6 ms·

Dairyland in Distress (2019)

34 points by nkurz 7y ago

t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
1. Develop a "value-added" dairy brand 2. Wait for Coca-Cola to buy your business 3. ??? 4. Profit! https://www.fooddive.com/news/coca-cola-acquires-full-ownership-of-dairy-brand-fairlife/569873/ https://www.fooddive.com/news/coca-cola-acquires-full-owners...
- gogopuppygogo 7y ago
  Brown, sticky, sugary, water is not a good product for a health conscious future. A future where people learn from an early age the perils of too much sugar. A future where governments limit the sale of such goods. Coca Cola needs to diversify. Then again, dairy seems like an awfully bad segment to get into given the issues it faces. Who am I to judge the brass over there though? I'm sure they paid some consultants eight figures to tell them that this was a good idea.
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    > Coca Cola needs to diversify. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands
    - mywittyname 7y ago
      I was about to say, Coca Cola is the epitome of a well diversified, but focused company.
  - t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
    > “ Brown, sticky, sugary, water is not a good product for a health conscious future.” The 8oz/240ml bottle of strawberry milk pictured in the article contains 170 calories and 10g of sugar... A perfect fit for Coca-Cola’s portfolio.
Merrill 7y ago
>There is no more quintessential image of Wisconsin than a red barn with a herd of cows grazing in a green field against a blue sky. This traditional farm cannot compete with modern operations of 30,000 cows or more. It's too bad, because dairying fit in well on farms with land that was not good for plowing and cropping. Marshy or sandy land was used for pasture and hay meadows. Now you rarely see small herds of cows in pastures along the highway. Marshes are either drained or left unused.
- war1025 7y ago
  When people complain about flooding problems in the Midwest, I wonder if they realize how much of our land has been tiled and drained for farming. Wetlands act as a sponge to keep water where it fell and slow its movement to the main arterial rivers. Habitat destruction is honestly something that concerns me much more than carbon emissions.
  - planteen 7y ago
    Definitely true. People also seem to forget the Red River basin (e.g., North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba) that flows north to Hudson Bay was a massive lake about 10,000 years ago called Lake Agassiz. So its periodic flood pattern is expected. The topography today is a flat flood plain. Because of the lake bottom history, the soil is extremely fertile. But the cities Fargo, Grand Forks, and Winnipeg are not well placed to avoid flooding. Floods happened in the early 1800s before the arrival of settlements, wetland draining, plowing, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1826_Red_River_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1826_Red_River_flood
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Too few people recognize grazing land as destroyed. Very often it used to be bog, forest, grassland supporting many wild species (before the soil was pumped full of nitrates) etc. A big grassy field can be an ecological wasteland.
    - 7y ago
NPMaxwell 7y ago
This looks like consolidation of small (family owned) farms into larger (corporate, maybe multinational) operations.
nimbius 7y ago
im not convinced this is an entirely bad thing as it seems the US has had a glut of dairy for quite a while. Here in the United States, we put cheese on everything and its slowly killing us. We largely started this trend when the USDA began eschewing whole milk in favour of skim. As a result, dairy farms simply redirected their waste fats to the production of cheese and cheese-like products instead of limiting their production as a whole. Efforts to tackle childhood obesity have zeroed in on things like sugary chocolate milk and unhealthy dairy products (aerosolized cheese and processed cheeses in general) to quantifiable success. I also question whether the newspaper for the largest dairy producing state in the US is capable of covering the issue without bias. "fake milk" and "fancy water" are a few key phrases that concern me. The coverage also seems to try to have its cake and eat it too...highlighting the urgent need for Latino workers (a critical requirement almost exclusive to industrial farming) while bemoaning the struggles of small farms as "the industry" which is actually in turmoil. Disclosure: I am a vegetarian, and derive a nontrivial amount of calories from dairy.
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  A couple of years back I had a rather abrupt dietary change due to some health issues. One of the key parts was the total elimination of cheese from my diet. I began to say to myself, "Props to those National Dairy Council guys," because cheese was everywhere I looked. It is kind of impressive, really. I am not against labels like "fake milk." If anything, I find myself increasingly annoyed by products that are not what they actually claim to be: silk that is not really silk, milk that is not actually milk. I'm quite okay with linguistic prescriptivism when it comes to product names.
  - freddie_mercury 7y ago
    > I am not against labels like "fake milk." I agree, anything other than full fat human milk that is non-homogenized and unpasteurized, with no additives (vitamins or otherwise) should be labelled fake milk.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
gshdg 7y ago
Maybe this results in replacing much of our dairy consumption with more environmentally sustainable plant-based alternatives? (Not almond milk, which is worse, but oat, hemp, and pea based milks and yogurts are much less taxing on the environment.)
- war1025 7y ago
