24 ms·

On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)

• qxfys 6y ago
  previous discussion about this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368542
  • dang 6y ago
    Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320335 with 1 comment from the author, pointing to this thread which started the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942467
• corty 6y ago
  While I can appreciate the author's nostalgia, I cannot really agree on some of the criticism: The manure problem is a problem at any size of farm, the amount of manure per cow is somewhat constant. So concentrating all the cows in some factory farm doesn't really make anything worse as long as the total number of cows is somewhat constant. The undocumented immigrant labour problem isn't as big a problem as the family farms' systemic problem of child labour and child exploitation. Which the author glosses over in his point of view. To feed a growing population on earth, we do need industrial farming. Maybe not so much cattle. But in general, higher efficiency and more professional operations should be applauded. Yes, that means that family farms will be gone at some point.
  • CuriouslyC 6y ago
    Manure isn't a problem if you free range your animals, have landscape structures to prevent runoff and have other animals that eat bugs in the same space such as chickens. Then it just contributes fertility to the land. Children working their family farm are learning real skills. Learning how to produce food is vastly more important than american history or most of the literature they would learn in school. Industrial farming is stupid, and totally unnecessary. Using permaculture and silvopasture, you can produce much more (and more nutritious) food in the same space, while improving (rather than destroying) fertility. If done right, you don't need pesticides, your animals don't need antibiotics or dewormers, and the whole thing mostly runs itself aside from a little pruning/herding and a lot of picking. The only downside to these methods is they take some time to get going, and they require knowledgeable farm workers rather than dirt cheap migrant laborers or a combine.
    • corty 6y ago
      > Manure isn't a problem if you free range your animals, have landscape structures to prevent runoff and have other animals that eat bugs in the same space such as chickens. Then it just contributes fertility to the land. I would contest that. Animal manure runoff has always been a problem to e.g. brooks and rivers and only in recent years has the legislation started to prevent some of the more problematic practices. Like grazing all your cattle on a soon-to-be-flooded grassland next to the river. Nitrate pollution of the ground water is also more pronounced in German areas where free-range animals are more common. > Industrial farming is stupid, and totally unnecessary. Using permaculture and silvopasture, you can produce much more (and more nutritious) food in the same space, while improving (rather than destroying) fertility. If done right, you don't need pesticides, your animals don't need antibiotics or dewormers, and the whole thing mostly runs itself aside from a little pruning/herding and a lot of picking. The only downside to these methods is they take some time to get going, and they require knowledgeable farm workers rather than dirt cheap migrant laborers or a combine. If it were only farmer's knowledge that is required, farming industry would do it in an instant, considering the significant advantages you named. I would guess that either the methods you mention are far more labour-intensive as well as requiring more qualified labour. Or that the advantages aren't really that significant. Industrial agriculture is hunting for every bit of efficiency gain, and lots of businesses are looking for an edge any way they can. So it seems strange to me that the methods you mention aren't used in any significant amount.
      • CuriouslyC 6y ago
        If you aren't running a ridiculous number of head per acre and you have swales cut into your land to control runoff, manure is absolutely not a problem. Permaculture + Silvopasture is labor intensive at harvest for sure, because you can't just run a tree shaker or tractor down rows, but you need to forage through a food forest which requires some knowledge and care. The bigger downside for industrial farmers is that instead of one product you can unload to a co-op easily, you have 30+ crops you need to find a market for. In my experience a lot of farmers are fairly set in their ways. Even 100% win solutions like no till planting with cover crop grazing are being taken up very slowly.
  • neolog 6y ago
    Currently kids spend a lot of their time working in schools; I'm guessing working on farms might be better or worse depending on the farm and the school, but I don't know much about it. Where can I learn more?
