20 ms·

On the death of my family's dairy farm

255 points by howard941 8y ago

bluedino 8y ago
Who drinks milk anymore? I love the taste but haven’t bought a gallon in as long as I can remember. If you drink milk, people look at you like some sort of weirdo. It may be a midwestern thing but I grew up drinking a glass of milk (and a slice of bread and butter) with every meal.
- mothsonasloth 8y ago
  Same, its a working class active lifestyle thing. My Grampa used to have half a loaf of bread with his tea every night
- leesec 8y ago
  >Who drinks milk anymore? Millions and millions of people >If you drink milk, people look at you like some sort of weirdo. Maybe where you live. Most places this is absurd.
  - Eric_WVGG 8y ago
    I’m told this is one of the chief sources of bemusement regarding Americans in Japan. They think we look like overgrown toddlers
    - pdonis 8y ago
      At least a part of the difference is genetic: a much higher percentage of Japanese than Americans are lactose intolerant.
- war1025 8y ago
  Judging by the size of the milk department at the super market, it seems a lot of people drink milk. Personally, I drink a lot less than I did growing up. The main difference is I switched to having water with meals instead of milk. But we still manage to go through about 2 gallons a week.
- platistocrates 8y ago
  I live in downtown Toronto, 3rd largest city in NA. Am a developer and business owner. I drink milk pretty much every day.
- yardie 8y ago
  My son goes through liter/day. When I was his age I went through 2L/day. When your body requires a certain nutrient it will seek it out. Now, I'm not growing any taller. Bones aren't forming, so my deman for milk has also dropped off.
- dilap 8y ago
  Butter, yogurt, cheeses...there's lots more to dairy than just straight milk. Also, milk+espresso (cappuccinos, lattes) is still hugely popular.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  Finland is, oddly enough, the largest consumer of milk: "The 2007 milk consumption per capita in Finland was 361.19kgs, with milk consumption per person at about 34.34 gallons per year." I don't often drink milk, but I buy a lot of it for making bread, and other cooking needs. I'm surprised people would notice if you drank milk, or that you would care. People will judge on anything, after all!
- eklitzke 8y ago
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=GOMAD http://lmgtfy.com/?q=GOMAD
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  When the fam was growing it was two gallons a week. Now with an empty nest we go through about one gallon per 10 days absent special occasions. But I eat more ice cream now too, so there is that.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  If I drink milk, people sniff at me, like some sort of person with lessened ability to digest lactose, who therefore ferments it in the gut and proceeds to fart out the result. I can't be bothered to mess around with separate lactase packets, or specifically seek out the lactase-added milk. Also, the last time I tried shelf-stable ultrahypermegapasteurized milk, it put me off drinking factory-processed milk. Nothing like preventing spoilage on the shelf by spoiling it before it even goes into the container. I might try 260nm UV-C irradiation pasteurization someday. I don't trust that individual dairy farms can reliably control E.coli and Listeria, and I don't appreciate the degradation of the product caused by the high-temperature methods used to rapidly pasteurize in a continuous flow. And none of it is worth it, if I just end up farting all day anyway.
- mac01021 8y ago
  My toddler and I drink a gallon per week between the two of us. Why don't you buy it if you love the taste?
- souprock 8y ago
  Milk is required for the consumption of cookies, cake, chocolate, peach cobbler, apple crisp, English muffins with jam, pancakes, and breakfast cereal. My family uses about 13 gallons per week, one per person.
platistocrates 8y ago
Thank you for sharing, it touches on a lot of topics that most programmers dont hear about. It's the kind of article that doesn't gain much traction around here. I enjoyed it.
forkLding 8y ago
I think another key issue that encourages consolidation in the dairy and other agricultural industries is the encroachment of automation, a lot of tractors are self-driving and many equipment increasingly don't require human hands. Mostly large corporations are the kind that can buy and invest in this technology and also are the ones who can benefit the most from it, which creates a loop where only large corporations start thriving and out-competing any smaller companies. The only direction I can see for smaller farms is to probably go the "organic" or "natural farm" route, but even that would be hard to achieve because larger corporations can probably just sub-contract and own smaller organic farms too. Agricultural industries is going the way manufacturing did a while back.
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  Small acreage farm automation is what we need. That would turn the tide in favour of local and cleaner food with shorter supply chains with farmers making better margins.(for non commodity crops)
supermatt 8y ago
It's tremendously sad. Large-scale high-intensity farming is raping the land, causing untold pollution both locally and globally, and small sustainable homesteads are falling by the wayside, while these large agro-factories receive billions in subsidies to produce "food" at a loss. It's disgusting.
- jopsen 8y ago
  It's also using less farm land and keeping people fed. It's not obvious that small homesteads would be a viable way to feed the world, much less a sustainable way to do it. I'm not claiming that industrial scale farming doesn't have environmental issues. But growing more food on less land might be a good thing.
  - mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
    It's not using less land than a small homestead, it's using less labor. A small homestead farming with smaller tools can get far more yield per acre than a huge mono-crop farm does.
    - rwcarlsen 8y ago
      And less energy.
      - supermatt 8y ago
        according to studies, smaller farms use less energy per head.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    > But growing more food on less land might be a good thing. Not if it costs us our humanity. The mistreatment of animals we eat/farm is astonishing. Maximizing efficiency isn't always the best metric to try and optimize for, it leads to some really warped places. (Interesting side note, Tolkien wrote about this a bunch -- Sauron was originally a forge/craftsman god who just really wanted to make things more efficient. His downfall was that he overly liked coordination and disliked wasteful friction.)
jonawesomegreen 8y ago
I think that it is interesting to consider this in relation to the renegotiations of NAFTA where Canada's dairy supply management [1] was put in the spotlight. For those that don't know some details about Canada dairy supply management [2]: > The model, which matches domestic demand with domestic supply through a quota system, is particularly well-suited to a commodity like milk, where 40 percent is consumed locally. Supply management is designed to even out the peaks and valleys of producer income, and in this endeavour, it has been successful. It also allows farmers to plan for the longer term, which is particularly important when producing a commodity subject to the whims of the cow’s natural production. Despite supply management going against free trade ideals most of the farmers I know do like it. It lets them keep the lights on and maintain family farms that have been running for generations, but on the other hand it costs consumers both in their pocketbooks and variety of choice. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-supply-management-explainer-1.4708341 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-supply-management-ex... [2] https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/cigi_paper_30.pdf https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/cigi_paper_30...
- ip26 8y ago
  Everybody likes being part of the protected market. That's part of the problem- "Well if you're going to protect dairy, and you want my support, how about you protect my steel too?" (repeat, repeat, repeat)
  - dleslie 8y ago
    It's a managed market. If consumer trends in Canada shifted away from dairy it would not somehow survive. Instead, dairy farmers collaborate to avoid production waste and to coordinate for seasonal/cyclical changes in demand and production.
    - Scoundreller 8y ago
      It’s hard to imagine higher prices without milk users getting creative. Lots of products that should be made with butter are made with oil. Alfredo sauces made with soybean oil instead of cream. The products that have these substitutions will have a greater discount and more sales. Frozen pizza makers slacking on cheese toppings. Processed cheese. And that’s just the industrial use side.
igouy 8y ago
"How America’s food giants swallowed the family farms" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american...
bradford 8y ago
A lot of American cultural institutions are being lost in our effort to modernize and optimize production. This affects a lot of industries, not just dairy. Sadly, like the author, I can't really think of a good solution. The only proposal that comes to mind: If America values its cultural institutions (I'm thinking specifically farmers, craftsmen, certain maritime industries, and machinists, although there are certainly more) and wants to preserve them, government entities need to provide some of the funding. This is obviously distasteful to some and I'm not sure if the positives outweigh the negatives. I'm also not sure what the extent of preservation societies are in America today.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > Sadly, like the author, I can't really think of a good solution. But that IS the solution. Preserving archaic inefficient institutions and forcing society to pay for it solely due to nostalgia is a terrible idea. But there are solutions: entertainment & agroturismo. Sure, it won't preserve every single farm, or even 1 in 1000, but it will preserve some of then, just as tourism helps maintain a lot of historical sites around the world.
