NORTH HAVERHILL — Hatchland Farm, with a total herd size of about 560 cows, is relatively large for the region. It’s also notable for its longevity.

When Hatchland Farm co-owner Howard Hatch, 79, first came to the Upper Valley 53 years ago, there were 42 farms shipping milk in the town of Haverhill alone.

Now there are three.

“I look at it as surviving,” Hatch said about keeping his farm running. “I don’t look at it as winning anything.”

Upper Valley dairy farmers are getting fewer and farther between. Smaller farms have been dwindling over the past few decades both in the Upper Valley and nationally. Just this year, farms in Hartford, Royalton and Randolph have sold their cows as the farmers age and no one has stepped up to take over.

Hatch’s observation of the industry’s decline in Haverhill is mirrored across the region.

“We often hear stories about how 20 years ago, 40 years ago, there would be dozens of small dairy farms in a particular town. And now there’s less than 10 or just a handful, or none,” Tunbridge resident Laura Ginsburg, the dairy strategy and innovation manager for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, said in a phone interview.

The dairy industry in the Upper Valley has long faced challenges, such as unforgiving milk prices, pressures from land development and a dwindling workforce. Farmers who are still milking have found a measure of stability through multiple streams of income and from consumers’ growing interest in knowing where their food comes from.

‘Next generation’

Because of the debts one generally has to incur when opening a new dairy farm, the new generation typically takes over their parents’ farms. But if there’s no one willing to inherit the family farm, the cows are often sold. “I’ve seen many farms go out of business because the next generation is not there to support it,” Kristen May, Howard Hatch’s daughter, said.

May, 52, said she left the family farm to go to college and “see a little bit of the world.” She eventually returned when she and her husband “decided that home was where we wanted to be to raise a family. And we wanted to come back and help out the family business,” May said.

But it wasn’t an easy decision in such an unpredictable industry. And the decision hasn’t become much easier over the years. “It is a little unnerving not knowing the direction that we are headed, going into an unknown future with things changing so drastically,” May said.

Still, May feels some financial security as the farm processes and bottles its milk, which it has done for over 30 years now. Because they sell it at their North Haverhill store, they’re able to set their own price.

Their farm has been able to grow, May said, because her father was “so innovative and wanted to do more than just milk a cow and ship his milk.”

‘Not fun anymore’

In recent decades, dairy farms have been centralizing as larger farms continue to buy the cows of the dwindling smaller farms. The number of farms in the Upper Valley with milk sales decreased from 315 to 182, from 2002 to 2017, with most farms that closed having fewer than 200 cows, according to the Upper Valley Land Trust, which defines the Upper Valley as the four counties of Windsor and Orange in Vermont and Grafton and Sullivan in New Hampshire.

The total number of dairy cows across all farms, however, has not changed nearly as much, showing that cows have been moving from smaller to larger farms.

And while the total number of cows hasn’t changed significantly, milk production has skyrocketed. In the U.S., annual milk production per cow nearly doubled from 12,587 pounds in 1983 to 24,087 pounds in 2023 — largely because of more efficient herd management and technology.

Farmers have not welcomed the market’s demand for efficiency with open arms. “It’s just asking the cows to do more, working them harder and (putting them in) confinement,” Hatch said.

Caring for one’s cows used to mean having an ear for their well-being, he said, “but now the nutritionist tells you the analysis of your feed, and they try to stuff all that feed into a cow and get as much milk out of that cow as they can.”

“It used to be fun. It’s not fun anymore,” Hatch said.

Market forces

Many of the issues facing the dairy industry can be explained by a failure of the national price of milk to keep up with inflation. That is largely due to “big dairy farms out West that can produce just as much milk for almost half the costs,” said Ginsburg.

In New Hampshire, the average price a farmer received per hundredweight of milk has dropped from $44.35 in 1983 to just under $22 in 2023, adjusted for inflation, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

The price of milk is set on the federal level, as the government considers it a basic good. Farmers not selling directly to consumers, as Hatchland Farm does, then have no control over the price of their milk. This makes it difficult to plan their businesses week by week.

