Spring 2002
Concrete Farming
by Michael Hatfield
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A two-day-old calf at Edaleen Dairy greets visitors in its new world. The dairy breeds its own calves to raise for future milk production. |
In spring Lynden smells like a dairy farm. It is not pleasant. When the wind is right, the piercing aroma of manure envelops the town in an invisible, insidious haze. The fumes occupy every open space, invading parks, shaded walks and back porches with impunity.
Twenty or 30 years ago it was different. Dairy farms were smaller, widely disbursed and not nearly as industrialized. The byproducts of dairy farming weren’t so palpable and there were fewer cows per acre and more farmers per cow.
Now it takes hundreds, sometimes thousands of cows to make one dairy farm profitable. The price of milk paid to the farmer has not changed significantly in decades. As a result herds have grown in size while dairy farms have dwindled in number.
Since 1981 the number of dairies in Washington state has declined more than 50 percent, yet total milk production has risen by 45 percent. The increase in production is explained in part by more cows, but it is also due to increased production per cow.
To achieve this, dairy operation intensity has multiplied several times over. In order to remain in business, dairy farmers must produce more milk at a lower cost. But it hasn’t come cheap for anybody – not the cows or the farmers.
For many the costs outran the benefits long ago.
In 1979 Andy Bergsma and his wife Rhonda bought a run-down farm in Lynden. At 22, Bergsma brought 50 cows and three children to the 45-acre spread. He rented another 40 acres and used his experience as a breeder to build his herd up to 125 cattle. He cleaned up the house, built a new barn, planted trees and transformed the farm into a respectable dairy.
In 1999 he quit.
“It was just hard to make it,” Bergsma said.
He is now a member of a swiftly growing group of former dairy farmers. Since July 1999, Whatcom County has lost 35 of 240 dairies.
“There are probably 500 to 1,000 (dairy farmers) on this side of the mountains that would love to be in it still because it’s a wonderful way of life as long as you can make some money at it,” said Ned Zaugg, the area dairy educator for Washington State University.
When Zaugg moved to Whatcom County from Arizona in the early 1990s there were nearly 1,000 dairies in the county. Since then he’s watched countless farms go under. Small dairies just don’t make it any more, he said.
“I was considered a small dairy,” Bergsma said. “One-hundred cows nowadays is very, very small.”
He estimates that 70 cattle is the minimum number on any operating dairy today. He said the only way such an operation could stay in business is if they already had everything paid for, with little or no mechanization and low fixed costs.
Larger herd size was one of the first efforts made by dairies to become more profitable. By increasing the density of cows on a farm, the farmer can produce more milk without proportionally raising costs.
Edaleen Dairy in Lynden runs 1,000 cows but is not the biggest in Whatcom County. De Groats Dairy, where Bergsma’s son works, operates two farms, each with 600 cows. In Idaho and California, herds are even larger and a farm under construction in Oregon is set up for 7,000 cows, Bergsma said.
The farmer still has to pay more for labor, feed and other maintenance, but saves by avoiding the expense of building bigger barns or newer facilities.
“The price of milk hasn’t really increased much,” Zaugg said. “All the other expenses are going up, especially now with the new dairy nutrient management laws.”
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Bergsma said that he didn’t want to expand his operation in response to these pressures.
“I didn’t want to get big,” he said. “I didn’t want 200, 300, 400 cows — I didn’t want that. I grew up on a family farm so that’s what I was used to.”
Zaugg said the farmers who’s herds did grow discovered there is a limit to the number of cows that you can put on a farm. Eventually something has to give, he said.
Dairy farmers learned to specialize. Instead of breeding their own herds, as Bergsma did, they contracted out the calving. Dairy cows must be impregnated almost every year, or they stop producing. But now, instead of raising the calves themselves, many dairies sell them or pay someone else to raise them.
They streamline tasks within the operation too, Zaugg said. In the past a farm employed general labor. The milkers would milk part of the day then go out on the farm to clean and repair equipment and facilities. Farmers discovered that general labor is not very efficient, so they specialized their workforce. Now the milkers just milk and the farmer hires people to do cleaning and maintenance. By focusing the operation in this way dairy farmers are able to produce milk more efficiently, Zaugg said.
Technology also contributed to this drive towards efficiency.
