Many of the Chesapeake region’s dairy farms have gone out of business over the last two decades. In Maryland, for example, 50 percent of the dairies have failed over the last decade, and 90 percent since 1970. Competition from industrial-sized dairies in the West and Midwest have made it hard for small family farms to survive.
The trend has been: get big, or get out.
But on the rolling pastures of a 200-acre farm in Frederick County, Maryland, Ron Holter has found a way to keep his fifth-generation dairy business in business. He is one of about 50 dairy farmers in Maryland that are boosting their profitability by going back in time.
Instead of confining his 100 cows in a steel building and feeding them a corn and protein mash, Holter and others are taking the seemingly radical step of letting their animals live outside and feed themselves by eating grass.
“Cows eating grass – ruminants of any kind, eating grass – is the natural way, the God-created way, for these animals to live. They are not created to eat grain,” Holter said, as he tended his cows with his son, Adam, 22, a sixth generation dairyman. “You care about their welfare because they are living beings. They are not robots.”
Holter follows a system called management intensive grazing, in which farmers regularly shift cows from one fenced-in paddock to another keep the grass and animals healthy.
Grazing tends to be better for water and air quality than conventional farming, as well as better for human health, said Dr. Robert Lawrence, Director of the Center for a Liveable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“You preserve air quality, water quality, soil quality, as well as reducing your need to import synthetic fertilizers and pesticides,” Dr. Lawrence said.
Compared to corn farms and concentrated animal feeding operations, pastures allow 87 percent less runoff of sediment into nearby streams that flow toward the Chesapeake Bay, as well as less fertilizer runoff, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Pasture dairy farms do not need to collect large amounts of liquid animal waste in outdoor lagoons, which can emit ammonia air pollution and leak into waterways.
Moreover, dairy from cows that graze have more Omega-3 fatty acids, which is good for the heart health of consumers and the brain development of embryos, Dr. Lawrence said. Milk from pasture-fed cows also is less likely to contain bovine growth hormones, which are linked to higher risks of cancer, Dr. Lawrence said.
But grazing isn’t just better for the world – it’s also better for the bank accounts of farmers. A University of Maryland study found that Holter farm (as an example of grazing) saves save about $1,400 per cow per year compared to a standard dairy farm, including less money for feed, labor, and veterinary expenses.
"It’s much less expensive to maintain the cows on pasture than it is in a confinement operation,” said the author of the study, Dale Johnson, a farm management specialist with the University of Maryland extension service. “ If you get the cows to do the work for you, you don’t have to have as much machinery. You don’t have to have as much labor.”
Not all farmers have embraced the switch away from confining cows, which became the norm after World War II. Only 10 percent of Maryland’s 500 farms have moved to pasture feeding, and it is mostly smaller farms with pastures conveniently located near the milking parlors.
Like Ron Holter, Matt Hoff also is a fifth generation dairy farmer. He runs a fairy large dairy farm in Carroll County, Maryland. Hoff said it would be hard for him to convert his corn fields to cow pastures, because he has about $2 million invested in corn harvesting machinery.
“With all that overhead, cows on grazing don’t milk quite as much and they don’t give milk in the wintertime,” Hoff said.
So Hoff has gone the opposite direction to survive, more than doubling the size of his heard, to 850 cows. He keeps his animals in a building and milks them with a machine three times a day, 365 days a year.
So which farmer has the better approach, Hoff or Holter?
Well, financially, it might depend on the individual farm -- and how much debt it carries. You could look at the question from an environmental or animal welfare perspective. But you could also ask: But which system treats farmers more humanely? Employees of conventional dairy farms work around the clock, 365 days a year, even on Christmas.
But because letting cows outside to feed themselves is less labor intensive, Ron Holter and other grazing-based dairy farmers get to take Christmas off, and have a lot more time generally to spend with their families.
Going back to the future has produced gifts for Ron’s family and for everyone else: the preservation of the Holters’ beautiful 1889 homestead, and cleaner water for the streams nearby that feed the Chesapeake Bay.
