Posted on 06/26/2003 8:16:06 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Only dairy farm in county moving
By Allison Fashek Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
CHEYENNE – The thing Diane Humphrey misses most about living on a dairy farm is the steady sound of the milk tank motor.
The motor, which sat on top of the metal storage tank just behind her family’s home, ran constantly for about 50 years, stirring the milk and keeping it cool and safe to drink.
But Humphrey and her family had to turn off the motor at their fourth-generation dairy farm last September.
They temporarily shipped their 400 black and white Holstein cattle to a farm in Fort Collins, Colo., and have since decided to get out of the dairy farming business. On Tuesday, a crane lifted the tank and its now eerily quiet motor onto a truck, preparing for its send-off.
While the Humphreys’ daughter, Shannon Hageman, has decided to take over, buy 200 more cattle and move the business to a modern farm in Wheatland, the relocation marks the end of an era. The Humphreys’ dairy farm was the last one in Laramie County.
“This was a good little dairy farm for almost 75 years,” Humphrey said, taking a look at her land. “It’s sad. It really is. It breaks our hearts.”
The number of dairy farms in the state has been steadily declining in the past couple of years due to a mix of low milk prices, high feed prices caused by the drought and overall competition.
In 1997, there were an estimated 7,000 milk cows in the state, while as of Jan. 1, 2003, there were 4,000, said Dick Coulter, state statistician for the Wyoming Agricultural Statistics Service. Today Wyoming has 37 dairy farms.
A big part of the problem is milk prices, which have hit a 25-year low, said Brad Sutherland, executive director of the Goshen County Economic Development Corporation.
Many of the state’s small operations, those with 50 to 100 cattle, are also facing pressure to grow or get out of the business, said Ted Craig, a value-added program manager for the Wyoming Business Council’s Agribusiness Division.
“The economics is that you have to have larger herds,” he said. “To be competitive, when you look at Colorado, they have 5,000- to 10,000-head farms milking 24 hours a day. It makes it tough on the small guy.”
It wasn’t always that way.
Diane Humphrey’s father, Dean Fogg, recalls during the 1930s there were 75 milk producers within a 25-mile radius of Cheyenne.
Fogg bought the farm along with his father in 1941. The family belonged to a local milk producer cooperative, which made sure there was enough milk to sell to F.E. Warren Air Force Base. When he signed up to serve in World War II, he was turned away because his work as a milk producer was too important.
Through the years, Fogg kept up with modern improvements, testing the amount of butterfat in his milk, artificially inseminating his cattle and installing a pipeline and 6,000-gallon tank to make milking and storage easier.
In 1978, Diane and her husband, Floyd, bought the dairy farm. The family admits it’s a hard life, waking up for work as early as 2 a.m., 365 days a year, but they love it.
“It’s a great way to raise kids,” Diane Humphrey said. “You tell them the later they stay out, the earlier they have to get up.”
But with milk fetching only $9 per 100 pounds, down from $16 per 100 pounds a few years ago, the Humphreys couldn’t afford the cost of shipping milk to the nearest milk processing plant in Colorado. Wyoming does not have its own plant, but there is a cheese processing plant in Star Valley.
Despite the trend, many in the industry are confident that there is still a place for dairy farms in Wyoming. Craig said the state could be a great place for the fast-growing industry of organic milk production.
Sutherland added that the Goshen County Economic Development Corporation will continue to recruit dairy farms to the area once milk prices improve.
The farms make economic sense for the region because of its focus on farming, he said. Other local farmers can use manure produced by the cattle as fertilizer, and dairy farms can buy feed from local farmers with low shipping costs.
Because milk prices move independent of meat and corn prices, dairy farms also could help diversify the area’s economy. And if the county can attract a minimum of 5,000 dairy cows, Sutherland said there is interest in building a milk processing plant.
“I don’t think they’re dying out,” Sutherland said of dairy farms in the state. “And when they start to come back, we want their introduction and growth to be well managed.”
For now, the Humphreys will keep their farm as a place for their daughter’s dairy cattle to calve.
“It’s tough for us, but we’re excited that our daughter wants to stay in the business,” Diane Humphrey said.
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