  - thatfrenchguy 8y ago
    Have you read the article ? The "new" way of doing things have horrible externalities that can destroy those communities.
    - ucaetano 8y ago
      That's a broad generalization, and it seems that it is mostly driven by anger. The reason you can go to a supermarket and buy food IS the "new" way of doing things. The reason there's close to zero food waste in production and distribution of food in developed markets is the "new" way. Their farm is dying because it is inefficient. Let it die.
      - thatfrenchguy 8y ago
        http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/en/ http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/en/ The UN says a third wasted.
garbagedisposal 8y ago
Oh no, how dare they no longer get paid enough in order to exploit animals...
briandear 8y ago
Yet somehow I just paid $7 for a gallon of Clover “organic” 2% milk yesterday at the Mountain View Safeway. That is insane expensive. Who exactly is getting that money? It seems like $7 per gallon retail ought to be enough to keep some small farmers in business. Organic milk costs almost double the price of jet fuel. I feel like someone is getting screwed.
- waffle_ss 8y ago
  Sadly, organic has been hijacked by the large industrial farms as well.[1] > Who exactly is getting that money? The USDA keeps track of those statistics.[2] As of 2017 about 30% of the cost of a gallon of milk goes to farms. Unfortunately milk prices are so low that only the very largest farms, that can squeeze efficiencies out of operating at scale, can make that profitable.[3] [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-organic-milk-may-not-be-organic/2017/05/01/708ce5bc-ed76-11e6-9662-6eedf1627882_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-org... [2]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/price-spreads-from-farm-to-consumer/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/price-spreads-from-fa... [3]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/milk-cost-of-production-estimates/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/milk-cost-of-producti...
GlenTheMachine 8y ago
This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it's also a national security issue of the first order. One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They'll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don't have to do anything differently in order to support two strains of corn or soybeans. You con't have to worry about one breed of milk cow being more susceptible to disease or giving milk with a different fat content. All your equipment is the same, all of your chemical inputs are the same, all of your processes are the same. That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Significant enough climate change could as well. A single new strain of disease, if it were robust enough to spread through the air or via wildlife, could kill huge fractions of our cattle or pigs. It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next, with just the wrong set of circumstances. We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system.
- projektfu 8y ago
  Dairy cattle are the poster children for a varied diet. They eat many kinds of waste such as distillers' grains, peanut hulls, beet pulp. They don't care where their corn silage comes from and they can even consume and detoxify aflatoxin-laden corn that cannot be placed into any other food supply. I'm not sure that larger dairy farms are going to have more of a monoculture attitude toward their supply of feed.
  - supermatt 8y ago
    Aflatoxins are excreted in milk. You shouldn't feed aflatoxin-laden feed to dairy animals.
    - projektfu 8y ago
      At low enough amounts, aflatoxin will be destroyed in the rumen, and won't enter the bloodstream.
marricks 8y ago
As someone who hates large corporations (I think I spend most of my HN time nowadays railing against big tech) and a vegan this hits me at a weird spot. CAFO’s are horrible to the land and the poor cows trapped in them. Greater volume equals greater profit and less concern on an individual… Small dairy farms are better in a few ways, but cows still live there for a fraction of their natural life spans, calves are taken from their mom’s while way too young because we use their milk for our own consumption. Say all you want about “they’re bred that way” but that all seems to be a guise for getting what we want out of them. I’m sure small farmers care about their cows, but I’m also sure their perspective is shaped by the need to make a living from them. Where this all comes to head now, with falling demand in milk and rising big companies, is rough. We’ll have more mistreated cows and larger businesses taking over. Society will change over time and should, we’re on the verge of environmental apocalypse it seems and meat and dairy are a part of it[1], finding a way to support those who need to change industries humanely is key. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
- jmull 8y ago
  I think it's probably fair to change this: > but I’m also sure their perspective is warped by the need to make profit out of them. to something like this: > but I'm also sure their perspective is based on their need to subsist on them. I think your heart is in the right place, but characterizing family dairy farmers as "warped" and profiting is not going to end up connecting or being helpful.
  - Djvacto 8y ago
    I mean, I'm not super well versed in small-scale agriculture or anything, but a) Is there that big of a difference between subsist and profit in this case? It's not like the family is just consuming the milk/etc themselves, they're selling it (in the case described above) and b)is there even a such thing as subsist in our society today? Especially in America, capitalism makes it impossible to just subsist, as you always need to be earning more. However, both of these are just as subjective as your suggested substitution, and I would like to express that I think Small-scale or Family Dairy Farmers are way better than any size factory farming.
ArrayList 8y ago
Good. Sayonara. I'm glad to see the dairy industry struggling. Torturing cows for their milk that we shouldn't be drinking anyway is abhorrent. Oat milk is way better anyway.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
...family farms struggle and pay dearly to hire and retain legal workers at a high cost. Other farms, particularly the large ones, pay lower costs for illegal labor and externalize the costs of depressed wages onto everyone else... one view of the debate about whether an influx of low cost laborers depresses wages. economists and various journalists often take the other side of the debate, citing studies that low skill labor pay rates are minimally affected by an increase in exogenous low skill labor. the debate rages on.
dqpb 8y ago
> The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4AM and 4PM. Why do cows need to be milked at those times?
- supermatt 8y ago
  Has 80-100 head of cattle (mentioned somewhere in the article), and can milk only a few at a time in an 8 stall parlour, takes about 15 minutes per cow plus a few minutes prep per cow, plus handling, cleaning, etc.. thats going to take 3-4 hours or so. Repeat again 12 hours later. Im guessing they want to be finished by 8:30pm after clean down?
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I suspect it's because the farmer wants to finish the milking before dinnertime, and it needs to happen at least twice a day. So 4 AM+4 PM works out according to the farmer's schedule. Automated milking machines are available on demand, and I am not aware of there being a "cow rush hour" on those, with annoyed cows queueing to use it at the same time, and telling each other to hurry up. They just step up as they require and let the robot handle it.
  - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
    Lely the Dutch milling robots turned 25 years old recently. The cows come to the robots to be milked by themselves. A thing of beauty. Of course..this requires capital..American dairy farmers ..largely due to subsidies ..barely make ends meet. And rely on undocumented labour.
skybrian 8y ago
Sarah Taber thread on family farms, cows, and economy of scale: https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/997221513978884096 https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/99722151397...
- waffle_ss 8y ago
  Taber is a consultant to corporate California produce farms and has a lot of unjustified hate towards dairy farms (in her own words she plays it up as some sort of "turf war" between produce and livestock farms). Her demolishing "a cute lil farmhouse with 1-2 cows or a microdairy with 8 cows" strawman and doing a "corporate consolidation good" song and dance, not mentioning the reality of that being 30K+ cow CAFOs and the unavoidable destruction to the land that entails, is just intellectually dishonest. But hey if you enjoy her woke fairy tales (e.g. ackshually organic was made by a racist nazi cabal), have at it. Just know you're living in a bubble outside reality: https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/1084197655213993986 https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/108419765521399398...
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Is there someone else you recommend for learning more about ag tech?
