Battle for dairy Minnesota
For the Daley family, which runs a dairy farm 30 miles to the east of Rochester, the plan is to expand, says The DairyNews.
"The way things are moving, you either get bigger or you get bought out", said Gabe Daley, 24. "Getting bigger seems to be the most effective way to stay in business today".
Daley and his cousins are the sixth generation on a farm that was established 160 years ago. Now, with 1,500 cows, the family wants to triple the herd to get an income that would allow their generation to stay in business and ensure a decent old age for the older generation.
They need permission from Winona County and the State's pollution control Agency. Environmental groups and other opponents of large-scale farming are trying to stop them.
The battle between the parties lasts for two years and continues in the course of the eternal dispute – whether the big in US agriculture should get bigger.
Barbara Sogn-Frank, organizer of the Land Stewardship Project, a Minneapolis-based group that seeks to keep more farmers on the land, says that "the groundwater of Southeastern Minnesota is too vulnerable to handle such a large farm, and that the overall trend toward farm consolidation should be stopped".
"This is an artificial economic model that benefits a relatively small number of people in the state and across the country", said Barbara Sogn - Frank.
John Daley, an Irish immigrant, settled in Winona County in the 1860s and opened a dairy farm to the south of Lewiston. For more than a century, this business remained small. George Daley's grandson and two of his sons, Michael and Stephen, took the first step towards consolidation. Each of them had a dairy farm with less than 150 cows. They combined the farms and in 1997 built a modern rotary milking parlor and four long blue barns to the west of Lewiston. In the following years, the fifth generation of the family increased the number of livestock.
This generation is Mark Daley, Neil Daley, Shelly Depestel, Brian Daley and Ben Daley, who are now in their 40s and 50s. A total of 26 employees plus family members who work on a farm with 1,500 Holstein cows, grow maize and hay on 3,700 acres of land.
Gabe Daley and other sixth-generation members Dustin Depestel, Dylan Depestel, Sidney, Greden, and Dominic Depestel grew up working with their parents and grandparents.
Greden, who is the daughter of Mark Daley, remembers accompanying her mother to the night milking from 11 pm to 3 am. Then the front living room was like a kindergarten, with a children's house, tricycles, and a small TV with a video tape recorder.
"It's a bit frustrating to be called an industrial farm", says Greden, 26.
In 2012, when Greden and Dylan Depestel went to college to study agriculture, the family began planning an expansion.
This is a problem that farmers face across the Midwest, and it's almost impossible to solve it.
The fourth generation of the Daleys, Michael and Stephen, still own most of the land — about 3,500 acres. The ownership and management of the dairy farm is divided between them, Michael's five children and his 13 grandchildren.
The Daleys see three scenarios. They could sell part of the farm, leaving the sixth generation of the family with a smaller business. Alternatively, the sixth generation could borrow money for a farm to provide their parents and grandmothers with pensions. On the other hand, they could make the farm bigger to get more revenue.
In 2018, the family applied for a state permit to store and process manure from another 3,000 cows.
The Minnesota pollution control Agency issued the permit in early 2019. However, the Land Stewardship project and the Center for environmental protection immediately sued the Agency, saying it was glossing over the effects of farm expansion on groundwater and the role of greenhouse gas emissions from cows.
The Agency published an updated impact assessment in January and launched another public comment period that will end on March 6. A decision will be made this spring.
A larger obstacle is the Winona County Council, part of which opposed the farm expansion.
<…>
Farmers, meanwhile, say that they will not put more manure on any one piece of land; that they will grow alfalfa, which absorbs more nitrogen than maize or soybeans; and that they themselves are interested in doing business as environmentally friendly as possible – because they live here and drink the same water as everyone else.
"People who have never worked in agriculture - see one picture - the farmer's wife and the farmer himself with a pitchfork in his hands. But I haven't lived in that world for a long time", said Ben Daly. – The world has changed, technology has made it better. But people don't want to see that things have changed in agriculture as well".
Цитаты дня
