Reprinted with permission from the July issue of the Ester Republic.

Barring the proverbial”act of God,” many people seem to agree that Matanuska Maid’s days are numbered — the valiant, last-minute coup detat by Governor Palin notwithstanding. It is not for a lack of vision; in fact you might say that too much vision is what has steered the dairy down this path. Mat Maid has been operating as if it bore a mandate to offer all manner of dairy products to all Alaskans, all the time, including some unexpected ones like Florida orange juice and a pro-biotic yogurt called “Glacier Yo” intended for export to Pacific Rim countries. There is plenty of blame to go around, and the folks who won’t buy local milk because they think it costs too much deserve their share of it, but nevertheless you simply can’t have an industrial dairy without first having a dairy industry.

To the fine farmers of the Matanuska Valley this is just the latest episode in a long history of bad situations. When the first 201 families from Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota arrived in the Palmer area in 1935, they found an unfinished tent city waiting for them that was ill-equipped to make it through the first snowfall, never mind an entire Alaskan winter. The federal government had also conveniently forgotten their commitment to clear the first 12 acres of land for each family, a promise that wasn’t met until 3 years later. Nevertheless, many of the farmers stuck with it, a number of them giving up on crop production in favor of eggs and dairy — the origin of the Matanuska Maid label.

But from day one the development of an agriculture industry was confounded by competition from Outside. As transportation improved in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and the price of shipping came down, cheap packaged goods became a real problem for local food producers. Iconic Creamer’s Dairy was the first to fall, despite prospering for the first half of the 20^th century. Their operations were obliterated by competition from imported milk, which thanks to pasteurization and the new Alaska Highway (which ironically was supposed to be a boon to Alaska’s economy) could be trucked into the state for less than it cost to produce in-state.

We cannot afford to let the closure of Mat Maid mark the beginning of the end for Alaskan food production. American culture has come to believe in consistency of food on the shelves as surely as they do the pull of gravity, but when it comes to food security, Alaskans don’t, in fact, have any. Not only does the massive amount of fuel needed to get the food here contribute its fair share to environmental concerns like global warming, but the distance of the supply chain also makes us extremely vulnerable to any interruptions in supply. Conservative estimates say that if all supply planes stopped flying into the state, Fairbanks would have three days of food on the shelves, and local food production wouldn’t come close to supporting our relatively small population. The quality, safety and nutrition of imported foods are also in question — research shows that freshness correlates not only with flavor but with nutrition. Too, it takes significant processing and specially-bred varieties of fruits and vegetables for our food to make the trip north in one piece, and when you breed for one trait, like tough skin or uniform color, you risk selecting against another. Not surprisingly, a 1999 study of USDA data showed that from 1950-1999 the produce we eat has declined in nutritional value, most likely because of such changes in cultivated varieties.

The Mat-Maid drama, which comes on the heels of the unfortunate BY Farms closure, is proof that our history of outsourcing is catching up with us. By consistently channeling money out of state we have usurped the development of any significant, local agricultural infrastructure and industry, such as slaughterhouses, feed growers, and processing, canning and packaging plants. Matanuska Maid has to import 65% of their milk from out of state because Alaska just doesn’t have the infrastructure to support the number of dairy cows and dairy farmers needed to maintain their current level of production. Rather than sit and wait helplessly for the State to develop that infrastructure, as has been suggested by members of a Dairy committee organized by the State Department of Natural Resources Agriculture Department (http://www.dnr.state.ak.us/ag/), our best chance for a food-secure Alaska is to grow that infrastructure naturally, as it might have in the first place.

My message to the folks at Mat Maid is simple: choosing to close down is a declaration of your belief that the dairy should be everything to everyone, or it should be nothing. Instead of giving up, do whatever it takes to become what Alaskans need: a self sufficient, local creamery. Take a nod from Northern Lights Dairy: scale back your product line to a level you are able to sustain with existing infrastructure, and focus on the needs of your local customer-base rather than trying to subsidize failing product lines with new products and diversification. If you direct revenue back into the agricultural community around you, infrastructure will develop itself as that community grows. Here too is where the State of Alaska can get in on the game, by creating financial incentives and support for infrastructure initiatives as they emerge. For proof of the importance of infrastructure one has to look no further than to the success of your own plastics manufacturing facility, which serves a number of beverage companies including Northern Lights Dairy, who otherwise would have to purchase their bottles from Outside. As your very own CEO Joseph W. Van Treeck put it, “a dollar generated in a value-added business like ours has four or five times more economic impact than buying the same product from outside Alaska.”

And one more thing: if and when you commit to a new vision as a leader in the growth of Alaska’s agricultural community, take some time to develop your website,’Mat Maid’s Future’ page (http://www.aadland.com/matmaid/pages/future.html), which currently looks like this:

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under News, Mixed Bag, Current Events, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.