rmason 8y ago
When I graduated from Michigan State I went to work as an organizer for the National Farmers Organization. The NFO was controversial, they worked to organize farmers and led a nationwide dairy strike in 1967 where LBJ threatened its leaders with imprisonment. I was a young optimist but the bottom line is that basic human nature makes it impossible to make it work. But I helped start a couple of Coop elevators and learned a lot about business. Farmers are faced with two choices: 1. Get big and be a commodity farmer ruthlessly focused on efficiency 2. Or a niche marketer preferably selling direct to the consumer. I've seen guys successful with either method but it's absolute suicide to be a small commodity farmer.
- ggm 8y ago
  In Australia, a small number of farm cooperatives succeed but most died on the vine. We lost our canning plants to overseas. We lost our cooperatives to industry self regulated open markets. The supply chain (coles, woolworths) pushed costs back on the supply side and bid farm against farm. I think the death of the cooperative movement in farming was a long-con by the industry. Somebody should have pushed back because Unity (the northern NSW farming coop for dairy produce) is alive and well, when other farming coops died and the farmers are now bereft of power in the supply chain.
jamst174 8y ago
Instead of having thousands of families eking out a modest but sustainable life, you have a handful of corporate entities and their shareholders making millions. Simple unfettered capitalism at work again (and I believe in the power of capitalism, but not without some boundaries). For perspective, my dad and uncle were forced to sell my grandfather's farm and equipment when my grandfather got sick and he needed 24 hr care. My grandfather had sold the cows years before, but I have lots of good memories of visiting them and helping out during the summers.
justin66 8y ago
I do not have strong feelings about milk, other than not wanting to drink it and using it only sparingly as an ingredient. However the mention of this protest by dairy farmers was striking to me: One of the bad times I can remember was in the mid-to-late 90s - I was in elementary school - when milk prices were so low that some farmers were dumping their milk down the drain in protest. At some point in the past I read about EU farmers doing the same thing, spraying large volumes of milk in protest. This seems pretty ineffective to me as a means of swaying public opinion. If I were someone who actually buys milk, I think my feelings towards the industry doing this would not be to wish them well.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  And usually the cause of those situations was a high fixed price, which killed demand. Meanwhile, the people paying the high prices wonder WTF is going on.
- GoToRO 8y ago
  Well, in EU the farmers get subsidies. I believe the thinking is that food is too important to let it be optimized by the markets.
microcolonel 8y ago
> I think the intent was to provide evidence of grassroots farmer support for Canadian-style controls on milk price and supply, which reduce volatility and the need for subsidies and have managed to maintain Canada’s family farms’ existence, which would give the American federal government ammo to institute similar policies. That's a very interesting take on these policies. Here in Canada, we pay an obscene amount of money for dairy, from considerably smaller disposable incomes. The understanding I've come to is that while the policies make it easier for some subset of mediocre dairies to operate, they make it much harder for productive dairies to expand business. The dairy propaganda here is quite laughable as well: the usual refrain is that dairy prices are "inelastic" (which is nonsense, people frequently choose not to consume dairy in Canada, whether because of cost or health concerns).
Causality1 8y ago
USDA marketing orders created an inflated market and USDA checkoffs robbed dairy farmers to fund pointless marketing campaigns. This is exactly what was always going to happen when we decided to put a finger on the scale for thirty years. http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/02/thanks-to-decades-of-government-meddling/ http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/02/thanks-to-decades-of-g...
jpollock 8y ago
NZ dairy farms seem to be doing o.k. I wonder how they compare (size/costs/distance to market) with US farms. I do know that NZ signed the CPTPP, which made markets for milk more open. https://www.tpp.mfat.govt.nz/assets/docs/TPP_factsheet_Dairy.pdf https://www.tpp.mfat.govt.nz/assets/docs/TPP_factsheet_Dairy...
- phire 8y ago
  Large NZ dairy farms are doing ok (I know of one farm with 5000 cows. They do once-a-day milking, they start at 7am and milk until 3pm in 3 separate milking sheds). There are no CAFOs in NZ. All farms put all of their cows out in the fields. But even without the CAFOs that this article is complaining about, smaller "family run" farms are dying out. Dairy farms are getting larger and larger, it's getting un-economical for the smaller farms to keep going and they are being bought out. From 2002 to 2016, the number of dairy farms in NZ decreased 23.5% Yet the amount of land used increased by 22.6%. The average herd size in 2016 was 414 cows. It's just economies of scale. Bigger farms are more economical.
  - quixoticelixer- 8y ago
    But why is that a bad thing?
  - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
    NZ also abolished subsidies and the largest dairy is Fonterra that is a co-op.
ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
(Apparently) unpopular opinion: literally everything in this article is good for everyone except the farmers themselves. More production from fewer cows is good for the environment, particularly the carbon intensity of milk production. Lower prices are good for consumers. Even the author benefited by not being roped into working on the family farm, instead using his skills more productively in the software business.
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  > More production from fewer cows is good for the environment You obviously did not read the article. The problem with factory farming this way is manure disposal. The article describes the environmental impact of this kind of farming in painstaking detail. In summary, dense factory farms disposing of high volumes of manure pollutes groundwater and spreads disease.
  - ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
    I did read the article. I just believe that it's better to sacrifice the local environment than the global one. If I could double the carbon intensiveness of milk production to completely eliminate its effects on the local environment, I would not.
    - ricardobeat 8y ago
      That makes no sense. "Local" impact is global when it happens at scale.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
        (Same respondent, different account.) I don't understand what you're trying to communicate with this objection. There is not sufficient demand for milk, at any price, that a typical person will live in the local environment of a dairy farm. Thus, the local environmental effects of dairy farms will never be global, even if they scale to the natural demand ceiling.
sigmaprimus 8y ago
I live in Canada and while our supply management system for dairy seems to support our farmers, it actually sets up a class system that is extremely difficult for aspiring farmers to break into. Sure if your the son or daughter of an existing farmer life is great for you but anyone else wanting to get into the business too bad, you can grow the hay or grain at a loss that will feed the lucky few dairy farmers cows. I bought a gallon of 2% milk yesterday for $6, that is the average price up here. I used to live near the US Canadian border and almost every one of my neighbors bought their milk and cheese in the US on a weekly basis. I feel bad for the dairy farmers demise but a socialist supply management scheme is not the solution, rather stacking enterprises on those failing farms is a much better idea, check out Joel Salatin on you tube for a viable solution.
squirrelicus 8y ago
I'm just not sure what the problem is. Outdated modes of production can't keep up with the lower prices for a fungible material. What's new?
- ggm 8y ago
  Price economics are really bad at modelling strategic. America (and Australia) don't want lowest price food. They want secure food, produced from domestic and international sources. If you want domestic food production you have to be prepared to force it, because on price alone, the foreign sources will always win. If its not mexico, its canada or vietnam. China is buying New Zealand and Australian Dairy because of the systematic rorting of their supply by industry using Urea to boost apparent protein levels. Now tell me again, how you want a US milk industry to compete with that? Uh-oh.. here comes protectionist regulatory checks on product...
robrenaud 8y ago
I am curious if the farmers considered or attempted to become cheese makers themselves? I would not be surprised to see an American artisanal cheese revolution in the same way that American craft beer's growth has happened in the last 10 years. The bigram American cheese sounds bad, but there are some fantastic artisinal cheeses produced here. I have started buying lots of great American farmstead cheese (herd + cheese making are in the same place) while living in NYC, often at ~$30/pound, but much of it comes from Vermont.
genericone 8y ago
A different outlook, for anyone willing to watch hundreds of hours of youtube videos on regenerative agriculture, a rising tide of decentralized farmers are going back to chemical-free and healthy, thriving produce, far beyond the organic label that corporations have usurped and rendered valueless. Look for living web farms and advancing eco agriculture on youtube and get ready for a world of information outside of software. 1. Living Web Farms 2. Advancing Eco Agriculture
