By Marian Burros • Photos by Molly McDonald Peterson

© Molly McDonald Peterson

When Michael Koch and Pablo Solanet bought an old farm in Garrett County, Maryland, in 1997 and turned it into their weekend getaway, it was not with the thought that it would become a working farm again. But one thing led to another, and by 2002 they were sitting on their back deck in late summer trying to come up with a name for their new cheesemaking endeavor.

As Koch tells it, “As the sun went down, there was a big field of goldenrod and a layer of fireflies that looked like the Milky Way, and FireFly Farms seemed appropriate.”

From one mild fresh goat cheese, Allegheny Chèvre, the business has grown to nine, including some very complex, aged varieties that would interest any serious artisanal cheese aficionado.

From Big City to Blue Ribbon

Koch and Solanet are both from farming families, and Koch remembers making cheese with his grandmother when he was six. His great-great-grandfather was a cheesemaker in Switzerland.

Like so many young people who are going back to the land, Koch and Solanet bring big-city experience with them. Koch continues to work in housing finance. Solanet, a graduate of L’Acadamie de Cuisine and a chef, wanted to move out to the country but continue to work with food. The next thing they knew, Solanet was making cheese.

“A local man had some goats left over from a project, and we convinced him we wanted to make cheese,” said Koch. “We were doing it for ourselves. And the first year FireFly Farms was officially in business, Pablo won a blue ribbon from the American Cheese Society for a goat’s-milk blue.”

Koch doesn’t find it so surprising. “Pablo is a brilliant chef and I took quite a bit of chemistry. Between the two of us, it was an effective combination.” Nevertheless, their success has been hard won.

By Guess & By Golly

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” he said. “We did it by guess and by golly because it was sort of a dream. We made a lot of mistakes.”

They sought advice from fellow cheesemakers. In 2001, both attended a weeklong course in cheese technology at the University of Wisconsin. Two years later, they hired Matt Cedro as cheesemaker; he went on to graduate from an artisanal cheese program at the University of Vermont in 2004.

On their way to profitability, they threw out whole batches of cheese. They almost ran out of money many times, but they persisted. In 2006, they went into the black with a repertoire of nine different cheeses—some of which are exceptional.

“We didn’t want to just copy someone else,” Koch said. “The cheeses are rooted in tradition but altogether different.”

What Recession?

A lot has changed since the fireflies floated over the goldenrod: The goats are gone—too much work to raise and milk them. FireFly Farms now buys its milk from three small Amish family farmers who farm organically but are not certified.

The business managed to survive the recession—because of the enormous interest in artisanal cheese, Koch believes—and is even expanding. Today Solanet devotes himself to marketing while Koch is president and chief financial officer of the company.

With a Small Business Administration loan, they are opening a new plant next year where they can produce 16,000 to 20,000 pounds a month—four times more than they do now. They already sell to local cheese shops in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, including Cowgirl Creamery and La Fromagerie; to Whole Foods in four states and the district; to a few wineries; to Mom’s Organic Markets; and at 13 farmers markets.

Ready for Raw?

Koch and Solanet want to make and sell raw-milk cheese, and the state of Maryland is now conducting a raw-milk cheese pilot in order to see whether it will allow the use of unpasteurized milk.

The couple is also talking about experimenting with cow-goat milk cheeses while remaining one of the only maybe half a dozen or fewer cheesemakers countrywide who make goat’s-milk blue cheeses. They see themselves as pioneers in their little corner of Maryland, which they want to become a hub of artisanal cheesemakers. The whole state of Maryland has only four goat’s-milk cheesemakers now.

That doesn’t mean, however, they want FireFly Farms to become a national brand.

“We do not really want to go all over the country,” said Koch. “The idea of putting my goat cheese in California and using all that jet fuel seems to me to be silly. I’m all about place, and we can make a living at it. Pablo and I are committed to small, sustainable agriculture. We want to be a well-known regional brand.”

FireFly Farms
Garrett County, MD
The farm is not open to the public.
(301) 245-4630
www.fireflyfarms.com

Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959, and at one time or other, she worked for The Washington Post and the late, lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.

SOME TASTING NOTES
Easy to enjoy, none of FireFly Farms’ cheeses would be described as intense.

Merry Goat Round: Goat’s milk brie, creamy.

Mountain Top Bleu: Pyramid with blue veining and white-bloomed rind. Delicate and creamy.

Buche Noire: Ash-covered, creamy.

Black & Blue: Sweet and sharp, creamy blue-veined with black-wax rind. A bit like sweet gorgonzola.

Bella Vita: Younger and milder than parmesan.

Allegheny Chèvre: Simple, fresh goat cheese.

