Can the Organic Label Save America's Small Family Dairy Farms?

The United States has lost 85,000 small dairy farms in the past 20 years. Transitioning to organic practices could save the ones that are left.
Rodale's Organic Life by Laura Sant, Photo by Liz Nemeth, November 01, 2017

"I like to say that we live in the heart of God's country," says 49-year-old Tracy Dransfield, who for the past nine years has run Windspring Farms, a small organic dairy in Gap Mills, West Virginia, with her 60-year-old husband, Doug. "It's beautiful here. The people are good. They're hardworking and very supportive." The Dransfields' farm, situated in the mountains just across the border of Virginia, is set in a landscape so idyllic you would be forgiven for thinking that, in 2017 at least, it only exists as a romanticized illustration on the back of a milk carton: acres of gently rolling green pastures; blue-green mountains in the background. Their herd of 75 black and white cows dots the landscape; there's a maroon house in the distance. But four years ago, things weren't looking so pretty—the dairy was struggling financially, they were concerned about the future of the farm.

Making a go of it as a farmer on a small scale is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States. Farms that gross over a million dollars accounted for a third of farm production in the United States in 1991; by 2015, that figure had risen to half. Small farms, on the other hand—those than earn under $350,000 in gross cash farm income—fell from 46% of production in 1991 to less than 25% in 2015. And the midpoint acreage of farms has been steadily increasing—from 589 acres in 1982 to 1,234 in 2012. The pressure to scale up is intense: technological innovations mean it's gotten easier to manage ever larger land acreage and more animals, enabling farmers to lower costs and raise profit margins the bigger they go. Small farms can find it harder to compete.

Dairy farmers like the Dransfields face the additional hurdle of climbing production costs and stagnant milk pricing: The prices farmers get for milk are unpredictable and, on the whole, haven't risen much since the eighties. Most of the milk we consume today is being produced by ever-larger farms. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture census figures, between 1992 and 2012 (the last year the department gathered data), the United States lost 85,000 small dairy farms. Many farmers went out of business. Others scaled up, squeezing more profit out of milk by making a ton of it: During that same 20-year period, the number of dairy farms with at least 1,000 cows more than tripled. Those larger dairy farms (the largest of which have as many as 15,000 cows) are hard on cows, and on the environment—there are problems with manure run-off, which degrades water quality and pollutes the air. But it's hard for smaller dairy farms to compete with the volume of milk they produce.