Words by Maili Smith | Photos by Wesley Lapointe

The first day of spring is the “best day of the year” on Double J Jersey Farms in Monmouth, Oregon. When sunny skies and gentle, warm breezes finally arrive in mid-April of 2023, dairy farmer Ross Bansen and his 150 cow herd breathe a collective sigh of relief. The cows emerge from their wintertime barns to the rolling pastures of the Willamette Valley, where they spend nine months of the year foraging on grasses. 

Dairy farming is ingrained in Bansen’s genes. A fifth-generation dairy farmer, Bansen grew up on the Double J Jerseys farm, purchased by his father in 1991. Although he was initially put off by the long hours he saw his parents put into the family business when he was in high school, Bansen reignited his passion for agriculture studying environmental science and business in college and felt a pull to go back to dairy. He spent a year learning about sustainable dairy practices in New Zealand before returning to the family farm.

Bansen hates keeping his cows cooped up in the barn for too long and is always ready to implement new practices to improve the quality of his cows’ health and, in turn, the quality of his cows’ milk – like the introduction of chickens to build soil health, or wind chimes to provide a soothing ambience for the cows in the barn.

The Bansen farm embodies the idyllic image of where milk comes from: cows grazing in green fields, marked by a gentle breeze and birdsong. Yet, these scenes are increasingly rare. Family-run farms are disappearing, replaced by corporate mega-dairies of more than 2,500 cows.

According to a 2022 report by the Oregon Department of Agriculture, milk is the fourth most valuable farm commodity in the state. Since the 1840s, a strong tradition of small-scale, multigenerational dairy farms has sustained milk production. However, while milk production has increased by 20% in the last several decades, the number of dairy farms in Oregon has dropped by nearly 60%. The trend is national.

Not all farms survive this transition. About 60 miles south of Double J Jerseys, Konyn Dairy was one of the few remaining dairy farms in Lane County. In 2019, David Konyn decided to sell his family farm after 44 years in the industry. It was just too hard to make a profit.

“At least half of the dairies that I know in the valley are out and many others are desperately searching for a way out,” Konyn said.

Konyn said growing up on a farm builds character and he is grateful that his kids were able to experience it. But larger scale farm operations are pushing out family farms that have been in business for generations.

 “You’re displacing a bunch of families that are making a really good living and love what they are doing. What does that mean? Is there any weight to that?” said Ross Bansen.

As small-scale dairy farms disappear from the public eye, young people are increasingly disconnected from the work that underlies milk production and the effort required to get it to the grocery store.

Shaped by a series of ice-age floods that deposited rich volcanic and glacial soil, the Willamette Valley’s temperate climate, abundant rainfall, and diverse soil types make it an agricultural haven. This land once sustained a culture of dairy farms in the valley and across western Oregon. However, Konyn said dairies in the Willamette Valley have been in retreat ever since milk processing facilities left for eastern Oregon and Washington, where large herds dominate.

When dairy processing was local to the valley, milk producers in the region received a price premium. When processing facilities moved east of the Cascades, dairies in the dry eastern Oregon climates offered economic advantages over those in western parts of the state. These benefits include cheaper land and feed, and less rainfall which reduces water pollution from manure runoff.

Konyn Dairy tried several novel approaches to increase profits. It was the first US dairy farm to use boluses, a device that sits in a cow’s belly and monitors temperature and acidity, and counts their steps. Konyn recognized that “a happy, healthy cow is going to be a profitable cow,” and just like us, Konyn said, cows want to be “content, healthy, and clean.”

Despite Konyn’s efforts to improve the quality of his cows’ milk, he struggled against declining prices. “The most sad thing for us was when we would go into a store and one pint of water cost more than a pint of milk.”

Low prices appeal to consumers, but cheap milk comes with other costs. Big dairies create waste on big scales that can pollute air and water. Dairies typically flush untreated manure into large cesspools, called lagoons, where it is stored until the manure is applied to fertilize fields. On smaller dairy farms, manure can be an asset rather than a pollutant, and can be reapplied to reinvigorate soil health. On larger farms, the sheer amount of manure often exceeds what crops can absorb and as a result can run off into local streams or pollute groundwater.. 

“The unquestioning idea that you have to ‘get big or get out’ is not serving the best interests for the people, the animals, or the environment,” said Galen Martin, a University of Oregon professor specializing in World Food and Agricultural Systems. For example, Threemile Canyon Farms in northeastern Oregon, the state’s largest dairy, houses 33,000 cows and produces about 436 million gallons of manure waste every year – at least twice as much as the state’s entire human population. 

In 2018, Lost Valley Farms, the second largest mega-dairy in Oregon, was shut down following more than 224 violations of its wastewater permit. Concerns about nitrate pollution from cattle manure persist in the Lower Umatilla Basin, where nearly 70 percent of dairy cows in the state live on mega-dairies.

In contrast, Bansen said his family’s farm in Monmouth, tucked in the hilly contours of the mid-Willamette Valley, has long relied on farming practices that prioritize the health of the environment, their cows, and their community.