By Marian Burros

Until last spring, phrases like “sustainable agriculture,” “local food,” and “mobile slaughterhouses” were only whispered in the halls of the Department of Agriculture, the agency where industrial agriculture and biotechnology reigned supreme.

Then Kathleen Merrigan—a 50-year-old assistant professor at Tufts University who had been teaching agricultural policy for the previous eight years—became the deputy secretary.

No Warm Welcome

Also a veteran politician and policy wonk, Merrigan began an arduous task: to make the agency rethink its role. By September, Merrigan (second in command to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack) introduced an initiative to rebuild the once-thriving local and regional food systems that can produce ecologically and socially responsible food, an idea to which the agency had hardly given the time of day.

Merrigan named it “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.” The program, which is aimed at local farmers and sustainable agriculture, farmers markets, and value-added-products, suddenly has agribusiness worried.
The chairman of the Iowa Corn Production Board, Tim Burrack, said modern agriculture is coming under attack and what he heard at the agency’s annual outlook conference in February “is radically different from what has taken place in the first 36 years of my career.” To Merrigan, he said, “This is not the USDA that people in the Midwest are familiar with.”

Unsaid was that Burrack didn’t like what he was hearing—perhaps because he’s worried that the subsidies his farm has been receiving from USDA, $1.1 million since 1995, might stop.

Merrigan’s response to him is the one she gives to all sides: “Well, you know, the USDA is a big place and there’s room in the tent for everyone.”

A New Agenda

What Merrigan is doing—with relatively small amounts of money from the 2008 farm bill, much smaller than the budget for industrial agriculture and biotechnology—is making the agency pay attention to both the little guy and the midsize farmer. She has found that the department is filled with people who want to work on projects to help them. “There are people coming out of their doors from the bowels of the bureaucracy saying, ‘Thank you. I’ve been wanting to work on this for years. I’ve never had this kind of work sanctioned.’ ”

When she got to the agency last spring, none of the money set aside in the 2009 budget for local food had been used. She recounted her exchanges with others at USDA: “ ‘How much money has gone into local food?’ Answer: ‘None yet.’ It takes a bureaucracy a long time to understand and embrace new imperatives unless you have someone pushing. So I came and I pushed. I asked, ‘What are you doing creatively to implement the law?’ ” And then she offered some more ideas.

Merrigan imagines more mobile slaughterhouses to serve small farmers who have no access to processing their animals and more medium-sized farms that can supply seasonal produce to 2,000 CSA (community supported agriculture) members, each paying $500. She imagines finding ways to make it easier for farms to sell to schools and having an organic program in which organic standards are strictly enforced.

As she wrote in an August 2009 memo, “I suspect that many USDA programs are under-utilized by those seeking to build local and regional food systems. I would like to play the role of match-maker during this Administration. By this, I mean I will work to help USDA program administrators to understand how our programs may better serve your efforts to build local and regional food systems as well as highlight for you USDA programs that present great opportunity for the work that you do.”

While her many supporters think she should have a lot more money to accomplish her goals, she thinks she can accomplish a lot with what she’s got. Asked if she is satisfied with her slice of the 2011 agriculture budget for which she is responsible, she said, “Yes.”

Merrigan always knows when to elaborate and when to be politic.

No Sellout

Her talent for navigating Washington is the trait Dan Barber, visionary owner-chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns outside New York City, admires most in her. “I think she is the smartest woman I know,” he said. “What’s so intriguing about her is her remarkable ability to be political and still have a strong set of values. Throughout her career, she has been able to further the principles of real sustainability without being a sellout. It takes a lot of political savvy to pull the right levers.”

Merrigan has spent years learning the art of politics and knows everyone. She worked for Senator Patrick Leahy when he was chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. She was the power behind the federal organic standards, managing to get them passed without harmful amendments.

Her last job in Washington was as the administrator of the Agriculture Marketing Service in the Clinton administration. When she came back to Washington after the 2008 election to lobby for a job in the Obama administration, it was not for anything as high level as deputy secretary. But many of her politically powerful friends lobbied for something much loftier. “I did not expect this job,” she said.

Fighting for the Underdog

She’s making the most of it to help the little guy, the person she has always looked out for. “I was always the kid standing up for other kids,” she said. “My parents wanted to be very inclusive, not to be judgmental. My daily mantra with my kids: Be kind.”

Her 12-hour days take her out of the house before her children are up. But her husband, a law school professor, makes it possible. “I don’t have to make difficult choices because he’s a great father and really great cook, and he picks up the slack,” she said as she sat in her spacious high-ceilinged office around the corner from Secretary Vilsack’s.
Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said Merrigan is off to a good start. But, he added, “All of this will be a drop in the bucket if the overall policy context doesn’t shift. To make a lasting impression, it has to be institutionalized.”