  • phillc73 6y ago
    > The manure problem is a problem at any size of farm, the amount of manure per cow is somewhat constant. So concentrating all the cows in some factory farm doesn't really make anything worse as long as the total number of cows is somewhat constant. I wonder if this is true. Perhaps the real problem is the concentration of such a large amount of waste in those manure lakes. I don't have any fixed evidence or numbers, but recalling my youth working on a 200 - 250 cow dairy, the animals were strip grazed in paddocks during the day and night. They would therefore mostly defecate in the paddock, on the grass, spread across a wider area and acting as a natural fertiliser. There was a small manure pond with wastewater from the dairy itself, but this was not large. Problems with large manure lakes intuitively seem more likely as the nitrates and other nasties are concentrated, something which doesn't seem as bad with the same amount of manure spread across a grassy paddock.
    • Laforet 6y ago
      This is indeed the case. On the other side of the same issue, the loss of large mammals in the wild slows down the natural cycling of nitrogen and this has a knock-on effect that leads to further loss of biomass. This has been an issue since the start of human civilization but intensive herding of animals certainly did not help.
    • corty 6y ago
      > I don't have any fixed evidence or numbers, but recalling my youth working on a 200 - 250 cow dairy, the animals were strip grazed in paddocks during the day and night. They would therefore mostly defecate in the paddock, on the grass, spread across a wider area and acting as a natural fertiliser. This is something the author mentions in passing: Almost everywhere, farms are required by law to have a certain amount of land per piece of cattle to spread the manure on. So as long as that certain amount of land is large enough and the spreading happens sufficiently often, there shouldn't be a problem. If there is a problem, current regulations need to be updated. That land requirement will also naturally limit the total amount of cattle that is being raised.
  • CaptArmchair 6y ago
    > the total number of cows is somewhat constant. But the number of cows isn't constant. The entire premise of the article is a demonstration of how large numbers and power laws work in economics. > To feed a growing population on earth, we do need industrial farming. Do we? That's a massively contested debate. See: (Neo)Malthusianism. > But in general, higher efficiency and more professional operations should be applauded These aren't virtues that one should blindly laud if the net result is externalizing costs towards the commons: society and ecology. What's the point of being able to feed 8 or 9 billion people on the planet, if quality of life for the majority of those individuals is rather low? The article rightly points at the glaring moral questions beneath all of this.
    • corty 6y ago
      >> To feed a growing population on earth, we do need industrial farming. > Do we? That's a massively contested debate. See: (Neo)Malthusianism. On the one hand, you dismiss my population growth argument as "Malthusianism" (which I don't consider a counter-argument at all, it is just naming things). But on the other hand you acknowledge that we cannot just feed ever more people: > What's the point of being able to feed 8 or 9 billion people on the planet, if quality of life for the majority of those individuals is rather low? So on one hand you are dismissing my argument as Malthusian, on the other hand you are making a very Malthusian argument yourself. My argument would be: I agree with you that mankind needs to shrink and right-size so the then-sustainable population can have some level of comfort for everyone.
  • ilikerashers 6y ago
    On family farms (and my own), manure is used as fertilizer. On factory farms most manure is disposed of and animals fed on grain. Children of parents on a family farm is hardly exploitation. Paying illegal immigrants sub minimum wage to squeeze additional profit out of the land certainly is a bigger problem. Do we need industrial farming if it's driven by big capital? If the industry is happy to damage the environment, flout labor laws, harm animal welfare is it worth it? Personally I think the cost is too high and if anything, food is too cheap now.
    • corty 6y ago
      > Children of parents on a family farm is hardly exploitation. How so? I know it often isn't against labor laws because there are specific exceptions for exactly that case. But in any other circumstance the same thing _is_ considered exploitative.
      • ilikerashers 6y ago
        Answered below but there is a difference between a full time job and doing chores around a farm. If you can't see the nuance in that then I suggest you visit a family farm some day.
  • gizmondo 6y ago
    > The undocumented immigrant labour problem isn't as big a problem as the family farms' systemic problem of child labour and child exploitation. Which the author glosses over in his point of view. He doesn't gloss over it, he glorifies it as "family bonding" or something. It's disgusting.
