Organic dairy’s fate up to consumers, says one industry leader

By Keith Whitcomb Jr.
RUTLAND HERALD
The Northeast may lose up to 143 of its organic dairy farms by this time next year, but the co-founder and former chief executive officer of an organic yogurt company says there’s an easy fix: Buy more local, organic dairy products.

“The only long-term solution for these farms, to save them, is to grow demand in the region,” said Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Farms, based in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Hirshberg is behind the Northeast Organic Family Farm Partnership, a group that’s a mix of farmers, processors, activists, and government agencies from several northeastern states formed to help address the potential loss of these farms.

While Hirshberg is the co-founder of Stonyfield Farms, he’s undertaken this effort on his own.

The partnership is asking people who buy dairy products to sign a pledge, found online at bit.ly/0113Pledge, to make one-quarter of their weekly daily purchases from one of 35 brands — found online at bit.ly/0113Partners — that have committed to buying milk from northeastern organic dairy farmers.

Hirshberg said that the loss of these farms, some of whom have been in business for generations, would represent a $140 million economic impact, something the industry, which has been challenged anyway, doesn’t need.

This particular economic “earthquake,” as Hirshberg referred to it Wednesday, began last summer when Horizon Organic, one of the top purchasers of organic milk in the Northeast, told 89 farms (two dozen of which are in Vermont) that it wouldn’t renew its contracts with them in the following year. It later agreed to extend them until February 2023, but the problem not only remains, it got worse.

Hirshberg said not long after the Horizon announcement, Maple Hill told 46 northeastern organic dairy farms that it wouldn’t be buying from them anymore.

“I calculate that’s roughly about $67 million of farm income across the region,” said Hirshberg.

Hirshberg believes that if northeastern dairy consumers all committed to making one-quarter of their weekly purchases come from brands buying from the regional organic dairy farms, things would turn around.

“What we’re saying is, this is a wake-up call. This number of farms, this number of families, we need a different approach,” he said. “We didn’t arrive at that 25% loosely. We spent a lot of time on this, it turns out, if one-quarter of New England’s consumers bought one organic dairy item per week this crisis would be averted; it’s that kind of scale.”

This isn’t the only effort underway to address this problem, Hirshberg noted. Vermont has set up a task force, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has helped organize a regional group to look at what can be done. Hirshberg said good ideas are coming from those areas, and this is meant to help that effort.

“And the idea is to build back enough demand so that by this time next year we’ve found contracts so these farms don’t go under,” he said.

While it starts with consumers, the plan is for larger dairy buyers, such as colleges, hospitals, grocery stores and school districts, to make this pledge as well. If they do, said Hirshberg, they’ll be given a logo they can display showing their support. He said companies sell what people want to buy, and people can control the items they see on the shelves.

“I know that consumers rule,” he said. “We consumers think that when we walk into a store … we’re like the victims of whatever the stores want to sell us, but we’ve got that wrong. Anyone who thinks there’s any accident in terms of color, size, flavor, assortment, price, doesn’t understand the way the business works.”

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keith.whitcomb @rutlandherald.com