250 Cows, One Goat on Navy’s Farm : Midshipmen Get the Cream of Dairy Products

Almost 80 years after a typhoid outbreak made officials wary of the local milk supply, the U.S. Naval Academy is still running its own dairy.

The cows don’t graze on this picture-book campus by the Severn River, but down the road a few miles, Naval Academy’s 865-acre farm, they share pastures with Bill the Goat, the middies’ long-horned mascot.

Fresh, rich milk from the herd is much in evidence in King Hall, the cavernous dining room where the 4,500 midshipmen take their meals. They empty nearly 2,500 of the blue-and-gold, half-gallon cartons daily.

There hasn’t been any typhoid around Annapolis lately, so why is the academy still milking its own cows?

“I guess tradition,” said Todd Dander, 21, a second classman from Dallas. “That’s what everything is around here, tradition.”

Break-Even Operation

Several others speculated that it was cheaper for the academy to have its own dairy, but the civilians who milk the 175 to 250 Holstein cows and raise calves there don’t claim to be underpricing the competition. They acknowledge that the farm’s staff of 16 is larger than the typical dairy’s, but they say they are milking only the cows, not the taxpayers.

The dairy supports itself through its sales to the Midshipmen’s Mess, not federal appropriations, said R. H. (Pete) Peterson, who has run the farm since 1982, first as a Navy lieutenant commander and, since his retirement in 1984, as the civilian manager.

He bristles at any suggestion that the dairy is a white elephant or, as a recent newspaper headline suggested, a prime candidate for the budget ax.

As with many great events in naval warfare, academy officials point out that this battle has been fought before--and the middies’ dairy won a decisive engagement.

The battle erupted in 1966, when the Department of Defense, at the urging of other local milk producers, suggested selling the farm.

Liens on Property

But the House Armed Services Committee rose to the defense of the middies’ milk supply. It determined that if the farm were sold, the money would go not to the U.S. Treasury, but to the Midshipmen’s store fund, which lent $25,000 to start the dairy in Annapolis in 1911. Two years later, Congress lent $155,000 to buy the property in Gambrills, Md., 13 miles from the academy.

“Some bright genius . . . wants to close this dairy over at Annapolis. This will be done over my prostrate body,” Rep. L. Mendel Rivers (D-S. C.), the autocratic committee chairman, barked at a hearing in October, 1966.

“We have developed a grade of milk over there that is wonderful, absolutely wonderful. . . . “ Rivers declared. “There is no reason to dispose of this property, no reason on Earth. It is owned by the young men over there.”

None of the 16 staffers on the farm is a civil servant. All except a secretary live at the dairy, where the workday begins before dawn.

Well-Staffed Enterprise

“Because it’s not a self-owned operation where you work until you drop, we have more employees than a farm this size would take in a private, commercial operation,” said Peterson, a former supply officer who appears every bit the farmer in well-worn jeans, boots, plaid shirt and Dekalb cap.

The Midshipmen’s Mess orders 1,282 gallons of 2%-butterfat milk a day and pays $1.66 for each gallon. The dairy also prepares orange juice, iced tea and other drinks for the middies.

The milk cartons, decorated with anchors and the Naval Academy insignia, are stamped with the date the milk came from the cow, usually two days before it winds up on the midshipmen’s tables.

Upperclassmen talk wistfully of the milkshakes they used to get from the cream skimmed off the milk, and Peterson said the academy recently restored homemade ice cream to the menu.

Of half a dozen midshipmen polled between classes, all but one knew about the dairy.

Ralita Hildebrand, 18, of Beaver Creek, Ohio, said: “I knew after plebe summer started, because everybody made such a big deal about bringing the milk cartons home for parents’ weekend. All the parents wanted to take a milk carton back.”

Fields, Not Houses

If commercial dairymen once looked askance at the Navy’s farm, its neighbors in Anne Arundel County, Md., now regard it as a green buffer zone between them and encroaching development, Jack Merritt, the farm superintendent, said.

“There is much more widespread and vigorous sympathy for us staying here, simply because the alternative appears to be another 48,000 houses,” Merritt said.

Jim Reeder, director of member relations for the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Co-operative, said the $1.66 the academy pays for its milk “is probably a competitive price.” He said the other dairies would prefer that the academy buy milk from them, “but we haven’t made any effort at all since (the 1960s) to do anything about it.”