  The current push for plant-based alternatives to everything reminds me of the effort to replace butter with margarine and tallow with vegetable shortening. I believe the consensus these days is that butter is superior to margarine health-wise. Wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in rendered animal fats for cooking as well at some point. The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). The whole idea behind margarine was a chemist figured if cows could get fat from plants, he could skip the cow and just get the fat from the plant. Very similar to current thinking on vegan meats, etc. Except it turns out that the end product was loaded with trans fats that turned out to be super bad for you. Oops. I would expect most meat alternatives to run into similar issues as we study them more.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    > The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). While that's true as far as it goes, the reality is that most animals are not farmed that way; they're fed largely stuff grown on land that could be used to farm crops for humans (and indeed often stuff that humans can eat directly).
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Crop land is more intensive than grassland. To grow crops today profitably, you have to use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. So cows for example largely eat grass. They also get some hay and some silage (which is made from the stalks of corn, inedible for humans). Even soy beans, which are used to feed pigs and chickens, only about 20% of the bean is useful for human consumption so they already extract that (soybean oil) and use it in many products. The rest is used for meal, and fed to livestock.
nihilismislove 7y ago
Well, animal agriculture has no future and the sooner farmers realize that, the better for us all
- war1025 7y ago
  I seriously doubt it, but am curious to hear an explanation of why people think this?
  - nihilismislove 7y ago
    Well, it's terribly wasteful in terms of resources. And so, compared to just using plants where possible (like with alternative dairy, plant-based meats etc.): 1: it's not sustainable ecologically (compare: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions); https://www.drawdown.org/solutions); 2: it wouldn't be sustainable economically if not for the subsidies
- jacurtis 7y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as saying it has "NO future". I think we are seeing a correction right now. From an over-reliance on animal agriculture and hopefully start transitioning to a more balanced relationship with animal agriculture.
  - nihilismislove 7y ago
    Maybe. Still doesn't seem like the best investment :)
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post generic flamebait to HN. It leads to generic flamewars, which are predictable and boring. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
digitalengineer 7y ago
This a is a global trend: 'The quiet suicide epidemic plaguing French farmers' (1) + ‘Europe loses 1,000 farms per day’. Meanwhile mega-corperations are receiving millions of European subsidies. (1) https://www.france24.com/en/20181026-suicide-epidemic-plaguing-french-farmers-loire-atlantique https://www.france24.com/en/20181026-suicide-epidemic-plagui... (2) https://www.agriland.co.uk/farming-news/europe-loses-1000-farms-per-day-new-agriculture-commissioner https://www.agriland.co.uk/farming-news/europe-loses-1000-fa...
portmanteaufu 7y ago
Off topic: the URL ("jsonline.com") is short for "Journal Sentinal Online", not "JS Online" or "JSON line" as my brain insisted on parsing it.
nikofeyn 7y ago
kind of a bad title given the fact that dairyland is not a word but is the name of a major insurance company. “dairy land” would have been better.
- tengbretson 7y ago
  Wisconsin considers it a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Wisconsin#/media/File:2007_Wisconsin_License_Plate.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
CydeWeys 7y ago
Wow, this is amazingly comprehensive and in-depth reporting. Wish we had more of this, especially on topics I was close enough to that it made sense to read the whole thing.
puttycat 7y ago
While comprehensive, this reporting is very shortsighted -- I don't see how one can ignore the horrifying image of hundreds of cows locked in mechanical milk-extraction machines, while only reporting on the very narrow Wisconsin industry. Clearly health, animal-rights and environmental awakening is also a factor pushing more consumers to prefer plant-based milk (soy, almond, etc.) which influence the cow-based industry.
- jetrink 7y ago
  That's not an accurate image of dairy farms, at least based on the large farm I visited. Cow productivity is strongly influenced by the quality of life of the cow. Stressed, stick or otherwise unhappy cows produce less milk and as a consequence, farmers put a lot of effort into keeping them healthy and happy. The particular farm I visited used milking robots produced in the Netherlands. Cows spent their days outdoors and would visit the milking robot on their own when they decided to. The robot would also clean the cow, give it a snack and record some some basic health data. The only thing that seemed inhumane to me was how calves would be separated from their mothers so early. Just a few weeks (days?) after being born, they were shipped off to a separate location a thousand miles away.
  - puttycat 7y ago
    95%-99% of farm animals in the US are born, raised, and die in factory farms [1], i.e. they are born into constant unimaginable suffering and die a gruesome death. These stats are about the same throughout the Western world. Cows and other farm animals who are raised in relatively "humane" captivity, like the one you're describing, are an anecdote. [1] https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory-farms/ https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...
    - mattlutze 7y ago
      The analysis behind that link suggests 70% of US cows live on factory farms. They use a cut-off of >150 cows on a dairy farm or >225 cows on a beef/veal farm = factory farm. The supporting sheets indicate that they take a simple 75% of the Small farm (300 head or 200 head for beef or dairy) maximum size as their cutoff for a factory farm. It doesn't explain why they use such an unsophisticated metric to define many small farms, and all medium- and large-sized farms, as factory farms. That lack of sophistication makes me skeptical of these numbers.

