Many of Vermont’s Dairy Farms Have Shuttered, and the Forecast Is for Still Fewer — and Much Larger — Operations 

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• Justin Cash
• Robert Bassett on his former dairy farm

Five years or so ago, dairy farming stopped being fun for Robert Bassett.

He had taken pleasure for 30 years in managing his herd, working outdoors and being his own boss. He had chosen this life, dropping out of college, abandoning his plans to become an engineer, and returning to the 98 acres his grandfather and father had farmed since 1945. The Bassett Farm was a landscape of flat pastures, hillside forest, red barns and Jersey cows less than two miles from the Woodstock Village Green. He felt a deep connection to the land.

For three decades, Bassett rode the steep ups and downs in milk prices and found ways to manage rising costs. He held on when the family's 240-year-old farmhouse burned to the ground.

But a persistent oversupply of milk in the U.S. depressed prices paid to farmers so much, for so long, that most dairies like his hadn't seen positive balance sheets in years. Bassett, 55, was growing weary of toiling for such little return. His 100-cow farm was just too small to operate with the same efficiency as the emerging 1,000-cow dairies in Vermont, and he couldn't afford to expand.

So, last fall, Bassett sold his herd. He is trying to figure out what to do next. For the first time in more than 75 years, no Bassett is milking cows in Woodstock. In fact, few people are. Bassett's farm was the last remaining dairy in town, aside from the nonprofit Billings Farm & Museum.

As he sat at his kitchen table one April morning and reflected on the state of the dairy industry in Vermont, Bassett offered a simple thesis.

"There's no money in it," he said. "You've got to get big or get out."

Many have gotten out. The business that shaped Vermont's landscape for more than 150 years has been largely transformed into an industry that a 1950 hill farmer would not recognize.

That year, Vermont was home to 11,000 dairy farms. Today, there are 508. Because what farmers are paid for milk rarely covers what it cost them to produce it, they search for economies of scale — to milk more and more cows and spread the expenses over the larger revenue. From 2012 to 2022, that resulted in a 44 percent decrease in the number of small Vermont farms, defined as those with fewer than 200 cows.

Others, as Bassett noted, got big. Even as the number of dairy farms overall declined, those with 700-plus cows more than doubled, to 35.

What hasn't changed significantly is how much milk Vermont dairy farms produce. Despite the industry's much publicized economic problems, it still generates a staggering 2.5 billion pounds of milk a year, or roughly 300 million gallons. Dairy farmers spend $500 million annually for goods and services and accounted for 6,000 to 7,000 jobs in the state, the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development found in 2015.

The industry has long enjoyed the state's backing. As State Auditor Doug Hoffer reported in 2021, Vermont spent more than $285 million supporting and cleaning up after the dairy industry between 2010 and 2019.

Less tangibly, dairy is largely responsible for the way rural Vermont looks and markets itself to tourists, and it has long nurtured the state's ethos of hard work and self-reliance.

Dairy has even produced folk heroes such as Fred Tuttle, the Tunbridge farmer who entered the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 1998, challenging Jack McMullen, a wealthy businessman from Massachusetts. In an unforgettable exchange during a debate, Tuttle queried his opponent, "How many tits does a Holstein have, and how many does a Jersey have?"

McMullen guessed six teats, which is two too many. Tuttle beat him to win the GOP nomination by 10 points and then endorsed incumbent Democrat Patrick Leahy, who easily won reelection.

The industry also has downsides. Many farms have come to rely on underpaid and overworked undocumented laborers from Mexico and Central America, some of whom live in substandard conditions. Nutrient runoff from farms has fouled waterways and fed blooms of toxic algae. The larger the farm, the greater the potential for pollution problems.

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The loss of small dairy farms has engendered 40 years of angst among policy makers, legislators and many Vermont residents. A parade of special commissions, legislative studies and independent groups has issued reports that attempt to answer the question: How can Vermont save its dairy farms?

In light of farms' labor and environmental missteps, however, some have a different query: Should dairy be saved?

