Do not lament the loss of the family dairy farm, because the greater Cortland area isn’t losing it. Instead, hope for the best for the new generation of farms growing in the greater Cortland area.
After years, decades actually, of seeing the number of dairy farms dwindle with each iteration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Census, we’re beginning to see the total number of dairy cows increase. The hitch is that it comes with a decrease in the number of farms, down to 55 from 87 five years ago, and from nearly 360 just 40 years ago. The farms are getting larger, much larger, to an average size of 250 cows per farm, up from 150 five years ago. And that’s up from 80 in 1992.
Fewer farms, but bigger farms. So what does that mean?
It does mean that putting more eggs in fewer baskets. Each farm that goes out of business will hurt more, because the county will lose a larger share of its milk production capacity. That means fewer jobs and less income and lower tax revenue. A diverse collection of smaller businesses is preferable to a handful of behemoths, and farming is very much a business.
But the farms that are here will likely be more profitable, and that’s not a bad thing at all.
Larger farms can pose a greater environmental hazard because clustering more cows on smaller spaces can mean putting more nitrogen in the soil, and perhaps the water table, than the environment can naturally handle. However, it also means a greater ability to concentrate resources to deal with that, such as a biochar facility that recently opened in Cayuga County to bake manure into a high-carbon soil amendment.
The farmers who don’t go big can still make a solid living by diversifying. If they cannot or do not want to expand to 300 or 1,000 or 2,000 cows, they can add beef to their product lines, or pork and poultry. They can plant high-value retail crops, like berries — the sort of crop that customers will pay just to pick themselves — or nuts; perhaps goats for Halal markets. Or they can go the value-added route and turn their milk into butter or cheese. Ice cream, anyone? That direction makes the whole buy-local effort a lot more fun.
But a change in the business model also does require changes in the rest of the community. With fewer farm families, the community cannot rely on a simple hand-off of a farm from one generation to the next, with the new generation picking up the skills — from shoveling manure to herd management to long-range business planning — almost by osmosis. Schools are adopting new curricula to acquaint their students with agri-business, but we suspect there’s more to taking on that career than one can learn in high school; we know too many farmers with advanced degrees.
And even if the mechanism exists to train new farmers, how many people who don’t grow up farming want to do it?
That suggests the greater Cortland area will need to draw farmers to the community — at first to staff the larger farms, which remain owned mostly by families and small consortiums, and then eventually to buy and develop their own farms.
A good place to get those farm workers is Central America. Agrarian practices and training are often part of the school curriculum in those nations, so the workers start with a greater skill set. They create more value to the farm owners and, therefore, the community.
Bringing those workers here would mean some changes in national attitude toward immigrants and federal policy, making H-2A visas for temporary farm workers easier to acquire. Maybe it could ease the EB-3 visa process for skilled workers, because farming is certainly a skill. On a side note, perhaps the state Department of Labor could track farm employment, as it does other industries. It doesn’t do that now, but clearly the industry is important to upstate New York.
The agriculture industry is certainly changing, and rapidly. The rest of the community, and even the nation, needs to change, too. And that must happen before Cortland loses the next generation of farms.
