Rising Costs Had Farmers Talking In Abingdon, Va., On Saturday

ABINGDON, Va. – Rising cost had local farmers talking on Saturday at the annual meeting of the Southwest Virginia Agricultural Association, the region’s largest agriculture political action committee.

"I’m concerned about what we’ve been doing in the past, and whether that’s going to work in the future," said Tim Sutphin, a Pulaski County beef producer who received a farm management award at the meeting. "It looks like in the future we’re going to have to go back to a forage-based system."

He said because of the amount of corn going into ethanol fuel production in response to a government subsidy program, corn for use as feed is becoming cost-prohibitive – and the price will continue to rise as the price of oil goes up. He’s planning to plant corn this spring for the first time since 1995.

"This ethanol thing, it’s driving land prices, it’s driving feed prices, it’s driving fertilizer prices, it’s driving equipment prices," he said. "Ethanol is the biggest hoax that’s been put on this country in many years."

With the added difficulty of this year’s drought-induced hay shortage, he said he’s begun using chicken litter to stretch his hay supply.

"You can’t feed $200-a-ton corn to cows, and you can’t feed $200-a-ton hay to cows," he said, noting the cost of feeding steers has doubled in two years.

"If you talk to leaders in the cattle industry, they think there’s going to be some downsizing in the cattle industry."

Blair and Kim Sanders, who also won an award for farm management, have a non-traditional solution to rising costs on their Pulasaki County dairy farm.

They run the farm based on seasonal grazing, minimizing the amount of feed they have to harvest, store or buy and drastically cutting costs to more than financially offset reduced milk production – while creating more free time for the family.

On another issue addressed at the meeting, a Web site is expected to be up and running this month that will allow people to search for local farm products, which will be listed for free.

"People that are moving into this area ... many of them shop by Internet," said Wythe Morries, commercial horticulture extension agent for Virginia Cooperative Extension. "It’s going to give them an opportunity to find locally grown produce."

Morries says the future lies in "consumer-driven agriculture," and more people are seeking local farm produce.

Joe Guthrie, the keynote speaker at the meeting, discussed a six-week research trip he took last year to Australia and New Zealand, to learn about the beef industry there.

One program Australia has adopted is an animal identification system that makes it possible to trace every animal – the type of system that’s been looked at here since the 2003 mad cow disease scare.

"The [Australian] state of Victoria did a test – they wanted to see if this was an effective system, so they pretended to lose 53 cows," said Guthrie, a Pulaski beef producer and Virginia Tech instructor. "In 24 hours, they positively identified that they had found 52 of those cows."

They found the last cow the following day, he said.

He said climate change is another big issue Australia is dealing with – and a government response prohibits farmers from cutting down trees.

"The place is on the verge of being too hot and dry all the time," Guthrie said. "If climate change is real and if it occurs – and they believe it’s already begun – then what they’re looking at is longer, more frequent and more severe droughts associated with greater heat, which would wipe out a large part of their agriculture."

He said possibilities exist in this country for a policy of paying people to keep their land planted in trees.

Another help to the environment would be to provide an incentive for farmers to practice environmental stewardship and land conservation, by marketing products that come from such farms with a special label, he said.

Perhaps the youngest farmer in the room was Matthew Heldreth, a freshman dairy science major at Virginia Tech who works on his family’s farm in Wythe County.

Heldreth, 19, quickly listed some of the issues in the dairy industry – increasing population, higher fuel costs and lack of interest in farming among youth.

Local extension agents say the region has seen a steep decline in the number of dairy farms operating in recent years.

"On my road, there used to be five dairies," Heldreth said. "Now there’s just one, just us."

He’s not sure if he’ll be able to make money as a dairy farmer in the future but he says the industry will have to exist somehow and the government will have to change costly regulations that negatively affect the small family farm.

"There’s always going to be a demand for milk," he said. "Somebody’s got to produce it."

But he said, with the price of fuel increasing, areas like Southwest Virginia will have to return to some ways of the past.

"Areas are going to have to start being more self-sufficient in a way," he said. "They’ve tried to get away from it, and it’s got us into scary condition, so they’re going to have to go back to it."

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