- hak8or 8y ago
  Why on earth would anyone want a chemical free farm? That just decreases yield and increases risk, contributing to increased price.
  - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
    Nope. Increasing yield leads to glut leading to low price. For the farmers. Plus there is always the downside of chemical pollution of air, soil and environment. Farmers are at the very bottom of the supply chain. We don’t see any appreciation in income even if food prices go up.
    - genericone 8y ago
      If you dig into those youtube channels, you'll find just how damaging the chemical fertilizers have been for our soil biome, how damaging tilling is to the microbiology, how herbicides leave farm soil bare and creating soil compaction and flooding when the inevitable rain is unable to infiltrate the soil fast enough.
  - genericone 8y ago
    It turns out that unless you are an uber-agri-corp, you're better off serving the niche local and regional markets. Yes you may have smaller yield, but why on Earth should you be incentivized by yield and not profit? Profit is the purpose, yield is the means to acheive that for big companies, small companies can focus on quality, flavor, nutrition, health in order to profit. Leave yield to the supply chain managers, let the farmers grow actual food I feel good about eating. No more bright red flavorless strawberries.
gcheong 8y ago
On the negative externalities point, can someone please explain how there are no negative externalities when you have 100 farms with 100 cows each vs 10 farms with 1000? The amount of waste generated is the same, presumably, and it all has to go somewhere, but perhaps it's just spread out more so that negative externalities aren't as apparent or is there a real difference as the article only brings them up as a consequence of large operations.
- ggm 8y ago
  Here's a fictitious but plausible example: Small operators impose a larger set of small burdens in time into things like waste stream, and transport. Large operators syphon their waste into the stream in one go, rather than diluting the 1000 cattle across a month, it presents as a wave of high nutrient content for processing. It overwhelms the tertiary waste treatment plant, requiring re-scaling of holding tanks, more oxygenation, more dilution into the river systems. Unless regulated, a single entity functioning as a "more efficient" process is very likely to impose scale breaking consequence on things. This would be true to road transport (for cows, for milk) for energy (cold storage, pumping) and it is very likely at a lower overall labour cost, so significantly higher apparent efficiency and profit to the farm holding corporate entity, but at community cost in terms of infrastructure/utility burden. Even thermal: a single aggregated cow barn for 1000 animals will radiate more heat have have a more aggressive effect on the microclimate than 10 100 cow sheds over a larger area...
jondubois 8y ago
Commodification is about taking products of different quality and marketing them as though they're actually the same. It creates an incentive to make products of the lowest quality possible because lower quality means lower production costs and more profit. Then over time, consumers get used to increasingly low quality products and so it becomes a race to the bottom for producers; who can make the lowest quality product which only just meets the minimum required grade. I just did a search for "commodity quality standards" on Google and came across a document which explains how corn is graded in the US; the criteria that they use includes things like "Heat damaged %" and "Broken corn and foreign material %". The criteria for other commodities like grains were also similar (focused on damage and presence of foreign material) - It doesn't appear that the chemical/nutritional composition of the commodities are taken into account when grading them. It's easy to see why this would drive the wrong incentives when it comes to things like choice of fertilizer (natural vs artificial) and using GMOs.
- opportune 8y ago
  Commodification is even more than that. It involves turning things, activities, ideas, etc. which were not evenly formerly traded into commodifiable entities. So it also includes intellectual property, the abundance of services we now formally pay for which used to be free or done informally, etc.
beloch 8y ago
There are a couple mentions of Canada's dairy supply management system, which the U.S. recently pushed hard for the elimination of in the recent NAFTA 2.0 talks. (Note: Concessions were made, but dairy supply management was not eliminated.) In Canada's system, farmers must buy production quota allotments from the government in order to sell their products. The number of quota allotments sold is calculated depending on demand in each province. Hence, supply does not exceed demand and dairy prices in Canada are several times what they are in the U.S.. We pay a lot more for milk, cheese, etc. than people in the U.S.. The import duties on U.S. dairy are over 300%, and American products are still able to sell at lower prices most of the time. This policy has not been particularly popular with average Canadians, for obvious reasons. Despite this, Canada has the same problems with many, smaller farms giving way to fewer huge farms, but not to the same extent as the U.S.. Small dairy farms are not wildly profitable, but they can survive. Meanwhile, the U.S. system has led to such massive overproduction that U.S. farms are flooding Mexico with subsidized dairy and are doing their best to do the same in Canada. Canadians generally view U.S. dairy as being of suspect quality due to laxer laws on the use of growth hormones such as rBST, but shoppers will still frequently just buy whatever's cheapest. U.S. dairy producers looking for endless market growth are running into a brick-wall of domestic market saturation and resistance from foreign countries who know lowering trade barriers could mean the annihilation of local production and replacement of quality products with ones of questionable quality. Big dairy in the U.S. is rapidly becoming an international problem.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "supply does not exceed demand" This is a misrepresentation of the microeconomics at play. However much milk is produced, it will all get consumed, because there is a massive demand for Milk, it would just be at very low prices, possibly below the cost of production. Supply management is better described as price fixing - the amount produced will enable the product to yield a certain price at a certain demand, and therefore be economically viable. " shoppers will still frequently just buy whatever's cheapest." - if they knew one product was superior to another, i.e. if the ostensibly efficient market which relies upon information clearing actually worked ... then the dynamics of the market would help solve these problems. This can be communicated through brand awareness, labelling, all sorts of things. Yes, as you point out, it's an issue basically everywhere because food production, like banking, telecoms, entertainment etc. - is a highly protected industry.
tomohawk 8y ago
The government already sets the price of milk, and has done so since FDR (1930s). http://www.eatingwell.com/article/16029/who-decides-how-much-we-pay-for-milk/ http://www.eatingwell.com/article/16029/who-decides-how-much... Such nationalized policies unfortunately are prone to capture by big players, so cronyism gets rewarded disproportionally over other concerns. I can see the point in government getting involved to make sure that the food supply is up to standard and that there is enough extra capacity in the system to ride through the inevitable bad times (like the dust bowl). However, given the dairy industry has been mostly shaped by government programs and regulations since the 1930's, it seem unlikely that salvation for small dairymen is going to come from that direction.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Just another example when unintended side effects of government regulation create a larger problem than the one it was supposed to solve.
  - ggm 8y ago
    I think the problem is not the regulation. The problem is the decline in bargaining power from the farm side, into aggressively un-regulated market concentration. The farmer cooperative buying produce to on-sell was replaced by direct sale to the supermarket and logistics costs pushed back on the farmer. All in search of a 1c a litre difference. Please don't blame regulation for what is unequal market forces.
    - tomohawk 8y ago
      The government mandates that the farmers sell through these middlement, at prices that are set by the government (and gamed by the middlemen). This is a government caused problem. You're right that the government should instead be focused on boosting competition and supressing cronyism, but its been, what, 85 years and they're still pushing the same thing?
fopen64 8y ago
My father grew up in small farm, my grandparents had something like 8 cows and made a living, it was not comfortable but they even bought properties in urban area so the kids would have a place to build a house on. Maternal grandparents felt the heat earlier, their crop was rice; a typical property would yield 100 x 60kg bags, and that would feed a family for the year, along with a couple pigs and chickens... the problem was my mother had 8 siblings, so no land to everybody, and glad they moved to the city, because agriculture shot up in scale. Relatives who stayed behind had to buy a lot of land, machinery, and they are well-off because they grow palm heart on the side.