“One of the things that happened along the way, during the 1980s and 1990s, is science really developed a database that helped them understand how digestion happens within a cow,” Zaugg said.
Research and new information helped farmers get more milk out of cows by feeding the cattle different types of food. Certain feeds digest better and the cow is able to convert more of the energy from the food to milk.
“They learned how to feed cows to maximize production,” Zaugg said.
But many people, both inside and outside the dairy industry, argue this comes at a cost to the cow. Higher rates of digestion are harder on animals because producing milk requires a great deal of energy.
Science also produced the Bovine Growth Hormone, a drug that increases milk production per cow by as much as 20 percent, Zaugg said.
During their study of digestion, researchers discovered cows with higher levels of Bovine Somatotropin, or BST, produced more milk.
Though scientists have known of BST’s benefits for some time, the hormone was difficult to extract, and such high production costs rendered it useless.
It was not until the 1980s that geneticists could produce BST less expensively by breeding special bacteria to produce the hormone. BST created in this way becomes recombinant Bovine Somatotropin, or rBST.
When scientists first introduced rBST it caused a split in the dairy industry. Some dairy farmers adopted it while others were against it, Zaugg said. Even today, differences of opinion on rBST exist.
Though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the hormone for use in 1993, other nations have not followed. The European Commission imposed a five-year ban on rBST in 1994, then extended that ban in 1999.
After more than nine years of comprehensive review, Health Canada rejected the drug in January 1999. It cited animal health risks as its primary reason for doing so. Other nations have rejected the drug based on social, economic and human-health threats. The hormone has been the subject of several international disputes, with the United States as the hormone’s primary supporter.
In the FDA’s studies, cows injected with rBST showed a 25 percent increase in incidences of udder infections. This has led many in the medical community to suggest that milk from treated cows is more likely to be contaminated with the antibiotics used to treat such infections.
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Edaleen workers milk the cows three times each day in the dairy's milking parlor. |
According to Canadian studies, rBST injections led to an 18 percent increase in infertility and a 50 percent higher risk of lameness. Even this draws disagreement from the agricultural community.
“We haven’t seen any negative effects on cattle through the BST usage,” said Jordan Vander Veen, spokesman for Vander Huizen Farms.
Vander Huizen farms milk about 670 cows. Vander Veen doesn’t believe rBST poses a risk to animal health.
But, cows don’t last as long as they used to, Bergsma said.
“I had cows that would have up to 10 calves, sometimes 12 calves,” Bergsma said. “Now you’re lucky if they have four or five.”
Vander Veen said they do have some cows as old as 14 years, but the average age that cows are retired on their farm is a little over 5-years old. Usually 5-year-old cows have delivered three calves.
This shortened working life cannot be solely attributed to rBST. It is also because of the way the cows live, Bergsma said. Whereas Bergsma, his father and grandfather would have turned their cows out in the spring to graze until October, many dairies keep their cows inside year-round.
“There’s probably a handful of guys that put their cows out now,” Bergsma said. “Most (cows) are all locked up.”
Keeping the cows inside all the time reduces the amount of energy the animals expend walking, which leaves more energy for producing milk. But being on cement all day destroys the animal’s legs and feet, Bergsma said. It would be comparable to forcing a person to stand on the floor of a supermarket all day and night.
But, Vander Veen said that dairy farmers aren’t particularly hard on cows, because cows don’t produce as much milk when they are uncomfortable.
“It’s in the farmer’s best interest to keep cows as comfortable as possible,” he said.
Vander Veen said the dairy industry has advanced as far as it can with herd size and mechanization. He said farmers are moving to less-animal-intensive operations, but herd sizes will continue to grow for a short time before the industry reaches a stopping point.
“There’s a certain size at which the agriculturalists aren’t going to give in to the competition,” he said.
That sort of outlook sounds like wishful thinking to Bergsma. He never used rBST and he didn’t want his herd to grow. Instead he tried to build the sort of farm that his father and grandfather built.
The Bergsmas will soon sell the farm they bought in 1979, along with the 1/3-acre they retained from their original 40. The farmer that bought the farm from them in 1999 now keeps his dry cows in their old barn.
“I wasn’t a real mechanized farmer,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’m out now, I don’t know.”
Junior Michael Hatfield studies environmental education and mass communications. This is his first published piece.