Merrigan has no illusions. So far she gives her performance a B. (“I was always a tough grader,” she said.) She feels she will have accomplished what she set out to do at the end of four years “if organic agriculture is in a stronger place within this bureaucracy, if local and regional [food systems] are working well, if I can help small farm operations grow so they can supply more of their income, and if I can help family farmers survive.”

“My aspirations are so great,” she said, “I won’t give myself an A-plus until ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ is having a major impact.”

Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959, and at one time or other, she worked for The Washington Post and the late, lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.

By Marian Burros • Photo by Kristen Taylor

With names like Boston Bounty Bucks, Fresh Checks, and Double Dollars, programs at a few farmers markets across the country—including some in the Capital foodshed—offer economically vulnerable people a deal they cannot refuse: as much as $20 worth of fresh fruits and vegetables for $10.

Double-voucher incentive programs are beginning to take off across the country with help from private foundations, local governments, and now even the federal government.

Just for Yuppies?

Just in the nick of time. As farmers markets spring up nationwide—there were 5,274 last year, double the number in 2000—the buzz that poor people cannot afford to shop at them grows louder.

Those who run the markets don’t deny it. “We know sometimes the food is not as affordable,” said Bernadine Prince, co-director of the nine FreshFarm Markets in metropolitan Washington. “The whole idea of Double Dollars has made food more affordable. We hope the people will come and get fresh food and make it a habit.”

“Double vouchers are exploding,” said Gus Schumacher, a former commissioner of agriculture in Massachusetts and an undersecretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration who has been involved in making farmers markets accessible to low-income shoppers since 1986, a plan that also gets more money into the hands of small farmers.

The double vouchers are available to anyone on food stamps, now known as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and to anyone who participates in the supplemental food program for women, infants, and children at nutritional risk (WIC). It is the latest effort to get people with limited incomes to shop at farmers markets. There are already programs that provide additional vouchers for fruits and vegetables to seniors eligible for food stamps and to WIC participants.

Twice as Nice

The first market in the Capital foodshed to offer double vouchers—and also one of the first in the country—was the Crossroads Farmers Market on the border of Takoma Park and Langley Park, Maryland.

According to Michelle Dudley, Crossroads’ executive director, the market began to offer double vouchers in 2007. By 2009, it was offering $10 for the first visit and $5 each visit. The program was so successful that it ran out of the money it had received from the city of Takoma Park and private foundations, so it had to continue raising additional money on a weekly basis in order to continue the project. “In June and July, our numbers were up over 300 percent because of the coupons,” said Dudley, “but we couldn’t keep up, and in August we offered only $3. Fewer and fewer people came. It was a huge deterrent.”

Dudley said the market also surveyed its customers. “People told us they wouldn’t be coming to the market if it weren’t for those benefits. They also said they can taste the difference. Senior citizens in particular express gratitude on a weekly basis.”

Market by Market

All too often, people eligible for these programs are not aware of them: Generally there has not been enough outreach from the farmers markets or from local government agencies publicizing their availability.

Just as the locavore movement began small and scattered, double vouchers are making their way on to the national scene slowly, market by market. Helping the poor shop at farmers markets is a recent phenomenon and there are still a number of barriers.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, for example, the city refused to sign the necessary government papers in 2009, so double vouchers won’t be available until later this year.

But there are problems at every level. Unlike grocery stores, which have been doing business with food stamp recipients for years, it was only five years ago that farmers markets began accepting food stamps, and even today, not all of them do: It’s up to each individual market whether it will buy the equipment necessary to accept them.

Technologically Challenged

EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) systems, now used in place of paper food stamps, are dependent on wireless technology equipment. A food-assistance recipient must swipe what is essentially a debit card in order to access his or her benefits (aka food stamps). Few recipients even know they can use their food stamps at participating farmers markets.

With WIC produce vouchers, each state is allowed to decide whether the vouchers can be used at farmers markets. No special equipment is required to process these vouchers, but, again, it is up to individual vendors whether or not to accept them.

For the double-voucher program, it is up to each market to decide whether to participate. Many of them simply do not have the funds it takes to match benefits. Farmers markets, which are often run by volunteers, may be interested in offering double vouchers but lack the resources for fundraising and administering the program.

Up until now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has not made it any easier. It requires that market organizers get special waivers to offer the double vouchers. In addition, grocery stores receive the EBT equipment for nothing, whereas farmers markets have to pay about $1,000 for one. Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan is aware of the financial barriers to both expanding the EBT system and offering vouchers to make those benefits go even further and is providing more money to reduce the burden on the markets. She said the agency is also working to simplify the process for being certified.

