For many Maine dairy farmers, 2016 has been a challenging year.
Wholesale milk prices have plummeted for farmers, some of whom received as much as $32 per hundredweight, or about 11.5 gallons of fluid milk in 2015 but as little as $10 per hundredweight this summer.
Still, there are bright spots in the state’s dairy industry, and one of them is yellow, rich, creamy and delicious spread thickly on fresh bread: locally churned butter. It’s made by relatively large and widely distributed companies such as Kate’s Homemade Butter in Arundel, which makes more than 1 million pounds per year, and Casco Bay Butter of Scarborough, which adds gourmet flavors to its product. Butter is also made in Maine by much smaller dairies that dot the landscape and sell through local stores and by word of mouth.
“If people have a local butter they love to buy, they are fiercely loyal to that butter, just like everybody’s got their favorite ice cream,” Julie Marie Bickford, executive director of the Maine Dairy Industry Association, said. “When you see a new butter, it is exciting, especially when you see it in one of the larger grocery stores. We’re so well situated, just a few hours from Boston, so Maine is in a great place to grow some of these value-added items.”
She’s not kidding about the fierce loyalty to local butter. This summer, when Houlton Farms Dairy had to suspend its butter production because fewer customers have been purchasing milk and so there was less cream available for butter production, northern Maine fans were disappointed and then some. They filled the company’s Facebook page with pleas for more butter and freely gave plant manager Eric Lincoln unsolicited advice for how Houlton Farms Dairy could end the butter shortage.
“Customers think butter is supposed to be in the store 365 days a year,” a bemused Lincoln said Thursday. “Consumers are getting farther and farther removed from food.”
He said the company has started to make a limited supply of butter again, which they sell just about as fast as they can churn it, meaning the butter shortage is not yet finished.
“We’re trying to do everything: make ice cream, sell our milk, make sour cream. And whatever’s left over at the end of the day we’ll make butter with it,” he said, adding that he could purchase cream from other sources to make more butter but doesn’t want to do that. “We choose not to bring in fat. I don’t think the butter would taste the same. And I’d rather have the complaint of being out of butter than the complaint of the butter tasting different.”
Butter-seekers from Aroostook County ventured far afield to find a fix, according to Stacey Hall of Penobscot County’s Hall Family Farm, which produces raw milk, unpasteurized butter, buttermilk and cream. The family sold their products this summer at the Orono Farmers Market but are on hiatus. That’s because Hall and her family live in Bradford but had to travel daily to her father-in-law’s farm in Dexter, about 20 miles away, to make their products. The long days just got to be too much. The Halls are hoping to purchase a bigger farm in Bradford and will restart the dairy as soon as they can.
“We’re pretty determined,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on our butter. And word got around. One couple came down from Aroostook County to the Orono Farmers Market just to get butter.”
Hall said she had to skip a couple of weekly markets because she was sick with a lingering cold. When she reappeared with her dairy products and butter, an older gentleman who bought from her made a beeline for her stand.
“He said, ‘Oh, thank God you’re back. I’m addicted to your butter. Just addicted to it!’” she recalled. “I’ve had I don’t know how many people have used that word. They ask what I put in it. Just salt and cream.”
So what does make one butter better than another? Belfast baker Anne Saggese of Sweet Henry’s goes through about 100 pounds of butter every month to make cakes, cookies, pies and other treats.
“All butter all the time,” she said, adding that for a product with only two ingredients, the taste can vary a lot. Cream tastes different, depending on the type of cows and what they’ve been eating. For instance, Saggese said, grass-fed Jersey cows produce high-fat cream that makes a rich, yellow butter. And if you see yellow butter on the store of your local grocery store, that may not necessarily mean that it comes from grass-fed Jersey cows.
“The yellow you see in grocery stores is food dye,” she said.
Saggese said that because she needs to buy so much butter and keep her costs as low as possible, she purchases from Cabot Creamery of Vermont, which sources milk and cream from farmers throughout New England and New York.
“It’s local,” she said. “The New England dairy farms are just inherently smaller and the cows are better treated than the midwest dairy farms. The farming operations are more sustainable. And it’s got a good-quality fat to it.”
Jessica Dickson, a Brooks dairy farmer who sells her raw milk, butter and cream to neighbors, to the Belfast Co-op and to the Stone Fox Farm Creamery in Monroe, said she and her husband had figured on getting out of conventional dairy farming back in 1994 when they sold off their 66-head herd.
“We weren’t going to milk anymore, but I couldn’t stand the sight of an empty barn,” Dickson, 67, said. “We cut back, and then we started making butter and selling milk to neighbors.”
Mike Knowles, the dairy buyer at the Belfast Co-op, said customers really appreciate having a locally made butter option. They reliably sell all of what they order from Dickson every week.
“People just like the fact that it doesn’t go through a factory,” he said.
Dickson Family Farms said they can make as much as 120 pounds of butter per week, but the amount varies.
“We sell the milk and the cream first, and whatever’s left turns into butter,” Dickson said. “The butter’s very important, because it brings a fairly good price. We never have trouble selling it. If you start out with a good product, like good thick Jersey cream, the results are going to be super. You can’t help but have good butter.”