34 points by nkurz 7y ago

1. Develop a "value-added" dairy brand 2. Wait for Coca-Cola to buy your business 3. ??? 4. Profit! https://www.fooddive.com/news/coca-cola-acquires-full-ownership-of-dairy-brand-fairlife/569873/ https://www.fooddive.com/news/coca-cola-acquires-full-owners...

gogopuppygogo 7y ago
Brown, sticky, sugary, water is not a good product for a health conscious future. A future where people learn from an early age the perils of too much sugar. A future where governments limit the sale of such goods. Coca Cola needs to diversify. Then again, dairy seems like an awfully bad segment to get into given the issues it faces. Who am I to judge the brass over there though? I'm sure they paid some consultants eight figures to tell them that this was a good idea.
- CharlesW 7y ago
  > Coca Cola needs to diversify. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    I was about to say, Coca Cola is the epitome of a well diversified, but focused company.
- t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
  > “ Brown, sticky, sugary, water is not a good product for a health conscious future.” The 8oz/240ml bottle of strawberry milk pictured in the article contains 170 calories and 10g of sugar... A perfect fit for Coca-Cola’s portfolio.

Merrill 7y ago

>There is no more quintessential image of Wisconsin than a red barn with a herd of cows grazing in a green field against a blue sky. This traditional farm cannot compete with modern operations of 30,000 cows or more. It's too bad, because dairying fit in well on farms with land that was not good for plowing and cropping. Marshy or sandy land was used for pasture and hay meadows. Now you rarely see small herds of cows in pastures along the highway. Marshes are either drained or left unused.

