RICH PATCH — The mountains of Alleghany County have become a lonely place for a dairy farmer. Watahala Farms, tucked into a hollow in Rich Patch Mountain, is the last commercial dairy in Alleghany County. ••  

Despite few hardships worse than last year in the dairy’s 80-year existence, Ronnie Bennett, 56, will stick with his farm. He inherited managing the dairy from his 86-year-old dad, Harry, who still works with the cows when he can. And Ronnie’s 29-year-old son, Ron, will inherit the dairy one day, too.

“Farmers don’t retire, they die,” Ronnie Bennett said.   Troubles have pecked away at Bennett and his neighbors over the years. About 30 dairies in the county closed in the last 60 years, indicative of struggles in the industry. Older farmers had no kin to carry on their businesses, or milk prices plummeted and costs grew too much.        Still, nearby Rockingham and Franklin counties are the two top-producing areas for dairy in Virginia, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2007 census.

“There were a lot more dairy farms in a lot of counties,” said Andy Allen, a Virginia Cooperative Extension agent who’s worked with Bennett for more than 20 years. “It used to be that people hand-milked just a few cows. It got pretty expensive to upgrade and set up a dairy.”

Dale Stull closed his dairy neighboring Watahala in 2002 when the state built a road through his property.

“If you’re going to be starting with nothing, it’d be a fortune” to open a dairy, Stull said. “You’d better have a whole lot of money, or you’re going to be milking a whole lot of cows.”

Even with the dairy up and running, expenses are high. Bennett spends $1,200 a day to feed his 200 cows in the milking herd. Each cow eats about 50 pounds of corn silage, 30 pounds of hay, 18 pounds of grain   and 18 pounds of concentrated protein pellets daily, he said.

He also needs a new barn to protect calves. That’s another $50,000 at least, he said. And it’s another $100,000 to replace and repair machinery every year.

Last year was a particularly tough year in the dairy business.

Milk prices declined by almost 50 percent, from $25 to $13 per hundred   pounds of milk, between 2008 and 2009. It may take Bennett five years to recover from the milk price crash, he added, even though this year’s prices have climbed to almost $19 per hundredweight.

This year Bennett had to dip into an income source he “had saved for a rainy day” to recover from losses last year, and he sold timber on his land for logging, he said.

A bill moving through Congress intended to protect the Chesapeake   Bay is another worry for Bennett, nearly 250 miles away yet in the bay’s watershed.

The Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009, supported by environmentalists and an executive order from President Obama, aims to decrease the amount of contaminants flowing into the bay. At dairies like Bennett’s, cow manure or fertilizer may get into creeks, trickle into the James or Jackson rivers and make its way   to the coast.

If the bill passes, farms will need to take steps to prevent contamination. “It’s not going to be an ungodly amount, but it will take up more land,” Bennett said.

Bennett has already cordoned off some of his streams from the cows and has 750,000 gallons of manure collected in a 12-foot deep concrete “lagoon.”

“You almost need to carry a notebook every day to comply with all the   programs,” he said.

Bennett spends 90 hours a week at work, trudging from barn to barn in camouflage-print rubber boots and a Farm Credit hat to shield his face from the sun.

Three times a day, seven days a week, the cows line up. They rise slowly, heaving their half-ton bodies from the barn’s browned floor onto spindly legs, like drunks waking up from a nap. The cows know what time it is — 2:30 p.m., the second milking.

None moos. “They’re content,” Bennett says.

The cows saunter from the fan-cooled barn out into the sun.

Twelve at a time, a worker herds them into the milking parlor’s stalls.  

Once inside the stall, the milk maids work quickly and repetitively. Put a hand on 12-year-old Big Ears to let her know you’re there. Dip each of her udders into a little pot of iodine, wipe them clean with a towel, flip the milking machine’s suction cups up onto the cows. The two shift workers dip, wipe, flip in 30 seconds flat, collecting 100 pounds of milk or more a day from each cow. Last year, Bennett sold 210,000 more pounds of milk than in 2008, yet his farm’s gross sales declined by $215,000, he said. How hard is this business? “Well, there’s one left. What do you think? “If I had enough money to start from scratch, I certainly wouldn’t pick this operation,” he said.