Bottling milk at Scrutton Dairy

Bottling milk at Scruton dairy farm

Local dairy produces three million pounds, has established market and is economically profitable.

Interview by Joe Adamowicz
January 1984

Once numbering in the hundreds, there are less than a handful of producer-handlers that sell milk under their own name in New Hampshire today. The Frank Scruton dairy farm in Farmington is one of those few.

A fifth generation farmer, Frank started the family business in 1942 when he bought twelve grade cows, two heifers, a bull and a 75 quart milk route for $1000. That year the milk was bottled right out of a pitcher on the kitchen table, and deliveries made out of the back seat of a 1937 black four door Plymouth sedan. A quart of milk sold for 12 cents.

*Left to right: Frank, John, Pauline and Arthur*

Today, Frank’s oldest son, John Scruton, 35, makes the deliveries each a.m., six days a week, heading out from 208 Meaderboro Road in a modern refrigerated truck with 1000 gallons of farm fresh whole milk — stocking the dairy cases and coolers of 35 stores and restaurants in four nearby seacoast communities.

Another son, Arthur, 33, a ’71 graduate ofUNH with a bachelor’s degree in dairy science, oversees the day to day operation of the farm, while sire selection and the genetic progress of the 300-plus purebred Holstein herd is in the capable hands of Frank’s wife, Pauline, who is also president of the N.H. Holstein association.

Last year, Scruton’s Dairy Inc., which has sold milk retail or wholesale for 42 years, posted an annual sales volume of over three million pounds of milk.

“When I first started I did everything myself,” he continues. “Bottled the milk, peddled it out, washed the bottles and milked the cows. Then in 1950 I got one cheap man to help me on the farm and it kept coming along.” In time the business flourished. Sales increased to 1000 door to door customers; barns were built; and extra men hired to help with the routes.

But nine years ago Frank switched from door to door sales to doing just stores and restaurants. “The economics of door to door were no longer there,” says Frank. “In order to pay a man, the depreciation on the truck and the insurance, you had to charge a higher price for your milk.

The bigger stores could buy it more cheaply. Consequently, that made it so we were doing smaller and smaller volume stops.”

“One day Frank went around Farmington and gave up 200 customers,” says Pauline Scruton, sitting in an easy chair across from her husband who is stretched out on a couch in the living room of their seven room Cape-style house.

“I’d delivered milk to some of those customers for over 30 years,” Frank. says with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “It was kind of a hard day.”

Another change was going from glass to plastic and paper. “Glass was a handicap in selling to the stores,” Frank explains. “So we fixed our bottle machine glass filler to put up gallon plastic and bought a paper machine. We went primarily to half pints and half gallons in the paper and gallon plastic. That’s all we’ve put up for the last nine years.”

Work days begin early at Scruton’s Dairy farm. The milk, about 1000 gallons, is transferred from a portable 2000-gallon bulk tank into an old Kari-Kool tanker truck the Scrutons bought from Fairmont Dairy in Woonsocket, RI, three years ago. It is then brought 200 yards across the yard to the processing plant where Larry Kelly, 49, a 25-year employee and part-time Farmington policeman, begins the 3 a.m. processing and bottling routine.

By seven a.m. the farm fresh whole milk is ready to be loaded onto the refrigerated truck so that John Scruton can begin his delivery route at 7:30 a.m. Next day delivery is a rule at Scruton’s Dairy farm although “sometimes it hasn’t been 30 minutes out of the cow before it’s packaged and ready for delivery” says Larry Kelly.

John Scruton is not your typical milkman. A 1972 graduate of the Gordon-Cornwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in dairy science from UNH, he is an ordained and practicing minister in the Meaderboro Community Church in Rochester.

After graduating from divinity school, he was the full time pastor at the Hampton Baptist Church for two years. In 1974 he returned to work at the farm.