war1025 7y ago
When people complain about flooding problems in the Midwest, I wonder if they realize how much of our land has been tiled and drained for farming. Wetlands act as a sponge to keep water where it fell and slow its movement to the main arterial rivers. Habitat destruction is honestly something that concerns me much more than carbon emissions.
- planteen 7y ago
  Definitely true. People also seem to forget the Red River basin (e.g., North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba) that flows north to Hudson Bay was a massive lake about 10,000 years ago called Lake Agassiz. So its periodic flood pattern is expected. The topography today is a flat flood plain. Because of the lake bottom history, the soil is extremely fertile. But the cities Fargo, Grand Forks, and Winnipeg are not well placed to avoid flooding. Floods happened in the early 1800s before the arrival of settlements, wetland draining, plowing, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1826_Red_River_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1826_Red_River_flood
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Too few people recognize grazing land as destroyed. Very often it used to be bog, forest, grassland supporting many wild species (before the soil was pumped full of nitrates) etc. A big grassy field can be an ecological wasteland.
  - 7y ago

NPMaxwell 7y ago

This looks like consolidation of small (family owned) farms into larger (corporate, maybe multinational) operations.

nimbius 7y ago

im not convinced this is an entirely bad thing as it seems the US has had a glut of dairy for quite a while. Here in the United States, we put cheese on everything and its slowly killing us. We largely started this trend when the USDA began eschewing whole milk in favour of skim. As a result, dairy farms simply redirected their waste fats to the production of cheese and cheese-like products instead of limiting their production as a whole. Efforts to tackle childhood obesity have zeroed in on things like sugary chocolate milk and unhealthy dairy products (aerosolized cheese and processed cheeses in general) to quantifiable success. I also question whether the newspaper for the largest dairy producing state in the US is capable of covering the issue without bias. "fake milk" and "fancy water" are a few key phrases that concern me. The coverage also seems to try to have its cake and eat it too...highlighting the urgent need for Latino workers (a critical requirement almost exclusive to industrial farming) while bemoaning the struggles of small farms as "the industry" which is actually in turmoil. Disclosure: I am a vegetarian, and derive a nontrivial amount of calories from dairy.

at_a_remove 7y ago
A couple of years back I had a rather abrupt dietary change due to some health issues. One of the key parts was the total elimination of cheese from my diet. I began to say to myself, "Props to those National Dairy Council guys," because cheese was everywhere I looked. It is kind of impressive, really. I am not against labels like "fake milk." If anything, I find myself increasingly annoyed by products that are not what they actually claim to be: silk that is not really silk, milk that is not actually milk. I'm quite okay with linguistic prescriptivism when it comes to product names.
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  > I am not against labels like "fake milk." I agree, anything other than full fat human milk that is non-homogenized and unpasteurized, with no additives (vitamins or otherwise) should be labelled fake milk.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago

gshdg 7y ago

Maybe this results in replacing much of our dairy consumption with more environmentally sustainable plant-based alternatives? (Not almond milk, which is worse, but oat, hemp, and pea based milks and yogurts are much less taxing on the environment.)

war1025 7y ago
The current push for plant-based alternatives to everything reminds me of the effort to replace butter with margarine and tallow with vegetable shortening. I believe the consensus these days is that butter is superior to margarine health-wise. Wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in rendered animal fats for cooking as well at some point. The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). The whole idea behind margarine was a chemist figured if cows could get fat from plants, he could skip the cow and just get the fat from the plant. Very similar to current thinking on vegan meats, etc. Except it turns out that the end product was loaded with trans fats that turned out to be super bad for you. Oops. I would expect most meat alternatives to run into similar issues as we study them more.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). While that's true as far as it goes, the reality is that most animals are not farmed that way; they're fed largely stuff grown on land that could be used to farm crops for humans (and indeed often stuff that humans can eat directly).
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Crop land is more intensive than grassland. To grow crops today profitably, you have to use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. So cows for example largely eat grass. They also get some hay and some silage (which is made from the stalks of corn, inedible for humans). Even soy beans, which are used to feed pigs and chickens, only about 20% of the bean is useful for human consumption so they already extract that (soybean oil) and use it in many products. The rest is used for meal, and fed to livestock.