Vermont can't do much to bend the curve. The price of commodity dairy — bulk milk sold into the regional market — is driven by federal regulation and national market forces that make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for public policy to save the state's traditional dairy farms.

These days, as Americans drink less milk but consume more dairy overall — in cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter — the bulk of Vermont's milk is processed into other products and exported around the country and the world.

Markets have always shaped Vermont agriculture. Lessons from the past, and a survey of the present, offer insight into the future of the state's dairy industry.

Rising to the Top

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• Justin Cash
• The Bassett Farm in Woodstock

Dairy wasn't always the darling of Vermont.

Early settlers generally produced food for their families, but they also sold extra goods in local or regional markets. Vermont's first true cash crop was wheat, which was made marketable by the opening of canals on Lake Champlain, the Connecticut River and the Hudson River. The Gleaner, berthed in St. Albans, was the first ship to pass through the Champlain Canal, in 1823. It headed to New York laden with wheat and potash.

Newfound access to larger markets was a mixed blessing. Canals enabled farms to scale up and sell more wheat but also allowed midwestern farmers to ship cheaper grain back east. Growing wheat in Vermont was a risky proposition; crops often succumbed to spring frosts, blights and soil exhaustion. By 1826, Vermonters realized it was easier to buy flour from the Midwest than to produce their own. Wheat's moment was over.

Then, in 1828, Congress enacted a protective tariff on imported wool and triggered a sheep-farming craze. To feed thriving textile mills in southern New England, Vermonters cleared thousands of acres for grazing and acquired huge numbers of sheep — 2.1 million by the mid-1830s. But yet again, western states began to undercut Vermont, shipping cheaper wool back east. By 1846, the wool tariffs had been dropped, and Vermont flocks shrunk accordingly.

Through the wheat and wool booms, milk was always in the background as a reliable food staple. Because it was perishable, milk was consumed locally. As salted butter and cheese, however, in the cold months it could be transported to distant markets.

Then along came the Yankee ingenuity of Vermonter Jonas Wilder, who designed the first refrigerator railcars, which were put into service in 1852 by Vermont Central Railroad. Vermont's dairy rush was on. By the dawn of the 20th century, Vermont was the country's leading producer of butter.

When midwestern farms started shipping cheaper butter and cheese back east, Vermont's farmers pivoted again, to selling fluid milk to northeastern cities. By 1928, the state provided two-thirds of Boston's milk. Dairy soon accounted for 65 percent of the income of Vermont farms.

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• Zachary P. Stephens
• Yearlings in the pasture at Corse Farm

Still, commercial dairy farms as we know them didn't yet exist in the Green Mountains. Instead, as University of Vermont historian Dona Brown explained, thousands of small farms had "maybe six milking cows.

"Yeah, they're making a little money," she continued, "but they're also providing for themselves and for local markets and making maple syrup and selling wood."

The Great Depression gave rise to the federal milk marketing order, a national pricing system designed to balance regional milk supply and prices. The marketing order, still in place, sets minimum prices that processors must pay dairy farmers for milk, which ensure an adequate regional supply and relatively stable prices for consumers.

That price is based on the supply and demand in different regions and usually tracks dairy commodities traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In the Northeast, where the cost of production is highest, the milk price is usually just a few cents more than it is in western and southern states, which produce milk more cheaply.

The marketing order has created a perverse incentive.

"You have a general reaction from farmers when prices go down to increase production to become more efficient, thereby worsening the too-much-supply problem," said Don Seville, the executive director of the nonprofit Sustainable Food Lab in Hartland. And in regions where there's unmet demand, farmers up their production to take advantage of higher prices. All roads eventually lead to increased supply — and lower prices. This federal pricing scheme has caused Vermont's farm numbers to drop steadily for the past 90 years.

That has intersected with the state's efforts to promote tourism and market Vermont to outsiders as an unspoiled rural paradise.

