Snohomish County Business Journal


YOUR COUNTY.	YOUR BUSINESS JOURNAL.

Published August 2003

Dairy ‘getting by’
despite poor market

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT
“We have some of the finest employees you could find,” said Country Charm Dairy owner Henry Graafstra (right), talking with employee Fidel Perez during a recent afternoon on the Arlington dairy farm.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

As the owner of Country Charm Dairy in Arlington, Henry Graafstra is one of the more fortunate farmers who’s still making a living for himself and 35 employees, still enjoying it and still proud of his career.

He has seen a lot of changes in the dairy industry in Snohomish County during the past 50 years that he has been in the business. All of the changes have not been good ones.

Once a major contributor to the county’s economy, dairy farming is facing hard times. Nearly all of the 350 remaining dairies in Western Washington are losing money, according to Jay Gordon, executive director of the Washington State Dairy Federation in Elma. Within the next five to seven years, he expects to see as many as half of those dairies shut down.

In the past two months, with milk prices equivalent to 1977 prices in absolute dollars and far less after inflation, nearly a dozen Western Washington dairy farms have closed down, including the largest state milk producer west of the Cascade Mountains, Doelman Dairy Farm in Olympia, operator of eight dairies in the region.

Over the past decade, Western Washington dairies have declined by almost half, from 1,156 in 1992 to 621 as of last April, according to the Dairy Federation’s statistics.

But, proving good business practices, creativity and diversification are the keys to survival in this deteriorating marketplace, Graafstra and his wife, Betty, continue to persevere profitably.

“We’re getting by,” he said, standing in the middle of a 65-acre pasture where he was busy harvesting silage for his herd of 500 dairy cows — and a smaller replacement herd of 350. To stay in business, Graafstra has a lot of things going for him.

“We have some of the finest employees you could find. A lot of them have been here a lot of years. We grow most of our own silage and buy some grain and alfalfa. We market our milk products to a variety of stores and businesses, and we’ve added products and a retail store,” he said.

From his dairy farm at the northeast corner of Arlington, adjacent to residential neighborhoods, he markets his products within a 30-mile radius with a fleet of his own trucks, serving restaurants, convenience stores and enterprises that serve ice cream cones and shakes, such as Foster's Produce on the west side of Arlington (see related story).

He also has a retail dairy products store at the farm, where people from miles away come for fresh, lower-priced milk and ice cream directly from the cows’ home.

“The store works well for us because our products are fresh and our quality is very good. We even have some customers who drive up from Seattle with an ice chest to fill it with our ice cream. We have a lot of flavors,” he said.

Over the years, Graafstra has built up loyalty with his customers, both wholesale and retail. That pays off for him. It also helps that he has his own pastureland, even renting some of it to other farmers. He also has invested in top-of-the-line milk processing equipment and ice cream making machines that maintain the quality products he wants.

“Agriculture in the county is in trouble,” he said. “I don’t know where it’s going to go, but we watch our expenses and marketing to keep going.”

No matter how challenging the dairy market is, however, he’s always watching out for young people who have an interest in agriculture as a career, and he makes sure he has work for them.

Besides hiring local high school students, he also likes to provide summer jobs for college students going into their senior year of agricultural studies. One of those is Jennifer DeVoe, a senior this fall at Washington State University. She does everything from driving tractors in the hay fields to using her computer skills to help Graafstra fine-tune his tracking of the farm’s finances.

“You know, one thing I’d like to see is more businesses in Snohomish County giving these students jobs to help give them practical experiences that will help their careers,” he said. “It’s part of what I like to do, to give something back to this community and to help these kids out.”

As for agriculture in Snohomish County, he believes consumers will decide its future.

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