    • ilikerashers 6y ago
      How? Helping on a family farm has been done for generations. A corporate exploiting Illegal immigration is a preferred solution? Interesting values.
      • gizmondo 6y ago
        Owning slaves was also done for generations, so not sure what your point is. Both are bad, but according to my values exploiting children is somewhat worse than exploiting adults, yes.
        • ilikerashers 6y ago
          Do you classify helping with chores around the house as child exploitation too? As on a farm, kids have chores. They're not working night and day.
          • gizmondo 6y ago
            They often work _way_ more than other children. If your kid is doing "chores around the house" for hours every day, it's exploitation too.
          • joerandom 6y ago
            Do you have ANY idea how chores on a farm look like? Hint: it's nothing like vacuming or taking dishes out from a dishwasher. It's lots of hard work. Dealing with excrements and dangerous animals (even a cow or pig is dangerous in confined spaces).
  • TrispusAttucks 6y ago
    This logic seems wrong. By definition pollution is a problem of location and concentration.
• VBprogrammer 6y ago
  It's difficult but I'm not sure what the alternatives might be. The largest dairy farms can cut costs in ways which would not be practical for small farms because the capital expenditure (robotised milking parlours for example) or the market power (being able to negotiate on feed prices). The mega lots with thousands of cows can sell milk for less than it costs a small farm to produce it. The only available option is specialisation. Build a brand around products manufactured on site, cheeses and butters for example. Diversification, I've been on two ex-dairy farms, one now produces mostly beer and the other is an ice cream based tourist attraction.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    You forgot the most important advantage of scale: Just barely comply with the letter of the law or be in the gray area, have a legal team that makes you harder to pick on and then wait for the regulators to figure out that the small guys are the easy targets.
• blowski 6y ago
  One of the main characters in Serotonin (Michel Houellbecq, 2019) is a French dairy farmer watching his family's business slowly go bankrupt. It's a ficitonal version of a simlar set of events, causes and consequences.
  • lioeters 6y ago
    Thanks for mentioning the book, on my reading list now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_(novel)
• belorn 6y ago
  There were a news article this fall about how demand for more ecological produced dairy and meat has gone down while public opinion about ecological produced dairy and meat has gone up. The explanation provided there is that while people increasingly care more about how the dairy and meat is produced, those same people are also reducing their consumption. This seems to be an area where pollution control and stricter regulation in regard to animal health is required in order to see improvements. In addition, human trafficking has become common practice in many cheap labor industries, to the point where the police has stopped investigating because otherwise they would have no resources to spend on areas which are more politically valuable. Many workers are forced to work or end up not getting paid, and then scared into avoiding the police in fear of violence. Work safety and health care rarely exist, and in the case of farm workers and construction there is few if any support system to help victims.
  • corty 6y ago
    Also, ecological production has suffered several scandals, quality problems and marketing snafus that have lead to it decreasing in popularity or getting less ecological: E.g. there have been scandals around contaminated ecological ("Bio-" in Germany) eggs because chicken droppings more easily contaminate eggs when nests and cages are larger and more free-range. Ecological vegetables had acceptance problems because the lack of pesticides meant that the looks were less appealing in the supermarket, leading to the increased use of "green" pesticides (that is, "naturally occuring" poison) and barrier methods that harm wildlife like nets and foils. Ecological meat has also consistently over-promised and under-delivered on the customer-apparent quality of the product. You just don't notice if the steak you are eating came from a happy cow...
    • belorn 6y ago
      I fully agree there exist problem with the ecological branding, and with eggs in particularly the standard is a bit shoehorned. In eu, ecological egg is mostly about how many chicken live per m^2, which is non-obvious by the name. For non-ecological egg in EU, the minimum standard is 16 hens in the small space of 6 cm^2 minimum per hen and cage. That to me is animal cruelty. Ecological egg has a minimum requirement of 6 hens per m^2 when inside, no battery cages, access to daylight 24/7 and outside access for half the year and then with 4m^2 per hen. There is also addition requirements for the feed but it feels so much less important than simply not having a cage where each hen has 6cm to stand on.