A 1931 report of the Vermont Commission on Country Life advocated for wooing flatlanders to visit Vermont and purchase abandoned hill farms as second homes. Vermont Life magazine, which was launched in 1946, helped promote the idea. The magazine presented alluring full-color spreads of Vermont farm scenes — green pastures, red barns, black-and-white cows — along with iconic images of the Green Mountains and natural landscapes. This charm offensive helped the state become synonymous with dairy farming in the minds of out-of-staters.

After World War II, a cascade of technological advances led to greater efficiency for dairy operations — and a wave of farm consolidation. Many hill farms couldn't afford to invest in bulk milk tanks and milking machines and so were abandoned. Larger herds, synthetic fertilizers, better tractors and a farm credit system to finance it all contributed to the ever-growing size of farms.

Dairy's Downside

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• Justin Cash
• The Bassett Farm in Woodstock

In the early 1970s, a typical Vermont farm family could handle up to 40 cows without outside help. But as herds grew, farmers had to hire employees — no easy task. The hours of a milker are long, and the job is physically demanding; turnover rates are high. Because most farms are exempt from labor laws, farmworkers haven't been able to organize or demand better pay.

As the U.S. standard of living has steadily improved over the decades, a dwindling number of Americans has been willing to do that hard, dirty work for a poor hourly wage. But in the early 2000s, undocumented Mexican immigrants began arriving in Vermont. They were eager to earn more than they could in Mexico so they could send money back home to their families. Over the past couple of decades, this has profoundly changed the face of dairy's workforce.

The Burlington-based farmworker advocacy organization Migrant Justice estimates that close to 1,000 undocumented people work on Vermont dairy farms today. Because of their immigration status and the language barrier, these workers rarely leave the farm. They feel they have little recourse when their living conditions are substandard or when they are exploited.

A survey by Migrant Justice in 2014 found that 40 percent of these farmworkers were being paid less than the minimum wage, which at the time was $8.63 an hour. Today, the starting wage on many Vermont dairy farms is not much higher, at $10.50 per hour. Many of these milkers are working 12- to 14-hour shifts without breaks and averaging 60 to 80 hours per week. Paid sick days and holidays are almost unheard of.

Conditions for some migrant farmworkers improved after 2017, when Migrant Justice convinced Ben & Jerry's to sign the Milk With Dignity agreement. It commits farms in the company's supply chain to adhere to a list of standards for decent working conditions. Most of the milk for Ben & Jerry's global ice cream production is sourced from farms in Vermont and New York, so the Milk With Dignity agreement applies to about 50 Vermont farms employing 200 immigrants. Migrant Justice is now pressuring the Hannaford supermarket chain, one of the major milk buyers in the region, to sign the agreement in hopes of getting more New England farms to commit to better standards.

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• Justin Cash
• The Bassett Farm in Woodstock

Most Vermonters don't see the poor working and living conditions of the farmworkers in their state. Much more apparent to them: the cyanobacteria blooms on Lake Champlain and other waterways that are caused, in part, by too much manure runoff. Farms sometimes struggle to manage manure, and the excess drains into streams, rivers and lakes. Phosphorus in the manure feeds algae, which can lead to large, toxic blooms that turn water green and force beaches to close.

Cyanobacteria blooms have been documented in Lake Champlain since the 1970s. In 2002, excess phosphorus in the lake was so high that — to comply with the federal Clean Water Act — the states of Vermont and New York adopted phosphorus-reduction goals. In 2011, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found Vermont's plan inadequate, which resulted in a new one five years later. In its 2016 plan, the EPA concluded that agriculture was responsible for 41 percent of the phosphorus load in the lake between 2001 and 2010. Today, Vermont's Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets works with farmers to put into place strategies such as rotational grazing, fencing to keep cows away from waterways, cover cropping and injecting manure into fields instead of spreading it.

Such practices will help, but the cyanobacteria blooms aren't expected to disappear anytime soon.

"It's going to take some time to remediate the issues that have been caused over the past two centuries," said Nina Gage, the agency's deputy director of water quality. "We've got a lot of work to do. We're trying to change the culture of how we farm."

