A major cause of air pollution—and good milk products—the local dairy industry is evolving significantly.
Local milk market evolves
Dairies once sold only to Crystal - now co-ops dominate
By Jim Downing - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, May 11, 2007
Thirty years ago, it was a safe bet that any Holstein by the roadside in Sacramento County made milk just for Crystal Cream & Butter Co.
But by this week, when the 106-year-old company was sold to a Massachusetts dairy products firm 12 times its size, Crystal's stature in the local farm landscape had faded.
"They had everybody," said Galt dairy farmer Case Van Steyn. "Now they've got way less than half" of the local dairy farmers.
As the milk bottling industry has consolidated, the traditional relationship between individual dairy producers and a local bottling plant has eroded.
Instead, most milk producers across the country now sell their product to giant farmer-owned cooperatives. These organizations, which buy milk from farmers and then either bottle it themselves or sell it to other companies, offer market muscle and the promise of security to individual farmers in an industry increasingly dominated by billion-dollar firms…
…The dairy business in Sacramento County has been contracting for nearly 20 years. The milk cow population in 2006 stood at 17,400, down from 27,000 in 1989, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Crystal has declined, too. In the 1980s, the company's production was at least 25 percent higher than it is now, said Roy Ratkovich, a Sacramento-based industry consultant and former Crystal executive. The company bottles about 160,000 gallons a day at its Belvedere Avenue plant.
Still, milk remains Sacramento county's second-leading agricultural product, with farm sales of $51 million in 2005. By the standards of many counties to the south, though, the local dairy industry is tiny. San Joaquin County, for instance, produces more than six times as much milk.