“Farmers don’t know what they’re going to receive for their milk that they produce today until next month,” Ginsburg said. “When you don’t know how much money you’re going to make until a month after you’ve done the labor, it’s really hard to plan and make effective strategies for managing a business.”

Unlike Hatchland Farm, most dairy farms in the Upper Valley (and the country) send their milk to cooperatives such as Agri-Mark, Dairy Farmers of America and Organic Valley, the three largest in the region. These cooperatives give farmers market access, share profits and more stable pricing.

Paul Doton, of Barnard, is among 15 Agri-Mark board members. Doton sells the milk of his 107 cows to Agri-Mark, which owns Cabot.

The board is responsible for ensuring the financial survival of the co-op. But the decisions made “in the long run may not be absolutely perfect for me and this farm, or for every farmer in the co-op,” Doton said in a phone interview. He declined to provide a specific example of such a decision.

The board is made up of dairy farmers and “it’s a delicate balance to make sure the co-op survives — but if you don’t have farmers to supply the milk, what good is the co-op?” Doton said.

This balance can lead to conflict: “It gets to be quite awkward and sometimes very, very tense and controversial,” Doton said.

Diversification

With challenges facing the dairy industry, many small farms in the Upper Valley have turned to value-added products such as yogurt, cheese and ice cream. “Most dairy farms, probably nearly all of them, have income streams beyond their production of milk,” Ginsburg said.

Value-added production is an element of what dairy farmers have always been doing: diversifying income. It’s not uncommon for dairy farms to also sell other crops and products such as maple syrup, sweet corn, timber, sawdust, beef, hay and silage.

“I’ve always carried quite a lot of debt,” Hatch said, “and I never had anything taken away from me, but I was doing something, whether I was doing custom work, planting corn for other people or selling a little extra feed.”

Like Hatchland, independent dairy farms often also have their own farm stands or stores so that they have more control over the prices. Instead of a set price, the only external factor is how much the customer is willing to spend on their milk.

“Having the store kind of cuts out the middleman and gives us the opportunity to make a little more profit off our own product,” May said.

Their store in Haverhill sells mostly local products such as cheese and ice cream, which has a more stable market than fluid milk alone, from Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

“It’s allowed us to continue farming,” Hatch said.

Optimism

A growing interest among consumers to understand where their food comes from offers encouragement for some Upper Valley farmers even as others have recently sold their cows.

“The long-term consumer trend that we’re seeing,” Ginsburg said, “is a greater desire to understand where one’s food is coming from. And maybe that’s because there were supply chain shortages during COVID that exposed the real fragility of our food system.”

At the height of the pandemic, farms had to dump milk because grocery stores, restaurants and schools were closed. “We had to dump a lot of milk, which we’ve never done before,” May said about Hatchland Farm, “we just didn’t have a place for it to go.”

But after this supply-chain difficulty, people have become more interested in local food products.

Randy Robar’s farmstand at Kiss the Cow in Barnard was bustling with people when the food system was struggling during the pandemic.

“Especially at first when people couldn’t get food from the supermarkets,” Robar said. “Our farm store was slammed with people because we could get food.”

Robar, 62, started the organic and independent farm with his wife, Lisa, 15 years ago after they both left teaching. They milk 14 cows and process and sell dairy products from the farm. Serving customers directly has added benefits for farmers.

“I know for us, the community values that we’re here every day. (They say,) ‘Thank you so much for what you’re doing,” Robar said. “Thank you for being here. We so appreciate you.’ And that helps us get through the day — some days that really helps us get through the day.”

In spite of the challenges facing the region’s dairy industry, most farmers think that things will improve in the future. “Most farmers are optimistic,” Doton said, “they have to be.”

Lukas Dunford can be reached at lukasdunf@gmail.com.