Nonprofits in the Lead

The biggest mover in the double-voucher program is the Wholesome Wave Foundation, of which Schumacher is chairman. The foundation gave seed money to 10 markets in four states in 2008 and another 55 markets in 10 states in 2009. This year it will support over 100 markets in 20 states.

Across the country other foundations as well as city and state governments are following the foundation’s lead. Even the federal government is helping out with grants. USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Services gave Massachusetts $15,000 for double vouchers and provided California with $500,000 to promote improved access for low-income residents, including double vouchers.

The program is so new that it is difficult to track how many additional markets with some form of double vouchers exist. Besides the markets funded by Wholesome Wave, some markets in New York, Maine, Ohio, Colorado, and Oregon have found ways to offer such incentives.

In addition to Crossroads, a few other Washington-area markets are offering double vouchers—the Silver Spring market in Maryland, the Spotsylvania County market in Virginia, and both the H Street NE market and the Vermont Avenue (White House) market in the district.

A Win-Win Situation

For areas where there is not enough business for a farmers market, such as inner cities, Wholesome Wave has come up with an innovative way to deliver fruits and vegetables. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a mobile veggie van brings local produce sold at half price to four inner-city neighborhoods. The mobile unit has been doing $3,000 in sales in a four-hour period. The produce doesn’t always look perfect because it isn’t graded, it isn’t waxed, and it doesn’t come in a box—but it’s fresh.

Wholesome Wave’s Schumacher says if more people on food stamps and the WIC program are encouraged to buy at farmers markets, they will eat healthier food while small farmers can make more money. “If 1 percent of the money in the national food stamp program is spent at farmers markets and 15 percent of the new WIC monthly vouchers are spent at farmers markets, by the end of two or three years that would mean $150 to $200 million for small farmers,” he said. “ I think that’s an achievable vision.”

SNAP Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Renamed in late 2008, this federal program was previously known as the Food Stamp Program. The stamps have been replaced with an electronic card that resembles a debit card.

EBT Electronic Benefit Transfer

SNAP clients access their benefits using the EBT system instead of receiving a cash payment or stamps. When purchasing food, they swipe a card with a metallic strip and enter a personal identification number into a point-of-sale machine, just as customers do when using credit or debit cards. The machine that reads the cards requires electricity and an Internet connection.

WIC Women, Infants & Children

This federal program is designed to get healthful food to low-income women and children at risk of not receiving proper nutrition. Recipients are pregnant women and recent mothers (up to six months after birth), infants, and children up to the age of five. Benefits, which vary according to the age of the children and the mother’s condition, allow recipients to buy items such as milk, produce, dairy products, and peanut butter.

Scrip

Because EBT systems are expensive and because electricity and phone lines are not readily available at most farmers market sites, most markets have only one point-of-sale machine. To make this work, the market will issue a scrip, or an alternative currency. The SNAP client swipes his or her card and receives scrip for the amount desired or, if the market is doubling benefits, scrip worth twice that amount. Clients then buy produce from market vendors with scrip, although they do not receive change in return. Market organizers later exchange vendors’ scrip for cash.

But what’s a mid-Atlantic chef to do when farmers markets close and fields lie fallow?

By Marian Burros • Photos by Molly McDonald Peterson

“This is my favorite time to cook,” said Cathal Armstrong, chef and owner of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, “from now until the end of February—all those amazing root vegetables that have so much flavor. I’m happy with turnips, parsnips, rutabaga, carrots. The flavors are so rich and hardy when it’s cold and rainy. Nothing beats a braised dish.”

One of the area’s premier chefs is talking about the same vegetables many people gagged on as children. And he acknowledged it. “When they’re overcooked, they lose all their delicious sweetness. That’s a big part of it. We hated them when we were growing up because moms used to overcook them.”

But slowly Americans have begun to warm to root vegetables. “There’s a lot more acceptance by diners,” said Barton Seaver, an owner and chef of Blue Ridge in Glover Park. “If the chef thinks rutabaga is good enough to put on the menu, [diners] are willing to try it.”

Addie's (Photo © Molly McDonald Peterson)

Local Food Doesn’t Hibernate

For those who think local food goes away with the first frost, Armstrong has a message. “There are plenty of things to keep us amused. At the restaurant, 90 percent of our produce in winter is local.”

Across the country, the push is on to serve local ingredients all year round, not only because they taste better and last longer, but also because buying locally may reduce the carbon footprint and is better for the environment. And with all the food safety problems in recent years, people feel more comfortable with ingredients grown nearby on small farms. Local and sustainable have become important buzzwords that appear to have staying power.

