There are no days off for Edwin “Scooter” LaPrise and his family at their 12-acre dairy farm, EMMA Acres.
They rise by 5:30 a.m., 365 days a year, rain or shine. “Sometimes we have breakfast before coming down, sometimes we don’t; it depends on the day,” said Maggie LaPrise, Scooter’s 19-year-old daughter. “Then we get chores started. We milk the cows first, then go feed the calves, clean all the barns and feed everyone.”
Morning chores are usually done by 9 a.m. Then in the afternoon, around 4 p.m., the whole cycle starts up again.
For Scooter, it’s a way of life. “You can’t get farming out of you,” he told WPRI 12 on a recent visit to the Exeter farm. “I mean, once it’s in you, you’re there.”
The LaPrise family’s routine was once the most common type of agriculture in Rhode Island. But today, it’s vanishing.
In 1964, the federal Census of Agriculture found 420 dairy farms in Rhode Island, many of them small operations to sustain an individual farm family. Now, a half-century later, there are just 11 in the whole state — nine cow dairies and two goat dairies. (One of the nine cow dairies only produces cheese and yogurt.)
“The number of dairy farmers going out of business is a scary thought, to be honest,” said Ken Ayars, longtime chief of the Division of Agriculture at the R.I. Department of Environmental Management. He estimates Rhode Island is losing an average of one dairy farm annually. Just last year, the Cottrell Homestead off Route 138 in South Kingstown sold its cows after 118 years of operation.
“Dairy has been struggling for a long period of time. … It’s a big concern of ours,” Ayars said. “We’ll do whatever we can to keep them viable.”
LaPrise said the biggest current challenge is the national price of wholesale milk, which has been down for more than four years. It costs him about $22 to produce roughly 90 gallons of milk, but he’s only paid $16.50 to $17.50. He and his wife, who bought the property in 1990, work off the farm to make ends meet: she is a registered nurse, while he runs a trucking company.
“Every day, you can walk down through the barn and say, yup, I’m losing $5 a day on her, $5 a day on her,” LaPrise said.
In addition to the oversupply of milk, consumption has dropped considerably as more people consume non-dairy alternatives made from almonds, coconuts or oats. Another recent setback has been the ongoing U.S. trade war: the National Milk Producers Federation estimates tariffs have cost dairies more than $1 billion. There are local challenges, too, such as the high cost of land and energy in Rhode Island.
Nationwide, the strain on dairy farmers has become so severe that some have taken their own lives.
“The despair is palpable; suicide is a fact of life, though many farm suicides are listed as accidents,” Jim Goodman, a Wisconsin farmer who is leaving the dairy business after 40 years, wrote in The Washington Post last month. “A farmer I knew for many years came home from town, folded his good clothes for the last time and killed himself. I saw no warning, though maybe others did.”
Ayars said one of his biggest concerns is succession — recruiting another generation to take over local dairy farms when the current proprietors retire.
“Dairy farming is the most year-round, intensive type of agriculture that exists,” he said. “Cows are milked twice a day minimally. It’s hard to break away from the farm. There are not a lot of young people that want to live that lifestyle, to be honest.”
The disappearance of dairy has occurred despite a broader revival in agriculture across Rhode Island, where the number of farms jumped from about 850 in 2002 to more than 1,200 in 2012. In fact, some former dairy farms have converted to other crops.
Even for the Rhode Island dairy industry, it’s not all bad news. Ayars pointed to family-owned Wright’s Dairy Farm in North Smithfield, which just completed a renovation of its on-site store.
“You have a retail environment happening right at the farm, processing happens at the farm, everything’s more or less self-contained,” he said. “Those are the types of dairy environments where we find much more chance of a long-term future. When you’re not able to tap into it, that’s much more of a challenge.”
Another boost has come from Rhody Fresh, a brand of locally produced milk that’s now sold in more than 100 area supermarkets. The Rhode Island Dairy Farmers Cooperative launched Rhody Fresh in 2004 with grants of $21,000 from DEM and $30,000 from The Rhode Island Foundation. The group also got a $125,000 loan from the state’s Small Business Loan Fund.
“It really took off pretty rapidly,” Ayars said. “They were able to pay the loan back faster than the terms required.”
Four of the state’s eight remaining milk-producing cow dairies are part of Rhody Fresh: EMMA Acres, Escobar’s Highland Farm in Portsmouth, Elmrock Farm in Ashaway and Breene Hollow Farm in West Greenwich. The farmers wind up with more of the proceeds from their milk by selling it themselves rather than to a large out-of-state processing company.
Ayars said Rhody Fresh is a clear success story. “If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be talking about eight or nine dairy farmers,” he said. “We’d probably be talking about far less than that.”
LaPrise said Rhody Fresh has helped, but he’s frustrated that it gets undercut on price by other brands, especially at large national chains. “They sell it for less than it costs us to make it,” he said. “That’s really hurt.” He urged Rhode Islanders to buy milk from Rhody Fresh, Wright’s or other local producers. “At least the money that you’re spending stays here,” he said.
LaPrise said he would also like to see the state legalize the sale of raw milk, which is allowed in Massachusetts and Connecticut and appeals to consumers who don’t want it pasteurized. But bills to do that have died repeatedly at the State House.
In 2017, the Senate created a legislative commission to study the state’s policy on raw milk and report back by Jan. 2, 2018. But a spokesperson confirmed no one was ever actually appointed to the commission, so it never got off the ground. (The commission’s prime sponsor, former state Sen. Nick Kettle, has since resigned.)
State Sen. Sue Sosnowski, a South Kingstown Democrat and an influential voice on agricultural issues, said she’s open to allowing raw milk but has heard testimony for and against in the past. “If Scooter LaPrise would come to me and say he would testify, I would be right on it,” she said, though she added that the state would need to establish clear rules.
Sosnowski says the state has taken other steps to help dairy farmers, including exemptions from sales tax and turning their acreage into conservation land to lower property taxes. She suggested the state’s public colleges should switch to buying Rhody Fresh milk for students to give the industry a further boost.
Massachusetts and Connecticut have other programs to help dairy farmers that Rhode Island does not, including tax credits and price supports, according to LaPrise. Ayars said the new farm bill, which President Trump signed late last year, includes additional supports for dairy farmers that he hopes will “provide a safety net for the industry.”
In the meantime, LaPrise is taking a page out of Wright’s book at EMMA Acres. The family is currently building a small store they hope to have open in the spring that will sell milk and cheese as well as fruits and vegetables. “Hopefully,” he said, “it will catch on and we can help support the farm by selling a little finished product.”
Maggie, his daughter, acknowledges the idea of taking over the farm makes her anxious. “It can’t really sustain supporting a family,” she said. “They can barely support themselves, these cows. So it stresses me out a little bit thinking about my future.”
“But as of right now,” she said, “my future is going to be on the farm.”
Source: wpri.com