255 points by howard941 8y ago

Who drinks milk anymore? I love the taste but haven’t bought a gallon in as long as I can remember. If you drink milk, people look at you like some sort of weirdo. It may be a midwestern thing but I grew up drinking a glass of milk (and a slice of bread and butter) with every meal.

mothsonasloth 8y ago
Same, its a working class active lifestyle thing. My Grampa used to have half a loaf of bread with his tea every night
leesec 8y ago
>Who drinks milk anymore? Millions and millions of people >If you drink milk, people look at you like some sort of weirdo. Maybe where you live. Most places this is absurd.
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  I’m told this is one of the chief sources of bemusement regarding Americans in Japan. They think we look like overgrown toddlers
  - pdonis 8y ago
    At least a part of the difference is genetic: a much higher percentage of Japanese than Americans are lactose intolerant.
war1025 8y ago
Judging by the size of the milk department at the super market, it seems a lot of people drink milk. Personally, I drink a lot less than I did growing up. The main difference is I switched to having water with meals instead of milk. But we still manage to go through about 2 gallons a week.
platistocrates 8y ago
I live in downtown Toronto, 3rd largest city in NA. Am a developer and business owner. I drink milk pretty much every day.
yardie 8y ago
My son goes through liter/day. When I was his age I went through 2L/day. When your body requires a certain nutrient it will seek it out. Now, I'm not growing any taller. Bones aren't forming, so my deman for milk has also dropped off.
dilap 8y ago
Butter, yogurt, cheeses...there's lots more to dairy than just straight milk. Also, milk+espresso (cappuccinos, lattes) is still hugely popular.
stevekemp 8y ago
Finland is, oddly enough, the largest consumer of milk: "The 2007 milk consumption per capita in Finland was 361.19kgs, with milk consumption per person at about 34.34 gallons per year." I don't often drink milk, but I buy a lot of it for making bread, and other cooking needs. I'm surprised people would notice if you drank milk, or that you would care. People will judge on anything, after all!
eklitzke 8y ago
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=GOMAD http://lmgtfy.com/?q=GOMAD
pnw_hazor 8y ago
When the fam was growing it was two gallons a week. Now with an empty nest we go through about one gallon per 10 days absent special occasions. But I eat more ice cream now too, so there is that.
logfromblammo 8y ago
If I drink milk, people sniff at me, like some sort of person with lessened ability to digest lactose, who therefore ferments it in the gut and proceeds to fart out the result. I can't be bothered to mess around with separate lactase packets, or specifically seek out the lactase-added milk. Also, the last time I tried shelf-stable ultrahypermegapasteurized milk, it put me off drinking factory-processed milk. Nothing like preventing spoilage on the shelf by spoiling it before it even goes into the container. I might try 260nm UV-C irradiation pasteurization someday. I don't trust that individual dairy farms can reliably control E.coli and Listeria, and I don't appreciate the degradation of the product caused by the high-temperature methods used to rapidly pasteurize in a continuous flow. And none of it is worth it, if I just end up farting all day anyway.
mac01021 8y ago
My toddler and I drink a gallon per week between the two of us. Why don't you buy it if you love the taste?
souprock 8y ago
Milk is required for the consumption of cookies, cake, chocolate, peach cobbler, apple crisp, English muffins with jam, pancakes, and breakfast cereal. My family uses about 13 gallons per week, one per person.

platistocrates 8y ago

Thank you for sharing, it touches on a lot of topics that most programmers dont hear about. It's the kind of article that doesn't gain much traction around here. I enjoyed it.

forkLding 8y ago

I think another key issue that encourages consolidation in the dairy and other agricultural industries is the encroachment of automation, a lot of tractors are self-driving and many equipment increasingly don't require human hands. Mostly large corporations are the kind that can buy and invest in this technology and also are the ones who can benefit the most from it, which creates a loop where only large corporations start thriving and out-competing any smaller companies. The only direction I can see for smaller farms is to probably go the "organic" or "natural farm" route, but even that would be hard to achieve because larger corporations can probably just sub-contract and own smaller organic farms too. Agricultural industries is going the way manufacturing did a while back.

jelliclesfarm 8y ago
Small acreage farm automation is what we need. That would turn the tide in favour of local and cleaner food with shorter supply chains with farmers making better margins.(for non commodity crops)

supermatt 8y ago

It's tremendously sad. Large-scale high-intensity farming is raping the land, causing untold pollution both locally and globally, and small sustainable homesteads are falling by the wayside, while these large agro-factories receive billions in subsidies to produce "food" at a loss. It's disgusting.

jopsen 8y ago
It's also using less farm land and keeping people fed. It's not obvious that small homesteads would be a viable way to feed the world, much less a sustainable way to do it. I'm not claiming that industrial scale farming doesn't have environmental issues. But growing more food on less land might be a good thing.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  It's not using less land than a small homestead, it's using less labor. A small homestead farming with smaller tools can get far more yield per acre than a huge mono-crop farm does.
  - rwcarlsen 8y ago
    And less energy.
    - supermatt 8y ago
      according to studies, smaller farms use less energy per head.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  > But growing more food on less land might be a good thing. Not if it costs us our humanity. The mistreatment of animals we eat/farm is astonishing. Maximizing efficiency isn't always the best metric to try and optimize for, it leads to some really warped places. (Interesting side note, Tolkien wrote about this a bunch -- Sauron was originally a forge/craftsman god who just really wanted to make things more efficient. His downfall was that he overly liked coordination and disliked wasteful friction.)

jonawesomegreen 8y ago

I think that it is interesting to consider this in relation to the renegotiations of NAFTA where Canada's dairy supply management [1] was put in the spotlight. For those that don't know some details about Canada dairy supply management [2]: > The model, which matches domestic demand with domestic supply through a quota system, is particularly well-suited to a commodity like milk, where 40 percent is consumed locally. Supply management is designed to even out the peaks and valleys of producer income, and in this endeavour, it has been successful. It also allows farmers to plan for the longer term, which is particularly important when producing a commodity subject to the whims of the cow’s natural production. Despite supply management going against free trade ideals most of the farmers I know do like it. It lets them keep the lights on and maintain family farms that have been running for generations, but on the other hand it costs consumers both in their pocketbooks and variety of choice. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-supply-management-explainer-1.4708341 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-supply-management-ex... [2] https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/cigi_paper_30.pdf https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/cigi_paper_30...

ip26 8y ago
Everybody likes being part of the protected market. That's part of the problem- "Well if you're going to protect dairy, and you want my support, how about you protect my steel too?" (repeat, repeat, repeat)
- dleslie 8y ago
  It's a managed market. If consumer trends in Canada shifted away from dairy it would not somehow survive. Instead, dairy farmers collaborate to avoid production waste and to coordinate for seasonal/cyclical changes in demand and production.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    It’s hard to imagine higher prices without milk users getting creative. Lots of products that should be made with butter are made with oil. Alfredo sauces made with soybean oil instead of cream. The products that have these substitutions will have a greater discount and more sales. Frozen pizza makers slacking on cheese toppings. Processed cheese. And that’s just the industrial use side.

igouy 8y ago

"How America’s food giants swallowed the family farms" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american...

bradford 8y ago

A lot of American cultural institutions are being lost in our effort to modernize and optimize production. This affects a lot of industries, not just dairy. Sadly, like the author, I can't really think of a good solution. The only proposal that comes to mind: If America values its cultural institutions (I'm thinking specifically farmers, craftsmen, certain maritime industries, and machinists, although there are certainly more) and wants to preserve them, government entities need to provide some of the funding. This is obviously distasteful to some and I'm not sure if the positives outweigh the negatives. I'm also not sure what the extent of preservation societies are in America today.