“I missed working with my hands and the physical labor,” says John, who lives on one side of the 100 yearold, 18-room, yellow farmhouse with his wife Sandra, and their three children, Rebecca, 10, Peter, 9, and Matthew, 7. His brother Arthur occupies the remaining rooms with his wife Sherrilyn and their two young children. “I found that being behind a desk was too confining,” says John. “Working on the farm and being a minister gives me a good balance. There are many small churches in northern New England that cannot afford to support a full time minister. This works out well for both of us.”

Whereas the route most milk follows to the grocer’s shelf involves transport time, and days of waiting in tank trucks and on loading docks, the Scruton’s product is strictly farm fresh.

“There are a number of people who are conscious of that fact,” says the milkman-minister. “They also say our milk tastes better because it’s not standardized. We put it out at full butterfat. The last test was 3.8 and that is what we are selling it at.”

Because it’s whole milk and they don’t standardize, the Scruton’s don’t have to worry about labeling their product. They do, however, have to keep strict records for the federal milk marketing report. Each month they must account for all their production and sales. “Everything has to coincide,” says John. “The milk we have in the tank has to coincide with the milk we process, bottle and selL”

As producer-dealers, the federal government allows the Scrutons a full Class I price for their product, as long as they produce all of their own milk and buy no more than two percent of their supply.

“We try to figure the dairy to run even and then the difference between Class I and blend is the profit we can make,” says John.

John explained that the farm uses up its two percent allocation by purchasing half pints of heavy cream, pints of light cream and quarts of skim and chocolate milk from Weeks Dairy of Concord or Oakhurst Dairy of Portland, Maine.

“The only time we put up chocolate milk is when the schools want 30 cases,” says John. (One of the Scruton’s wholesale customers is the 1000+ student Farmington school district.) “But usually we. sell so little chocolate milk it doesn’t pay to dirty our lines.”

“We used to handle and separate skim milk and cream,” he says. “At one point, during the holidays for example, half pints of cream would outsell quarts of milk. But that’s no longer the case.”

In addition to Class I price benefits and a guaranteed market, another advantage of being an independent family run dairy is not having to pay transportation-shipping fees or co-op dues, although the Scrutons are not exempt from the federal milk tax. “That puts us at a real disadvantage with the processors who don’t have to pay it,” says John. “That tax comes out of the farm — not the processor,” he says. “Our competition is not the farmer but the major dairies and they don’t pay that.”

Are the Scrutons competitive with other dairies in pricing their product? “We can compete price for price with almost any dairy except the major chain bidding,” says John. “The reason we have trouble is that many of the larger supermarket chains are locking themselves into a contract price with one dairy. That in turn is creating a hazard for the smaller dairies because they are left with only the smaller stores. The big supermarkets don’t like you to come in and undersell the chain price. So no matter what you charge, they are going to sell your milk for more than their own brand name. Another thing is that some of the supermarkets are buying their own dairies,” says John.

“But we do quite well when we are given an equal chance to compete and are not locked out by a New England or state contract,” he adds. “Because we are local and the customers have demanded our milk, we’ve gotten into some places in spite of a New England contract.”

Like her husband, Pauline comes out of a solid farming background-growing up on a cattle farm in Webster, NH. “It was a small farm but it had good bloodlines and was active in Holstein affairs,” says the diminutive grandmother of fourteen who as a youngster travelled the show circuit with her five sisters — their father proudly displaying his “William Phelps and daughters” sign.

The Scruton home, barn and production facilities

During World War II, when the DHIA program was devastated by the fact that many men had gone off to war and male milk testers could not be hired, Pauline and two of her sisters took over as milk testers in Belknap and Merrimack Counties.

As producer-dealers and purebred breeders, the Scrutons have an outstanding herd. Their top 15 cows are above 22,000 in milk production and they’ve got their top 30 cows producing 20,000 or better. It’s not until you get to the 42nd cow does the average drop below 19,000 pounds.

“The two best family lines go back to owned daughters of Ivanhoe,” says Pauline. “At present, over half the herd can be traced back to Elevation.”

Like most good purebred breeders, the Scrutons use top national sires and buy semen from a variety of stud services.

