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SARE 2001 Highlights
By
Adding Value, Dairy Farmers Develop New Markets for Milk
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| Above: Community development specialists in northern
Pennsylvania, hoping to boost the local economy, surveyed consumers
about their dairy buying preferences. Many Pennsylvania dairy farmers
produce milk from cows raised in well-managed pasture systems. Photo
by Valerie Berton. |
To counter static dairy prices, a diverse group of Pennsylvania community
development and business representatives received a SARE grant to study
the feasibility of adding value to milk right in their region. The Union
County Chamber of Commerce led a group of central Pennsylvania dairy producers,
farmland protection advocates and business leaders in investigating whether
producing local milk and cheese—and adding value to it with such
techniques as glass bottling—would benefit area farmers. The grant
funded market research that helped the group identify a healthy demand
for locally produced farm products in the Susquehanna Valley. The researchers
turned up information about how many producers might be needed to fill
local niches and how farmers might meet the demand—and with what
products. As a result, a group of growers opened a producers-only farmers
market in Mifflinburg, Pa., while a dairy cooperative received a USDA
rural development loan to construct a bottling plant and retail milk market
featuring old-style glass bottles. (See cover photo.) The SARE research
was key to the cooperative's successful application, said project cooperator
Bill Deitrick, Union County agricultural land preservation administrator.
"The dairy industry is a mature industry," he says. "The
only way to develop new marketing potential is to re-invent the wheel.
We need to re-train farmers so they develop marketing skills alongside
production skills." The group is continuing to identify markets for
locally produced farm products and hopes to jointly support a regional
ag marketing specialist position.
[For more information, go
to http://www.sare.org/projects/
and search for LNE98-099]
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