ucaetano 8y ago
> Sadly, like the author, I can't really think of a good solution. But that IS the solution. Preserving archaic inefficient institutions and forcing society to pay for it solely due to nostalgia is a terrible idea. But there are solutions: entertainment & agroturismo. Sure, it won't preserve every single farm, or even 1 in 1000, but it will preserve some of then, just as tourism helps maintain a lot of historical sites around the world.
- thatfrenchguy 8y ago
  Have you read the article ? The "new" way of doing things have horrible externalities that can destroy those communities.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    That's a broad generalization, and it seems that it is mostly driven by anger. The reason you can go to a supermarket and buy food IS the "new" way of doing things. The reason there's close to zero food waste in production and distribution of food in developed markets is the "new" way. Their farm is dying because it is inefficient. Let it die.
    - thatfrenchguy 8y ago
      http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/en/ http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/en/ The UN says a third wasted.

garbagedisposal 8y ago

Oh no, how dare they no longer get paid enough in order to exploit animals...

briandear 8y ago

Yet somehow I just paid $7 for a gallon of Clover “organic” 2% milk yesterday at the Mountain View Safeway. That is insane expensive. Who exactly is getting that money? It seems like $7 per gallon retail ought to be enough to keep some small farmers in business. Organic milk costs almost double the price of jet fuel. I feel like someone is getting screwed.

waffle_ss 8y ago
Sadly, organic has been hijacked by the large industrial farms as well.[1] > Who exactly is getting that money? The USDA keeps track of those statistics.[2] As of 2017 about 30% of the cost of a gallon of milk goes to farms. Unfortunately milk prices are so low that only the very largest farms, that can squeeze efficiencies out of operating at scale, can make that profitable.[3] [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-organic-milk-may-not-be-organic/2017/05/01/708ce5bc-ed76-11e6-9662-6eedf1627882_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-org... [2]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/price-spreads-from-farm-to-consumer/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/price-spreads-from-fa... [3]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/milk-cost-of-production-estimates/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/milk-cost-of-producti...

GlenTheMachine 8y ago

This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it's also a national security issue of the first order. One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They'll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don't have to do anything differently in order to support two strains of corn or soybeans. You con't have to worry about one breed of milk cow being more susceptible to disease or giving milk with a different fat content. All your equipment is the same, all of your chemical inputs are the same, all of your processes are the same. That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Significant enough climate change could as well. A single new strain of disease, if it were robust enough to spread through the air or via wildlife, could kill huge fractions of our cattle or pigs. It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next, with just the wrong set of circumstances. We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system.

projektfu 8y ago
Dairy cattle are the poster children for a varied diet. They eat many kinds of waste such as distillers' grains, peanut hulls, beet pulp. They don't care where their corn silage comes from and they can even consume and detoxify aflatoxin-laden corn that cannot be placed into any other food supply. I'm not sure that larger dairy farms are going to have more of a monoculture attitude toward their supply of feed.
- supermatt 8y ago
  Aflatoxins are excreted in milk. You shouldn't feed aflatoxin-laden feed to dairy animals.
  - projektfu 8y ago
    At low enough amounts, aflatoxin will be destroyed in the rumen, and won't enter the bloodstream.

marricks 8y ago

As someone who hates large corporations (I think I spend most of my HN time nowadays railing against big tech) and a vegan this hits me at a weird spot. CAFO’s are horrible to the land and the poor cows trapped in them. Greater volume equals greater profit and less concern on an individual… Small dairy farms are better in a few ways, but cows still live there for a fraction of their natural life spans, calves are taken from their mom’s while way too young because we use their milk for our own consumption. Say all you want about “they’re bred that way” but that all seems to be a guise for getting what we want out of them. I’m sure small farmers care about their cows, but I’m also sure their perspective is shaped by the need to make a living from them. Where this all comes to head now, with falling demand in milk and rising big companies, is rough. We’ll have more mistreated cows and larger businesses taking over. Society will change over time and should, we’re on the verge of environmental apocalypse it seems and meat and dairy are a part of it[1], finding a way to support those who need to change industries humanely is key. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

jmull 8y ago
I think it's probably fair to change this: > but I’m also sure their perspective is warped by the need to make profit out of them. to something like this: > but I'm also sure their perspective is based on their need to subsist on them. I think your heart is in the right place, but characterizing family dairy farmers as "warped" and profiting is not going to end up connecting or being helpful.
- Djvacto 8y ago
  I mean, I'm not super well versed in small-scale agriculture or anything, but a) Is there that big of a difference between subsist and profit in this case? It's not like the family is just consuming the milk/etc themselves, they're selling it (in the case described above) and b)is there even a such thing as subsist in our society today? Especially in America, capitalism makes it impossible to just subsist, as you always need to be earning more. However, both of these are just as subjective as your suggested substitution, and I would like to express that I think Small-scale or Family Dairy Farmers are way better than any size factory farming.

ArrayList 8y ago

Good. Sayonara. I'm glad to see the dairy industry struggling. Torturing cows for their milk that we shouldn't be drinking anyway is abhorrent. Oat milk is way better anyway.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

...family farms struggle and pay dearly to hire and retain legal workers at a high cost. Other farms, particularly the large ones, pay lower costs for illegal labor and externalize the costs of depressed wages onto everyone else... one view of the debate about whether an influx of low cost laborers depresses wages. economists and various journalists often take the other side of the debate, citing studies that low skill labor pay rates are minimally affected by an increase in exogenous low skill labor. the debate rages on.

dqpb 8y ago

> The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4AM and 4PM. Why do cows need to be milked at those times?

supermatt 8y ago
Has 80-100 head of cattle (mentioned somewhere in the article), and can milk only a few at a time in an 8 stall parlour, takes about 15 minutes per cow plus a few minutes prep per cow, plus handling, cleaning, etc.. thats going to take 3-4 hours or so. Repeat again 12 hours later. Im guessing they want to be finished by 8:30pm after clean down?
logfromblammo 8y ago
I suspect it's because the farmer wants to finish the milking before dinnertime, and it needs to happen at least twice a day. So 4 AM+4 PM works out according to the farmer's schedule. Automated milking machines are available on demand, and I am not aware of there being a "cow rush hour" on those, with annoyed cows queueing to use it at the same time, and telling each other to hurry up. They just step up as they require and let the robot handle it.
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  Lely the Dutch milling robots turned 25 years old recently. The cows come to the robots to be milked by themselves. A thing of beauty. Of course..this requires capital..American dairy farmers ..largely due to subsidies ..barely make ends meet. And rely on undocumented labour.

skybrian 8y ago

Sarah Taber thread on family farms, cows, and economy of scale: https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/997221513978884096 https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/99722151397...

waffle_ss 8y ago
Taber is a consultant to corporate California produce farms and has a lot of unjustified hate towards dairy farms (in her own words she plays it up as some sort of "turf war" between produce and livestock farms). Her demolishing "a cute lil farmhouse with 1-2 cows or a microdairy with 8 cows" strawman and doing a "corporate consolidation good" song and dance, not mentioning the reality of that being 30K+ cow CAFOs and the unavoidable destruction to the land that entails, is just intellectually dishonest. But hey if you enjoy her woke fairy tales (e.g. ackshually organic was made by a racist nazi cabal), have at it. Just know you're living in a bubble outside reality: https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/1084197655213993986 https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/108419765521399398...
- skybrian 8y ago
  Is there someone else you recommend for learning more about ag tech?