In 2000, Bansen’s father joined the Organic Valley co-operative, a then burgeoning model that promotes organic products, produced without toxic pesticides, synthetic hormones, antibiotics or genetically modified organisms. Federal organic standards also require that organic milk comes from cows that spend 120 days grazing per year.

In 2017, the Bansens took another step forward, committing to ensuring their cows were entirely grass-fed. 

Most dairy cows are grain-fed because of the high energy content. Although grass-fed cows produce less milk, studies have found that grass-fed milk contains more nutritionally dense, healthy fatty acids, important for preventing heart disease. Trampling of soil by cows, combined with the manure they produce, boosts grass health and soil health in a regenerative loop. As a result of these grazing practices, Bansen’s cows keep their milk production up and live twice as long or more than a conventional dairy cow.

“When we’re focusing more on one end material product, we lose sight of what abundance it can bring elsewhere. Even though we might not produce as much milk, we’re bringing a lot more benefits to our local habitats or local ecosystems than these other farms. How much degradation do we need to experience before the tipping point comes too late?” Bansen said.

Improving cow welfare and milk quality can be difficult in an industry that prioritizes economic efficiency. Bansen recognizes that many farms “feel like they’re almost kind of trapped to some degree. It’s because the systems are brought up in how they learned what efficiency is and what that means to them.”

The now defunct Koryn Dairy was part of the Darigold co-op, which markets both organic and conventional products. Occasionally, Darigold would offer premiums for hitting benchmarks for high-quality milk, but these premiums did not last because higher-quality milk did not translate to more sales. 

Conventional farm products are made on a scale that makes them less expensive than organics, but they come with health and environmental costs borne by consumers, the land, and water rather than the large dairy companies. This means that not all dairy farmers can afford to produce organic milk, even if they want to.

“Regardless of what people say, in the end, they go to the store and they look at the price,” Konyn said. “It has to come from the consumers, and it has to be communicated what the value is. And that’s hard to do.” 

An organic model has worked well for Double J Jerseys, but Bansen recognizes that this success relies on finding consumers willing to pay for the benefits of Organic Valley milk. 

“We’re trying to tell a story here about what we’re doing. What we do here, it’s going be a little bit more costly to do so because we just don’t have those efficiency scales. And we also have to make sure that we stay in business here and keep going,” Bansen said. 

“The paradigm of ‘get big or get out’ is pretty true across agriculture. But the way it’s being combated in many places is through value added processes. Value added could be organic versus conventional. In dairy, it might be small raw milk production,” Professor Galen Martin said.

Raw milk is milk as it comes from the cow –  unpasteurized and not homogenized. Proponents of raw milk advocate for legalizing its sale in Oregon, in part because raw milk sales can provide small farmers a way to compete with a different product in a cutthroat pricing market. 

“Right now the only entry points to the dairy industry are to have a lot of money upfront or to be born into it. Raw milk dairy is a crucial entry point for new farmers trying to get into this industry and grow business to feed their communities,” Bansen said, in a public hearing before the Oregon Legislature in Salem on January 24th.

Versions of a raw milk bill have been proposed in 2011, 2020 and now 2023, but all have failed because public health officials maintain that food-borne pathogens have been linked to drinking raw milk, and they say immunocompromised people are especially vulnerable to pathogens in unpasteurized milk. 

The legalization of raw milk may be a route to promote smaller farms, but legislation efforts are hindered by a disconnect between producers and consumers. Few consumers understand systems that underlie food production and what is required to produce, process, and distribute a carton of milk that ends up in our refrigerators. 

Many people believe in dairy farming that promotes harmony with the land and welfare of the cows that produce it. However, the image of a grazing herd on a self-sustaining farm that we envision as the source of our milk is becoming the exception as large-scale dairies operate out of balance with the carrying capacity of the landscape. Fostering the desire to learn where milk comes from and the processes that produce it is a first step to combat the growth of mega-dairy.

“The whole food industry is built on this image of the family farm that doesn’t exist,” said Professor Galen Martin.

“A joke among dairy farmers is that you’re married to your cows,” said Professor Galen Martin. 

Despite the hard work ahead, Bansen is hopeful. He believes that the landscape of Oregon dairy can be composed of small-scale farms in cooperation and collaboration, rather than competition. 

“I think if you were to do this on a small scale, and do more of these farms here and there, you know, that in turn, builds communities too. I think communities have a lot of benefit to have this farm surrounding them–it keeps some money in there, keeps the community thriving,” said Bansen.

Bansen emphasizes that his practices are not perfect, and he is committed to working towards a vision of milk production that supports the health of his cows, his community, and the ecosystem. For this to work people need to commit to supporting these these practices through purchasing decisions they make at the dairy case in the grocery store.

“As long as there’s a good group behind us saying, ‘We’re willing to spend a little bit extra money to say, Hey, I know that you’re doing something that’s improving your habitat, your ecosystem or the watershed. Let’s keep doing this.’ That makes me very, very grateful,” he said.