Struggling dairies get creative, hoping to stay afloat

To rescue her father’s ailing Wicomico County dairy farm, 31-year-old Rebecca Harcum had emptied her savings, maxed out her credit cards and taken a loan against her 401(k). She’d poured nearly $100,000 into the effort, and her father, William Blan Harcum Jr., had also exhausted his savings and credit. It made little difference to the farm’s growing $600,000 debt load.So, in late January, Rebecca Harcum, a Baltimore financial analyst with the Social Security Administration, logged onto the popular crowdfunding website, GoFundMe, and posted a plea to the world, asking it to save Beechnut Farm.For decades, the Harcums had been releasing good karma into the Lower Eastern Shore, welcoming tens of thousands of students onto the centuries-old property to learn about farming.Maybe, Rebecca Harcum thought, people would care enough to donate.“I mean, it’s not just a place. It’s not just a piece of property,” she said in February, sitting inside her father’s cluttered office. “It’s what we know. And we’re doing everything we can to save it. And this is one of those possible Hail Mary—” “My dad had a saying,” her 70-year-old father said, jumping in. “He said, ‘To try where there is little hope is to risk failure. Not to try at all guarantees it.’ We’re going to give this our best shot. We’ll just see.”Seven months in, the Harcums have raised about $8,000.They are one of many families in Maryland and across the United States whose dairy farms have been pushed to the brink of collapse as several years of sunken milk prices have squeezed the state’s declining dairy industry. Though the number of dairies has been steadily shrinking since the early 1990s, agriculture officials said the last four years, following a brief 2014 peak in milk prices, have been particularly stressful as smaller, indebted farms have fallen deeper into debt, pushing some out of business and forcing many farmers to make difficult decisions about the future of their operations.