From Milk to Mollusks

Oakmulgee Dairy Farm in Amelia County is partnering with Vanguard Renewables to convert cow manure into natural gas.

When Jeremy Moyer was 6 years old, he started following his dad around their 1,000-acre dairy farm in Amelia County. By the time he was 12, he was getting paid to do chores around the farm. Now, at 42, he runs the farm with his father and brother.  

But his core mission at Oakmulgee Dairy Farm isn’t just to nudge his 320 cows to produce 9 million pounds of milk annually — it’s to produce that milk sustainably. 

In other words, in a way that doesn’t harm the environment, doesn’t overtax the animals, land, or those who work on it, and makes it possible for future generations to farm the land for years to come.  

“Dairy farmers who don’t adopt sustainable practices will deplete their land and cease to exist,” Moyer said. “Either you figure out how to farm sustainably or you won’t be around for long.” 

That’s not just a warning, it’s a terrestrial fact. Moyer doesn’t claim that his farm, which milked its first dairy cows in 1905, always put sustainability first. But it does now. And the very process of farming sustainably — despite its steep upfront costs and increasingly complex technology — is becoming a key lynchpin to successful dairy and other food and beverage production and processing throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

“Most people think that sustainability is about a husband with a pitchfork, a wife, and dairy cows milked by hand,” Moyer said. “I’ll argue it’s much more complex. For example, the GPS device on my tractor [to avoid over-applying fertilizer] is more accurate than on a military-guided plane.”

Welcome to the new world of sustainability. Farmers — in Virginia and nationally — are making progress, but they have some catching up to do.

Sustainability Feeds Profitability  

Agriculture accounts for nearly a quarter of global emissions, according to a 2024 report from McKinsey & Co. While more than 68% of farmers surveyed have adopted reduced- or no-till practices, some are going even further. About half are using sustainable variable-rate fertilizer application, and 35% are using sustainable controlled irrigation practices.

Dairy farmers continue to embrace new sustainable techniques, according to The Dairy Alliance, an industry coalition, which said the domestic dairy industry contributes less than 2% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, in the 63 years between 1944 and 2007, dairy farming practices in the U.S. took 90% less land, 65% less water, and a 63% smaller carbon footprint to produce a gallon of milk. 

Some of the most compelling steps in sustainability are taking place at Oakmulgee, which Moyer claims is the longest continuously operating privately owned dairy farm in Virginia.

"Sustainability is our No. 1 issue,” Moyer said. “The dairy business isn’t sustainable if you aren’t making money. And you don’t make money unless you take care of your cows and the land.”

He certainly knows how to do that. But he doesn’t stop there. Family members cross-train each other on the specifics of running a sustainable dairy farm, so that if one of them faces a health issue — or even dies — other family members can pick up and keep doing it. Moyer keeps his dairy farm sustainable by: 

• Using robotics for milking. Eight years ago, they started to make the switchover because it was getting too difficult to find and keep workers for the demanding manual milking process — and because it was becoming very taxing on his dad. “Before the robots, we had to get up at 4 a.m. to do the milking,” Moyer said. Now, he doesn’t have to wake up until 6:30 a.m.
• Building a tech-forward barn. This includes climate control and improved ventilation. It also has a closed-loop system where any urine or manure in the barn is recycled as fertilizer. 
• Repurposing cow manure as an energy source. In partnership with Vanguard Renewables, cow manure will soon be mixed with food waste to create methane, which is then purified into natural gas and injected into the natural gas pipeline to the tune of more than 250,000 metric million British thermal units a year. This is not only a sustainable action, but “will ensure we’ll be able to pass a profitable farm along to the next generation,” Moyer said. 
• Installing solar panels. The solar panels, which were mounted this past spring behind the barn on ground that was not suitable for growing crops, supply all the electricity needed for the milking barn. “It made our electric bill disappear,” Moyer said.
• Doing no tillage or plowing. By not disturbing the ground — except to plant off-season crops that actually feed the soil and the earthworms under it — the soil has remained fertile.

Leading the Way on Dairy Innovation

Virginia dairy farmers have been at the heart of increased expansion activity over the past year — much of which could lead to a more sustainable dairy industry: 

• Shamrock Farms, one of the largest family-owned dairy product makers in the country, announced plans to focus on local dairies as it invests $59 million to expand its manufacturing operation in Augusta County. 
• Desi Fresh Foods, a leading U.S. producer of dahi (a drinkable South Asian yogurt), announced plans to open a new manufacturing facility in Frederick County and source a significant amount of dairy ingredients from local Virginia farmers. 
• Homestead Creamery — which uses milk from local dairy farms to produce ice cream and eggnog — announced a $2.5 million renovation and expansion of its Franklin County production facility.

