Organic Dairy Production by Sarah Flack

Author:Sarah Flack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Featured Farm:Chase Hill Dairy Farm, Warwick, Massachusetts, Mark and Jeanette Fellows

(Excerpt reprinted by permission from an article by Jonathan von Ranson that appeared in the NOFA/Mass News June/July 2003 and NODPA Notes 3 no. 4.)

Chase Hill Farm is the only organic dairy in Massachusetts [at the time this article was written], and it is making a decent living. It is one of the six dairies in the “Our Family Farms” group, which through good marketing and a favorable arrangement with a processor is able to pay farmers a premium for their milk. And Jeannette has developed a cheese business with outlets at farmers’ markets, farm stands, and food markets.

Early on, the Fellows attended a UVM dairy conference and took home a one-page handout about rotational grazing that seemed to make sense. Mark began moving his herd daily to new pasture, learning about pulsed grazing and its benefits to the land and the cows.

He decided to give up growing corn for silage, deciding “it’s cheaper to buy it from the farms in the Valley” where it’s easier to grow. But the economics of the Fellows’ operation still didn’t make sense. Like so many in their situation, they almost went under.

Around 1990, Mark said, he noticed how “in summer, when the cows were on grass, the checkbook was overflowing. And in winter it was harder.” After trying his brainstorm out on his vet (the vet playing devil’s advocate), “I decided to go seasonal.”

Mark called that decision “the best thing I ever did,” and said it had some interesting effects. “It made me like a big farmer. I have a big group of cows freshening at the same time, a big group of calves I’m raising of the same age. The cows come into heat about the same time, and, instead of watching them all year-round, in May and June I take my granola into the field and watch them for signs of heat as I eat breakfast.” In the late fall they’re dried up all at once, and “Then I get four months off.” (Maintaining a dry herd over the winter basically involves hauling hay and cleaning the barn—easier than the summer regimen of milking, manure-spreading, breeding, fence moving, haying).

After seasonal milking had settled into a pattern, “the next step was to become organic,” Mark said. “We were profitable selling commodity milk. It’s expensive to make the transition. We made the change because we could.”

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