With a focus on flavor, organic dairy finds a productive niche

[S.Annadana]

By REBEKAH DENN


LYNDEN, WHATCOM COUNTY – The sun is shining on Shawn and Clarissa Langley's 400 acres, sweetening the grass. The milk from the grazing cows might taste a little different here at Fresh Breeze Organic Dairy. And customers – here's the unusual part for modern-day consumers – also might taste the difference.

Fresh Breeze, a former supplier of conventional milk to Darigold, broke off recently to operate in a combination of ways that is almost unheard of for a dairy in Washington. The Langleys built their own small factory to process and bottle the milk from their herd. They oversee its distribution. They had the farm certified organic.

The milk is vat-pasteurized a short walk from where the cows graze, a slower, lower-temperature process than most large brands use, leaving its products with nuances of flavor and color that change with the seasons.

Fresh Breeze's rich milk, cream and half-and-half are being sold at Seattle grocery stores such as Town & Country Markets and PCC. Their products also are being snapped up by discerning chefs and manufacturers, coaxed into savory sauces and signature creme brulees at Le Gourmand, and enriching ganaches and the famous salted caramels at Fran's Chocolates.

"It's funny, the milk just tastes sweeter. It's fabulous quality," said Bruce Naftaly, chef-owner of Le Gourmand. He would like to see the farm branch into European-style cultured butter.

Such sentiments were echoed at Fran's, where Dylan Bigelow, director of chocolate, said, "Something I haven't really experienced before in dairy is to have that wonderful sweetness, that full sweetness, that wonderful, flavorful cream.

"The industry has made us think it's all supposed to taste the same, with a very consistent flavor. But their nonfat (milk) is just unbelievable, too. It tastes like there's fat in it."


Joshua Trujillo / P-I
Ha Tran measures cream from Fresh Breeze at Fran’s Chocolates. Vat pasteurizing at the Lynden dairy produces more flavorful milk and cream.
Fresh Breeze's Shawn Langley, who farms in Lynden like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather before him, still hasn't turned a profit on his investment. But he now at least sees hope the farm will survive to hand down to a sixth generation: Cassidy, 6, and Kenny, 4.

"Everything we've got now is on the line ... ," he said.

"But that's what farming is. You're always on the edge."

Dairies in decline
Dairy farms have been in a steep decline in Washington for years, casualties of rising land prices, encroaching development, regulations and, more recently, skyrocketing prices for feed and fuel. Wilcox Farms, one of the most prominent large farms in the region, cited unsustainable costs when it quit the dairy business earlier this year. Smith Brothers, another large and local operation, still processes and delivers milk but – hit hard by federal regulations that went into effect last year – no longer owns its own herd.

"We've been at a regular loss of about 10 percent (of the state's dairy farms) per year," said Ned Zaugg, dairy agent for Washington State University Extension. About 500 remain.

The closures are slowing, though, because many of the small, family-run "way of life" farms either have already been weeded out or have fundamentally changed. To survive, many got bigger, reaching a point where, "basically, all your decisions are based on economics rather than the good of the family," Zaugg said.

That's the crossroads Langley faced a few years ago, a hard turning point for a man who believed farming was in his blood. Langley spent his childhood on the Lynden farm, working there every summer even after his father died and the family moved to Renton. The day after high school graduation, he was back for good, marrying Clarissa and going into business with his grandfather, who died in 2003. But as the years passed, the obvious road to profitability went against his instincts.

He didn't want his cows injected with growth hormones to boost their production. He didn't want to feed them primarily grain rather than grass. He didn't want to chemically induce all the farm's cows to go into heat at the same time or to feed calves "milk replacement" instead of milk.

But without such innovations – without "pushing" the cows, as Clarissa put it – he also was producing a third less milk per cow than some competitors, which also was no way to save a family farm.

They could have moved to another state, with cheaper land, as some farms have done, Clarissa said. But they wanted to "try to survive" where the family had been so long.

"Someone has got to step back, and look at this, and change."

Back to the future
His old-fashioned beliefs already were aligned with organic farming, so he started the slow investment of raising new heifers organically, then selling off his conventional herd when the young ones reached milking age. He took the steps to become certified as an organic dairy through the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Organic milk is an area of fast growth – representing more than 10 percent of the milk sold in the Seattle area, according to the state dairy products commission. The state has 36 organic farms now, with eight more on the way. There was still room in the market, and Fresh Breeze's products could be competitively priced with industry leader Organic Valley, but with a local face.

"If there were already 10 people doing it, we wouldn't have done it," said Clarissa.


Meryl Schenker / P-I
Shawn Langley carries a calf into his barn. His herd comprises about 170 Jerseys, Holsteins and Jersey-Holstein crosses.
They built the small production facility, complete with two 200-gallon vats and a cooling tank, a separator, a homogenizer and a bottling machine that is set up to handle only the quarts and gallons. Clarissa and their employees fill, date-stamp and label the smaller containers – up to 1,000 per day – by hand.

