Monument Farms

Vermont Business Magazine, Jan 01, 2005 by Barna, Ed

Monument Farms in Weybridge was one of the last Vermont dairies to give up delivering milk to people's homes. But there's still self-delivery: people come into the office after hours, take their milk from the cooler, and note in the ledger that keeps such accounts how much they owe for.

That kind of closeness to customers has helped Monument Farms survive while dozens of small operations in the Champlain Valley slowly but surely gave up or were consolidated. Through bulk tanks and pasteurization, through mergers and acquisitions, they have both kept small and kept growing, and are about to celebrate their anniversary.

Milk from several large companies costs less per gallon, and is widely available in

stores, but Monument Farms continues to draw people who say they can tell the

difference in quality that comes from local freshness and small farm quality

control. How can anyone who has the same objection to cows being given bovine

growth hormone that baseball enthusiasts have for players avoiding hormonal

supplements know for sure that the cows aren't on the stuff? It helps to know that

all the milk is coming from one farm's 3.50 or so milking cows, with only

occasional supplementation from one neighboring farmer the family owners

know adheres to the same standards. "Vertically integrated" is the business school

term; or, you might say they stand for something.

It doesn't hurt that Middlebury College, determined both to help the area economy and to maintain a "peak of excellence" in environmental affairs, buys Monument Farms milk for their approximately 2,350 students plus faculty, staff and visitors. Nothing else. Since 1950. Many area elementary schools and high schools have made a similar choice.

The bottling plant and headquarters remain within an escaped heifer's ramble of the obelisk (honoring native son Silas Wright, governor and senator in New York State) that is one of rural Weybridge's most identifiable landmarks. But as is typical for Vermont farms, there is a patchwork of fields that supply alfalfa and corn, bought up on an as-available basis or brought into the fold through marriages.

The realization that survival depended on growth guided the enterprise from the start, said Millicent "Millie" James Rooney, who runs the office side of the milk plant. In 1929, at a time when the Depression was hitting with full force and Millie was just a baby, Richard and Marjory Bingham James left the large New York State farm where he was the herdsman, and bought a 21-acre farm that had become available in Weybridge, where they had grown up (her father mortgaged his farm to help bring the family back together).

About a year later, the young couple bought the milk route of Elvin Lovett, a Middlebury man who served a few homes and a diner. For years they washed and scalded bottles in the kitchen sink and cooled milk in the cellar in chopped ice, before expanding to the shed on the south lawn.

That shed is still there, dimly recognizable in one corner of the milk plant. Growth was steady, but patient and careful nearby farms, used bottling equipment, growing and mixing their own feed. They weathered the regulatory storms that demanded pasteurization in the late 1930s and bulk tanks in the Fifties, the latter a turning point for the era of small, survival-oriented dairy homesteads. "Bottling" systems changed and changed again: today, glass and waxed paper have given way to plastic. They acquired their big competitor, Palmer's Dairy of East Middlebury, in 1986. When they gave up milk delivery in 1996, a New York Times article about the end of that era reached friends as far away as Hong Kong.

Succession issues have doomed many family businesses, but at Monument Farms a third generation of the James and Rooney clans has stepped up. Jon Rooney, son of Millie and her late husband James Rooney, manages the plant. Peter James, son of her late brother Steve James, takes care of the animals. Bob James, another nephew, oversees six drivers, whose trucks not only serve Addison County but have made inroads into Chittenden County via smaller stores and a few restaurants.

With 34 employees, Monument Farms is the town's largest employer. The former Jewett, Hamilton, Gilmore, Bingham, Gingras and Haggar farms have increased their acreage to about 1,600, enough to support about 600 cattle.

Don't look for those land holding to shrink. "We feel we have a heritage we need to cultivate," Millie said. "We have all this land we don't want to see buildings developed on." A few steep and wooden acres have been sold to get through tough times, but not prime agricultural land.

"It's a local pride," she said. "We think that, and we like to know other people think that, too."