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Bourdeau Brothers A Vital Resource For Farming In The Champlain Valley

Tuesday July 21, 2009

By Ed Barna

    If dairy farmers aren’t getting paid enough for milk to meet their costs, and if dairy farms are still producing milk, then someone must be carrying the farms’ debt load.

    Yankee Farm Credit lends to farmers, and the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and some banks. But few have given credit (so to speak) to the companies that deal with farmers’ feeds, seeds, needs and machines, which aren’t labeled banks but are in some cases holding more IOUs than the depository institutions.

    If farmers owe too much money, then these farm-related businesses are owed money they might not recoup. Part of the danger of the present dairy crisis is that it may go deep enough to damage the business infrastructure that has heretofore made dairying viable in Vermont.    

    A good example of why dairying has held on so tenaciously despite a horrendous pricing system is Bourdeau Brothers in Middlebury. That’s the name at the store and administrative center on Seymour Street; legally, Bourdeau & Bushey, Inc. does  business as both Bourdeau Brothers and Feed Commodities International.

    A lot more goes on in and around that building than most people realize. To take one example, suppose a farmer growing corn needs it fertilized because the rains have washed many nutrients out of his soil, but the rain has also made the field so muddy that his tractor would bog down.

    What can he do? He can call Bourdeau Brothers, and have them come out with a vehicle that has tires 10 feet high and four feet wide, which can go through just about anything, and without compacting the soil.

    That’s low tech, though. The amount of high tech in the farm supplies business today is the eye-opener.

    Take, for instance, that 200-foot-high feed mill by the railroad tracks, one of the structures that does most to define the Exchange Street district as a place to do business. Jim Bushey, owner and general manager at Bourdeau Brothers, said two employees can run the whole thing.

    “Actually one person could operate it, but OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) wants two,” he said

    There are four dairy nutrition specialists. Meeting a farm’s needs means knowing what the farm produces, how to balance that production with outside sources, and how best to nourish a cow at different stages of its life.

    There may appear to be a lot of corn growing in Vermont, Bushey said (well, in a good year, anyway). But the local supply does not come anywhere near meeting the feed needs of the cows—or the horses, chickens and turkeys, game birds, goats, and miscellaneous other animals who depend on Bourdeau Brothers.

    Fertilizing can be complex, too. Each farm has a nutrient management plan (state required), and based on soil tests, Bourdeau Brothers creates a fertilizing plan—which will be put into effect by a fertilizing unit that can handle a 60-foot swath and is guided (like the farmer’s tractor earlier) by GPS coordinates.

    Above Bushey’s desk is a television set that doubles as a monitor for the futures market. Futures are contracts that make it possible to buy so much of such and such at a particular time at a particular price—in effect these are guarantees that help provide the stability that agriculture needs in order to function efficiently.

    Bushey said the business uses them to get the best possible price, and so do some of the Champlain Valley’s larger farms. In some cases, Bourdeau Brothers buys the futures and sells them to the farm as a service rather than a for-profit venture—because the farmer may be too busy doing other things to become familiar with such derivatives.

    Size matters in getting feed at a good prices, which is why they acquired Feed Commodities International in 2004. Besides the mills in Middlebury and Vergennes, there is one more in Vermont plus others in New York, Maine and Massachusetts—each with its own manager and the group administered by partners Germain and Remi Bourdeau in Sheldon, Vermont.

    As for seeds, research is being done constantly on improving the varieties, and Bourdeau Brothers has test plots in an area beside the store/office building. Bushey estimates that genetic modification such as developing corn that tightly shuts out earworms has reduced the amount of pesticides needed to a tenth of what was applied previously.

    This year, besides the corn, they are testing varieties of canola, which may have strong value for farmers seeking to grow good feed. If you’d like to see and learn more about all that Bourdeau Brothers does, come on Sept. 3, “Plot Day,” when the results of the summer’s growing season are unveiled at a kind of harvest celebration.

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