nihilismislove 7y ago

Well, animal agriculture has no future and the sooner farmers realize that, the better for us all

war1025 7y ago
I seriously doubt it, but am curious to hear an explanation of why people think this?
- nihilismislove 7y ago
  Well, it's terribly wasteful in terms of resources. And so, compared to just using plants where possible (like with alternative dairy, plant-based meats etc.): 1: it's not sustainable ecologically (compare: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions); https://www.drawdown.org/solutions); 2: it wouldn't be sustainable economically if not for the subsidies
jacurtis 7y ago
I wouldn't go as far as saying it has "NO future". I think we are seeing a correction right now. From an over-reliance on animal agriculture and hopefully start transitioning to a more balanced relationship with animal agriculture.
- nihilismislove 7y ago
  Maybe. Still doesn't seem like the best investment :)
dang 7y ago
Please don't post generic flamebait to HN. It leads to generic flamewars, which are predictable and boring. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

digitalengineer 7y ago

This a is a global trend: 'The quiet suicide epidemic plaguing French farmers' (1) + ‘Europe loses 1,000 farms per day’. Meanwhile mega-corperations are receiving millions of European subsidies. (1) https://www.france24.com/en/20181026-suicide-epidemic-plaguing-french-farmers-loire-atlantique https://www.france24.com/en/20181026-suicide-epidemic-plagui... (2) https://www.agriland.co.uk/farming-news/europe-loses-1000-farms-per-day-new-agriculture-commissioner https://www.agriland.co.uk/farming-news/europe-loses-1000-fa...

portmanteaufu 7y ago

Off topic: the URL ("jsonline.com") is short for "Journal Sentinal Online", not "JS Online" or "JSON line" as my brain insisted on parsing it.

nikofeyn 7y ago

kind of a bad title given the fact that dairyland is not a word but is the name of a major insurance company. “dairy land” would have been better.

tengbretson 7y ago
Wisconsin considers it a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Wisconsin#/media/File:2007_Wisconsin_License_Plate.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

CydeWeys 7y ago

Wow, this is amazingly comprehensive and in-depth reporting. Wish we had more of this, especially on topics I was close enough to that it made sense to read the whole thing.

puttycat 7y ago

While comprehensive, this reporting is very shortsighted -- I don't see how one can ignore the horrifying image of hundreds of cows locked in mechanical milk-extraction machines, while only reporting on the very narrow Wisconsin industry. Clearly health, animal-rights and environmental awakening is also a factor pushing more consumers to prefer plant-based milk (soy, almond, etc.) which influence the cow-based industry.

jetrink 7y ago
That's not an accurate image of dairy farms, at least based on the large farm I visited. Cow productivity is strongly influenced by the quality of life of the cow. Stressed, stick or otherwise unhappy cows produce less milk and as a consequence, farmers put a lot of effort into keeping them healthy and happy. The particular farm I visited used milking robots produced in the Netherlands. Cows spent their days outdoors and would visit the milking robot on their own when they decided to. The robot would also clean the cow, give it a snack and record some some basic health data. The only thing that seemed inhumane to me was how calves would be separated from their mothers so early. Just a few weeks (days?) after being born, they were shipped off to a separate location a thousand miles away.
- puttycat 7y ago
  95%-99% of farm animals in the US are born, raised, and die in factory farms [1], i.e. they are born into constant unimaginable suffering and die a gruesome death. These stats are about the same throughout the Western world. Cows and other farm animals who are raised in relatively "humane" captivity, like the one you're describing, are an anecdote. [1] https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory-farms/ https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...
  - mattlutze 7y ago
    The analysis behind that link suggests 70% of US cows live on factory farms. They use a cut-off of >150 cows on a dairy farm or >225 cows on a beef/veal farm = factory farm. The supporting sheets indicate that they take a simple 75% of the Small farm (300 head or 200 head for beef or dairy) maximum size as their cutoff for a factory farm. It doesn't explain why they use such an unsophisticated metric to define many small farms, and all medium- and large-sized farms, as factory farms. That lack of sophistication makes me skeptical of these numbers.