• morpheos137 6y ago
  Why don't struggling dairy farmers convert to beef production? Seems to me it would be much less labour intensive and more profitable. Obviously if every struggling dairy farmer converted to beef it would drive prices down. I think people are eating less dairy in general than in past times. I am not lactose intolerant but I don't think I have had milk or ice cream for at least a year. I do eat cheese and yogurt so maybe that (more than?) counterbalances my lack of milk consumption. With regard to the manure issue there are various ways to handle it. Some modern barns are set up with trenches running along the stalls, the stalls can be periodically washed into the trenches, and the trenches drain into a giant holding tank. Manure can be used as a nitrogen source for fields fertilisation or it can be anaerobically digested for methane which can be used as a source of energy.
  • urthor 6y ago
    Because beef uses feedlots with grain as well, and have the same manure lakes. The beef industry has figured out that cattle fatten up far faster on grain, so they leave the cattle out for I think it's 12 months to basically grow to their "adult" size, then put them on grain for a few months to fatten up. They have it precisely timed, because the cattle basically die on the all grain no silage diets they get, or would if they don't get sent to the abattoir literally a fortnight before.
  • dbg31415 6y ago
    > Why don't struggling dairy farmers convert to beef production? Seems to me it would be much less labor intensive and more profitable. Love these comments. Clearly someone who has never been on a dairy farm vs. a cattle ranch. =P So for dairy, you normally have smaller pastures (less land) and keep your cows fed hay and expensive foods to help keep them producing high quality milk. For beef production, you'd normally have large pastures for cattle to graze on grass. More land, more naturally occurring (cheaper), but lower caloric-dense food. Big call out... there are different kinds of cows for milk and beef. Holstein's make milk, Angus make hamburgers. There's a huge list of types of cattle... each have their own pros and cons for beef vs. dairy production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cattle_breeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cattle_breeds To support the "more land" approach, you have horses to move the cattle around between pastures. You also need equipment to put up hay for the winter (buying hay is expensive). You can go the feedlot route, but that's more the "finishing school" for beef production. Not a lot of margins at small scale. Dangerous to keep too many cows together too, from a disease perspective. As a rancher, since you've got a tractor anyway for hay production, and ample land, you may want to plant a few fields of corn, wheat, millet... anything to sort of help cover costs of all the expensive equipment and cost of land. And you're not bound to a rigid daily care schedule for the cattle. Ranchers have spurts of work... more cows, living outdoors, so harder calving seasons... more work for branding and such, more time fixing fence for bigger pastures. Put ranchers and dairy farmers in a room... they're different people. They may look similar, but they're just wired differently. You invest a small fortune in the milking facilities, if you run a dairy operation. You invest in land if you're a ranch. They're not like "oh, let's just flip a switch and it's converted." Anyway I'd write more but just because you have cows, doesn't mean it's at all interchangeable.
• jeromenerf 6y ago
  Is it even worth it to make cheese anywhere else than France, Switzerland and Italy mountains?
  • jansan 6y ago
    I have relatives who run an organic farm, which is rather large and industrialized for a farm that has the official German "bio" label. They make their own cheese as a side business, but it is only sold locally. This way they can charge a higher price and there are no middlemen, so it is profitable. But I doubt this would scale.
    • arethuza 6y ago
      We were on holiday in France skiing for a week once and the hotel dinner included 4 different local cheeses each night - none were repeated of the course of a week. It wasn't exactly a smart hotel (2* I think) but the food was sublime.
      • jansan 6y ago
        Some of the cheese they sell in France would be classified as a biological weapon in Germany. They are awesome.
        • YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
          Equally, Limburger would be classed as a biological weapon in France, and I dare say, the world. Brevibacterium Linens for the ... eeeugh. (but, good cheese)
          • jeromenerf 6y ago
            Nope. There are many French cheeses like that. Munster, livarot, époisses ...
            • 6y ago
• ainiriand 6y ago
  As a vegan, I am concerned about the cruel treatment of farm animals. Losing family farms only aggravates the problem in this price race against the bigger actors in dairy production. While dairy is not strictly necessary for grown ups, I recognise that it will be present for some time so we should care about how it is produced. Dairy should be more expensive than it is now, similar to what happens to meat.
  • speeder 6y ago
    Mind you, activist veganism is one of the biggest reasons family farms are being destroyed all over the world. Basically, low quality food is flooding the market, and getting purchased by the poorer population, that don't feel they have a choice in what they eat, because they eat whatever is necessary to fit in their budget. Meanwhile people that CAN afford to buy high quality food from family farms, don't, because of activism convincing them that doing so is evil, specially any farm that has anything to do with animals, this results in things that are actually really bad, like climates where wool is an excellent product have the farmers fail due to lack of demand, and instead people start buying plastic-based clothes, that contribute to plastic pollution. Or in Brazil: people love to blame the animal industry there for the fires, but it is not so simple, the massive areas being deforested ilegally are often used to produce soybeans, that are on an evergrowing demand due to two sources of demand compounding: 1. As family farms die, cattle instead of eating grass (something that in Brazil and some other countries was important, as some places only grow grass, and not other plants more useful for direct human comsumption), people switch to factory animal farms, that require rations, that are often made of soybeans. 2. Meanwhile the upper strata of society is switching from high quality meat (that would eat grass) to eating soybean-based products (like soybean milk, soybean-based meat, etc...) I think many activists have their heart in the right place, but they don't understand they are causing more problems than fixing them, the soybean industry is massively destructive, incentivizing it is extremely bad idea. final note: Remembered other major source of soybean usage... when in the 60s and 70s there was this massive media campaign against usage of animal fats for frying, people switched to soybean oil to fry instead, Brazil also produces massive amounts of that, and I know many people that personally use soybean oil because they honestly believe it is healthier to them and better for the environment than using butter, pork fat, etc...
• foxhop 6y ago
  And now the land will continue to be gobbled up by the Gates foundation and trust. Unregulated capitalism winner takes all regardless of industry. Monopolies and patients on life and genetics as far as the eyes can see.
  • esaym 6y ago
    Don't forget China: https://foxsanantonio.com/news/yami-investigates/chinese-wind-farm-in-texas-its-the-greatest-national-security-concern-said-hurd https://foxsanantonio.com/news/yami-investigates/chinese-win...
• urthor 6y ago
  On one point the article has made. Canadians are really really unhappy with their milk system, they have some of the highest priced milk in the entire world and they despise it. "probably through a supply management program similar to what Canada has" is a nonstarter for cityfolk. It would mean $4 milk.
  • k__ 6y ago
    We have rather cheap milk here in Germany, because it's heavily subsidized. But right now plant based alternatives are on the rise. I didn't buy milk for years now.
  • refurb 6y ago
    I remember the first time I saw cheese prices in the US and almost cried. A 1 kg block of good cheese was like $20-30, not $60-90.
    • pja 6y ago
      ! Decent cheddar is £7 / kg in the UK & that’s ignoring the cheap stuff.
      • hc-taway 6y ago
        Once you're above the grade of "cheese" that I'd suppose Europeans wouldn't recognize as such at all, even our low-end actual cheese in the US is incredibly expensive compared to (Western, at least, IDK about the rest) Europe. Not sure why.
    • MarkusWandel 6y ago
      Costco is our salvation here in Ontario. Cheese prices are high, yes, but about 1/2 at Costco compared to anywhere else. They have good selection and quality. Reference is a 500g block of Jarlsberg at currently $9.50 Canadian. Expensive, but still affordable.
    • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      Officially, US cheddar seems to be trending about $12/kg ($5.50/lb). I actually pay a lot less, ~$12.50 for a 4lb block (Walmart). ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236863/retail-price-of-cheddar-cheese-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/236863/retail-price-of-c...
• dbg31415 6y ago
  > It seems hard to believe but at one point it was possible to make a decent living as a dairy farmer with a small herd (what’s now considered small, anyway). In 1981 my dad had a herd of 82 milking cows and he cracked the top 50 in all of northwest Wisconsin’s 22 counties for average milk production. > As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the “farmers” are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation. Mirrors a lot of what my family went through. Grew up on a cattle ranch in the 80s... ranches were already 5-10x larger than they had been the generation before. Efficiency and capitalism and finding better ways to solve problems... totally get the reasons for the consolidation. Just sucks for the people. Farmers and Ranchers have been a dying breed for so very long now. And replacing the family farm with a factory farm -- practical or reasonable or not -- it just seems so... offensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E Interesting with the dairy cow milk production graphs since the 1970s. Probably belongs on this list. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
• lettergram 6y ago
  As someone who’s spent a lot of time in and around farms. I even bought a farm last week! This is an accurate depiction for the vast majority of farms. It’s an industry where you have a high over head cost (want to start raising cattle - $300k land, $50k equipment, $30k housing / barn, $20k fencing, $10k to start a herd - profit in 2-3 years). This scales well. Get some more land, you can keep the equipment running longer, concentrate cows, etc I do think this creates overall a less healthy and productive nation. The reason I bought a farm was for my families nutrition. Food from the store has far less nutrition. Working on a farm teaches you hard work (as the article describes) and family bonds. We personally don’t plan on making much profit, if any. All that being said, focusing on the niche is important. In Tennessee they produce grass fed cattle. Many farmers make profits with relatively small herds. I’m planning on planting a walnut or pawpaw grove, and raising elk. Unique goods provide a way to make a profit without scale. This is like every industry.
  • willismichael 6y ago
    I understand that you're probably estimating bare minimum costs, but getting started for half a million dollars is actually way more affordable than I imagined you would describe. That's comparable to what some people pay for a middle class suburban home near a lot of the mid-sized metropolitan areas around the United States.
    • lettergram 6y ago
      That’s literally the cost I just paid lol But yes, $500k is about the minimum. Plus ~40 acres. For grass fed beef you can raise probably 20 heads and buy supplementals. You might only make $5-10k up to maybe $30k (buying hay or leasing other land to grow feed) profit initially. BUT it’s not a ton of work, really only feeding the cattle every other day, doing injections on the cattle and cutting / bailing hay 2-3 times a year. Average is probably 10 hrs of work a week. When those trees I mentioned start growing in, I can net closer to $2-3k per acre. So closer to $60k profit on that 40 acre farm. That’s only one harvest a year, plus checking periodically. I can work a full-time job besides the 2 week harvest season. Another important factor for me, was the protection from inflation. Food prices go up during inflation, so my farm is worth more. Further, what the farm PRODUCES is worth more. So I took out a loan and my loan will be easier to pay off from the production and be worth more when I sell. Effectively letting me leverage the loan to make more profit.
• bsima 6y ago
  buy raw milk from a local family farm. its one of the best ways to spend your money
• JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  My niece is (was) a Milkmaid in Switzerland. Her family dairy farm sold off all the cattle a few years ago when the state de-regulated milk. I remember the cattle were pastured across the road. There was an underpass for the cattle to get from barn to field and back. In the evening they would begin their trek, the herd gathering and filing through the underpass. Each cow would take her place in the barn, in a stall with her name, ready to be milked. To be sure, they re-purposed the land and farm. The national polo team practices in the field and stables in the barn. So that's some income. But not the same. My niece is a teacher now.
• IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  unfortunately the cow seems out of the barn for reasons other than legislation being missing. Farmers have not adapted to changes in conditions and they had time to do so. The point of a union should not be to collute to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources to break monopolies in creameries, or pollution. Any farmer should have seen the writing on the wall to have 1 creamery being their only customer, and develop options immediately. Their lifelihood depended on it!! Farmers can't be kicked out of a coop they own. Too late for that. Also, farmers should have pooled resources and sued to high hell all the pollutants and reported farms using illegal labor. Petition townsfolk to start class action sue pollutants. Hit where it hurts. The article never talks about that. Only complaints about the law (which incidentally, should have not happened if farmers had been proactive at getting their communities to unite against the pollutants). Instead of putting bad actors out of business, this article seems to state that small farmers were not successful in petitioning - via legislation - to become bad actors themselves. Unfortunate. Legislation seems to have gotten small farmers in trouble, legislation will not come to the rescue now. Legislation is for the big guns. They are not that.
  • Spooky23 6y ago
    Agriculture was the first victim of the red/blue phenomenon. Agricultural and trade policy is all about government supported grain industry. For the dairy farmer, they are stuck between regulatory reform that dramatically increases the supply of milk by creating a national market, while their downstream supply chain partners are allowed to consolidate and form monopolies, because American legal theory is insane. I live in upstate NY from a former dairy producing region. I’m aware of 5 different dairy processors that were within 30-40 miles of my childhood home. Now there is one larger company. It’s only getting worse. The push for meat-substitutes will just lead to even more consolidation, and start introducing supply risks down the road. The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted, and climate change will affect the Southern California miracle in the desert. In the meantime, the well-watered, prime farm I worked on as a teen had most of the topsoil stripped and sold, and there is a subdivision with 40-50 houses on it.
    • 6y ago
• 14 6y ago
  I love how this article mentions Canada’s Dairy Cartel. They make it seem like such a good thing. It is not. We pay very high prices for milk and dairy products. I would rather a free market where those who can provide cheap and quality get the market share. Instead there is no competition the system is really screwed and definitely not endorsed by all Canadians. One gallon of milk costs us about $6Cad. Mean while if you have a good year and your cows really produce well you are only allowed to bring to market there set amount you produce. So yes Canada has a dairy cartel that price fixed and regulates the entire market but is allowed.
• kickout 6y ago
  Great write up OP! Love hearing first hand accounts of the “get big or get out” directive that probably caused many unintended second and third order effects
• duxup 6y ago
  Farming as a business gets idealized in the US and there's often this concept of a good old days when family farming was profitable and stable. But historically speaking farming has always been a boom and bust industry. Even during the land rush days in the US the amount of space granted per farm was barely enough / not enough to scrape by, even at that time. Now everything is so heavily tied up with legislation to try to recreate appropriate market conditions that I suspect whatever the actual market would be without all that legislation is an unknown. I grew up around folks trying to scrape by on their family farms living at the whims of markets that can make or break them over the course of just a few years. As much as I like the ideal of the family farm, I'm not sure it is, and not sure it ever was a good way to make a living (outside some exceptions).
  • pullmn 6y ago
    Yes, if you compare farmers with actors, they seem to have similar problems with stability of employment, low pay, and hard working conditions. In both cases these are partly caused by unavoidable factors about the industry, partly caused by ruthless suppliers, customers, investors and so on, partly caused (let's be honest) by the fact that many people make a lifestyle choice to do those professions, and will put up with poor conditions to keep on doing so. However, we constantly hear about the rough deal farmers are getting and how important it is to do something to help them. And we never hear this about actors.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • YinglingLight 6y ago
      You don't need Shakespeare to live
      • pullmn 6y ago
        Well, you don't need steak either, but both things are considered extremely important to human life and our society.
