In 1995, Tennessee had 1,544 dairy farms; it has 375 now, says University of Tennessee at Knoxville professor of animal science Stephen Oliver.
Grainger County veterinarian Mike Tarrier, who specializes in treating cows, told Tennessee Watchdog 25 percent of the state’s existing dairy farms will have gone out of business by 2017.
Why? The federal government wants to know, and it’s spending $3 million in taxpayer money to find out.
No need, says Mary Hoefer, who runs the only remaining dairy farm in Anderson County. The Tennessee county used to have 20.
Hoefer knows exactly why dairy farms are dying off in the Southeast. But the researchers, part of the five-year long Southeast Quality Milk Initiative, have to start asking the right questions.
Seven Southeastern colleges, including UT-Knoxville, divvied up the grant money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The schools sent out an assortment of grad students, clipboards in tow, to interview local dairy farmers. Oliver is overseeing the study.
There are several reasons dairy farms have no future in Tennessee and the six surrounding states, Hoefer said. Cows don’t milk as well in hot, humid climates.
Research from the University of Georgia backs that up, saying “hot and humid conditions stress the lactating dairy cow and reduce intake of the nutrients necessary to support milk yield.”
Fewer people in the South want to do that kind of work, Hoefer says, and, maybe most important, dairy farmers can’t compete against less expensive, better quality milk from the Midwest.
“When the researchers came out here I just stood in the middle of the dairy and answered 50 questions while my husband milked,” Hoefer said.
“Some of the questions were reasonable, but a lot of them were questions like, ‘Do you run fans in the dairy?’ and I would say, yes. Then they would ask, ‘When do you turn them on?’ and then I would say ‘When it gets hot.’ Not one time did they ask ‘In your opinion, why do you think dairies are going out in the Southeast?’”
It may not matter.
“When everyone I know saw the grant and got notice of it we just laughed,” said Tarrier, who worked on farms in the Midwest and knows the advantages they have over similar farms in the South.
“They are spending all this time writing up this report, and by the time they’re done they are just going to blame the farmers for not doing an adequate job. This report they ultimately put out won’t help anything.”
Oliver said the quality of the milk produced in the Southeast isn’t as good, so perhaps dairy farmers in the region are doing something wrong.
“We’re not passing judgment on the farmers. We are just going to list some recommendations,” Oliver said.
Oliver said he doesn’t accept the farmers’ reasoning for their struggles.
“I can show you two farms within five miles of each other in the region, one producing a really high quality product and another producing a very poor quality product,” Oliver said.
“It’s really related to management of those cows. Also, the costs for making milk in other parts of the country are not going to be that different from what it costs to make milk here in Tennessee. That’s an argument I’ve heard from farmers on a regular basis, but I don’t see any data to substantiate that.”
According to the Southeast Quality Milk Initiative’s website, milk production will decline by 35 percent in the Southeast during the next 15 years, while overall U.S. production will increase by 23 percent.
The study is also happening in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, according to the same website.
Source: Watchdog