Dozens of chefs in the D.C. area, like Armstrong, are confident that, at least until February, there are plenty of choices. In addition to buying at the farmers markets, some of which operate year-round, these chefs have contracts with co-ops like Tuscarora Organic Growers in Pennsylvania and Northern Neck Fruit and Vegetables in Virginia. They also contract with individual farmers who grow to order. The pool from which to choose keeps getting bigger.

“It’s easy here in Washington,” Seaver said. “There are lots of farmers with good distribution networks.”

And not just for produce. Sources of local meats and all kinds of poultry, as well as dairy products, breads, and even dried beans and grains, are becoming more plentiful.

Jim Crawford of New Morning Farm in Pennsylvania, who sells in the Washington area through the Tuscarora Co-op, said the number of members in the co-op will jump from 28 to 48 next year. “We’ve never had that amount of growth at one time,” he said, “and the number of young people going into farming is even more amazing.”

What they are planting—celery root, salsify, sweet white turnips, scarlet turnips, watermelon radishes, Jerusalem artichokes, kohlrabi, microgreens, herbs—expands every season. Now they are using high tunnels, or hoop houses, to grow arugula, different lettuces, and spinach.

Jose Andres is expanding the area’s growing season for tomatoes with a greenhouse on the Eastern Shore. His seven Washington-area restaurants need a year-round supply.

No one is arguing that the tomatoes grown indoors will be as good as field tomatoes in the middle of summer. But, as John Paul Damato, the chef at Jaleo in Bethesda pointed out, “At least they won’t have to come all the way from Mexico.”

Dino's (Photo © Molly McDonald Peterson)

Sustainability Is Not Seasonal

Shopping for local produce sounds romantically old-fashioned but requires dedication. It is much more time-consuming than calling up a couple of distributors and having everything delivered. “If I go to four or five markets a week, it adds three hours a day,” said Vicki Reh, the executive chef at Buck’s Fishing and Camping in D.C.’s Upper Northwest. “But I think the produce I get is so beautiful, it’s definitely worth the effort.”

No one at Buck’s will miss the conventional green salad in the dead of winter when they can have fire-roasted peppers dressed with a little balsamic, pickled onions, and Romenesko cauliflower with big chunks of housemade cottage cheese.

Dean Gold, owner with his wife of Dino’s in Cleveland Park, hangs around farmers markets until closing time. Then he buys up whatever is left over at a greatly reduced price. On occasion, he has had to make a choice between his wife riding back to the restaurant in his car and taking the produce. The produce always wins: She takes Metro.

Right now his gelato freezer is filled with 200 to 300 quarts of concentrated summer tomato sauce, ready to heat and spoon on pasta.

A spectacular dish of potatoes that have been sautéed in duck fat and topped with a mascarpone-horseradish sauce and translucently thin slices of spec (smoked prosciutto) made from American Berkshire pigs is satisfying enough to make it a meal. It is definitely a cold-weather dish.

“We have a core group of customers that get what we do,” Gold said. “To them, seasonality is incredibly important because of flavor—and because it’s sustainable. Even our to-go containers are biodegradable.”

Restaurant Eve (Photo © Molly McDonald Peterson)

An A for Effort

But there are limits: Gold cannot afford local beef. It’s too expensive for his restaurant.

There is concern about the cost of local food. “I’ve heard a lot of this lately,” said Restaurant Eve’s Armstrong, but buying local ingredients saves his restaurant money.

The chef offered an anecdote to prove his point. Not so long ago, he turned the running of Eve over to one of his chefs while he was busy with another project. When he returned, he was upset to find the chef had been buying from conventional suppliers and put a stop to it immediately, returning to his local suppliers.

“If you buy from a conventional supplier, the food is already two weeks old at least,” he said. “It’s lost its sweetness; it has a shorter shelf life. You have to throw things away because they are spoiled. So the waste factor tends to balance the cost. We found that not having to throw anything away dropped our food cost 3 percent.”

For restaurants, there’s also money to be saved if the chef has butchering skills. “It helps if you can buy the whole pig or steer and butcher it yourself,” said Nate Waugman of Addie’s in Rockville. “Every piece of animal that comes to me, I use— making pigs’ heads into scrapple and head cheese.”

When he arrived less than a year ago at Addie’s, part of the local Black Restaurant Group, 20 percent of the ingredients at the restaurant were local. This summer it jumped to between 80 and 90 percent, and he expects to keep 50 percent of his produce local this winter.

Not every chef wants to go to this much trouble, Waugman said, “but if people don’t think this way, we won’t have any farmers. It is getting easier because now everyone wants it, because they want bragging rights. I think in 20 years, most cities will be able to buy local.”

Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959, and at one time or other, she worked for the The Washington Post and the late lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.

Unlike cows at large-scale conventional dairy farms, these cows at Threlkeld Farm in Brandy Station, Virginia, are managed seasonally and are totally grass-fed, so they do not produce milk during the winter.

Milk’s positive image has been taking a shellacking on many fronts for several years now. Should humans drink it? Is it safe?

But those controversies pale in the face of the huge fight that is brewing over record-low prices for milk being paid to farmers. Across the country, dairy operators are going broke and selling off their herds at an accelerated rate. In Vermont—which once had more cows than people—32 dairy farmers have gone out of business since January, compared to 19 last year.

Milk Monopoly?

A group of farmers in the Southeast, including Virginia, have filed a huge antitrust suit against the people who buy and process their milk. Several members of the U.S. Senate have written the Department of Justice telling them to look into anti-competitive practices in the industry. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in mid-September to explore concentration in the dairy business. And the Justice Department has sent very strong signals that the dairy industry is at the top of its list of investigations for antitrust violations.

In August 2008, farmers received an average of $18.40 per hundred pounds of milk; in August of this year, they were receiving $11.80. The cost of milk at the supermarket still does not reflect the significant drop in price paid to the farmer. Between January and August, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there was only a 31 cent drop in the average price of a gallon of whole milk, from $3.80 to $3.49. So while farmers took a 36 percent hit, consumers have seen less than a 10 percent drop.

Hard Times Made Harder

There has been a decreased demand for milk because of the worldwide recession, but many experts say concentration in the dairy industry has exacerbated the difference between what farmers are paid and what consumers pay.

According to Chris Galen, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, the dairy farmers’ trade association, “The degree of red ink, at least this spring, was as wide a gap as we’ve recorded over the past 40 years. Milk prices are 25 to 30 percent below the cost of production.” Part of the problem is the high cost of feed and fuel.

Mike Stiles, a third-generation dairy farmer in Clear Brook, Virginia, is a typical dairy farmer whose bills each month are $12,000 to $15,000 higher than his monthly income. Right now he is using his savings and retirement money to keep farming. “That’s not good,” he said. “The big question is how much longer can we do this, or do we want to do it?”

Fuzzy Math

Milk produced by these cows at Cows-N-Corn in Midland, Virginia, is sold under the Marva Maid brand and the store brands of Bloom, Harris Teeter, and Giant.

While acknowledging that there is a reduced demand for milk, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who is leading the call for tighter scrutiny of the dairy industry, says the real causes for unsustainable prices for milk at the farm are anti-competitive practices brought about by the decades-long consolidation of milk processors and wholesalers. Dean Foods is the largest fluid milk processor, controlling about 40 percent of the buying market nationally and much more in certain states, according to Sanders and others.

In a statement, Dean Foods said it buys less than 15 percent of the nation’s supply of raw milk. “To suggest that we control the raw-milk market, or that we are the cause of low milk prices, makes no sense.” But the company’s figure is misleading because it includes not just fluid milk, but also the milk used for manufactured products like ice cream, cheese, and powdered milk. Dean Foods does not specify its share of the fluid milk market.

The country’s largest milk cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), which controls at least one-third of the nation’s milk supply and as much as 90 percent in the Southeast, has only said, “The national scope and size of our cooperative bring about scrutiny.” Dairy cooperatives were established to help farmers receive a fair price for their milk, but, ironically, members of DFA are among those who have filed the lawsuit in the Southeast.

“Basically, it means farmers end up not having a lot of options for selling their product,” said Sanders. “While milk prices have plummeted, profits at Dean have soared this year”—up 35 percent for the first six months of 2009. “You have to be dumb not to see the connection.”

Fewer Buyers

The Department of Justice has been aware of this problem at least since the second term of the Bush administration, when career employees at the department conducted a two-year investigation into dairy industry competition. The chief investigator recommended that the Justice Department take action. Political appointees in the department shelved the project. People in the dairy industry, who were interviewed during the investigation, confirm the facts but have requested anonymity because they could be subpoenaed to testify again.

The new political appointees in the Justice Department have signaled that antitrust violations in agriculture, particularly dairy, are high on their list of investigations. In August, the Justice Department and the Department of Agriculture announced a series of workshops starting next year to explore competition issues affecting agriculture.

Remarks made at the mid-September Senate Judiciary Committee in Vermont by Christine Varney, chief of the antitrust division at the Justice Department, make the department’s interest clear. In her testimony, Varney said, “Parts of the dairy industry have experienced extensive consolidation in recent years, with fewer processors and therefore fewer buyers of dairy products. As a result of consolidation, the potential for an exercise of buyer power has increased.”