On Corse

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• Zachary P. Stephens
• Corse Farm Dairy in Whitingham

In the town of Whitingham on Vermont's southern border, the Corse Farm Dairy has an abundance of green pastures and a dazzling view of the Berkshires to the south. The Corse family has been farming its land on a rolling plateau 2,000 feet above sea level since 1868. Its 55 milking cows are probably some of the happiest bovines in the state.

Leon Corse, 69, graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in plant and soil science. When he returned home to run the farm, he spent the next 10 years unlearning his studies.

At the time, the common tenets encouraged farmers to feed their cows corn and grain to maximize milk production. But the farm's soil was full of rocks and classified as "hilly upland till," which means it grows one type of plant especially well: cool-season perennials, such as grasses. The farm had never grown corn, and Leon decided he wasn't about to start.

"I realized that the land needed to be farmed the way it wanted to be farmed," he said, "and I wasn't going to fight with it anymore." That meant no tilling or plowing or planting. Instead, he would manage the land with a perennial grass system.

The Corse farm never confined its cows; their diet was all grass, all the time. In the 1960s, the family began rotationally grazing their animals, which involved constantly moving fences to let the cows browse in fresh paddocks of grass, while previously grazed areas were allowed to regrow. The stellar results in the milk tank and the healthy green pastures convinced Leon and his father that they were doing the right thing.

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• Zachary P. Stephens
• Abbie Corse feeding a herd of yearlings

Before organic dairy farming became a separate category of the industry, the Corse farm was close to that standard, which calls for using only certified organic inputs and pasturing cows for at least 120 days per year.

Consumers who are health and environmentally minded pay a premium for products that are free of potentially harmful chemicals and better for the land. In 2005, when the Organic Valley cooperative came to the area to buy more organic milk, Leon called his daughter Abbie and asked her whether she thought the farm should make the change. She was working at the Flynn performing arts center in Burlington at the time, and she sensed that organic was the future of Vermont dairying.

Leon took Abbie's advice and spent the next three years transitioning their 55 milking cows to meet the organic standards, feeding them only organic hay and grain. They shipped their first load of organic milk in May 2008, and Abbie returned to help run the farm the following September.

"I've only ever been an organic farmer," she said.

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• Zachary P. Stephens
• Leon Corse

Leon is still at it every day. When Seven Days visited recently, he sported a cut below one eye. He explained that a Jersey named Marshmallow had delivered a hearty kick during milking — but he finished his work all the same.

Like many Vermont farmers in the early 2000s, the Corses were attracted to organic dairying purely for economic reasons. The organic food movement was strong and growing, and there was a healthy, unmet demand for organic milk products. Plus, organic milk processors such as Stonyfield Organic and Organic Valley were not regulated by the federal milk marketing order, so they could pay farmers a milk price that reflected the cost of production. In 1992, Vermont didn't have a single organic dairy farm. By 2007, there were 204.

Just as they had shifted from wheat to wool to milk, Vermont farmers were again looking for the next competitive advantage, and organic, which is well suited to smaller farms, was it.

And, as it does, history has repeated itself. Huge western dairies took advantage of a loophole in the organic standards and converted to organic, then flooded the market. Since 2015, a glut of organic dairy products has depressed organic milk prices.

To make matters worse, global events, including a trade dispute with India and the war in Ukraine, have caused the price of organic grain to spike. Last year, rampant inflation dealt the industry another blow, as organic consumers became more price sensitive. They started switching to store-brand organic products from the likes of Walmart or stopped buying organic altogether.

Jen Miller, the farmer services director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, a nonprofit organization that promotes organic practices, describes the economic situation for organic dairy farmers in three words: "total shit show."

Organic farm numbers bear that out. By the end of April, their number in Vermont had declined to 127. Many organic farms are on the verge of giving up, and farmers are hoping for federal and state assistance, which is on the way this summer. (The state budget approved by the legislature but vetoed last week by Gov. Phil Scott contains $6.9 million in relief for organic dairy farms.) But it might be too late for a lot of these ag enterprises.

