Saving the Family Farm
"Innovation" might not be the word that comes to mind when you travel the back roads of New England. And "marketing expert" might not be the term you'd apply to the guy cutting hay. But agriculture is changing, and farms are having to change with it. Witness these four examples of farmers breaking with tradition to survive.
GONE ORGANIC
It was as if they were changing religions, and in a sense they were.
Ten years ago, when Gregg and Gloria Varney decided to convert Gregg's family farm on the Nezinscot River in southeastern Maine into the state's first organic dairy, Gregg Varney's uncles, cousins, and neighbors were skeptical. The word "hippie" might have come up a few times in conversation, and as they watched the Varneys wean their Holsteins off antibiotic-laced grain, they may have wondered: What the hell are they going to do when their animals get sick?"
In the dairy industry, people are always telling you there's a better way to do what you're doing. Buy this additive, and it will make you a better farmer," Gregg says, sitting at a picnic table behind the couple's farm store in Turner. "When someone is saying, 'Throw all those things away,' they don't know what to do with that."
Nobody's clucking at the Varneys anymore, at least not once they've done the math. Conventional farmers spend about $16 to produce a hundredweight of fluid milk, slightly more than 11 gallons, for which they're lucky these days to be paid $11 to $13, including a small federal subsidy. Gregg and Gloria receive $21 for their organic milk. And while sales of conventional milk have been anemic over the past decade, US organic food sales have grown 20 percent a year, led largely by dairy. "A lot of really good conventional farmers can't pay their bills," says Gregg. "The only farmer with cash in his pocket is the one who's doing organic."
The Varneys and 76 other Maine and Vermont farmers belong to Organic Valley, a cooperative that markets the organic dairy products, meats, poultry, and produce of 622 farmer members in 17 states. The co-op projects sales of $180 million for 2004. But profit is only one part of the mission; the other is to keep farms in business, even if that means paying some farmers higher prices than others. Organic Valley actually pays the Varneys and other Maine farmers more than Midwest farmers because their production costs are higher. And buyers are willing to pay Organic Valley more for milk, including Stonyfield Farm Yogurt of Londonderry, New Hampshire, one of the region's largest purchasers of organic milk.
Travis Forgue, who farms in Alburg, Vermont, and used to recruit farmers for Organic Valley, says current prices for organic milk and the co-op's practices make smaller-scale farming more viable for families. "Now they're getting paid for what they're doing," he says. "It doesn't change the workload, but it enables you to hire someone. Somewhere down the road of the first year, people recognize they're human beings again. They can travel or have a night out with the family."THE
ACCIDENTAL CASH CROP
Organic farmer Eero Ruuttila was merely practicing sound farming years ago when he planted several acres of Austrian field peas at the 40-acre Nesenkeag Cooperative Farm, which he runs in Litchfield, New Hampshire. The field pea, a legume, takes nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fixes" the element into the soil, building it up for next year's crops. In the late 1980s, Ruuttila's curiosity was piqued when the Cambodian women who worked in his fields began taking the greens home to their own kitchens. He soon discovered that other people were cooking with them, too: California uber-chef Alice Waters and, in Boston, Lydia Shire, Jasper White, and Gordon Hamersley. About 4 inches long and spring-green, pea tendrils are a staple of Asian cooking and are often used in New American-style restaurants as a bed for, say, an entree of sesame-infused sea bass.
Ruuttila planted more and stopped plowing it under. And he started picking. Today, he sells 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of the slender greens each year to Asian markets and to the region's chefs for $5 to $7 a pound. Pea tendrils have become a major cash crop for the farm, generating between $10,000 and $15,000 a year. "That's a lot of money for a piece of land that was fallow," says Ruuttila, who is 53. "In terms of net income, it's one of my best crops, because it doesn't require a lot of work to maintain."
Chefs like the tendrils for their color and versatility, and farmers value the field pea as an agricultural dynamo that begins earning its keep early in the spring. The pea sets its own seed, so a farm actually gets two crops from the same planting.
For Nesenkeag Farm, it's pea tendrils, but for other small farmers, it could be heirloom tomatoes, milk sold in glass bottles, or hydroponically grown herbs, all high-value, high-cachet products. Ruuttila says the survival of small farms depends on their ability to spot economies of scale and plug in to food trends, no matter how strange they might sound. "I could never compete with California agriculture or the huge industrial scales, conventional or organic," he says. "But I've cut out the middleman, and we're selling to the most affluent clients in the Northeast. We're not rich, but we're surviving."
