PINE GROVE — Just before dawn, Eric T. and Amy L. Wolfe, Washington Township, start their day milking dairy cows and checking their smartphones.
“I don’t know if all farmers use them. We got them, I’d say, five years ago just to keep in touch with what’s going on. It’s technology right there in the palm of your hand, and it’s easy to use,” Amy, 39, said Monday.
Their cellphones help them check the weather, access their security cameras, and keep up with market trends, allowing them to get on the Internet to visit websites like www.keystonecommodities.com.
“I see milk is $16.74 per hundredweight. It’d be nice if it was closer to $20. I get concerned when it’s like $13 or $14. And when that happens you think maybe you shouldn’t wake up to go milk the cows. The market is unpredictable,” Eric, 41, said.
June is National Dairy Month, according to the National Dairy Council. Schuylkill County is home to more than 20 dairy farms. The Wolfes, who own Mar-K Farms at 181 Wolfes Rd., talked Monday about their history and their challenges.
According to a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, they’re in “a tough spot.”
“Perhaps the big over-arching question dogging dairy farmers boils down to survivability. Small increasingly gives way to large. This has been a trend since the 1960s but it is feeling more acute now. Something like 3 percent of U.S. dairy farms provide 45 percent of the U.S. milk supply. Unless you are the biggest of the big chances are your size cohort is diminishing,” Andrew M. Novakovic, director of outreach at Cornell University’s Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, said Saturday.
In 2010, Novakovic was appointed chairman of the ad hoc Dairy Industry Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. He’s scheduled to speak at the IDF World Dairy Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, to be held Sept. 20 to 24.
Mar-K farms is set on “about 1,100” acres, Eric said. The family raises 360 cows, including 155 dairy cows. The rest are heifers and calves. And the Wolfes grow most of their own feed. The family has a staff which includes one full-time employee, Justin Renninger, 21, of Pine Grove, and six part-time workers.
“They’re not big enough to be a low-cost producer but too big to make it up with a part-time job. Your nearby Amish farms have persistence but this is the result of a very modest lifestyle. Survivability is especially challenged by a marketplace that seems to be increasingly risky. Dairy farming used to be thought of as a low-risk business that didn’t make you rich but wouldn’t likely bankrupt you either. Now we see milk price volatility, feed price volatility, labor uncertainty, market uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty. Add on top of all the production headaches, dairy products also have lost some of the halo that they have historically enjoyed. There are so many more competing products and questions about whether or not milk really is good for you,” Novakovic said.
“He’s got a good point,” Renninger said.
“It is tough. You got to keep growing as an operation and getting larger, because the price of everyday living keeps going up so you got to keep trying to keep up with that,” Eric said.
“Nowadays, if you’re not going to keep growing you’re not going to keep up with these big guys out West, if you’re talking on a worldwide scale,” Renninger said.
Eric is the son of Marvin Wolfe, Pine Grove, and the late Kathleen L. Wolfe, who died in February 2013.
His parents started Mar-K Farms in 1975.
“Mar-K stands for Marvin and Kathy. I think they started out with about 500 acres, and they were doing both dairy and crops,” Eric said.
Eric graduated from Pine Grove Area High School in 1993.
“I married into the farm. We were married in 1996,” Amy said.
The couple have two children, twins, a boy, Kase, and a girl, Kallie, both 12.
Eric has a brother, Mark, who also has a wife named Amy. They run Mar-Am Farms in Washington Township.
Over the years Eric and his family have worked to improve and expand Mar-K Farms.
“In 2007, we were milking 70 cows. Today, we’re milking 155,” he said.
Mar-K Farms produces “about four million pounds” of milk per year, Eric said.
On an average month, the farm can spend “upwards of $40,000” in operational expenses. The family brings in “about $65,000” in income a month, Eric said.
The family grows most of its own feed, which includes corn, alfalfa, rye and Timothy hay.
“The only part of the feed I buy is soybean meal and brewers grain, and you have your minerals and vitamins, and milk replacer for the young calves,” Eric said.
On an average month, the family spends “about $15,000” on feed, Eric said.
Other expenses he’s concerned about include “fuel, fertilizer and seeds,” the cost of fertilizer in particular.
“It costs about $360 for a ton of liquid nitrogen. That’s almost double from where it was two years ago,” he said.
This year, he said, it might cost his family upwards of $54,000.
“The last three years it’s been going up. Sometimes that’s because of the cost of fuel,” he said.
The family sells its milk to Guers Dairy, Tamaqua.
The most recent statistics regarding milk production in Pennsylvania can be found in the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture and the National Agriculture Statistics Service.
Pennsylvania’s milk production for 2011 was 10.6 billion pounds, 133 million pounds less than 2010 production. The 2011 average milk production per cow was 19,601 pounds for the year, 246 pounds less than 2010 production of 19,847 pounds per cow, according to the 2012 census.
Pennsylvania held steady at fifth place in the nation’s ranking in milk production, producing 5.4 percent of the nation’s milk. California was first with 21.1 percent of the U.S. production, according to the census.
In Schuylkill County in 2011, there were 3,500 milk cows which produced 56 million pounds of milk with a $12.38 million production value, according to the census.
In 2011, there were 54,711 dairy farmers in the nation, 7,829 in Pennsylvania and 50 in Schuylkill County, according to the census.
The Wolfes were not certain how many dairy farms there were in Schuylkill County at present, but believed there were more than 20.
Dwane Miller, an educator with Penn State Extension, Pottsville, thought there might be 25.
“We don’t have an official dairy list, but I can come up with about 23 or so that I know of. So I think there’s approximately 25,” Miller said Monday.
The USDA census is traditionally conducted every five years. The next will be the 2017 census, according to www.agcensus.usda.gov.