Fisher working to halt dairy exodus from state

By MILES JACKSON
AFP Correspondent

TRENTON — The New Jersey Department of Agriculture released a “framework” on Aug. 18 for preserving the state’s dwindling number of dairy farms.
The 11-page document was designed to be a start for a discussion by all parties involved in milk production on options to address the “severe pricing crisis” that has hit New Jersey’s dairy farmers as hard if not harder than other dairy farmers in states with lower production costs, according to state agriculture officials.
The options provided in the document will be discussed at four regional workshops which started on  Aug. 26 in Sussex County and will end on Sept. 14 in Burlington County.
State Agriculture Secretary Douglas Fisher said the options outlined in the framework: “Examine ways in which we might direct more of the dairy dollar to New Jersey’s farmers so they can remain in the business of providing a supply of wholesome, fresh milk to our residents and our schoolchildren.”
“Remain in business” is a key phrase on the report’s purpose and a harsh reality of dairy farming in New Jersey.
The number of dairy farms going out of business is a stark reminder of the severity of the pricing crisis and the precarious position those who milk cows for a living hold in the Garden State.
“In the 1960s, New Jersey had more than 3,500 dairy farms,” Fisher said on Aug. 18. “Today we have 87.”
And that number is dropping daily, with the state losing nearly 20 dairy farms in the last year alone.
And two producers in the Salem County area stopped milking their cows in August. Others interviewed after the report’s release said they are waiting for some sort of lifeline to help them stay in business or they, too, will sell their cows.
Others remain determined to keep their cows, but realize the uphill battle they face in a state with high land value, high property taxes, high labor costs and a rigorous regulatory process.
“For us to get more for our milk, somebody else is gong to have to give up money,” said Milton “Woody” Eachus, a Salem County farmer who milks about 325 Holsteins and for whom the word quitting isn’t in his immediately vocabulary.
At the bottom of the chain that also includes wholesale milk buyers, processors and retailers, Eachus said dairy farmers nationally are being squeezed with little chance of relief in sight. During a recent trip to the supermarket, Eachus said he saw ultra-pasteurized milk labeled as coming from Mexico.
“Everybody says they want to help the farmer, but nobody wants to let go of any money,” He said after a long day of cutting and storing silage for the coming winter months. “There’s not four or five places you can go looking for the best price, so when it comes to price, the man sets it and you take it or walk.”
Margery Eachus has been milking cows all her life, coming from a family that milked cows going generations back and marrying a dairy farmer with whom she operates a hilltop farm on Route 40, a main highway that cuts through the heart of southern New Jersey.
Of their four children, two — Kevin Eachus and Melanie Richman, both in their 40s — have remained on the farm. The family has everything invested in the farm, including dairy science degree of their daughter, the farm’s herdswoman.
“This is what I’ve done all my life, it’s what we do as a family,” Mrs. Eachus said. “But we’re going to have to get at least a dollar more per hundredweight (of milk) for three years just to pay for this year’s loans.”
Even a dollar doesn’t make sense when looking at the total picture of their production numbers. A milk cooperative pays them $14 a hundredweight of milk it costs them $18 to produce.
“We’re getting paid the same amount as we were getting paid when Jimmy Carter was president,” she said. “And yet you go to the supermarket and milk is $3.95 a gallon when it was $2 a gallon back then.”
If just part of the increase in retail price had gone to farmers, Margery Eachus said the producers of raw milk wouldn’t be in such a bind today. But with a limited number of wholesale buyers in “cooperatives” buying for sale to processors, she said the pricing was out of her hands.
“The man comes to you and offers this much,” she said. “And if you don’t take it, he just goes somewhere else. There’s a lot of milk being produced and not enough people buying it for sale further up the chain.
Margery Eachus testified to this during the hearings held by the state Department of Agriculture from late 2009 to early 2010. The testimony from these hearings was the genesis of the stabilization framework released on Aug. 18. The family looks forward to attending the workshops that will be the next step in the process.
But for some farmers, the process was too little too late.
In the beginning of August, Gary Hitchner, 59, and his two sons, Josh and Matt, both in their 30s, sold all of their 170 Holsteins to the slaughterhouse. Some 60-plus heifers still carrying calves, both which will be sold late after birthing.
Standing in the yard of the unnaturally quiet lot between the main house and the barn, Gary Hitchner and his two sons ticked off the reasons for dropping out of the business.
A recession that has hit every segment of the economy, a federally-formulated Milk Marketing Order that set prices for bulk milk too low and left New Jersey’s dairy farmers at a disadvantage to dairy farmers in states with lower production costs, years of drought, more years of milk prices lower than the cost of production for dairy farmer across the nation and the need to make a decision on putting a million or more dollars of investment into their dairy operation that wasn’t making money were all on the short list of reasons to sell out.
But the solution lay on the supermarket dairy department where prices for processed milk have far outpaced they price dairy farmers get for raw milk, Gary Hitchner said.
“Back in 1969, we were getting paid almost a dollar a gallon for raw milk and it was a dollar twenty-five at the supermarket,” he added.  “Now, we were getting a dollar-twenty-five for raw milk and it’s close to four dollars at the supermarket.”
Like Margery Eachus, the Hitchners said someone further up the chain that brings milk to the consumer had to give a little to the people milking the cows. While the few wholesale buyers seem to post healthy profits, the Gary Hitchner said the stranglehold they had on the market gave them little incentive to share those profits with farmers.
“There’s been investigations about monopolies, but they never seem to go anywhere,” he said.
Although it hurt to the bone, the decision to stop milking cows was a matter of common sense, said 36-year-old Matt Hitchner.
“We’re just a small family farm,” he said. “If you can’t get the price to make it pay, you do something else.”
The three men said they had the 500 acres of land purchased by Gary Hitchners’s father and grandfather more than 80 years earlier.
“And we have the equipment to grow grain,” Gary said. “But that’s not enough, not nearly enough, to support three families.”
Leaving the farm is also out of the question according to Matt and Josh, two young, men who have their most productive years in front of them.
“To go to vegetables would require irrigation for all our acreage and that’s a huge investment,” Josh said. “What else? I’m not sure yet.”
But for Josh and Matt, leaving the farm altogether was unthinkable.
“This is in our blood,” Josh said, glancing out at the fields of corn surrounding the old brick farmhouse and a cluster of buildings filled with machinery.  “Leaving the land that’s been in the family that long  isn’t an option.”
About 10 miles south on Salem County’s border with Cumberland County, 68-year-old Kenny Wilson was still in the old stanchion barn kept immaculately clean despite its obvious long use.
Across the yard, his son was welding machinery for growing processing potatoes, the lifeblood of the farm’s income.
Wilson and his brother helped out his son and his brother’s son with the potatoes, but the dairy was the passion of the two older men.
“Do we make money milking cows?” Wilson asked rhetorically. “I can’t really say. I’ve never really looked.”
The older Wilson brothers were milking 56 Holsteins, down from the 65 to 70 they usually milk for reasons left unstated.
But Kenny Wilson was sure of one thing: The Holsteins nosing in the barn window to see who the stranger was would stay on the family’s farm for the foreseeable future.
“I’ll milk cows until I can’t do it anymore.” He said, leaning on a well-worn push broom that kept the barn’s concrete floors almost as shiny as polished marble.
For 28 out of every 30 days, Kenny Wilson said he gets up at 3:30 every morning to milk cows, something he’s done for the past 50 years.
“I figure I work for nothing when you go and look at the numbers and try and find what I get paid for this,” he said. “But it’s a way of life. And it’s not going to change. For me, at least.”