Dairy crisis: ‘I’ve always been a dairy farmer. It’s who I am. Well, who I was’

Dairy farmer Steve Dalitz has been forced to walk away after 30 years, selling his last milkers as high water and feed prices become too much. It’s a disturbing trend that threatens our milk supplies.

Dairy farmer Steve Dalitz has worked his guts out for 30 years, and it’s come to this.

“I just feel empty,” he says, as the last of his milkers goes under the hammer at Shepparton saleyards. “I’ve always been a dairy farmer. It’s who I am. Well, who I was.”

He’s doubled his dose of antidepressants today, to try and make it through the auction without breaking down.

After decades of pre-dawn starts, sacrificing family holidays and weekends and relentless hard, physical labour, the 51-year-old Yalca father of three is further behind than when he first started in the dairy game, and selling up his cows.

He’s trying to sell the family farm too.

Consecutive years of skyrocketing water and stock feed prices have seen Steve and his wife

Kristi, 47, saddled with a million dollar debt and a farm which is worth less than what they owe.

“We’ve worked our butts off for more than 25 years as a married couple — we’ve gone without, and worse, the kids have gone without — and for what?” Kristi says through tears.

Kristi Dalitz watches the family’s dairy herd go under the hammer. Picture: Alex Coppel

Local real estate agent Darren Scott reckons just about every dairy farm in Victoria’s north is for sale these days, whether it has a sign out the front or not.

Knock on a door, name a reasonable price, and most will gladly sell.

“They’re all trying to get out,” he says.

It’s been his heartbreaking job to sit around kitchen tables and tell dairy farmer after farmer that their properties are not worth what they thought: That their years of backbreaking work and sacrifice have been in vain.

“There’s so many farmers out there that are haemorrhaging and on the border of catastrophe,” he says.

Numurkah real estate agent Darren Scott from Gagliardi Scott Real Estate has the hard and sad job of trying to sell family dairy farms across the district. Picture: Alex Coppel

Steve has become something of an identity in the Victorian farming community over the last few months, after talking openly of his heartache and battle with depression on a dairy farmers Facebook page.

The night before the auction he posted “that’s a wrap”.

“Sitting here with a tear in my eye drinking my last coffee as a dairy farmer. That’s 35 years of blood, sweat and tears completed. Three generations of dairy finished. Over 50 years of breeding in this herd, that was my grandfather’s herd, finished,” he wrote. “My heart is broken today.”

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Kristi says, faced with losing everything they’ve worked for, many dairy farmers in the State’s north are suicidal.

“You look at all those single-vehicle accidents, well they aren’t all accidents, I can tell you.”

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