Ties to the Land at Risk

As Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, members of the Mauthe family huddled on the porch of their rustic farmhouse, agonizing over the threats to their 335-acre dairy farm.

Kenny and Jamie Mauthe and their four children watched as howling winds toppled their feed bin, turning it into a pile of crushed metal. The couple wondered what would happen to their herd of 40 Holstein and Jersey cows, their organic milk and cheese business and the 2,400-square-foot barn where their 24-year-old daughter, Sarah, planned in four weeks to exchange marriage vows.

When debris no longer sailed across the property, Kenny ventured outside to discover that a felled tree killed a Holstein heifer in the pasture. Half the barn’s roof had been ripped off, soaking the electrical system that powered his milking equipment.

That night, the family milked the herd by hand, spilling the liquid onto the barn’s cement floor because they had no way to keep it fresh.

The farm, 100 miles north of New Orleans across the Mississippi border, was largely intact. But the floods had thrown the Mauthes’ customers -- New Orleans’ finest restaurants -- out of business, at least temporarily.

Kenny, 45, knew he needed to find new customers quickly to secure the $2,500 monthly payment to keep the farm. But first he needed to process his milk.

Seven days after Katrina struck, the power came back at the processing plant 45 miles into Louisiana where Kenny’s 77-year-old father, Henry Mauthe II, also farms. When Kenny called to tell his dad that he was bringing a load of milk, Henry told him he shouldn’t bother until his customers and the farmers markets -- where much of the Mauthe cheese is sold -- were back in business.

The conversation between father and son degenerated quickly. Kenny threatened to come yank the pasteurizer and cream separator -- equipment he paid for with money given to him by his divorced mother -- off his father’s farm.

“Try that and I’ll have you arrested,” Kenny quoted his dad as saying.

The phone call ended with Henry yelling: “Never call me Daddy again.”

Much is known about the physical damage that Katrina inflicted on the Gulf Coast. But the feud between Henry and Kenny Mauthe illustrates how the storm has damaged some relationships. For the two farmers, Katrina unleashed a torrent of emotions, forcing the father to choose between the survival of his own business and his son’s.

Although they’ve disagreed over the years on the direction of the business and on Henry’s divorce from Kenny’s mother, both men believed they worked well as father and son and business partners -- until Katrina struck.

Over the years, Kenny and Henry have banded together to stave off bankruptcy and fierce competition from large dairies. Two decades ago, Kenny bought his farm of green rolling hills in a foreclosure sale; another farmer had gone out of business. In the mid-1990s, Kenny needed the government to write off $113,000 of debt so that he could keep the farm.

The milk business was all the Mauthe men knew. Henry would regale Kenny with family stories about the elder Mauthe’s great-grandfather who was a dairy farmer outside Paris and how Kenny’s grandfather Henry Mauthe plied a door-to-door route that meandered from New Orleans’ Jackson Barracks to the French Quarter.

“Henry has dedicated his life to the dairy business and that’s something we shared,” Kenny said.

The brush with insolvency prompted Kenny to reestablish the Mauthe milk brand. “We had to start marketing and selling our own milk,” he said.

Kenny paid $900 for a well-used cream separator and $1,500 for a pasteurizer. He installed the equipment on his father’s property and started marketing the products as specialty, organic gourmet items in the local markets and to renowned chefs. Their signature product was the Mauthe Creole cream cheese, a buttermilk-tinged delicacy that some compare to ricotta, others to creme fraiche.

Some consumers, such as Bourbon House chef Jared Tees, were gleeful that the Mauthes were reviving a New Orleans tradition by producing the hard-to-find cheese.

Diners feasting on alligator and marsh fish at the Bourbon House in the French Quarter capped their meals with “Bourbon Milk Punch,” the eatery’s popular drink that is made with Mauthe milk. Breakfasts at LuLu’s in the Garden featured Mauthe Creole Cream Cheese in the pancakes. The trendy Savvy Gourmet cooking school in the Magazine Street shopping district stocked Mauthe chocolate milk in its refrigerator.

The Mauthes belong to a small cadre of farmers who provide specialty ingredients for the region’s world-famous cuisine. These suppliers include alligator hunters, shrimp fishermen and Satsuma orange farmers, many of whom have seen their businesses destroyed by Katrina.

Some food experts fear that Katrina will, at least in the near term, alter the region’s culinary traditions as farmers and fishermen struggle to rebuild their businesses. Some farmers have already sold their farms to take advantage of soaring land values.

In a good year, Kenny and Jamie could rack up to $180,000 in sales.

“We struggled to put Sarah through college so that she could become a certified X-ray technician,” Jamie said. “But we are not big spenders and have almost no personal debt. It’s all in the farm.”

With his father refusing to let him in the processing plant, Kenny Mauthe, the youngest of four siblings, might have to decide whether he should sell the farm.

Business Before Family

A few years before Katrina, the father and son had agreed to divide the region’s market. Kenny’s family sold in the metro market, the historic heart of Mauthe milk sales. Henry had the smaller but growing area north of Lake Ponchartrain and into parts of Mississippi.

Henry credits his son for figuring out how to keep the family in the milk business when many farmers were going under, pushed out by mega-dairies in Texas and New Mexico. And Kenny praises his father for pushing the family back into Creole cream cheese production.

