We need to focus on the number of dairy farmers, not just the number of dairy cows. Cows don't shop on Main Street --people do. A community is better off with 10 100-cow dairies, rather than one 1,000-cow operation. - Dave Minar

More recently, the MDA has been trying to get the state Legislature to pass a bill that would allow foreign investors to own farmland. The most obvious problem with this is that it will drive up the price of farms.

Farmers from other countries with deeper pockets, and backed by investors, will outbid local farmers wanting to expand, or beginning farmers wanting to get into the dairy industry. When the offers are from local people, the price paid for a farm better reflects the profit that farm can reasonably be expected to generate.

Like the "livestock friendly" initiative, making it easier for foreign investors to buy farmland does nothing to help existing dairy farmers. It can be expected that these foreign investors will build dairies of around 700 cows or more, as they've done in places like Ohio. Larger producers receive better prices per hundredweight through volume premiums, and reduced or eliminated milk hauling fees.

This means that when I sell my milk on the regular market, I'm getting paid less than a producer with several hundred cows, even though there's no difference in product quality. Even though smaller farmers like myself have lower production costs, it's difficult to compete with a mega-dairy that receives a bonus for simply being big.

The solution to the dairy crisis is not to recruit outside investors to build the biggest dairies possible so we can claim we are number one in dairy cows. In Minnesota, we need to focus on the number of dairy farmers, not just the number of dairy cows. Cows don't shop on Main Street --people do. A community is better off with 10 100-cow dairies, rather than one 1,000-cow operation.

We need to help our existing producers. One way is to help them adopt and use systems that increase profitability, not just productivity.

On Cedar Summit Farm, we are using two strategies. We are marketing a large portion of our production through an on-farm processing plant we built last year. Customers in our neighborhood, as well as the Twin Cities, pay us a premium price for our milk, cream, butter, yogurt, ice cream and cheese.

And we produce our milk using management intensive rotational grazing (MIRG), which moves cows through a series of grass paddocks. This dramatically reduces feed costs, while spreading manure in an environmentally sound way.

We have been very happy with grazing since we made the switch from conventional dairying over a decade ago. We aren't the only ones who find this system is a viable alternative to building an expensive, environmentally hazardous large-scale confinement operation.

The University of Wisconsin's Center for Dairy Profitability has found that Wisconsin graziers, on average, are consistently more profitable because of their lower operating expenses. These grazing operations are outperforming the large-scale confinements, despite the fact that they generally produce less milk per cow and have smaller herds.

Greater profitability per cow allows dairy farms to be viable on a smaller scale, and that's good for rural communities. University of Wisconsin researchers have found that the percent of dairy feed purchased locally goes down as herd size increases. That means larger dairies are doing less to support other local farm enterprises like crop production. University of Minnesota researchers found similar results when examining the purchasing patterns of large-scale livestock operations in southwest Minnesota.

With our Minnesota winters, we can never build and operate large-scale confinement facilities as cheaply as they can in California and Texas. So instead of stepping onto someone else's playing field, why not focus on our homegrown strengths?

We can grow lots of quality grass and other forages. We also have a base of family farmers who are topnotch managers, and a rural infrastructure set up to support those farmers. Why not take steps to encourage innovative production and marketing systems that build upon those strengths?

I'm not saying that rotational grazing and on-farm processing offer the only viable future for dairying in Minnesota. However, we are increasingly seeing that when farms focus on profitability, rather than no-holds-barred productivity, in the end more successful dairy operations result. And that means more families buying at local shops, attending local churches and supporting local schools. It also means more farm kids see a reason to return to the land.

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