America's Dairy Farms Are in Crisis and the Farm Bill Won't Help

[oberliner]

When Lorraine Lewandrowski drives from her Herkimer County dairy farm to her law office each day, she notices the changes happening across rural upstate New York. “When I grew up here, we had 30 or 40 farms in our neighborhood,” she says. “We had a local hardware store, machinery dealers, two dentists, two doctors. We had a vibrant rural town. Now we don’t have that.”

Today, she says, roadsides are dotted with “for sale” signs. Farms sit vacant, their owners having relocated to urban areas in search of work. Once-pristine barns have become dilapidated after years of low prices left farmers without money for infrastructure upkeep. The closest city, Utica, is the sixth-most distressed city in the country, with about half of the adults unemployed and more than a quarter of the population living in poverty.

Depressed farm prices are impacting farmers across industries nationwide. Since 2013, farm income has fallen by more than fifty percent, and median farm income for 2018 is projected to be negative (-$1,316, to be exact). But dairy farmers are arguably being hit the hardest, as they face a fourth year of milk prices that are well below the cost of production. The resulting stress has become so pronounced that the Agri-Mark Dairy Cooperative, which manages milk sales for its member farms, sent farmers suicide hotline numbers along with their milk checks earlier this year.

Today, it costs a farmer approximately $22 to produce a hundredweight, or one hundred pounds, of milk. But the market price for milk is significantly less. While the price of milk constantly fluctuates, farmers are currently paid as low as $15 per hundredweight—30 percent less than the cost of production.

https://talkpoverty.org/2018/06/07/americas-dairy-farms-crisis-farm-bill-wont-help/

[First Speaker]

1. This is a national tragedy. Small farms were always the backbone of the country...

...I know, because I spent much of my childhood living on one. It couldn't survive, and eventually went the way of all the other small farms in New England--converted into housing... … America will always have wilderness. But we've lost our thriving countryside. I wonder what goes thru the head of some people, when they hear the words, "the United States of America". Does it bring up any actual concrete images, or do they simply think vaguely of "markets" and "free enterprise"? Oh well...the death of dairy farms makes the animal rights people happy, I suppose...

[oberliner]

6. It is a shame

There really will soon be nothing left of the small family dairy farms.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

2. Wait a minute..

Half the adults unemployed? That sounds like reality around here as well. But apparently our eyes are lying to us bc the PAPER and dt sy unemployment is at..."Historic lows." This lie has been foisted on the American people since about 1999. President Clinton gave us the last big economic boom. President Obama revived a crisis economy so we all didn't die, but the gop keeps telling us it's our perception that jobs are gone. Who's lying?
huh.
Additionally, it's not just farmers who can't keep their barns up. Homeowners can't keep the average house up either. ESPECIALLY with ever increasing weather patterns of rain, high winds, high temps. extreme low temps. and on and on. We feel ya.

[Hoyt]

3. What is the solution? My granddad was a small dairy farmer, but he sold out in 60s as he

got too old to farm. He got nothing for his farm because no one wanted a dairy farm at the time. Loved that place and the idea of a small farm, but times change. It's depressing sometimes.

[oberliner]

4. Seems like the solution is to sell

Sad though that may be.

[a kennedy]

5. Hope that the organic farm will rise to save the corporate farm......

ah, that isn’t going to happen, but if the small farm can just make a dent....... Is it to late??

[oberliner]

7. People aren't really drinking milk anymore

And I doubt that trend will reverse.

[a kennedy]

8. Damn......I'm part of the problem then.......

quit milk......but may-be if I start with skim again??

[ProudLib72]

25. Depends on how "rural" is my bet

Grow small and locally, sell locally, and it would have an impact.

I reminds me of a door to door salesman who visited a couple of years ago trying to get us to buy local milk. It was sort of a coop deal. You buy into the coop, and they loan you a cooler that sits outside your front door. You choose what products you want each week, and the delivery van drops them off in the cooler. I didn't go for it, but I did like the samples of chocolate and strawberry milk he left me. To this day, I wonder just how well they are doing. I don't see them anymore, so I fear the worst.

[Kaleva]

9. We have too many diary farmers producing too much milk

"Mark Stephenson: Milk production. It is too strong, and there’s too much dairy product in inventory, especially milk proteins. As long as we continue to maintain or grow milk supplies faster than demand for dairy products, milk prices will remain relatively low."

https://www.dairyherd.com/article/prolonged-milk-price-pressure-2018

[oberliner]

11. Yes, and the demand keeps going down

And that trend will probably continue. So what's the solution?

[Kaleva]

13. The solution is already happening

Dairy farms are going out of business. This will continue till supply matches demand.

[oberliner]

14. That's not really a "solution" per se, more of a consequence

People no longer being able to support themselves and having to shutter family businesses that go back generations is not really a solution. It is making rural poverty, and all the horrors that go with it, even worse.

[Kaleva]

15. Same thing happened with the home ice delivery and whale lamp oil businesses

Dairy farms around where I live have been gone for decades. People adapted.

[oberliner]

16. The "Whale Oil Myth"

This post is hopelessly long-winded, and not even prompted by a viewer question, but by a criticism I stumbled upon while scouring the Internet. As I searched for something economist Lester Lave had said about oil prices in one of our stories, I happened on a link entitled Whale Oil Myth. I caught the implication at once: Lave had mentioned whale oil scarcity in the mid-1800s as a catalyst for the modern petroleum industry, something I myself thought I’d learned long ago – a staple of my understanding, in fact.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/this-post-is-hopelessly-long-w

Kind of an interesting article. The implication being that subsidies and government intervention was actual responsible for the shift towards kerosene, not natural market factors.

[Kaleva]

17. Kerosene and whale oil lamps are both obsolete for home lighting

Small dairy farms are also an obsolete business model.

[oberliner]

18. Small dairy farms are thriving in Canada

As Vermont's Milk Industry Continues To Free-Fall, Canadian Dairies Are Thriving

While Vermont dairy farmers are experiencing some of the hardest times in recent memory, their counterparts in Quebec are thriving. The reason is a complex system that regulates the supply of milk and sets the price that farmers receive.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/06/599434624/as-vermonts-milk-industry-continues-to-free-fall-canadian-dairies-are-thriving

[Kaleva]

19. And small dairy goat farms are doing well in Oman.

[oberliner]

21. Canada is more similar to the US than Oman

They have been able to put structures in place to maintain their dairy industry. The US could do something similar if it wanted to go down that road. We certainly do it with other industries.

[Kaleva]

20. To regulate supply of milk in the US as done in Canada, we have to reduce the number of farmers

So that supply would match demand

[oberliner]

22. Or eliminate factory farms

[Kaleva]

23. Moving away from diary all together would have a positive impact on the enviroment

Methane from cattle is a major contributor to climate change and run off contaminated with cattle waste pollutes our water supplies.

I grew up on a small dairy farm and worked as a teenager at a nearby larger one. Even then, back in the 70's, I could see that there w asss little future for the small dairy farms. The local creameries and cheese plants had all closed by then. My father was the last dairy farmer in the area and he retired by the late 90s.

[msongs]

10. humans have zero need for cow milk. it's a luxury. maybe better marketing will help nt

[oberliner]

12. So what happens to the US dairy industry?

Shut it down?

[leftstreet]

24. What's the percentage of working population involved?

I mean, I have no idea

I'd assume it's been shrinking over the years as demand shrinks

Obviously it wouldn't have the impact of, say, closing all public schools tomorrow and putting thousands and thousands out of work

Are there any state or federal retraining, employment transition programs dairy industry people can access?