Varney also said that agriculture has become more vertically integrated over the last 15 or 20 years. (Vertical integration involves ownership at multiple stages or contractual commitments. In this context, that would include collecting, processing, and distributing fluid milk and milk products.) Varney added that “a careful review of these arrangements is merited.”

Market Forces

At the Vermont hearing, Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the state’s senior senator, said, “As I think about the gap between retail and farm prices, I cannot help but think back to 2001 and the Dean Foods merger with Suiza Foods”—the number one and two companies in the industry. “That merger created the largest milk processing company in the world, and I continue to be disappointed that the Justice Department, under the previous administration, approved it. Just as I had feared eight years ago, it seems that market dominance has translated into overwhelming power in the dairy industry.”

Some farmers are not waiting for the government to act. The group in the Southeast has filed two lawsuits against Dean Foods of Dallas and Dairy Farmers of America of Kansas City. They charge the companies with “unlawful activities designed to artificially and anti-competitively reduce the price paid [to producers] for Grade A milk” in 17 states. They seek hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and reform of the system.

The Fate of Local Dairies

For small dairy farmers, the alternative to dealing with big business is to sell directly to consumers. Clear Spring Creamery in Clear Spring, Maryland, an organic dairy, milks 30 cows. “We dictate the price—$6 for a half gallon—for all the milk we sell directly at farmers markets,” said Clare Seibert, who owns the farm with her husband, Mark. “The [price of the] milk we sell through an organic wholesaler is affected somewhat.”

But nothing like how milk from conventional producers has been affected. Organic Valley, a cooperative that sells milk in many large grocery stores throughout the Capital foodshed, has reduced the price it pays producers for milk from $26 to $25 per hundred pounds; it has also instituted quotas that reduce the amount of milk it will buy from farmers by about 7 percent. But these slightly lower prices for organic milk have nothing to do with market concentration. Instead, there is a surplus of organic milk because many people can no longer afford it.

Farmers have received temporary relief from the federal government, which has raised the price for some milk products by about $1 per hundred pounds. Additional funding was passed by Congress at the end of September.

“If you do not have fair prices, you are going to see more and more farmers being driven out of business,” said Sanders. “There will be a need to import more from all over world. People want local, fresh, good quality. We are going exactly in the wrong direction.”

Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959 and remembers when there were no farmers markets. At one time or other, she worked for The Washington Post and the late lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.

Look for products from local dairies like these at grocery stores and farmers 
markets. Some even offer home delivery.

Clear Spring Creamery
Clear Spring, MD
www.clearspringcreamery.com

Homestead Creamery
Wirtz, VA

South Mountain Creamery
Middletown, MD
www.southmountaincreamery.com

Trickling Springs Creamery
Chambersburg, PA
www.tricklingspringscreamery.com
Trickling Springs milk complimentary of Roy’s Orchard and Market, 
Sperryville, Virginia.

Is the White House’s organic kitchen garden more than just a photo op?

When the White House announced Michelle Obama would be planting an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn, cynics claimed it was nothing more than a photo opportunity to burnish the new First Lady’s image. They could hardly have imagined how a 20-by-50 plot of snap peas, kale, tomatoes, and squash would have such a profound impact on the politics of food.

Obama’s simple act of connecting the dots between food and health got everyone’s attention, even the attention of those who would never dream of planting a garden. For champions of local and sustainable food and of teaching children about healthy eating habits, the garden has been just the catalyst they needed to get the movement off the ground.

Big Ag Responds

It’s even been a wake-up call for the chemical pesticide industry. The industry is worried that local food and organics are not fads but are here to stay. The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA), an organization that represents companies manufacturing and selling chemical pesticides and fertilizers (such as Monsanto and Dow), was so upset by the garden that it begged Obama not to forget conventional agriculture. In a letter addressed to Mrs. Barack Obama—a form not used since ladies wore white gloves—they euphemistically refer to chemicals as “crop protection products.”

To make sure the message was received, the organization asked its members to start a letter-writing campaign to the First Lady. On the MACA website, the request noted that “Bonnie McCarvel, executive director of the Mid-America CropLife Association and Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador coordinator, ‘shuddered’ at the thought that the White House garden will be organic and asked: ‘What message does that send to the non-farming public about the “crop protection products”?’”

Enough Rope to Hang Themselves

The blogosphere gleefully provided answers that heaped scorn on MACA for even asking the question.

But it was Jon Stewart who offered the pesticide supporters an opportunity to make even greater fools of themselves, inviting them to appear on The Daily Show. A spokesman for the American Council on Science and Health—a group that generally sides with industry in health and environmental matters and that has been funded at one time or another by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Exxon, and Dow Chemical—agreed to discuss the White House garden in a segment titled “Little Crop of Horrors.”