rmason 8y ago

When I graduated from Michigan State I went to work as an organizer for the National Farmers Organization. The NFO was controversial, they worked to organize farmers and led a nationwide dairy strike in 1967 where LBJ threatened its leaders with imprisonment. I was a young optimist but the bottom line is that basic human nature makes it impossible to make it work. But I helped start a couple of Coop elevators and learned a lot about business. Farmers are faced with two choices: 1. Get big and be a commodity farmer ruthlessly focused on efficiency 2. Or a niche marketer preferably selling direct to the consumer. I've seen guys successful with either method but it's absolute suicide to be a small commodity farmer.

ggm 8y ago
In Australia, a small number of farm cooperatives succeed but most died on the vine. We lost our canning plants to overseas. We lost our cooperatives to industry self regulated open markets. The supply chain (coles, woolworths) pushed costs back on the supply side and bid farm against farm. I think the death of the cooperative movement in farming was a long-con by the industry. Somebody should have pushed back because Unity (the northern NSW farming coop for dairy produce) is alive and well, when other farming coops died and the farmers are now bereft of power in the supply chain.

jamst174 8y ago

Instead of having thousands of families eking out a modest but sustainable life, you have a handful of corporate entities and their shareholders making millions. Simple unfettered capitalism at work again (and I believe in the power of capitalism, but not without some boundaries). For perspective, my dad and uncle were forced to sell my grandfather's farm and equipment when my grandfather got sick and he needed 24 hr care. My grandfather had sold the cows years before, but I have lots of good memories of visiting them and helping out during the summers.

justin66 8y ago

I do not have strong feelings about milk, other than not wanting to drink it and using it only sparingly as an ingredient. However the mention of this protest by dairy farmers was striking to me: One of the bad times I can remember was in the mid-to-late 90s - I was in elementary school - when milk prices were so low that some farmers were dumping their milk down the drain in protest. At some point in the past I read about EU farmers doing the same thing, spraying large volumes of milk in protest. This seems pretty ineffective to me as a means of swaying public opinion. If I were someone who actually buys milk, I think my feelings towards the industry doing this would not be to wish them well.

Scoundreller 8y ago
And usually the cause of those situations was a high fixed price, which killed demand. Meanwhile, the people paying the high prices wonder WTF is going on.
GoToRO 8y ago
Well, in EU the farmers get subsidies. I believe the thinking is that food is too important to let it be optimized by the markets.

microcolonel 8y ago

> I think the intent was to provide evidence of grassroots farmer support for Canadian-style controls on milk price and supply, which reduce volatility and the need for subsidies and have managed to maintain Canada’s family farms’ existence, which would give the American federal government ammo to institute similar policies. That's a very interesting take on these policies. Here in Canada, we pay an obscene amount of money for dairy, from considerably smaller disposable incomes. The understanding I've come to is that while the policies make it easier for some subset of mediocre dairies to operate, they make it much harder for productive dairies to expand business. The dairy propaganda here is quite laughable as well: the usual refrain is that dairy prices are "inelastic" (which is nonsense, people frequently choose not to consume dairy in Canada, whether because of cost or health concerns).

Causality1 8y ago

USDA marketing orders created an inflated market and USDA checkoffs robbed dairy farmers to fund pointless marketing campaigns. This is exactly what was always going to happen when we decided to put a finger on the scale for thirty years. http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/02/thanks-to-decades-of-government-meddling/ http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/02/thanks-to-decades-of-g...

jpollock 8y ago

NZ dairy farms seem to be doing o.k. I wonder how they compare (size/costs/distance to market) with US farms. I do know that NZ signed the CPTPP, which made markets for milk more open. https://www.tpp.mfat.govt.nz/assets/docs/TPP_factsheet_Dairy.pdf https://www.tpp.mfat.govt.nz/assets/docs/TPP_factsheet_Dairy...

phire 8y ago
Large NZ dairy farms are doing ok (I know of one farm with 5000 cows. They do once-a-day milking, they start at 7am and milk until 3pm in 3 separate milking sheds). There are no CAFOs in NZ. All farms put all of their cows out in the fields. But even without the CAFOs that this article is complaining about, smaller "family run" farms are dying out. Dairy farms are getting larger and larger, it's getting un-economical for the smaller farms to keep going and they are being bought out. From 2002 to 2016, the number of dairy farms in NZ decreased 23.5% Yet the amount of land used increased by 22.6%. The average herd size in 2016 was 414 cows. It's just economies of scale. Bigger farms are more economical.
- quixoticelixer- 8y ago
  But why is that a bad thing?
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  NZ also abolished subsidies and the largest dairy is Fonterra that is a co-op.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago

(Apparently) unpopular opinion: literally everything in this article is good for everyone except the farmers themselves. More production from fewer cows is good for the environment, particularly the carbon intensity of milk production. Lower prices are good for consumers. Even the author benefited by not being roped into working on the family farm, instead using his skills more productively in the software business.

gwbas1c 8y ago
> More production from fewer cows is good for the environment You obviously did not read the article. The problem with factory farming this way is manure disposal. The article describes the environmental impact of this kind of farming in painstaking detail. In summary, dense factory farms disposing of high volumes of manure pollutes groundwater and spreads disease.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
  I did read the article. I just believe that it's better to sacrifice the local environment than the global one. If I could double the carbon intensiveness of milk production to completely eliminate its effects on the local environment, I would not.
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    That makes no sense. "Local" impact is global when it happens at scale.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      (Same respondent, different account.) I don't understand what you're trying to communicate with this objection. There is not sufficient demand for milk, at any price, that a typical person will live in the local environment of a dairy farm. Thus, the local environmental effects of dairy farms will never be global, even if they scale to the natural demand ceiling.

sigmaprimus 8y ago

I live in Canada and while our supply management system for dairy seems to support our farmers, it actually sets up a class system that is extremely difficult for aspiring farmers to break into. Sure if your the son or daughter of an existing farmer life is great for you but anyone else wanting to get into the business too bad, you can grow the hay or grain at a loss that will feed the lucky few dairy farmers cows. I bought a gallon of 2% milk yesterday for $6, that is the average price up here. I used to live near the US Canadian border and almost every one of my neighbors bought their milk and cheese in the US on a weekly basis. I feel bad for the dairy farmers demise but a socialist supply management scheme is not the solution, rather stacking enterprises on those failing farms is a much better idea, check out Joel Salatin on you tube for a viable solution.

squirrelicus 8y ago

I'm just not sure what the problem is. Outdated modes of production can't keep up with the lower prices for a fungible material. What's new?

ggm 8y ago
Price economics are really bad at modelling strategic. America (and Australia) don't want lowest price food. They want secure food, produced from domestic and international sources. If you want domestic food production you have to be prepared to force it, because on price alone, the foreign sources will always win. If its not mexico, its canada or vietnam. China is buying New Zealand and Australian Dairy because of the systematic rorting of their supply by industry using Urea to boost apparent protein levels. Now tell me again, how you want a US milk industry to compete with that? Uh-oh.. here comes protectionist regulatory checks on product...

robrenaud 8y ago

I am curious if the farmers considered or attempted to become cheese makers themselves? I would not be surprised to see an American artisanal cheese revolution in the same way that American craft beer's growth has happened in the last 10 years. The bigram American cheese sounds bad, but there are some fantastic artisinal cheeses produced here. I have started buying lots of great American farmstead cheese (herd + cheese making are in the same place) while living in NYC, often at ~$30/pound, but much of it comes from Vermont.