GRASS-FED BEEF
Guy Crosby has been raising beef cattle and haying a 65-acre patch of land south of White River Junction, in eastern Vermont, since 1985, and in that time he's learned why cattle farmers are such a pessimistic bunch. "I didn't get the price I wanted," he says, summing up the last time he sold his beef cows at auction in Pennsylvania. "I got burned."
Now Crosby, 51, is gambling on something new: He's raising 50 Angus-and-shorthorn crossbred cattle completely on pastureland, as opposed to traditional feeding practices, which can include grain, bakery products, and food-processing byproducts. His animals are part of a premium brand of beef being developed by the nonprofit New England Livestock Alliance (NELA), an organization of the New England Heritage Breeds Conservancy, at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He is one of about 30 farmers, so-called early adopters, currently working with NELA. By next summer, the group hopes to have 100 New England farmers raising grass-fed beef, produced without hormones or antibiotics.
New England farmers don't get much in the way of federal subsidies, but they are increasingly reliant on the kindness of (often wealthy) strangers: the nonprofit land trusts that preserve farmland, the state programs that fund marketing of local produce and run the farmers' markets. NELA's undertaking would likely be impossible without the help of the Cabbage Hill Farm Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to help small family farms. A New York investor group also purchased a Connecticut meat-processing facility for NELA several years ago and has spent millions to upgrade it.
NELA will pay Crosby about 35 cents more a pound for his beef than commodity buyers do, and while Crosby raises the animals, NELA handles the slaughtering, marketing, and distribution. The meat will be sold for prices starting at about $5 per pound for hamburger in upscale supermarkets in the Northeast and online.
"We're trying to promote the concept of going back to grass-fed breeds not because they're nice traditional livestock, but because it's a healthier way of eating and a way farmers can dramatically increase their income," says NELA executive director David Rich.
NELA provides technical advice, even doing an ultrasound on each animal so farmers know what the beef is going to look like. In the process, NELA and the farmers are increasing the genetic stock of high-quality beef cows in the region. Cattle farmers are hard to convince, especially when it comes to the promise of better prices, and with good reason; other marketing alliances have failed in the past. But Crosby thinks that locally raised, grass-fed beef, with its stronger flavor, is the right product at the right time. "There's a growing percentage of people who are interested in knowing where their animals are coming from, either for ethical or safety reasons," he says. "This has huge potential to provide a measure of diversification for existing dairy farms."
Will it pay off? Ask him in five years, Crosby says, adding, "You've got to be somewhat of a romantic."
FARMERS BUY THEIR WAY OUT OF A PICKLE
Consider the pickle. It's not the trendiest of foods, but over the past 100 years, the growing, picking, and processing of cucumbers have developed into a $31 million micro-economy in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts. Farmers tend some 2,000 acres of cucumber fields, and 115 people work at Oxford Foods, the South Deerfield pickle factory whose piquant aroma was a running joke in the other towns of Franklin County.
Two years ago, when M. A. Gedney, the factory's fourth owner in 14 years, announced he was selling, many people thought it was the end of the line. Farmers wondered who would buy their cukes and what they'd do with the high-tech picking equipment they had invested in so heavily during the 1990s. Factory workers began checking the help wanteds.
But last year, the owners of four farms -- 18 farmers altogether -- went into a partnership with plant executive Jeffrey Morse and bought the factory. They now grow, process, and sell pickles, relishes, and jellies under the Oxford Foods label and sell to hotels, restaurants, and delis.
The transition from farmer to factory owner unfolded over a lot of sleepless nights, says Gary Gemme, 50, of Hatfield, but ultimately provided a sense of security he'd never had before. "We took a great big gulp and jumped on board," Gemme says. "Since we've become owners, not a whole heck of a lot has changed, except now we can talk about where we want to go and what we want to do. It's a nice feeling, and I hope we can survive."
State help was crucial in the purchase; the Massachusetts Office of Housing and Community Development provided a $400,000 loan and a $500,000 grant.
"Initially, there was less security," says Gemme. "But we own a market, and we're doing our best to run the thing properly, so I think in the long run we'll have a lot more security. This is my attempt at solidifying the farm and maybe having something I can hand to my children and say, 'Here, this is something worth having.' "
B.J. Roche is a freelance writer who lives in Western Massachusetts. She writes the "Peaks and Valleys" column in the Sunday Globe.
