Kane dairy farmers not liquidating herds

Low milk prices spark some farmers to have herds butchered

SOUTH ELGIN — Mike Kenyon estimates the 150 or so dairy cattle he keeps on the edge of South Elgin are one of only about nine dairy farms still left in all of Kane County. And it haunts him that some of his own money is going to pay farmers like him across the country to send their entire herds to the butcher in an effort to raise milk prices that just aren't high enough to make raising cows profitable.

Kenyon, whose family has raised cows here for decades, said, "You'd have to really get desperate to do that. If you have any love for cows ..." He can't finish that thought.

Kenyon imagines what it would feel like if he ever had to liquidate his herd.

"These guys have worked their whole lives to enhance the breeding of their animals. And then they have to send them off to be butchered. It's like you collected stamps or butterflies all your life, and you have to sell your collection to somebody who you know will just burn the whole collection."

Among the group forced to liquidate are Jake and Lori Slegers of Fresno. Calif. But the Slegers figured they didn't have much choice. So one day last summer, their sons tagged all 1,571 cows, loaded them onto trailers and watched them rumble away to a slaughterhouse.

Lori Slegers said her husband came into the house and broke down.

"He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do," she said. "Luckily, my boys could do it."

When times were better, growing demand in developing nations drove up milk prices, and dairy farmers expanded their herds. But the global recession hurt exports and left American farmers with too much milk on their hands. Milk processors cut the price they were willing to pay farmers, in many cases below what it cost to produce milk.

In the past year, hundreds of farmers have come to the same conclusion as the Slegers: The only way to raise prices is to reduce the supply, and that means killing cows. In some cases, whole herds have been turned into hamburger. In others, farmers have kept their best producers and sent the rest to slaughter.

"At one time we were getting close to $20 per 100 pounds of milk, which is about 12 gallons," dairy farmer Al Lankaitis Jr. of Campton Hills said. "Now we're down to about $12."

Lankaitis and Kenyon said they don't know of any local dairymen who have liquidated or greatly reduced their herds. "It's not pretty and a few of my friends in Wisconsin have gotten out of the business," Lankaitis said. "But dairy farmers are a resilient group. We're hanging in there and hoping the price comes back up."

Kenyon said he's indirectly part of the industry-run program that helped the Slegers get out of farming. His Kenyon Bros. Co, is part of a farmers cooperative called Foremost Farms, and that in turn — "though I have no choice in it," he quickly adds — is part of a project called CWT, or Cooperatives Working Together. It was CWT that paid the California family to get out of the milk business.

"For every 100 pounds of milk I sell, a quarter goes into the CWT fund," Kenyon said. "When that fund gets high enough, they buy people's entire herds and dispose of them, with the idea that milk production will go down nationwide and our prices will go back up."

Until this year, the 6-year-old CWT program had paid for about 275,000 dairy cows to be slaughtered. This year alone, it has paid for 225,000.

In addition, individual farmers are sending cows to slaughter at a pace of about 55,000 per week.

CWT spokesman Christopher Galen said most of the cows slaughtered in the program have come from western farms.

Midwest farmers haven't been hit as hard as those in California, where farmers can't grow as much of their own feed. In Wisconsin, the number of cows actually has increased slightly since a year ago.

In Faribault, Minn., lifelong dairy farmers Keith Sammon, 55, and his brother, Mark, 53, decided to sell their herd to CWT last summer after considering the low milk prices, the cost of modernizing their operation and some personal health issues.

Keith Sammon recalled the somber mood as he loaded the 80 cows onto livestock trailers one Sunday morning.

"As we milked the cows ... it was pretty quiet, but then my son came out with my granddaughter, who was 10 months old and she was just beginning to walk around. Just having her around made it easier," Keith Sammon said. "We would load the cows for a while and then go back and play with her for a while. It kind of took your mind off of it."

As cows have been killed, the price processors pay for milk has gone up an average of 66 cents per hundred pounds of milk, said Scott Brown, an assistant research professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Consumers haven't seen prices go up because processors still pay dairy farmers much less than the retail price, Cropp said. In fact, grocery store prices may still drop some because the milk supply remains much greater than the demand, he said.