Speaking of Agri-Mark, the cooperative announced a few weeks ago that they are asking their dairymen to go rbST-free by August 2009.
For all intents and purposes, the New England dairy industry will be “rbST-free” by the end of summer 2009. Facing the threat of losing markets for its highly successful Cabot brand of cheeses, cooperative owner Agri-Mark has told its member farmers that if they want to continue using bovine somatotropin to boost production their milk will have to go to a cheese plant in northern New York State at a cost to them of up to $2 per hundredweight to cover the trucking.
“Cabot sales were at risk, and we were going to lose markets if we continued to accept milk from rbST-treated cows at our Middlebury and Cabot (Vt.) cheese plants and our West Springfield (Mass.) butter and powder plant,” says Bob Wellington, senior vice president of Agri-Mark, the largest producer cooperative in New England.
The two primary marketers of farm milk in New England, Agri-Mark and Dairy Marketing Services/Dairy Farmers of America, have wrestled with assembling and marketing two separate streams of farm milk, one from farms using rbST and one from farms that shun the technology.
Agri-Mark’s board of directors has set Aug. 1 as the cutoff for any rbST milk coming into its system, a decision which essentially is the deadline for both its member farms and all the rest of the New England and eastern New York farms shipping into the New England market.
That’s because Agri-Mark operates the only major manufacturing plants that serve to balance the region’s milk supply, Cabot, Middlebury and West Springfield. Milk beyond the needs of fluid processors, ice cream plants and a handful of small cheese enterprises has to find a home somewhere, and Agri-Mark is the only entity that can economically handle it.
He adds that Agri-Mark waited as long as it could to close the door on rbST, but the pressures coming back from consumers and retailers forced the cooperative to protect its Cabot brand.
3 Comments on “Agri-Mark to go rbST-free”
We are sorry to see that another coop has gone the rbst-free route. The pricing in the dairy industry is already at a crisis point for farmers and a tool to help make milk is taken away. Please go to http://farmersforfairdairyprices.blogspot.com and join us to correct the inequities in the prices we are paid as farmers
We are sorry to see that another coop has gone the rbst-free route. The pricing in the dairy industry is already at a crisis point for farmers and a tool to help make milk is taken away. Please go to http://farmersforfairdairyprices.blogspot.com and join us to correct the inequities in the prices we are paid as farmers
We are sorry to see that another coop has gone the rbst-free route. The pricing in the dairy industry is already at a crisis point for farmers and a tool to help make milk is taken away. Please go to http://farmersforfairdairyprices.blogspot.com and join us to correct the inequities in the prices we are paid as farmers