SEARSMONT, Maine – Glendon Mehuren II’s Faithful Venture Farm, 55 miles east of the state capital of Augusta, looks as tranquil as the farms depicted on cartons of organic milk. Cows roam among weathered barns on a hill, surrounded by small pastures and woodlands.
But it has been hard on the farm since August. Then Mr. Mehuren received a registered letter from Horizon Organic, who had been buying his milk for 16 years. He said it would terminate his contract within a year. Horizon delivered the same letter to 88 other organic dairies from Maine to New York.
In December, Horizon granted all affected farmers a reprieve, extending their contracts until February 2023 and paying a little more for the milk. But the future for small dairy farmers in the Northeast still looks bleak.
For the past 20 years, organic milk has provided a lifeline for small farms in the Northeast, helping them survive while milking 100 cows or fewer. Now those farms are in trouble because there is a lack of milk processors in the region and an abundance of milk from huge organic dairy farms in western states.
On a crisp December morning, Mr. Mehuren and one of his daughters were milking their Holsteins in the small parlor, in six shifts of eight cows. His father was outside in a tractor hauling hay. Mr. Mehuren was quick to rattle off the names of the many nearby dairy farms that had failed over the decades. The farms that survived expanded, hoping the volume would offset the low milk prices, he said.
“Milk prices were very low in the early 2000s,” he said, and many smallholders believed the only option was to grow or die. “Then came a sort of organic deal.”
That gave smaller farmers a third option. Mr. Mehuren obtained organic certification for his farm and dairy herd and started selling milk to Horizon in 2005.
Since then, organic milk has grown to more than 5 percent of the national milk market and is dominated by large companies. Horizon Organic is owned by the French company Danone. Stonyfield Organic, the New Hampshire yogurt maker that purchases organic milk from farmers in New England, is owned by Lactalis. And the Organic Valley farmers’ cooperative, based in Wisconsin, now has annual sales of more than a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, bottling was consolidated in larger dairies outside New England. Ed Maltby, the executive director of the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance, said nearly all packaged organic milk is now ultra-pasteurized, giving it a shelf life for months.
“You used to have your offer locally to your market,” said Mr Maltby. “Now that paradigm has been turned upside down. The whole concept of regionality is gone.”
Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, agreed.
“If you go to a grocery store in Maine, there’s Horizon milk on the shelves, and yes, Horizon picks it up from 14 producers in Maine.” she said. “But the milk that’s on the shelves might be from Colorado, maybe from Ohio, maybe from Virginia.”
Chris Adamo, the vice president for government affairs, policy and partnerships at Danone North America, said several factors contributed to Horizon’s withdrawal from New England.
“The Northeast region presents some ongoing challenges to collect and transport milk to the processing facility we operate in Western New York,” Mr. Adamo said in an emailed statement.
“While the reduced mileage is important, it is only one factor,” he added. Mr Adamo mentioned a scarcity of truck drivers as another.
With Horizon withdrawing, another challenge for organic dairy farmers in the Northeast is competition from larger farms.
“There has been tremendous growth in organic dairy farms west of the Mississippi – Texas, Colorado,” said Richard Kersbergen, a professor at the University of Maine’s Cooperative Extension Program who has worked with dairy farmers in Maine for 37 years. “That has created a situation where these mega-organic dairies can produce organic milk at a much lower cost than those farms in the Northeast.”
One company, Aurora Organic, has 27,000 dairy cows on four ranches in Colorado and Texas, according to its website, the equivalent of about 500 small farms in New England. Ms. Alexander called such operations “factory farms.”
Amanda Beal, the commissioner for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, said he is concerned that larger organic farms in the West are not being held to the same standards as those in the Northeast. Two organic certification rules established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have long been points of contention: the rules requiring organic livestock to have access to pasture, and the “origin of livestock” rule prohibiting conversion from conventional cows to organic. limited.
Ms. Beal said she would like to see the grassland rule more evenly enforced by organic certifiers across the country. She also said she hoped the USDA would soon clarify the origins of livestock farming to eliminate loopholes used by larger dairies.
“It creates an uneven playing field for our farmers,” said Ms Beal. “I feel that if the playing field was level, our farmers could definitely hold their own.”
Ms Beal asked Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, about this when she and her colleagues in other northeastern states met with him twice via video to discuss how Horizon is canceling the contracts.
Ms. Beal understands organic dairies because she grew up on a farm. That farm, now run by her brother, is one of those dropped by Horizon.
“I really want to emphasize that this is not about one farm or my family’s farm,” she said. “These are about 14 family farms in Maine and 89 family farms in the Northeast, and each one of them is important.”
At Faithful Venture Farm, while cleaning the parlor between milkings, Mr. Mehuren that he understood the trends in the dairy industry, but that he didn’t think they were an improvement.
“Having 10 farms milking 50 cows is vastly better for the local economy than one farm with 500 cows,” he said. “Consolidation seems to be the name of the game. The local hardware store closes and you have a Super Walmart.”
Mr. Mehuren and other farmers in Maine hope they can sell their milk to Organic Valley or Stonyfield Organic, the only other commercial buyers of organic milk in the state.
The extension of Horizon’s contracts through 2023 was little consolation to Judy Smith at More Acres Farm in East Dixfield. Mrs. Smith, 68, and her husband, Leslie, 77, had milked and sold 30 cows to Horizon. They had hoped to hand over the farm to their 40-year-old son. But Horizon’s August letter put an end to that dream. The uncertainty seemed too great and they sold the dairy herd.
“We were sitting between a rock and a hard place,” said Mrs. Smith. “We were devastated when those cows had to go, I’ll tell you something. To us they were more than just dairy cows.”