MAGNOLIA — Like thousands of college students across the country, Southern Arkansas University Mulerider Sunny Wilcox has a college work-study job to help pay the bills.
Instead of checking books at the library, however, Wilcox milks cows.
She’s one of about 30 students who milk the SAU farm’s 70 cows - at sunup and sundown - 365 days a year. Wilcox’s Wednesday shift starts at 4:30 a.m.
“The cows don’t care if you are tired. The cows don’t care if you went out the night before. The cows don’t care what’s going on in your life,” the 21-year-old said as the early morning sun rose over the Magnolia campus. “They have to be milked.”
The SAU dairy is the only college-run dairy farm remaining in the Natural State.
In the past, there were college dairies at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Arkansas State University at Jonesboro and ASU-Beebe.
The closures have accompanied the general decline in the state’s dairy industry. Dairy cows have disappeared from thousands of Arkansas farms over the past 30 years.
Jeff Miller, chairman of SAU’s agriculture department, said the school is committed to retaining its dairy.
SAU was founded in 1909 as an agricultural college. The dairy itself is at least 50 years old.
“We are committed to the point that we are going to build a new dairy,” Miller said. “The skills this dairy teaches are invaluable, and we’re not going to lose it.”
LEARNING, NOT EARNING
The dairy farm is one of the first buildings anyone sees after turning onto the SAU campus from U.S. 82. It sits next to a dormitory and the football field.
Every day at 4:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., a rotating shift of SAU students rounds up the cows from the pasture, marches them 10 at a time into the milking parlor and goes to work.
The students check the udders for infection, drench the teats in iodine and attach the milkers.
It takes about 20 minutes to milk each set, then it’s on to the next 10 cows. The milk sits chilled and churning in a 1,000-gallon tank until pickup.
The SAU farm is a “Grade A” dairy, meaning the milk can be sold in groceries for human consumption or converted into cheese.
SAU sells its milk to the Dairy Farmers of America marketing cooperative. The cooperative then resells the milk to a processing plant.
Most often, SAU milk ends up in the Coleman Dairy plant off Interstate 30 in Little Rock. Coleman pasteurizes it, packages it and ships it out to grocers.
Miller said the dairy is lucky if it breaks even most years. The dairy lost money last year, when the price of milk dropped to about $10 per 100 pounds of milk. The SAU dairy needs to sell it at about $18 per 100 pounds to break even.
But the SAU dairy farm is more about learning than earning, Miller said.
All students who work on the dairy farm are agriculture majors considering careers in the field.
Even if they don’t go into the dairy field, milking is practical experience for students who will go on to work jobs such as high school agriculture teachers and extension agents, Miller said.
“This is as close to production agriculture as you can get, real world, out on the farm,” Miller said. “We are teaching work ethic, responsibility, starting a task, finishing a task, taking pride in a job well-done.”
The students also get paid.
It’s $7.25 per hour working on the farm proper. They get an extra dollar an hour at the dairy to make up for the odd hours. A student who works 20 hours a week can earn enough to cover about half the tuition at SAU, Miller said.
Besides the early mornings, the dairy farm also demands its student workers cover weekend, holiday and vacation shifts.
Bart Emerson, assistant director of farm operations, said most students adapt to the demands of the dairy farm. Some don’t, but that’s a learning opportunity, too.
“It’s like any other job. You don’t show up, you don’t keep a job,” he said. “You can have a big time tonight, but you’ve got to come back tomorrow.”
Student Carley Calico, 20, said it can be hard to wakeup at 4 a.m. to get there. But it’s nice to get her work done while her friends are sleeping and then have the rest of the day free, she said.
The biggest challenge is the work itself, Calico said. Fail to clean the milking system or properly sterilize a cow, and an entire batch of milk goes down the drain.
“I try to be really careful,” Calico said. “I don’t want the whole farm saying, ‘Carley ruined that tank of milk.’”
SHIFTING WINDS
Most of America’s larger universities had dairy farms in years past, said Wayne Kellogg, a professor who teaches milk production in the Department of Animal Science at UA-Fayetteville.
Now, there’s only about one in every other state.
The evaporation of college-run dairies in Arkansas has followed the decline of the state’s dairy farms. Arkansas now produces only about 20 percent of the milk it consumes, said state Agriculture Secretary Richard Bell. The rest has to be imported.
Today there are just 130 “Grade A” dairy farms in Arkansas, Bell said. That’s down from 435 in 1999.
In 1980, about 5,500 Arkansas farms had dairy cows, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By 2007, the number had dropped to 340.
A national milk surplus, driven largely by overproduction in California, pushed milk prices low enough to put Arkansas dairy farms out of business, he said.
Farms have been disappearing of late from north central Arkansas in particular. Bell said dairy farmers there are turning instead to natural-gas harvesting in the Fayetteville Shale to produce income.
The Arkansas Milk Stabilization program - a $9 million grants and incentive fund that makes direct payments to farmers - has helped slow the decline. But the number of farms isn’t increasing, Bell said.
For the schools that have closed their dairy farms, it comes down to a question of how best to allocate limited resources, Kellogg said.
College dairies are expensive to operate, highly labor intensive, face stringent environmental regulations and are aesthetically unappealing to many on campus.
At SAU, for example, the odor can be overpowering.
“When the wind changes, everybody smells the dairy on campus,” Wilcox said. “The art majors - they really despise the dairy.”
UA-Fayetteville closed its dairy in 1997.
Keith Lusby, head of the school’s animal science department, said the 65-cow dairy needed major renovations to stay open.
The university investigated building a larger, modern dairy off campus. But administrators decided the $3 million price tag was too high.
“Frankly, we just did not have enough students who were interested in a career in dairy,” Lusby said. “It was hard to justify keeping it.”
But that’s not the case at SAU.
Miller said the school wants to move the entire SAU farm, including the dairy, to a 650-acre plot off campus.
SAU is raising private money to help make the move, estimated to cost $4 million.
“The dairy is a part of our history,” Miller said. “And it’s a part of our future.” Information for this article was contributed by Laurie Whalen of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/17/2010