In spite of the worsening situation for Northern New England dairy farmers, there are still those that would like to own a dairy farm that do not have a farm to take over. Ken Harman comes from a farm family in Pennsylvania and currently works on a farm in Penacook, New Hampshire, where he wants to stay until he can position himself to get a farm of his own. Harman, who is 29, married and has degrees in agronomy and environmental science, has no illusions about how difficult it will be to set himself up with a farm of his own. "The cost of cattle is at an all-time high right now. We’ve got some of that started on our own, we have a small herd. That’s one of the other reasons that we came up here. We had an option to start a small herd and work for the farmer. The biggest cost, and it’s the biggest cost facing anybody in the agricultural industry today, is just the cost of land. The land capital required, it’s atrocious and it’s getting worse…It’s being valued for things that are considered more valuable than agriculture…housing, recreation, private estates." He and his wife Jen have decided to be patient and wait for the right moment to make their move, even if that takes a few years. "Oh I’d like to do it in the next ten years but that’s play by ear go by feel see what comes along. Every once in a while my friends and other people I know stumble into farmers that want to keep the land that they have in business, but they physically can’t do it anymore. So they’ll switch to things like lease-to-own and they’ll sell you the property on a lease basis. It’s an open-ended time frame kind of."
Saving the Farms
As problems continue to mount, many Northern New England dairy farmers have begun to focus on efficiency. Some farmers are finding that diversifying is the answer while others have decided to grow larger. State governments, concerned about the loss of the farms and with maintaining an adequate supply of milk for the region, have designed programs to help the farmers in tough times. Many of these efforts appear promising but are often controversial or strewn with problems of their own.
Some of the more controversial plans include various forms of financial aid. One method that was popular with farmers and stayed out of taxpayer pockets was the Northeast Dairy Compact. This regional program served dairy farmers in the New England states and those outside the area who sell fluid milk there (other forms of milk, i.e. cheese and butter were not covered). The plan required milk processors to pay into a fund that would directly benefit dairy farmers when fluid milk prices dropped below a minimum level set by the compact commission. The life of this program, however, was short.
 Ted Foster is one the farmers who liked this program and believed it fair to both farmers and consumers. "What we find amazing is that when the Compact first went in, people were arguing that it’s costing the consumer twenty or thirty cents a gallon more for their milk. But since the compact has gone off milk has gone up another twenty cents a gallon. It hasn’t come down any so I don’t think the compact hurt the consumer too much." Foster believes that the fears concerning overproduction were baseless. "I don’t think it caused overproduction. In fact several years during the compact there wasn’t enough milk and that’s why the market price got up to $17.00 a hundred weight ($17.00 for each hundred pounds of milk) because there wasn’t enough being produced."
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