Alexandre Family Farm Sees Financial Health In Regenerative Dairy

Alexandre Family Farm believes old farming practices are in need of new rewards and more support for the environmental ecosystems and rural communities they help sustain. The regenerative dairy farmers sell their own branded line of grass-fed, A2 milks, creamers, yogurts, kefirs and eggs, which are all produced on their 9,000 acre ranch in Crescent City, California.

“We’ve been regenerative since the beginning of time, and we just came to really understand that over the last decade or so,” stated Blake Alexandre, co-founder of Alexandre Family Farm. “Most people think this is some new, cool and groovy movement that’s fun to market. It’s just a new word, for an old system, that was meant to be from day one.”

In 2021, the Northern California dairy became the first Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) farm and at the same time, was verified by the Savory Institute’s Land To Market ecological outcome program for its soil health restoration work. Alexandre Family Farm has remained one of only a handful of certified regenerative dairy farms in the country ever since.

That niche status is something that they’d like to see change, but for now the reward doesn’t equal the effort for farmers who haven’t been as attuned to regenerative practices. Aside from the lengthy certification process, reams of paperwork and expensive fees – it can cost up to $1000 for just an initial application – dairy farmers have not yet felt a financial incentive from their distribution and retail partners to make the leap and begin overhauling daily operations to align with regenerative practices.

“We’ve got to get a premium established [for regenerative organic milk] because farmers are frankly tired and out of money,” said Blake Alexandre. He said that currently, there isn’t a market-standard premium for the nascent space of regenerative dairy products, but noted that the family-run farm has experienced growing interest in recent years from brand partners and retailers looking to source regenerative milk.

So far, Alexandre Family Farm has been unsuccessful in convincing neighboring dairy farmers that the investment is worth the elusive reward. They’ve also faced pushback from retailers who want products that sport regenerative bona fides, but aren’t willing to pay more for them – never mind evidence like a recent joint report from Nielsen IQ and McKinsey that found that consumers are increasingly interested in food and beverage products making an environmentally-positive claim, and are willing to spend more to get them.

​​“Consumers have a right to pay more, to get more – it’s that simple,” believes Blake Alexandre. “That’s what drove us to start our own brand with all those attributes. Not only does it taste better, and it’s better for you, but it’s better for your world. It’s better for our environment and it’s part of the solution, not the problem.”

The Roots To Regenerative Agriculture

As fourth generation dairy farmers, Blake Alexandre and his wife, Stephanie, have made soil health regeneration and organic dairy integral parts of their business since they bought the first plot of their ranch back in 1992. The Alexandres were raising organic cows well before there was a federal standard and, soon after befriending a local soil agronomist, they began operating on a regenerative farming model to revive the volume of organic matter in their soil.

Now the farm, which can grow green grass year-round due to its geographic position along the border of Northern California and Oregon, is home to over 8,500 cows as well as thousands of chickens. Those animals are regularly moved through a grazing rotation, which consistently and incrementally improves the soil, grass and health of the animals over time.

“Life in the soil is everything and we pay close attention to that,” said Stephanie Alexandre. “Today, people are much more aware that a healthy gut leads to a healthy body – well, it’s the same for healthy soil. That leads to healthy plants, which thus makes healthy cows.”

But healthy cows and healthy soil alone haven’t catalyzed premium pricing for the Alexandres. So they’ve looked to different consumer-facing attributes as a way of making more from their herd.

The family farm first aimed to earn a premium on its milk by raising A2 cows, a species that produces a gut-friendlier dairy protein that was popularized by New Zealand farmers in the early 2000’s. By the mid-2000’s, the Alexandre’s farm consisted solely of organically-raised A2 dairy cows and for nearly a decade, they tried to work with the A2 Milk Corporation, the leading A2 milk supplier globally, to launch an organic A2 milk line.

Blake Alexandre said the premium the A2 Milk Corporation was already bringing in from its own products likely made their proposal a low priority and it never came to fruition. Nonetheless, Alexandre Family Farm has found that the concept of regenerative agriculture, though still loosely defined by many in the industry, resonates with consumers much easier than A2 ever did.

