Dairy Farmers

Nine million cows keep American dairy aisles stocked, but all their laboring back and forth to the milking parlor is getting them down. One in five now has leg or foot pain - a condition called lameness that costs the agricultural industry more than a half-billion dollars annually and can leave the animals unable to produce much milk or even stand. To keep the udders, and the dairymen, in business, a team of inventors led by a University of Maryland, Baltimore County engineer has built a device that weeds out cows for early treatment.

One Friday morning, Kate Dallam leaves her dairy farm in Harford County for the hour-long drive to Israel Kinsinger's cheese plant in Pennsylvania to collect cheese he has made from the milk her cows produced. But she is not sure the Lancaster County farmer knows she is coming. Kinsinger, who is Amish, has a phone in the woods behind his house, but he may not have checked his messages. "Communication can be a challenge," says Dallam, who with her husband owns Broom's Bloom Dairy in Creswell.

Faced with wholesale milk prices that are at a 25-year low, Maryland's dairy farmers could see some relief over the next year under a plan by the National Milk Producers Federation to boost prices by trimming cattle herds and cutting back the nation's milk production. The plan - called Cooperatives Working Together - could help boost the wholesale price of milk by 9 percent over the next 12 months, said Christopher Galen, the federation's vice president of communications. Dairy farmers in Maryland and throughout the Northeast won't be expected to reduce production significantly under the voluntary plan - the greatest cutbacks would likely occur in the Southwest and Northwest, Galen said yesterday.

Think about it from the cow's point of view. Most comfortable at 50 degrees or cooler, she has to lug her 1,400 pounds through those 95-degree afternoons that have been so common this summer. Her owner is afraid the wells will run dry so he has stopped spritzing her regularly, and, unlike a person, she can't sweat away her body heat. Can you blame her for not wanting to eat the gobs of food that keep her milk flowing? Dried-up reservoirs and dying crops might get more attention, but droughts wreak havoc on dairy and beef cattle farmers as well.

The four-year struggle by Maryland farmers to become part of a regional dairy compact is over, but state dairymen are not complaining. The Senate included an alternative to dairy compacts in the version of the new national farm bill it passed Wednesday. The proposal would make $500 million in subsidies available to dairy farmers in 12 Northern states, including Maryland, when the farm price of Class 1 (drinking) milk drops below $16.94 per hundredweight. "It looks good, it has my hopes up," said Carroll County dairy farmer Myron Wilhide.

When Bobby Prigel took over his family's Glen Arm dairy farm, he shooed the cows out of the barn, cut milk production by 30 percent and planted grass on the cornfields. He doesn't even milk his cows a large part of the year and he works only half as many hours now as in the past. Despite moves that would seem fatal to a viable dairy operation - particularly in Maryland, where dairy farms have been going out of business at a record pace in recent years - Prigel insists that his profits are soaring.

As state farmers prepare for the new planting season, the outlook is bright for poultry, livestock, and greenhouse and nursery farmers, but grain farmers and dairy farmers will continue to struggle. "There are some trouble spots, but 2002 could be a good year for state farmers," said state Agriculture Secretary Hagner R. Mister. "That is providing we get some rain." For the second consecutive year, corn literally piled up on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The 30- to 40-foot mountains of grain were evidence of another bumper harvest for state grain farmers but also an indication of troubled times in the year ahead.

Butter? Margarine? Butter! Consumers have been slowly but surely oozing their way back to butter over the past seven years or so. It's not a huge jump, but the category is steadily growing at about 6 percent a year, with Americans now consuming about 4.3 pounds per person a year. After the scared-of-your-dinner 1980s, this increase is a good sign to dairy farmers, who've watched their countrymen gobble up margarine and other spreads while ignoring the once-golden butter. But butter consumption is still a long way from what it once was. "There was a time in this country," says Al Costigan, the president of the American Butter Institute, a trade group for dairy farmers and marketers, "that Americans each ate about 16 pounds of butter a year."

Farmers attending today's annual meeting of the Maryland Dairy Industry Association in Westminster should have a little more money in their pockets this year. "Milk prices are at a record high," said Myron Wilhide, a Carroll County farmer who milks 205 cows and is president of the Maryland Dairy Industry Association. According to a computer printout, the average price of milk sold at the farm so far this year is nearly $15 per hundredweight. Wilhide's milk payment last month topped $18.50.

RANDOLPH, Vt. - Over the knoll from Perry Hodgdon's place, a one-time farm has become a housing development. Hodgdon's own 100-acre dairy farm was once four separate ones, and may itself cease operations or get absorbed into another farm next year when Hodgdon hopes to retire. Family dairies, with their weathered barns and Ben-and-Jerry cows grazing on gentle green terrain, retain their hold on New England's physical and emotional landscape, even as they find it ever harder to stay afloat in the current tide toward larger-scale agriculture.