Got Local Milk?
October, 2009
By Michael Wall
Dairy farming has been a part of Georgia’s history since its very founding, literally. It was James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony, who brought the first dairy cows with him when he arrived here in the early 1700s.
Technologies such as pipeline milking equipment, cooling and transportation improvements and hormones for milk cows have ensured a slow and steady rise in milk production, as well as the growth of the dairy industry as a whole.
In 2005, the dairy industry was valued at $258 million to the state of Georgia. When you take into account other dairy-related sales and industries, dairy has a total economic impact of more than $500 million.
A large part of the financial success of Georgia’s dairy industry has been its mindset of squeezing as many drops of milk as possible out of each milk cow.
For some in the restaurant industry, this means cheaper prices. But it’s also been frustrating for restaurant owners and chefs who are looking for a higher quality of milk.
Customer demand for local and/or organic food is at an all-time high. But regulatory and industry practices create substantial hurdles for local, small-scale milk producers, often to the detriment of local economies.
Dairyman Russell Johnston encountered this firsthand. In fact, he’s still dealing with it.
Russell’s father started milking cows for a living in 1956. The Johnston Dairy Farm, located in Newborn about 50 miles east of Atlanta, was passed down to Russell, under whom it survived but not necessarily thrived as a small operation that sold commodity milk to wholesalers.
There are about 100 cows roaming Johnston’s hilly green fields, which are splattered with wooded areas that serve as ideal shade cover for the cows on brutal summer days.
About five years ago, Johnston realized that his farm’s survival was at risk because of federal production controls that keep profit margins razor thin for any farmer selling any product on the commodity market.
“I started to look into bottling our milk and eliminating the processor, and trying to capture a little more of the retail sales here on the farm,” he says. “I’ve got two little boys, and if they choose to, I want to give them something they could make a living at instead of having to get big or get out.”
After three years of research and visiting other smaller farms, Russell broke ground on his own processing and bottling plant.
He began bottling his own milk in November 2008, and the bureaucratic obstacles that Johnston overcame – and still struggles with – demonstrate why buying local, fresh milk is a difficulty for most restaurateurs and consumers alike.
Johnston said some state regulators bentover backwards to help him, but of other, more higher-up officials, “I wouldn’t say they tried to stop me, but they were a little unwelcoming. On the county level, I had to fight tooth and nail.”
He says county officials first tried to tell him that his farm wasn’t zoned correctly for bottling. Then they told him that if the plant was built to a certain size, he would need to install a $25,000 fire suppression system – for a building made out of concrete, housing all stainless steel equipment.
Johnston sidestepped that issue by keeping his plant small. It wasn’t until he’d built his plant and was preparing to start bottling his own milk that he encountered the single greatest obstacle and threat.
The Federal Milk Market Administrator, a cooperative to which Johnston belongs, requires Johnston to sell his milk to the co-op, then buy it back before he can bottle it.
“Even though it never leaves the farm, it costs us about 30 cents a gallon to buy and then bottle our own milk,” says Johnston. “And that’s what’s keeping us from getting into the black financially.
“What needs to change is that there needs to be more support from local and state government. Other states have homestead farm liaisons who would have sent someone out to hold my hand through this process. That would not only have made it easier for me, but it also has a ripple effect that supports local economies,” Johnston says. “That’s why those other states do it. It’s basic economic development support, and there’s zero of that in the state of Georgia. Zero.”
On a recent summer morning, just an hour before temperatures led man and beast to seek shade, Gabriel and Julie Simpson bought several gallons of Johnston’s bottled buttermilk and whole milk to take to the chefs at their restaurant, The Glenwood, in the East Atlanta Village.
They’ve only recently discovered Johnston’s milk, and since they live in nearby Madison, it’s convenient to buy from Johnston a couple times a week.
“It’ll be used in all the cream sauces, like for the macaroni and cheese and sweet potato soufflé, and the desserts. We make our ice cream from scratch,” Gabriel says. “We’re committed to using local and organic products as much as possible. We found out about Mr. Johnston, tried his products and decided they’d be a good fit for us because it’s fresher and such high quality.”
Restaurants were some of the first customers who sought out Johnston Dairy milk. So did mom-and-pop grocery stores, and a passionate type of consumer that Johnson had never encountered before.
“We’ve got people that come get our milk because it’s local and our cows are grass-fed and pastured, and they want to support their local farmer. They care about where the product comes from, and the quality of the background of the product correlates to the end product,” Johnston says.
“The other kind of person that buys my milk – I’ll just say they are real enthusiastic about it – is the kind of person that absolutely buys it for taste only. They wouldn’t care where it came from. They say our 2% tastes like grocery store whole milk.”
Johnston’s milk does taste different, which is just one reason top restaurants seek out his product. The richer taste is due to the minimal amount of processing the milk goes through.
“The large plants, they heat it to 171° for 15 seconds, which destroys all the beneficial amino acids and enzymes that are in the milk,” he says. “All we do to our whole milk is low-temperature pasteurize and cool it off and put it in a bottle. It’s time consuming and inefficient, but the quality of the product – there’s no comparison.”