Alexandre Family Farm launched its own branded regenerative A2/A2 dairy line in 2017. The family said the brand wasn’t created simply to sell milk – they had been supplying local retailers with dairy already – but to bring “financial health, sustainability and profitability back to the farm.” Blake Alexandre said that launching a brand and implementing a premium for those products was the only way for the dairy to receive fair compensation for the work they do.

Today, Alexandre Family Farm products are sold nationwide at retailers including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Market Basket, Natural Grocers, Hy-Vee, and Harmons, among others. A half-gallon carton of Alexandre Family Farm Organic A2/A2 Milk 2% Reduced Fat has an approximately $3 premium over conventional, 2% Reduced Fat A2 milk.

The Solution Is To Go Deeper Into CPG

The farm has since become a milk supplier for CPG companies and currently sells to six brands including Cheddies Crackers, Serenity Kids and Alec’s Ice Cream. The Alexandres see the ingredient supply arm of the business is a key aspect of driving consumer awareness and demand for regenerative farming systems.

“Our responsibility as the leaders in this category is not to convert the dairy farms but to convert the milk market,” said Blake Alexandre. “We’re doing a lot of work trying to establish more regenerative dairy products. We don’t make cheese, it doesn’t need to be our cheese, but we want to help the local cheesemaker establish a program and the demand for regenerative cheese.”

When Blake and Stephanie Alexandre first met while studying Agriculture at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) 40 years ago, they said soil health was never a part of the curriculum. Blake Alexandre said that has not changed over the years and he believes it creates a knowledge and wealth gap for the next generation of American farmers.

“Now I just fully understand there’s so much more – soil is a living organism and it’s the biome of the farm that creates everything that comes off the farm, including our financial health,” he said. “In other countries, small farms, the garden in the backyard, are feeding the world. [But in the U.S.] our large scale arrogance has led us down a path that is ultimately unsustainable, and it literally took us 50 or 70 years to figure that out, but a lot of farmers still don’t know.”

According to the Alexandres, only non-livestock farmers have inquired about tactics for transitioning to regenerative farming methods, though Blake Alexandre said a regenerative system without animals or animal inputs “just doesn’t make sense.” In addition to a well-managed grazing pattern, the Alexandres compost the cow manure with other waste from the farm and spread it across the pastures to help rejuvenate the soil. Without those inputs, he doesn’t believe a farmer is working efficiently, and in their own best interests to regenerate soil health.

Change Must Come From The Top

But the dairy set has been slow to change. Two years ago, as it looked to increase the supply of regenerative organic milk available in the market, the family presented 30 of its neighboring dairy farmers with a roadmap on how to qualify for a regenerative certification. Not one of the farmers chose to pursue the seal.

With the number of California dairies continuing to decline – dropping from six to two over the course of 2021 in Alexandre’s county alone – the ability to charge more for milk could be a lifeline for many small farms. Blake Alexandre said he was extremely disappointed, but not with the farmers, rather with the high auditing cost farmers would be charged on the path to conversion.

“[Some people] are afraid to say it, but it’s about the money, stupid,” Blake Alexandre stated. “It really is and has to be because without profits, nothing is sustainable. We can feel good about our gardens in our backyards, but that’s not going to feed the world.”

When Alexandre Family Farm first got involved with ROC during its pilot program in 2018, numerous larger organic dairy companies, including Maple Hill Creamery and Horizon Organics, took part, but none went on to earn the verification. As the movement has grown, General Mills, PepsiCo and other large corporations have announced initiatives to support transitions to regenerative farming for crops such as wheat, corn and soy. Within the dairy industry, however, a true leader still doesn’t exist.

Blake Alexandre believes the only way to get more farms certified and operating on a regenerative model is for retailers, dairy processors, distributors and consumers to understand the importance of the premium for regenerative products, as well as the impact it can have on rural communities. He said while his company is constantly engaged with others in the market looking for new solutions, the pull from milk buyers can be discouraging.

Recounting a recent call with an inquiring retail partner, he said that despite wanting to launch a super-premium private label milk line, the buyer did not want to pay the farm’s premiums for A2, regenerative or even their 100% grass-fed attribute.

“That’s the pull from the marketplace,” Blake Alexandre stated. “[Some retailers] just don’t want to pay for any of the going attributes that we are currently getting paid for. That’s a problem.”