Of course, even with sustainable dairy practices, there are surprises — like the 3 a.m. wake-up call the Moyers recently received when the robotic milking system malfunctioned and Jeremy had to rush over to the barn to change the milk filter.

A couple of hours north of Oakmulgee in Orange County is another small dairy farm that is also trying to adopt sustainable practices. 

Molly McWilliams runs that farm, J-Team Dairy, with her father, Jim Elgin. The farm has 200 cows, milked three times daily, and 140 tillable acres. Except, for sustainability reasons, it’s run as a no-till farm.  

“We ask a lot of our land, so we care for our land,” McWilliams said proudly. To keep the topsoil from eroding in the winter, they plant ryegrass that’s fed to the cows. 

J-Team partnered with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, the Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association, and the Piedmont Environmental Council to plant more than 200 trees in a riparian buffer project that will help promote water quality in the area. The trees help to retain the soil and filter out and soak up cow manure so it doesn’t run off into the nearby Rapidan River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. 

McWilliams and J-Team are considering sustainable methods of actually injecting the manure into the soil so that more of the manure’s nutritional value would fertilize the crops. When manure just covers the soil, some nutritional value evaporates into the atmosphere. She’s also looking into shifting to robotic cow milkers in the future. 

Virginia’s dairy ecosystem runs the gamut from small family farms to massive multinational companies like Danone North America in Rockingham County.

Seafood Sustainability 

Sustainability is critical on a dairy farm, of course. But in Virginia, sustainability is increasingly being embraced by some seafood producers, too. 

One Virginia company at the forefront is Matheson Oyster Co., a 3-year-old enterprise in Gloucester County that plans to plant and grow over 4 million oysters at its oyster farm over the next year. The oyster farm, each section of which stretches longer than a football field, looks something like an underwater vineyard, said owner Sarah Matheson-Harris.

That’s because they use a unique sustainable method for growing oysters. Tiny oysters are placed in special cylinder-shaped baskets that are rocked back and forth by the waves, growing a premium oyster with little equipment. Beyond raising the oysters sustainably, Matheson-Harris said, they are also sustainably merchandised. 

For example, the company refuses to use the Styrofoam packaging common among seafood companies. Instead, it uses curbside recyclable packing boxes and sustainable, biodegradable, compostable bags made from beechwood fiber. 

Their ultimate goal, she said, is to renovate a larger facility on the waterfront and create a modern, sustainable coworking space with the potential of working with other companies and watermen. “We are passionate about giving good stewardship to working waterfronts,” she said. 

But sustainability on the waterfront can take many forms — particularly in and around the Chesapeake Bay, where Virginia and Maryland officials are aggressively working to fix a sustainability crisis inadvertently created more than 50 years ago. While trying to improve the area’s recreational fishing climate, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries released 300,000 blue catfish into the rivers that feed into the Chesapeake Bay. 

What officials didn’t realize at the time was that these catfish would ultimately adapt to almost anything. They started eating all the aquatic life in the freshwater rivers. Then, in search of even more food, they eventually swam into the saltier waters of the Chesapeake Bay and began gorging on the marine life there, too. Researchers now find stomach contents from the catfish that contain countless numbers of clams, oysters, blue crabs, rockfish, and many more of the seafood traditionally harvested from the Chesapeake Bay.

Now, said Michael Schwarz, director of the Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center, the whole ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay “is at a significant tipping point due to the ecological impact of this introduced species.” 

Today, Schwarz said, there are so many blue catfish in the Chesapeake Bay system that their sheer numbers have multiplied from about 500 million pounds in 2015 to as much as 700 million pounds today.

Sustainability Through Gastronomy  

That’s why the Commonwealth is trying to create a solution that benefits everyone. One of the most surprising things about these catfish is, due to their seafood-rich diet, their nutritional and flavor profiles are excellent. 

Virginia leaders are working to create a new market for these large, tasty fish, establishing the Governor’s Blue Catfish Processing, Flash Freezing, and Infrastructure Grant Program in 2023 to help address the problem by enhancing the processing infrastructure surrounding the species. If the public got a taste for these blue catfish, it could decrease their numbers and ultimately dissuade them from entering the Chesapeake Bay, because there would then be ample food for them in the nearby rivers. The goal is to create a new, sustainable fishery to process the blue catfish.

This will take time — up to a decade, Schwarz said. But within 10 years, he said, “We should be able to turn this around to the direction of a sustainable fishery.” 

Throughout the state of Virginia — whether on a dairy farm, an oyster farm, or in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay — food and beverage producers strive to maintain clean, usable land and water for the next generation.  

Back at Oakmulgee, Jeremy Moyer simplifies the sustainability cycle best of all: “The more you take care of your cows,” he said, “the more they take care of you.”