The narrator set the scene: “This seemingly harmless 20-by-50-foot token gesture has created a firestorm.” Jeffrey Stier, associate director of the council, called the Obamas “organic limousine liberals” and then went on: “I think the Obama garden should come with a warning label. It’s irresponsible to tell people that you have to eat organic and locally grown food.

Not everyone can afford that. That’s a serious public health concern.”

Because? “People are going to eat fewer fruits and vegetables.  Cancer rates will go up. Obesity rates will go up. I think if we decide we’re only going to eat locally grown food, we’re going to have starvation.”

Obesity and starvation simultaneously?

A Parent’s Concern

The White House did not respond to the letter-writing campaign, but to clarify, Obama never suggested everyone had to have a garden and eat organic food. In an interview with me in March, she acknowledged that not everyone can plant a garden. “You don’t have to bite off more than you can chew, because sometimes that is also daunting for a working family. You can begin in your own cupboard by making different choices about what you eat, in trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables. But you can also extend it into shopping at a farmers market, if it’s accessible, or even thinking more broadly about developing a community garden.”

She also said the idea for the garden came out of her experiences as a working mother having a difficult time feeding her daughters healthful foods. “We were eating out three times a week. I could cook one day, then we’re ordering in pizza, then maybe they’d get one sandwich. You’d have a hodgepodge of food.  And we were starting to see the effects of some of those decisions, just on our bodies.”

The family pediatrician told Obama to start thinking about diet and nutrition and that her daughters, Malia and Sasha, needed to slim down. “He raised a flag for us,” she said of the doctor’s warning.

“Kids’ approach to food is simple: How does it taste? What I’ve learned is if you buy it fresh, if it’s grown locally, it’s probably going to taste better,” she explained.

“And a really fresh carrot tastes different from a carrot that was bought, picked, and grown weeks ago. And children know the difference.”

Personal Becomes Political

When the White House garden was ready to be harvested in June, Obama invited the fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, who had helped dig and plant the garden in March, to do the harvesting and use the ingredients to cook a meal.

And, for the first time, she took the opportunity to make the point that a vegetable garden and healthful eating are directly related to politics. They are tied to two important pieces of legislation currently under consideration: health care reform and the reauthorization of school lunch that calls for providing healthier food in schools’ meal programs.

“The President and Congress are going to begin to address health care reform, and these issues of nutrition and wellness and preventative care [are] going to be the focus of a lot of conversation,” she said. She ticked off diet-related diseases—diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure—noting that nearly one-third of American children are either overweight or obese.

These diseases cost the country $120 billion a year. If children ate more nutritious food and exercised more, costs would go down, she said, adding that it would help if there were more school gardens and community gardens, particularly in poor communities in urban settings.

“We need to improve the quality and nutrition of the food served at schools,” she urged. “We’re approaching the first big opportunity to move this to the top of the agenda with the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs. In doing so, we can go a long way toward creating a healthier generation for our kids.”

So What?

Washington is not the only place the White House garden is having a significant impact. When the Obamas announced their plans for the garden this spring, sales of vegetable seeds rose across the country and nurseries ran out of seedlings. Gardener’s Supply, of Burlington, Vermont, saw a 25 percent increase in unique visits to its online Kitchen Garden Planner.

“People are connecting school gardens and farm-to-school programs with this very tangible, concrete example,” said Abby Nelson, director of Vermont’s Food Education Every Day (FEED). “If the First Lady can do it, our little school can do it. It brought to the attention of parents, teachers, and even legislators that kids want to grow food and want to know where their food comes from.

“It increased the level of importance because it was connected to what the First Lady thought was important. It is not just a cute, faddish effort.”

Now the question is whether Obama can use her high approval ratings to further her agenda: to make healthy eating part of the health care debate and what children are served in school. Jocelyn Frye, Obama’s policy director, and Sam Kass, White House Food Initiative coordinator and an assistant chef, are exploring the next steps.

“The job is not done,” Kass said. “We are finding ways to reinforce and elevate the connection between food and health. We are looking for new approaches, working on practical tools people can use in their daily lives.”

When Obama returns from vacation in September—and her children return to school—food activists and agribusiness executives alike will be watching to see how she advances the crusade she began last March.

Marian Burros was on staff at The New York Times for 27 years and still writes for them. She has lived in the Washington area since 1959 and remembers when there were no farmers markets. At one time or other, she worked for The Washington Post and the late lamented Washington Star and Washington Daily News. She was also a consumer reporter for D.C.’s WRC-TV. The author of 13 cookbooks, she has been writing about small farms and the pleasures of local food since the 1980s.