How A Vermont Family Dairy Farm Makes Ends Meet

The number of dairy farms in Vermont continues to decline, with around 805 in business this spring. While large farms, with more than 700 cows, are a growing sector of the dairy economy, small operations with fewer than 200 animals still make up 80 percent of the state’s dairy farms.It’s challenging for small farms to stay in business as costs increase and the price of fluid, non-organic milk fluctuates, but some have found a way, including Silloway Farms in Randolph Center. They figured expanding would mean expenses. They’d have to build a bigger barn and milk house, which would add up to long-term debt. Instead, they found other ways to grow the  business. Just up the road from the farm, logs are loaded onto a machine that cuts and splits them. The chunks of firewood rattle up a conveyor and into a waiting truck.In the most recent year the family’s firewood business added another $140,000 to the bottom line and it’s still growing.“At some point we decided we did not want to expand the size of the herd. We would expand sugaring or firewood,” says David.A sugaring business is separate from the farm, but the two help each other by loaning money back and forth when each needs it.John Silloway says the biggest challenge to running the farm is juggling finances to compensate for the two big variables in dairy farming: the weather and roller-coaster non-organic milk prices.