Like the McNamaras, Ted Foster has found a way to get more value from what his cows’ produce. However, the product is brown not white, and it aint chocolate milk. Foster has found a market for the endless stream of manure that the farm’s cows produce, and it’s a product that’s just as important as milk to Foster’s bottom line. The manure is composted and bagged on the farm and then sold to garden centers and green houses throughout New England and New York State. The manure end of the business [no pun intended] started in 1993 and has now reached the point where it brings in as much income as the milking operation. It is so successful that it brings in manure from other farms to compost. Making this enterprise work effectively has a price. For Foster, this means spending a lot of time in the office and staying abreast of changes in the business.
Above one of the structures on the Foster farm is a sparsely furnished, makeshift office that Foster uses to organize and analyze the farm’s business and financial matters. After finishing morning farm chores Foster, whose Amish looking beard gives him the appearance of a simple country farmer, heads directly to this office. Once there he sits down, fires up his computer, and immediately takes on the air of a corporate CEO that loves to discuss his winning business techniques and methods. "I study a lot of the numbers. I really enjoy that aspect of it, looking for trends, looking for problem areas, comparing to other farms, other businesses, watching the ratios a lot. I do the same with the dairy a lot to. I look at a lot of the numbers there. I spot problems by graphing the different production areas." Foster believes that taking the time to educate himself in these areas helps insure that the farm will remain profitable in the future. "There’s not much margin. You don’t have much room for mistakes. I think it’s time well spent. The employees don’t always think so. They wonder why I’m sitting in the office but I’m out there with them eight or ten hours a day, then in the office for awhile after that."
The Foster operation also did something else to remain competitive: It got bigger. In the early 70s the Foster farm was milking around 150 cows, since then growing to 350, a number that does not count dry cows, heifers and other livestock. The Flood farm in Clinton, Maine also grew from a 150-cow size in the early 70s to it’s current 1,190 milkers and 2,350 total. Getting bigger does have advantages. The farmers get more bang for their equipment buck, they bring in more money and they can better afford the labor that is needed to run a larger operation. Operations with more than two hundred cows are also the only size range where there is actually growth instead of decline. Vermont Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture Louise Calderwood, whose husband runs a dairy farm, confirms this trend. " I’ve been working closely with dairy farmers in Vermont, I guess for fourteen years now, and we’re continuing to see a polarization in that some are choosing to become larger so that they can afford the labor and economies of scale that come with a larger size."
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