Those that shut down are probably not coming back because it's usually too expensive for young farmers to start a dairy farm from scratch. The ones who hang on, though, could be well positioned.

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• Zachary P. Stephens
• From left: Herd manager Mackenzie Wallace holding his daughter Oaklyn, Leon Corse and his daughter Abbie Corse

According to Britt Lundgren, the senior director of sustainability and government affairs at Stonyfield Organic, nearly half of all the milk produced in the U.S. comes from regions that are under drought stress, and the dry conditions are likely to worsen. Climate experts don't expect New England to face severe droughts.

Furthermore, Northeast organic dairies are probably the most environmentally sustainable in the country, as they use practices that build soil health and climate resiliency, such as rotational and regenerative grazing. They don't use pesticides or fertilizers made with fossil fuels.

"For long-term food security, it makes sense to invest in and promote dairy production in the Northeast," Lundgren said. "While we're having trouble in organic now, it continues to be the best model financially for dairy producers in this region. But we have to get through this tight spot first."

Corse Farm Dairy is not closing anytime soon. Abbie Corse acknowledged its enviable position.

"My father is an incredible farmer," she said. "My parents and grandparents created an impressively managed business that's been around for 155 years."

The farm has no mortgage. It doesn't use a lot of expensive equipment. Solar panels on the barn provide 95 percent of its electricity.

The farm supports Abbie's parents and a herd manager, who recently began working full time. Abbie's husband is a general contractor. She's the first Corse to benefit from off-farm earnings.

Even if they can sustain their own farm, though, the Corses know they can't survive in a vacuum. Eventually, if the farm numbers dwindle much more, the agricultural infrastructure they rely on will start to vanish.

"How far is the milk truck willing to travel?" Leon asked. "How far can the farmer travel to get the equipment fixed?"

Spoilage Date?

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• Caleb Kenna
• Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport

No one really knows what the tipping point is for the dairy industry in Vermont, but we might find out in the next 10 years. If the past decade's trends continue, then by 2033, a mere 63 conventional dairy farms would remain. Those farms would milk 1,800 or so cows apiece, which would maintain the state's current rate of milk production, but they would still be competing against 10,000-cow dairies in the western states.

What would those Vermont farms look like? A visit to Blue Spruce Farm, a 5,000-acre, 1,500-cow operation in Bridport, offers a glimpse.

Founded in 1958 by Norman and Mary-Rose Audet with fewer than 80 cows, the farm has grown into one of the state's largest dairies. The family has grown, too; 10 of the farms' 30 workers are descendants of Norman and Mary-Rose.

Blue Spruce Farm doesn't look much like the iconic picture of a Vermont dairy farm. Its 121-foot-tall wind turbine is visible from Route 22A, rising above three green metal barns, which are roughly 512 by 108 feet. The Holstein and Ayrshire cows spend most of their time inside the free-stall barns, eating a ration of hay mixed with grain. Fans circulate air, and the walls are open. In cold weather, they can be closed.

Bigger doesn't necessarily mean dirtier, and Blue Spruce has embraced innovation. Its wind turbine, installed in 2013, produces 176,000 kilowatt hours of renewable electricity per year. The farm's manure generates more energy.

In 2005, Blue Spruce was the first dairy farm to sign on to Green Mountain Power's Cow Power program, which pays dairy farms to produce electricity. Waste is collected in a 16-foot-deep anaerobic biodigester dug into the ground like a swimming pool. Methane from the manure fuels a generator, which in turn feeds enough electricity onto the grid to power more than 300 homes. In addition to capturing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, the biodigester "cooks" the undigested plant matter from the manure and turns it into soft bedding for the cows.

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• Caleb Kenna
• A worker in the milking barn at Blue Spruce Farm

The biodigester also separates 70 percent or more of the phosphorus from the liquid manure, and it is injected into the farm's fields — an improvement over simply spreading manure, which leads to runoff. In the spring, Blue Spruce's planters push seeds into the ground without disturbing the soil structure.

