Organic rewards keep crop, dairy farm sustainable

The Country Today
By Sara Bredesen

ROSENDALE, WI – For Daniel and Darlene Coehoorn, sustainability is more than staying away from chemicals and leaving the land in as good or better condition than they found it. It also is earning enough money from farm production to be able to stay in business without an off-farm job.

“We didn’t even aspire to be organic when we moved here,” said Mrs. Coehoorn of the 520 acres of land they own and rent in Fond du Lac County. “We slowly started to convert all the crop acres to organic, because we needed the money, and conventional crops weren’t returning enough.”

The couple bought the farm in 1989 and in 1994 had their first fields certified as being organic. Both agreed they wanted the crops to be organic, but Mrs. Coehoorn admitted to being leery about shifting their dairy herd.

She said her veterinarian had her convinced she couldn’t live without dry-treating cows until she realized her incidences of mastitis were the same whether she treated them or not.

She stopped using drugs on her cows long before they started shipping to Organic Valley Cooperative in 2000.

“We just didn’t tell the vet,” she said. “If they’re sick, we treat them, but we use alternative treatments – garlic, homeopathy, nutrition – and work on avoiding problems. It’s a lot easier to prevent something than to cure it once you’ve got it.”

The couple has milk quality awards from National Farmers Organization and Organic Valley lining their dining room wall, and they recently received a Gold category quality milk production award from the National Mastitis Council to add to the collection.

Mrs. Coehoorn does most of the milking and is happy to keep a herd of about 55 cows that fit in the tie-stall barn and can get personal attention. The herd is mostly Holstein and a collection of artificial insemination crosses selected to improve performance and work efficiently on pasture.

The couple intended to continue confinement dairying until about 2002, when the organic rules required pasture feeding.

“It was a major disaster,” Mrs. Coehoorn said. “The cows didn’t know how (to graze), and we didn’t either. Now I wouldn’t go back, even if we weren’t organic.”

The cows are still supplemented with a total mixed ration before going on pasture in the summer and have limited time outside in the cold in the winter.

The Coehoorns raise their own replacement calves and sell excess heifers through the conventional market. Mr. Coehoorn said the organic cow market is flooded at the moment, so they sell where there are buyers.

Organic production has had some recent growing pains, the glutted cow market being one of them. A shortage of organic feed is another issue.

Many farmers who thought about organics jumped into production ahead of new rules that would require them to have their cows on 100-percent organic feed before they could start shipping milk.

“That push put a whole glut of farmers on at once without enough feed producers to accommodate them. That drove the price of grain up,” Mrs. Coehoorn said.

That is a good thing for the Coehoorns – who raise organic corn, hay, wheat, rye, oats, spring and winter barley, and soybeans for sale – but they still have to buy inputs for their crops and nutrients for the cows that have premium prices on them because of the organic label.

Cropping organically also requires more passes over the fields to keep weeds in check, so rising fuel prices have a significant effect. Organic fertilizer has also gone up, but not as much as commercial fertilizer.

Mr. and Mrs. Coehoorn are advocates of organics. Mrs. Coehoorn is active as a board member for Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services, president of the Midwest Organic Dairy Producers Alliance and is on the Organic Valley dairy executive committee.

The Coehoorns have helped neighbors transition to organics and are mentors for others around the state.

Mrs. Coehoorn said the transition is like going cold turkey with smoking or alcohol.

“It’s really hard, but if you can wean off of it, it’s a little easier,” she said. “I’d encourage (others) to do it over a longer period while they still have conventional Band Aids to fall back on into their comfort zone if they have to.”

“Because we went a little bit at a time, the learning curve didn’t hit us so hard,” Mrs. Coehoorn said. “You can survive with a 10-acre mistake, as opposed to a 100-acre mistake.”

People make decisions about organics in a lot of different ways. For consumers, Mrs. Coehoorn likes to call it a choice market rather than a niche market.

“More consumers become aware that it’s a choice – they choose to avoid drugs and chemicals – they choose our product and value it enough to pay a premium to get it.”

For farmers, they may like the idea of organics, but often it is the price that finally gets them to make the move, Mrs. Coehoorn said. She said their first organic milk check eight years ago was almost double the amount of their last conventional milk check.

“There’s more paperwork, but as far as your field records and your cow records, it’s paperwork that any good farmer would be doing anyway,” she said.

Mr. Coehoorn said there is more fieldwork and more pre-planning with field crops, because you can’t just run to town to get inputs. Timing is important for weed control, and it sometimes takes more equipment to do the job well.

“There’s no reason, just because you’re organic, that you can’t get the same yield as anybody else,” Mr. Coehoorn said. “There’s some challenges to doing that, but … if you have your soil balanced and everything else is up to snuff, there’s no reason you have to take less.”

“The challenges are more, but the rewards are more too,” he said.

Sara Bredesen can be reached at [email protected].

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