But after the storm, Henry said there wasn’t room for his son in what was left of the market.

“I have just two stores and one farmers market [that I’m supplying] right now,” said Henry. “I can’t get in touch with my other stores and I know one was washed away.

“His end of the business was New Orleans and that’s shot,” Henry said. “Kenny will just have to wait.”

If he let Kenny into the plant, Henry said, his son might steal his markets in the outlying areas.

Kenny said that wasn’t his plan. He would sell milk from the back of his truck to get some cash in his pocket, or to make a portion of his farm payment to keep his creditors away.

“I know my dad isn’t sitting there with a lot of money,” Kenny said, “but all I was asking for until our business in the city came back was a way to buy feed for my cows and groceries for my family.”

The verbal fight convinced Kenny that he would have to separate his business from his father’s. He could no longer rely on the informal arrangement of sharing milk and equipment.

Kenny said he should have known that the arrangement was doomed. When Kenny’s marketing efforts began to pay off, grocery stores began demanding more of the Mauthe’s milk and cheese.

But “Dad said, we are not going to get big,” Kenny recalled. “I think he was worried that if the business took off, it would be out of his control.”

The plant was on Henry’s property and he paid to renovate the building. But the two men occasionally battled over who owned what. And Kenny said that when he supplied 10 days of milk each month to a local cooperative, his father accused him of holding back product.

Henry says he’s only trying to survive. He doesn’t understand why his son is so angry with him.

“I am just an old guy who was hoping to retire and let him have the business until this hurricane got in the way,” he said. “I would let Kenny back -- once he has his customers again.”

Facing a Decision

But time is not on Kenny and Jamie’s side. They owe more than $400,000 in loans, and with the milk market reduced to a trickle, they see no way they can come up with the $2,500 monthly payment to keep the farm.

The Mauthes want to get back into the dairy business but are facing wrenching decisions, like farmers who have lost their crops and shrimpers who’ve lost their boats.

Last week, Jamie and Kenny gathered their children around the kitchen table to discuss their future. The parents explained how they had to decide whether to rebuild the business or to sell out like other farmers in the area.

“This is the hardest decision our family has ever had to make,” said Jamie, 44.

Travis, 15, worried about leaving the only home he had known and asked where he “would work with his daddy” when he wasn’t in school.

Sarah, who put off her plans to get married Sept 24 after Katrina damaged the barn, talked about how “unfair” it was that the storm could force the family to sell “the farm daddy has worked so hard to keep.” Henry had planned to attend the nuptials.

In a postcard announcing the wedding postponement to her guests, Sarah expressed her devotion to the farm in a poem: “Katrina came and crushed our plan/Including trees throughout the land/That crushed the barn wherein part/We had planned to tie bonds to our heart.”

Both Sarah and her younger sister Katie, 22, say they wished they could continue in the dairy business, perhaps expanding into other types of cheese.

A Market for Land

Three weeks after the storm, the telephone rings in the kitchen where Kenny and his family met to discuss their future. Jamie’s chest shudders and tears flow down her cheeks as she listens to the voice on the other end of the telephone.

It was real estate agent Richard Cook of McComb, Miss., who explained that a Florida land speculator was ready to pay them $1 million for the farm.

“They’re fixing to write a contract,” Jamie tells her husband across the table.

Katrina created a land grab by out-of-state speculators that is extending far beyond the suburbs of New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Land prices in the area where the Mauthes farm have almost doubled to $3,000 an acre since the storm.

Anticipating a housing demand from evacuees who might return to the region, some investors want to build subdivisions where crops had sprouted and animals grazed.

Since the hurricane, Cook said he had listed more than 2,000 acres of dairy and ranchland owned by farmers wanting to cash out.

“The market [for farmland] was off but now it is on,” Cook said. “You can throw all the old price comparisons out the window.”

Katie sobs as she listens to her mother’s end of the conversation.

Katie worries that the family will be shunned by their neighbors and that she will lose lifelong best friend Kerri Brown, who lives just a mile down the road.

The people of this rural corner of the South, where the intersection of two roads, a few retail buildings, a gas station and a Southern Baptist church make up a township, are suspicious of land speculators and people from New Orleans, which in this area harbors a reputation for crime and drugs.

Katie said of her friend: “She made comments about the other farmers who sold land to build FEMA villages.”

Regardless of what the neighbors think, Jamie and Kenny accepted Cook’s offer and said they planned to sign a contract.

“Katrina was fixing to make us homeless too,” Jamie says to Katie. “Do we sit here and wait for the [U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency] to foreclose on us because of what the neighbors think?”

Kenny’s feeling of loss is overtaken by the sudden opportunity to escape his financial problems.

“There’s no way prior to the hurricane I could have sold the farm for $1 million,” said Kenny, with a look of resignation.

“We have just fought and fought to keep this farm,” he said, “but this is the only answer to be able to continue farming.”

Kenny talks about buying 100 acres over the border in Louisiana where he would build a new plant and creamery that would allow him to expand into cheddar and other mold-ripened cheeses. He said he had heard that many California farmers had successfully done that to make small dairies profitable.

His father, he said, probably would no longer be a part of his business -- or his life.

“I just don’t know if there can be a reconciliation,” Kenny says. “We are better off on our own.”