The notice from Fraley Auction Company, announcing the Friday, May 11 auction of Callicoon dairy farmer Ken Peters's herd, is short and businesslike. But any farmer knows what a devastating tale lies behind this curt announcement:
100 milking, 35 dry, (65 lst & 2nd calf) 25 fresh last 60 days. Averaging 55 lbs in tank, 3.7BF 3.2P SCC 150,000 at the plant. 20 short bred heifers. Cattle have great feet, legs & udders. Ken always bought a good registered bull, these cattle are all bred to these top bulls for years
NOTE: After 3 generations of milking cattle on this farm, Ken has decided to discontinue the milking business.
Today's Times Herald-Record has a story about Peters, who until last week's auction was one of just about two dozen dairy farmers left in Sullivan County. Like many local farmers, Peters worked a full-time job in addition to running the family farm, but still couldn't make ends meet.
Reporter Steve Israel writes:
Listen to Peters and his wife, Donna, as they sit in the farmhouse kitchen that still has a big white Chambers stove, with its own bread-baking oven and soup-making well:
"The feed bill is $8,000 a month, the fuel (for the tractors, for heating the house and the barns and the milking equipment) is $3,000-$4,000," they say, explaining that the price of feed has soared ever since ethanol manufacturers began paying top dollar for corn, which means the price of that corn to feed cows has skyrocketed.
"Before ethanol, it was $1.50 a bushel; now it's $7.50," says former farmer George Martin of Honesdale, Pa. who was at the auction to offer the Peters family "moral support."
With little control over either the price they get for their milk or the costs they pay for their overhead, many of New York State's dairy farmers have been caught in an economic vise that just keeps getting tighter. Over the last ten years, Israel writes, nearly half of the county's dairy farms have gone out of business -- an all-too familiar tale in the once dairy-rich Northeast.
But the decline of local dairy farms goes back much farther than the last decade. According to the USDA, the number of dairy farms in New York State dropped from 19,000 in 1980 to 7,900 in 2000.
