The numbers are in and they’re not pretty. Wisconsin lost a record number of dairy farms last year. More than 800 farms folded. More than 2,700 have called it quits in the past five years.
How does this happen when artisan cheese consumption is booming? And what does it mean for all those amazing Wisconsin cheeses we love? For insights, I turned to a couple of Wisconsin’s most respected cheesemakers: Andy Hatch (above right) of Uplands Cheese Company, a farmstead producer of Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Rush Creek Reserve; and Bob Wills (above left) of Cedar Grove Cheese, who buys milk from more than 30 Wisconsin farms for his cheeses. This post is longer than usual, but these gentlemen have a lot to say and we need to hear it.
First, some background: The average milk price paid to Wisconsin’s dairy farmers cratered after peaking in 2014. Too much supply, too little demand. Americans are consuming less. (Soy latte, anyone?) The Chinese are buying less. And cows have gotten way more productive. So while Wisconsin has lost thousands of dairy farms, the ones that remain are much bigger and they’re turning out too much milk.
Andy, doesn’t this oversupply mean that Wisconsin cheesemakers are paying less for milk? That’s good for them, right?
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Hatch: Smaller cheesemakers who make their living on quality, not efficiency, pay a premium to their farmers and always have. They don’t ride the tide of the commodity milk price. They recognize that they need to keep their farms healthy.
You’re a farmstead cheesemaker; you have your own cows and don’t buy milk. Is your business affected by this crisis?
Hatch: Our little business is sustained by the dairy infrastructure in Wisconsin: the number of vets in the countryside, the people who service milking parlors, the trucks picking up milk. When that infrastructure is threatened, our survival is threatened. All these services require critical mass. One thing that made Wisconsin special is that we had enough small farms for these services to exist. Big farms have services in house. They have their own vets and repair people.
Are you alarmed by this decline or is it just part of an economic cycle?
Hatch: The milk market has always been cyclical, but this is an aberration. Prices have stayed low for so long because the supply hasn’t contracted. Big farms are adding more cows. Dairy farming was an economic miracle in the early 20th century and it built our whole state. Does it need to be replaced by something else? Yeah, maybe. But we ought to be careful before we let it go. It has been so good at distributing prosperity throughout the countryside.
You go through Iowa and Nebraska now, with their huge corporate farms, and the tractor dealer is rich, the seed guys are rich, and a couple of farmers are rich, but there’s nothing in between. The great thing about small dairy farms is they kept our small towns full. I don’t know what could replace them that would be as good for our rural economy.
What’s wrong with big farms? Number one, consolidation of wealth. Number two, can they manage their environmental impact responsibly? It’s a lot of manure on fewer acres and that can pose risks. But you can’t just say that big farms are worse. A lot of small farms don’t have the resources to invest in facilities to handle manure properly.
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Beyond the environmental risk, there’s a big risk in consumer perception. The upswelling of public sentiment against animal agriculture has been incredible. A lot of it is due to the rise of plant-based meat and cheese. They’re demonizing animal agriculture, and most Midwest farmers I know just have their heads in the sand over this. The optics aren’t good. We are not doing a good job of explaining animal agriculture.
Bob Wills, if there’s plenty of milk and the price is low, is that not a good thing for you?
Wills: If I have to buy from a few really big farms it creates instability for me. If one of them picks up and goes somewhere else, it can really disrupt my supply. We prefer working with smaller farms we’ve worked with for a long time. We know their values and the quality of their product. Plus, a lot of small farms are grazing, and our preference is to have a significant component of grass milk in our cheese.
Immigration issues can’t be helping matters.
Wills: Finding any employees is ridiculous right now. We’ve located potential employees and then they were unable to get visas. The labor situation is killing industry in this country. There’s only so much growth you can do if you don’t have money to mechanize or people to do the work.
Are you alarmed by this decline or is it just part of an economic cycle?
Wills: It’s up to consumers. Whenever there’s really low-cost cheese coming into the market, it challenges us because the way we do things is not cheap. As the price gap grows between factory-farm cheese and artisanal products, it’s a harder choice for consumers to make. But it is their choice. They have to understand who they are buying from and why.
Whole communities are falling apart. In our town the grocery store has closed; the restaurant has closed. The farmers who went out of business were customers in their community. Last summer I went to a funeral in a tiny church for one of my farmers—a natural death—and learned that two farmers in the community had committed suicide that year. The community toll is a lot more important than what’s going to happen to artisan cheese.