"As a large farm organization, we can't have nutrient runoff," said Marie Audet, who grew up on a dairy farm in Middlebury and married Norman and Mary-Rose's son Eugene. "We've taken that to another level by improving the quality of our soils by cover cropping and no-till planting."

The Audets are members of the Agri-Mark co-op, which produces the Cabot Creamery brand of dairy products. Cognizant of the perennial oversupply of milk, Agri-Mark discourages its farmers from increasing their milk production by paying them much less for any milk they generate over a predetermined quota. In effect, the Audets have stopped growing their herd.

To remain viable in the face of growing grain costs, the Audets are aiming to cultivate their own. They are investing $2 million in machinery to harvest and dry the soybean and corn they raise.

"This is a new skill set for us, and we're learning," said Marie Audet, who was inducted into the Vermont Agricultural Hall of Fame in 2019 as a notable agricultural innovator. "But we're confident it will save us money and pay for itself rather quickly."

To be sustainable, Vermont's dairy farms will likely need to be as forward-thinking as Blue Spruce Farm and Corse Farm Dairy.

Currently, when dairy farms stop milking, the land is often used to graze other farmers' heifers or to raise their crops. But if those other farms disappear, so would the demand for those services. It's easy to imagine farmers, in need of retirement income they couldn't amass while dairying, selling their land to developers who would build housing. Or maybe the dairy farms would continue to transition into farms for beef, cannabis, hops and solar.

Laura Ginsburg, the dairy developments and innovation chief at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, takes an all-of-the-above approach.

"From the agency's perspective, we want to support farmers who want to stay in production, those who want to diversify, and those who want to stop dairy farming and do something else," she said. "There are a lot of paths we can help people find, whether it's technical assistance in business viability, or grant funds if they're thinking about processing their own milk or switching over to goats."

At the same time, she acknowledged that, as long as Vermont operates under the federal milk price system, there's a limit to what the state can do to aid farmers.

Over the years, dairy policy experts in Vermont have looked to Canada for a potential alternative system. A milk-supply quota there keeps farm milk prices high enough to provide farmers a decent living. That may explain why dairy farms north of the border often look a little shinier than their Vermont counterparts.

The system works only because the government has also prohibited milk imports and exports. Without that trade embargo, cheaper American milk would flood Canada, disrupt the supply balance and lower prices.

Such a supply quota is unlikely to get traction in the United States, according to the Sustainable Food Lab, which researched the issue. American farmers don't like being told what to do. Further, said the lab's executive director, Seville, states with very large dairies that produce milk cheaply don't see the need for change. The move would also cost Vermont producers their export sales.

Despite all of that, Seville doesn't think Vermont should give up on the idea. "The Québec system was really inspirational," he said. "To see a farmer with 350 cows making a good livelihood and being able to invest in renewable energy — there's something there we haven't looked at enough yet."

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• Caleb Kenna
• Cows at Blue Spruce Farm

For longtime Vermont dairy critic James Maroney, there's only one thing Vermont can do to save its dairy industry: force all the farms to become organic. A former organic dairy farmer, he has an intriguing rationale. In his analysis, Vermont's Global Warming Solutions Act makes conventional dairy farming untenable. Passed in 2020, the act requires the state to reduce carbon emissions to 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and ultimately to 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

"Conventional dairy is wholly dependent on fossil fuels," Maroney said, in the form of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and is thus bound to run afoul of the law.

Maroney's remedy would be to market products under a premium "Vermont Organic" brand. In his mind, this would both solve the industry's pollution problems and create a viable business model for small- and medium-size dairies. As the first emissions target approaches, Maroney aims to push harder for his plan, which he acknowledges doesn't stand a chance.

"Most likely, the trend toward bigger and fewer farms will continue," he said. "And Vermont is not ideally suited to farms with 5,000 cows, which means the Vermont dairy industry will just continue to dwindle into nothing."

"Nothing" is a dire prediction. But his other prognostication echoes that of Robert Bassett in Woodstock. As the churn continues in Vermont's dairy industry, a few farms will get bigger — and more farmers, like Bassett, will get out.