genericone 8y ago

A different outlook, for anyone willing to watch hundreds of hours of youtube videos on regenerative agriculture, a rising tide of decentralized farmers are going back to chemical-free and healthy, thriving produce, far beyond the organic label that corporations have usurped and rendered valueless. Look for living web farms and advancing eco agriculture on youtube and get ready for a world of information outside of software. 1. Living Web Farms 2. Advancing Eco Agriculture

hak8or 8y ago
Why on earth would anyone want a chemical free farm? That just decreases yield and increases risk, contributing to increased price.
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  Nope. Increasing yield leads to glut leading to low price. For the farmers. Plus there is always the downside of chemical pollution of air, soil and environment. Farmers are at the very bottom of the supply chain. We don’t see any appreciation in income even if food prices go up.
  - genericone 8y ago
    If you dig into those youtube channels, you'll find just how damaging the chemical fertilizers have been for our soil biome, how damaging tilling is to the microbiology, how herbicides leave farm soil bare and creating soil compaction and flooding when the inevitable rain is unable to infiltrate the soil fast enough.
- genericone 8y ago
  It turns out that unless you are an uber-agri-corp, you're better off serving the niche local and regional markets. Yes you may have smaller yield, but why on Earth should you be incentivized by yield and not profit? Profit is the purpose, yield is the means to acheive that for big companies, small companies can focus on quality, flavor, nutrition, health in order to profit. Leave yield to the supply chain managers, let the farmers grow actual food I feel good about eating. No more bright red flavorless strawberries.

gcheong 8y ago

On the negative externalities point, can someone please explain how there are no negative externalities when you have 100 farms with 100 cows each vs 10 farms with 1000? The amount of waste generated is the same, presumably, and it all has to go somewhere, but perhaps it's just spread out more so that negative externalities aren't as apparent or is there a real difference as the article only brings them up as a consequence of large operations.

ggm 8y ago
Here's a fictitious but plausible example: Small operators impose a larger set of small burdens in time into things like waste stream, and transport. Large operators syphon their waste into the stream in one go, rather than diluting the 1000 cattle across a month, it presents as a wave of high nutrient content for processing. It overwhelms the tertiary waste treatment plant, requiring re-scaling of holding tanks, more oxygenation, more dilution into the river systems. Unless regulated, a single entity functioning as a "more efficient" process is very likely to impose scale breaking consequence on things. This would be true to road transport (for cows, for milk) for energy (cold storage, pumping) and it is very likely at a lower overall labour cost, so significantly higher apparent efficiency and profit to the farm holding corporate entity, but at community cost in terms of infrastructure/utility burden. Even thermal: a single aggregated cow barn for 1000 animals will radiate more heat have have a more aggressive effect on the microclimate than 10 100 cow sheds over a larger area...

jondubois 8y ago

Commodification is about taking products of different quality and marketing them as though they're actually the same. It creates an incentive to make products of the lowest quality possible because lower quality means lower production costs and more profit. Then over time, consumers get used to increasingly low quality products and so it becomes a race to the bottom for producers; who can make the lowest quality product which only just meets the minimum required grade. I just did a search for "commodity quality standards" on Google and came across a document which explains how corn is graded in the US; the criteria that they use includes things like "Heat damaged %" and "Broken corn and foreign material %". The criteria for other commodities like grains were also similar (focused on damage and presence of foreign material) - It doesn't appear that the chemical/nutritional composition of the commodities are taken into account when grading them. It's easy to see why this would drive the wrong incentives when it comes to things like choice of fertilizer (natural vs artificial) and using GMOs.

opportune 8y ago
Commodification is even more than that. It involves turning things, activities, ideas, etc. which were not evenly formerly traded into commodifiable entities. So it also includes intellectual property, the abundance of services we now formally pay for which used to be free or done informally, etc.

beloch 8y ago

There are a couple mentions of Canada's dairy supply management system, which the U.S. recently pushed hard for the elimination of in the recent NAFTA 2.0 talks. (Note: Concessions were made, but dairy supply management was not eliminated.) In Canada's system, farmers must buy production quota allotments from the government in order to sell their products. The number of quota allotments sold is calculated depending on demand in each province. Hence, supply does not exceed demand and dairy prices in Canada are several times what they are in the U.S.. We pay a lot more for milk, cheese, etc. than people in the U.S.. The import duties on U.S. dairy are over 300%, and American products are still able to sell at lower prices most of the time. This policy has not been particularly popular with average Canadians, for obvious reasons. Despite this, Canada has the same problems with many, smaller farms giving way to fewer huge farms, but not to the same extent as the U.S.. Small dairy farms are not wildly profitable, but they can survive. Meanwhile, the U.S. system has led to such massive overproduction that U.S. farms are flooding Mexico with subsidized dairy and are doing their best to do the same in Canada. Canadians generally view U.S. dairy as being of suspect quality due to laxer laws on the use of growth hormones such as rBST, but shoppers will still frequently just buy whatever's cheapest. U.S. dairy producers looking for endless market growth are running into a brick-wall of domestic market saturation and resistance from foreign countries who know lowering trade barriers could mean the annihilation of local production and replacement of quality products with ones of questionable quality. Big dairy in the U.S. is rapidly becoming an international problem.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"supply does not exceed demand" This is a misrepresentation of the microeconomics at play. However much milk is produced, it will all get consumed, because there is a massive demand for Milk, it would just be at very low prices, possibly below the cost of production. Supply management is better described as price fixing - the amount produced will enable the product to yield a certain price at a certain demand, and therefore be economically viable. " shoppers will still frequently just buy whatever's cheapest." - if they knew one product was superior to another, i.e. if the ostensibly efficient market which relies upon information clearing actually worked ... then the dynamics of the market would help solve these problems. This can be communicated through brand awareness, labelling, all sorts of things. Yes, as you point out, it's an issue basically everywhere because food production, like banking, telecoms, entertainment etc. - is a highly protected industry.

tomohawk 8y ago

The government already sets the price of milk, and has done so since FDR (1930s). http://www.eatingwell.com/article/16029/who-decides-how-much-we-pay-for-milk/ http://www.eatingwell.com/article/16029/who-decides-how-much... Such nationalized policies unfortunately are prone to capture by big players, so cronyism gets rewarded disproportionally over other concerns. I can see the point in government getting involved to make sure that the food supply is up to standard and that there is enough extra capacity in the system to ride through the inevitable bad times (like the dust bowl). However, given the dairy industry has been mostly shaped by government programs and regulations since the 1930's, it seem unlikely that salvation for small dairymen is going to come from that direction.

StreamBright 8y ago
Just another example when unintended side effects of government regulation create a larger problem than the one it was supposed to solve.
- ggm 8y ago
  I think the problem is not the regulation. The problem is the decline in bargaining power from the farm side, into aggressively un-regulated market concentration. The farmer cooperative buying produce to on-sell was replaced by direct sale to the supermarket and logistics costs pushed back on the farmer. All in search of a 1c a litre difference. Please don't blame regulation for what is unequal market forces.
  - tomohawk 8y ago
    The government mandates that the farmers sell through these middlement, at prices that are set by the government (and gamed by the middlemen). This is a government caused problem. You're right that the government should instead be focused on boosting competition and supressing cronyism, but its been, what, 85 years and they're still pushing the same thing?

fopen64 8y ago

My father grew up in small farm, my grandparents had something like 8 cows and made a living, it was not comfortable but they even bought properties in urban area so the kids would have a place to build a house on. Maternal grandparents felt the heat earlier, their crop was rice; a typical property would yield 100 x 60kg bags, and that would feed a family for the year, along with a couple pigs and chickens... the problem was my mother had 8 siblings, so no land to everybody, and glad they moved to the city, because agriculture shot up in scale. Relatives who stayed behind had to buy a lot of land, machinery, and they are well-off because they grow palm heart on the side.