They can't take credit for realizing that vat pasteurization would improve the milk's flavor, Clarissa said. The process – heating the milk at 145 degrees for 30 minutes (compared with a much briefer blast at 16 degrees hotter for most pasteurized milk and 280 degrees for ultrapasteurized) – was "the only thing we could afford," Clarissa said. But they had stumbled into a process that had won fans nationwide who believe less flavor is "cooked out" of the milk at the lower temperatures. Certainly Fresh Breeze's entire output is more variable, tied to a particular herd's diets and ages and the time of year rather than having its idiosyncrasies smoothed out by being mixed with large volumes from other farms.

The milk "required a little bit of education with our customers," said Michelle Elsom, specialist for the six-store Town & Country markets. "You get a little bit of, as we call it, farm-fresh taste, which is different than a lot of the milk people are used to tasting. There was definitely a curve there, but it seems to have really caught on."

Once the company's production was under way, one of the biggest jobs was still ahead: finding a market for its products, a task it could ignore when under the Darigold umbrella.

Luckily, once again, a niche was waiting for them – they were large enough to supply other businesses but small enough to make a personal connection.

When Fran's Chocolates began trying to source organic cream earlier this year, the family-owned company was interested in teaming up with a counterpart in the dairy business. "It was a lot harder than I expected" to find a single producer, Dylan Bigelow said.

"There are a few small people doing it," but anyone large enough to regularly supply a business's needs tends to sell to a cooperative pool. "You don't have single-family farms anymore involved in dairies," he said, and they felt lucky to come across Fresh Breeze.

The company is "super unique" in its inclusiveness, said Elsom of Town & Country, knowing that the people they talk to on the phone are the same ones who milk the cows, bottle the milk and can see the cows grazing from their backyard.

"They've exceeded our expectations as far as customers instantly latching on to the fact that they are so close to us ... ," Elsom said. "Instead of the milk going into processing plants and warehouses and more trucks, there are just less steps between us and the cow. I think that's really recognized."

Freedom
The Langleys milk about 170 cows – Jerseys for flavor, Holsteins for higher production and Jersey-Holstein crosses. The farm has 11 employees, counting the Langleys and part-time workers. They would like to grow, perhaps to 250 cows, which would put them around half the average size of dairy farms in the state.

"We want to keep it a family, a small family farm. We can't get much bigger than that," Clarissa said. "It's also limited because you have to pasture your cows, and you have to have enough fields around for that."

For now, the changes appear to have made the farm sustainable. The Langleys are their own chief employees and "they've eliminated the middle person," said Zaugg.

"But if someone goes down, someone gets sick, someone gets injured, then what?" he said. "That's where I see almost all of these small niche operations. They're fun, it's exciting, but they work themselves to death."

It's true that the workload has increased since Fresh Breeze changed course. There probably are four hours of added cleanup alone at day's end, Shawn Langley said. Just the milk separator, for instance, has 70 discs that need to be cleaned and maintained. If the machinery breaks, it needs to be fixed.

"If I'm done before 10 at night, it's a good day," he said. Workdays start early and run as late as 2 a.m.

[jmvivek]

Smt. Veena,
This article has been very encouraging to me for my passion to move into organic/biodynamic farming.(may be noton the economics side though). But I guess meticulous planning with some added luck/blessigs should cover-up the economics part.

To introduce my profile, I am a banker by proefession for the last 10 years, and I am looking forward to startup a mis sized dairy farm towards the end of 2009 or 1st quarter of 2010. Currently I am on the lookupt for a suitable stretch of land in and around the borders of Kerala/Karnatak/Tamil Nadu.I would like to know from you if you can help me get into contact with an organization/more prefarably passionate people who are into Biodynamic/organic farming/organic dairy. This is to help me learn the scientifc & commercial aspects/vaibailty of such a setup and aso get hand son experience on the same as I see myself being a full time empoyee for the initial 2-5 years to bring the farm up the curve as per my long term plan/roadmap. Really do appreciate your feedback, if its of n ot much of botgheration to you

[lucky]

The article is of good sense, but the surprise is that, in india,ppl do not pay higher $$ for the organic quality, and so the organic dairy owner cannot compete with the comercial dairy owners.
The senses of the western ppl are different than our indians, .western ppl would like to pay for the quality, which is like ,the regular milk (whole )per gal in USA (walmart quality) $5.20. and the organic is 6.99 $ for 1/2 gal.
will the indian ppl pay this difference??
plus, how the ppl will examine the milk ,wether its organic or un-organic?? here in usa, its certified by the govt agencies and the dairy has to go thru all the norms set by the govt.
what about in india???????????????????

[S.Annadana]

Visit ICCOA at ICCOA [International Competence Centre for Organic Agriculture]
Visit the Regional ofice of NCOF in Bangalore
Visit Jaivik Society in Lalbaugh