Arthur Scruton and herdsman, Pat Powers, both trained A.I. technicians, do all the breeding work — breeding cows anywhere from 55 to 75 days after calving “depending on the cow” and first calf heifers from one year ten months to two and a half years old.

“We breed first calf heifers when we’re going to need the milk for the routes more than anything else,” says Arthur. “It’s quite a job and sometimes we get fouled up. It’s hard to figure out a year ahead of time what you think the demand is going to be and then try to supply it.” “If a heifer’s going to be calving at two years old, but we don’t need the milk, we’ll hold her another three, four, five or six months,” he says.

The Scrutons milk at 5:30 a.m. and again at 5:30 in the evening and the chore takes three and a half to four hours to complete. Bob Somricker, 38, a three year employee from Attica, NY, who lives on the farm with his wife, Linda, and their two young children, is responsible for the milking six days a week.

Up until last April, for the past six years, the Scrutons, were milking three times a day.

“We stopped because we wanted to see how much milk we were gaining on twice a day milking,” says Arthur. “At the time, we had plenty of extra milk and it looked like the demand wasn’t quite so much as it had been.”

“Another reason was that we thought we might be wearing the cows out a little more. Some of the cows were tied up for as much as 15 hours a day in milking. We thought that was hard on their feet and legs.”

The milking parlor is a Boumatic double six herringbone with a computer hookup, weigh meters and automatic take-offs. The one and a half inch lowline was changed to two inch and ballast tanks and a bigger vacuum pump were added following a trip to California in the early 70’s where Frank and Pauline looked at various systems. In 1977, the parlor was updated from a double four and the lowline changed to three inch.

On the wall of the farm office in the free stall barn is a Boumatic Agri-Comp dairy computer that keeps track of milk production as well as vital breeding information. Readily available is coded data ranging from which cows are ready to bred to which cows are ready to be called pregnant. In addition, a full summary of year to year lactation records gives the Scrutons a complete update of their herd.

The Scrutons feed a complete balanced ration twice a day and the cows are fed in the barn year round. The high producers, about 87 cows at present, producing between 55-75 pounds of milk daily, are fed 31 pounds of corn silage, 31 pounds of haylage (50% dry matter from the Harvestore silo), 36 pounds of wet brewers grain, 24 pounds of high moisture ear corn, 12 ounces of min-a-mix mineral from Blue Seal and six pounds of bi-carb in addition to salt.

The Scrutons own 1500 acres of land, most of which is woodland, with 200 acres in crop and hayland. Three hundred acres are rented — the furthest fields about 12 miles away in Madbury.

Arthur describes the home farm land as “rocky” but good quality soil.” It holds the nutrients and the moisture well. It doesn’t take so much lime as a lot of soils but there are a lot of rocks and small fields.”

The cropping program accents on corn silage with 175 acres put in annually. The Scrutons have put up their own high moisture ear corn but with this year’s dry weather they bought 550 tons of ear corn.

For their hay operation they have two mower conditioners, A Hesston and New Holland, a New Holland rake, baler with kicker and four hay wagons. “We don’t put up a lot of hay,” says Arthur. “Just enough for the dry cow and heifers.”

“We use hay as a buffer. If we have a poor year, we chop a lot more of it and it goes into haylage. If we have an average or better year, we usually sell some. We do the same thing with corn.

Frank and Pauline Scruton have been married for 37 years. Besides their three sons, they have three married daughters: Ann, 34, Rute, 31, and Barbara, 26.

A New England champion many times over, who’s been around oxen since he was three years old, Frank still attends 25 fairs each year — often competing against his son Arthur.

“The Scrutons have always had oxen, says Frank, who as a young man played all the vaudevilles, from Canada to Kentucky, with a pair of oxen he had trained to do tricks.

The Scruton family say they are proud to be producer-handlers. They believe a small dairy such as theirs is good for the community and they like the idea of having an established market for their milk.

And the family tradition? “Well, we’re proud of that too,” says Frank. “But we wouldn’t be in the business if it wasn’t economically profitable.

“We wouldn’t work hard just for the sake of tradition.”