The Infrastructure of Milk in North Carolina: October 2007

Here are some of our maps. To scroll to the next maps roll your cursor over the map and choose the left or right arrow. The maps are available as much larger files on blackboard so you can see the legend and spatial areas more clearly. Please comment and tell us what you think!

Also, here were our official group meeting times thanks to Jack, our research coordinator.

Sept. 11th: outside of the Student Union to discuss the central question and to come up with questions that we would need to answer in order to be able to write the paper.

Sept 21st: Visited Harris Teeter to gather information on milk prices, brands, distributors etc.

Sept 26th: Met at Union to discuss future plans and how we would go about getting information from Food Lion and Weaver St. Market.

October 2nd: Met at 3:15 outside of Union to finalize plans for presentation, go over paper and figure out if we were missing anything on the rubric that needed to get done.

Information on Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association Based on Interviews:

Hunter Farms (Harris Teeter Brands) and Food Lion brands both use M&V Milk Cooperative. Because of huge demand, however, Hunter Farms also uses Piedmont Milk (see below for more info) which is privately owned. A big question stems from the difference between private milk and cooperative milk.

M&V's logo here shows cows, the farm, the cooperative, and the final bottle of milk. Througout their website there are idyllic images of small farm, sunsets, and the association of the coop with big money. Piedmont Milk, conversely, doesn't have a website.

M&V is responsible for marketing the raw milk to processors as well as doing in house processing and balancing. This is not done by Piedmont Milk.

M&V collects raw milk and organizes buyers for it. They also schedule and organize pickup and delivery. Some clients (such as Food Lion) do not have diary processing capabilities, so production is shifted to one of the three in house fluid processing plants. The plant for Food

Lion brand in Carborro is in Newbern, NC.

Production is done independently of the Coop by individual farm owners. Profits are divided by volume produced (image courtesy of the University of Georgia).

If there is extra milk on the market from weekend production, or from a period of surplus, milk is transferred to a balancing plant. This brings up interesting economics issues—they are actively controlling the amount of supply to artificially control the price. At a balancing plant, milk is converted into a “shelf stable” form. This is milk powder, cream, or condensed milk.

All profits from the milk sales are then collected and divided by volume amongst members of the cooperative. Specifically, it is divided “per hundred weight” basis. Dairy farmers are paid a fixed price per hundred pounds of milk. Thus, a major difference between cooperatives and private distribution is that in a cooperative, farmers just produce the milk. Privately, they must find a middle man and worry about infrastructure issues associated with distribution of their product.

A major factor in comparing Piedmont and M&V is risk. Piedmont, through direct contracting, gets higher prices for its dairies. If a processing plant goes bankrupt, however, they are no longer obligated to buy from a dairy farmer, meaning there is nowhere for the milk to go. Also, laws restrict dairies to producing for a single processing plant, so it’s kind of like putting all your eggs in a single basket. In a large cooperative, per hundred weight prices are lower, however, the cooperative is designed to be fluid so that it is not based on any single processing plant. Different forms of sale also make it somewhat safer. They process some milk, as well as sending it to places like Hunter Farms raw.

Geography and the “Milk Deficit”

A large milk cooperative such as M&V Milk Cooperative will have about 1,500 milk producing families, each of whom can own several dairies. The geographical distribution of farms for M&V Milk Cooperative stretches from Pennsylvania to Georgia and from the East coast over to Kentucky and Tennessee. The reason for the huge geographical area is because the South East in general is referred to as a deficit market year round. There are too few dairies so milk is constantly being shipped to the area. This is especially true in traditionally low milk periods, such as late summer. High humidity and heat are bad for milk production as cows become fatigued. Water beds and misters are used to cool cows but this remains the all time low for milk producing. This is also a time of great demand because schools are starting up. When milk production rises processing tends to occur near the production site (so the Newbern plant would process milk from Virginia and North Carolina).