On a sweltering Wednesday afternoon, with the threat of rain hovering in the distance, Victor Womack was doing what he has done for the past six decades: puttering around the outbuildings that make up his dairy farm.
Inside a small concrete barn, Terry and Holly Anderson, Womack’s two ranch hands, led a dozen cows into a series of stalls before attaching suction cups to their udders.
The milk being pumped into a nearby refrigerated tank was white, but it means green to Womack. Increasingly, though, the green is becoming less and less.
It costs Womack, who runs the last dairy farm in East Baton Rouge Parish, more to produce a gallon of milk than he can get by selling it, and he worries that he might have to do what hundreds of Louisiana dairy farmers have done before him: shut down.
Running a dairy farm in the heat of a Southern summer is already difficult: the cows don’t give as much milk in the heat. But a toxic mixture of other factors has piled on, including costs for land, buildings and equipment that have risen faster than the price of milk. Variable costs, such as for feed, fuel, fertilizer and electricity, also have climbed faster than the price of milk, according to Louisiana Agricultural Commissioner Mike Strain.
Many farmers were forced to borrow against their land and other assets to meet expenses. Once in debt, they were unable to recover, Strain said.
Hundreds of farms in Louisiana, mostly in St. Helena, Tangipahoa and Washington parishes, have shut down.
When Victor Womack married his wife Joy in the 1980s, there were more than 1,000 dairy farms in Louisiana. In 2004, there were about 300, according to the Southeast United Dairy Industry Association, a multi-state promotional group. Now, there are just 119, and the number is still dropping.
It’s a national trend. There were 45,344 dairy farms nationwide in 2014, according to Hoard’s Dairyman, an industry magazine. That was about one-third of the number in 1992.
The decline is especially pronounced in the Southeast, where a combination of bad economics, national politics and climate change has made it harder and harder for the farms to survive.
Womack’s assessment is blunt. “There’s no future in the dairy business,” he said.
Supply and demand
The most recent farm closure came from Kleinpeter, the Baton Rouge-based dairy processor that sells products throughout south Louisiana, including in the New Orleans area.
Until earlier this year, Kleinpeter ran a 1,500-acre, 300-head dairy farm near Montpelier in St. Helena Parish, which served as one of its suppliers of fresh milk. But as times got tougher in the industry, the farm ended up competing with the other local — and mostly smaller — dairy farms that Kleinpeter needed to stay in business.
“The biggest complaint about the farm was from the dairy farmers,” said Vice President Kenny Kleinpeter. “We needed their milk more without our farm.”
Buying more local milk hopefully will help prevent those farms from having to shut down, he said. He added that Kleinpeter pays a premium for high-quality fresh milk with a low bacteria count.
But that premium doesn’t go very far. It adds only a little to the price of milk, which is set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on a regional basis.
Notification of the price comes to farmers in something called Federal Order No. 7. The most recent order set the price at just under $14 per hundredweight, or about 11 gallons.
“It costs us between $18 and $20 to produce a hundredweight of milk,” Joy Womack said. And in recent years, those costs have risen.
The cost of grain has gone up. The Womacks used to vaccinate their cows themselves, but now regulations require a registered veterinarian do that. And things that increase efficiency, like tractors run by computers, now require trained technicians to service them, rather than Victor Womack tinkering in the shed.
The Womacks recently sold 33,000 pounds of milk to Kleinpeter and were paid less than $5,000, including the premium. That amounted to about two weeks of milking, Joy Womack said. Factoring in her costs, like the $3,800 for feed she needed for the same period, leaves no money for extras.
“We don’t go out for pizza unless I have a coupon or it’s a special day,” she said.
The Womacks also keep a beef herd that helps offset the expenses, but it’s not enough.
The harsh realities of the business environment have not only pushed farmers out of the dairy business but also made sure that no others are coming in.
“You know what the average age of the dairy farmer in Louisiana is? 70. Seven-0,” Strain said. The only farmers left are the ones who began 40 years ago or inherited their farms, he said.
Milking Washington
Changing the way milk is priced is an uphill battle, Strain said. It might require, literally, an act of Congress.
According to Strain, a good option would be for Congress to authorize a regional dairy compact — an agreement among states that would allow them to set their own price for milk. A compact was authorized in the Northeast in 1996 but was allowed to expire five years later. And it’s unlikely that lawmakers could be persuaded to set up another one in the Southeast, he said.
Strain pointed to the upper Midwest states, where milk is cheaper to produce because of a more conducive climate, as the main opponents of such agreements. Those states have little incentive to support a measure that would enable dairy farms in the South to compete with the Midwestern farms, he said.
Louisiana now imports about 70 percent of the milk its residents consume, most of that from the upper Midwest.
“I have tried for 15 years to get a resolution” through Congress, Strain said. “We just do not have the votes.”
Heating up
The production of milk is a relatively straightforward matter: feed the cows, milk the cows. But even though the steps are simple, the process is not.
Cows are sensitive to external factors, including temperature, noise and the unfamiliar.
For instance, when a visitor entered the Womacks’ barn, Joy cautioned him to be quiet, so as not to startle the cows and cause them to give less milk.
And dairy cows — mostly Holsteins, Jerseys and Guernseys — don’t like hot weather, something Louisiana has in abundance.
Kleinpeter said it’s getting worse. He pointed to another possible factor: climate change.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the cows are giving less and less milk.
“It’s just getting harder and harder to milk cows down here in the Southeast,” Kleinpeter said.
Victor Womack has noticed a change in how his cows give too, even in the summer.
“I think so,” he said when asked if climate change was affecting his cows’ milk production. “It’s got to be something.”
Strain agreed.
Higher temperatures and violent storms add stress to the cows and result in less milk that’s more expensive to produce, he said.
Bleak future
The slide in the number of dairy farms in Louisiana doesn’t look like it’s going to turn around anytime soon.
“We are taking about an industry that may not be here in five or 10 years,” Kleinpeter said.
Strain said he hopes a change in the White House may lead to some progress.
“The only thing that could change is the federal government taking into account the price of production,” he said. But he didn’t sound optimistic.
He pointed to Alabama, which has just 40 dairies remaining, as a harbinger of where Louisiana could be headed.
For Victor Womack, the dairy farm is a legacy from his father and grandfather. The Womacks have two sons, who sometimes help out, but when asked if they plan to pass the farm along to their sons when they retire, the parents’ answer is short.
“Not no, but hell no,” Joy Womack said.
Source: The Advocate
