Perkinsville
Fuller, who has run his Plains Road farm in Perkinsville since 1977, said low milk prices and higher prices for materials needed for farming have led him to conclude that at age 59, it’s time to stop milking cows for a living.
“The price of milk has certainly crashed from year over year,” he said on Friday. “It’s pretty well known it’s down 40 percent.”
Vermont farmers have been paid an average of $16.80 per hundredweight for their milk, or about $1.45 a gallon, in 2016. That’s down from an average of $25.49 per hundredweight in 2014, and barely more than the $15.98 per hundredweight dairy farmers were paid in 1998, according to statistics from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fuller, a former selectman in Weathersfield, said the new federal insurance system for milk prices enacted in the latest farm bill moved away from a more reliable “safety net” for dairy farmers should the price of milk drop, and it’s not benefiting farmers.
“The crash is here, and like magic, the formula is right at the price where we can’t get any insurance. It’s a disaster,” he said.
Fuller attended high school in Sunapee, started buying cows as a teen and, after he graduated from the University of New Hampshire, started his dairy farm in Perkinsville. At its height, he ran more than 200 Holsteins and milked as many as 127. Today, he’s milking about 60 to 70 cows.
He said farming costs are increasing even as milk prices remain low.
“Whenever you want to buy anything, it seems like it has another zero on it,” he said.
Peter Cole, a Weathersfield selectman who grew up on a dairy farm in Newbury, Vt., said he was sorry to learn Fuller no longer will run a dairy operation, but also said he was not surprised.
“It’s unfortunate that this is a situation that is being repeated across the country all too often nowadays, particularly smaller farms,” said Cole, who now is executive director of Holstein Association USA in Brattleboro, Vt. “It’s just becoming increasingly difficult to make a living.”
Fuller said there had been as many as 10 dairy farms in Weathersfield in the 1980s, but he has been the only dairy farm in town for several years.
State Rep.-elect Annmarie Christensen, a Democrat from Perkinsville, said the end of dairy farming in town would be a blow.
“This is incredibly sad, because it’s such a rural town,” Christensen said. “This is a part of life that’s not coming back anymore in Weathersfield.”
As of 2014, Vermont was home to 868 dairy farms, the majority in Addison, Franklin and Orleans counties. Some 749 of the farms were considered small, with fewer than 200 cows, according to statistics from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.
At the time, Windsor County had only 36 dairy farms. Orange County was home to 84 such farms.
In New Hampshire, a drought this year has forced some dairy farmers to thin their herd or close their farms. The Concord Monitor recently reported that the state had 115 licensed cow-only dairy farms in October, down from 123 at the start of the year.
While Fuller is selling his dairy herd, he won’t give up farming entirely. He said he has a lead on some Herefords and hopes to raise beef cattle.
News staff writer John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com or 603-727-3217.