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Albert Straus_May 2022-3

Local organic dairies withering under huge jumps in production costs

  • Media Coverage

KRCB Northern California Public Media

Written by Marc Albert

After decades of growing demand, drought and a far-away war are laying low local organic dairy farmers and processors.  Without cash soon, it’s feared several local dairy operators may soon close up shop.

“We have a drought crisis that is extreme,” said Albert Straus, founder and CEO of Straus Family Creamery and something of the dean of sustainable animal agriculture. “Of the one hundred and six organic dairies in California, ten have gone out of business in the last few months, and there’s another ten that are expected to go out of business before the end of the year, or by spring at least,” he said.

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A person wearing a hat, gloves, and work clothes stands at an outdoor research station at Correia Family Dairy, pouring a reddish liquid into a large funnel-shaped container connected to hoses and pipes. Several plastic sample bottles sit on the ground nearby, and shade cloths overhead provide cover. The setup includes pumps, tubing, and monitoring devices, suggesting a water, soil, or nutrient treatment experiment.

These very hungry microbes devour a powerful pollutant

PETALUMA, Calif. — The cows had to be deterred from messing with the
experiment.

Researchers from a Bay Area technology company had come to the sprawling
dairy farm north of San Francisco to test an emerging solution to planetwarming emissions: microscopic pink organisms that eat methane, a potent
greenhouse gas.

Kenny Correia, 35, of Correia Family Dairy, watched the team from Windfall Bio
working near the lagoons used to store manure from the farm’s several hundred
cows. The researchers erected a futuristic system of vats, pipes, tubes and shiny
metal supports. Then, when everything was assembled, they poured pink liquid
into one of the vats. “They were looking like mad scientists out there,” Correia
recounted.

He acknowledged initially thinking it was a “crazy idea” to integrate an outdoor
laboratory into a working farm. There was the potential for the cows to “be all
over it — licking it, pulling out wires and scratching on it,” he said.
But livestock farms are a significant source of methane emissions, and Windfall
wanted to see how much the microbes could help.

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December 8, 2025
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