  • 6y ago
• nineplay 6y ago
  I think he's glossing over the obvious. A friend of mine was just reminiscing about growing up in her family's dairy farm. Every Saturday morning, every Sunday morning, every Christmas you get up to take care of the cows. Feel sick? You've got to get up and take care of the cows. Want to go on vacation? Can't, there's no one you can leave the cows with. It's a hard life - maybe a satisfying life in some ways but there are a lot of sacrifices. The author points out that only one of his brothers wanted to take over the dairy. He doesn't point out that without that one brother with the insane work ethic the farm would have shut down years ago. It's not a sustainable business model.
  • mitjak 6y ago
    what a strange point. "the obvious" is not that there's concentration of power but that farming is hard? what about small farms where many people are happy to continue working because they find it fulfilling?
    • nineplay 6y ago
      The "obvious" is that operating a family farm as a profitable business is hard. Harder than three of the four adult children in the article are willing to work. That doesn't mean there aren't people who want to do it, that means that a lot of family farms are going out of business because there aren't enough people who want to do it, regardless of external pressures.
      • mitjak 6y ago
        that conclusion doesn't necessarily follow though. the proposed thesis by the article author is difficulty of having enough cattle to break even. you need to make enough to grow your operation, which is difficult given that you rely on external factors like creameries. the only reason you only have your family's labour to rely on could also be the difficulty of scaling up.
        • nineplay 6y ago
• sologoub 6y ago
  Fortunately for me, some US producers have managed to create a sustainable business model, while providing great (if old fashioned) product: https://blog.goodeggs.com/blog/straus-family-creamery-pioneering-organic-dairy https://blog.goodeggs.com/blog/straus-family-creamery-pionee... Straus milk is not cheap at ~$9 per gallon, but we don’t consume a lot and the quality is simply amazing. Still haven’t figured out what it is, but regular cheap US milk makes me incredibly sick to the point that my DR diagnosed me with lactose intolerance, except I noticed when traveling to continental EU, I never got sick even when accidentally eating something with dairy. Turns out I can have milk and milk-based product just fine, but something about the regular US milk was like poison to me. Tried the A2 bandwagon - didn’t work. I can’t now recall how I stumbled on Straus product, but it was life changing and I really hope they continue to survive!
  • snikeris 6y ago
    I'm also willing to pay more for milk I perceive as better. That seems to be the way forward...distinguish your milk as something better than what's usually found at the supermarket. The farm near me places emphasis on their breed of cows.
• SavantIdiot 6y ago
  Fun fact: newborn cows are switched from their mother's milk to an industrial milk formula just five days after their birth, instead of the normal weaning period of 8 months, so that humans can drink the calf's milk.
  • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    > Fun fact:... Fun is weird where you are. What are your amusement parks like?
  • hycaria 6y ago
    Far from an universal truth from my experience as a veterinarian
    • SavantIdiot 6y ago
      Really? Tell me: what is the typical time your patients wean their calves? Because it literally cannot be 8 months, because then there is no milk left to sell. So what is the weaning period, and what are the calves fed before they start grazing? EDIT: Nevermind, I just went through your comment history. You seem to be a lot of contradictory things. Like, both male and female.
      • hycaria 6y ago
        For meat breeds, the veals stay under the mother. If it's for veal meat, they can be bred very late without being weaned at all nor having a diversifying diet (and have iron deficiencies for it but they're slaughtered soon enough), to maximise the mass of veal meat. Basically, they're raised by the mother. Maybe formula if there's a problem with the mothers production but not otherwise. And these breeds are not milked for human consumption anyways so .. ? For dairy breeds, considering a good holstein makes 50L of milk per day and a veal drinks 2-5L per meal (2x a day) depending on age, you've got a lot of milk left. And since most medications make milk improper for human use, this is the milk that's given to a calf, past the first milking (colostrum, which is too fat to be suited for consumption anyways), bc there will most probably be at least one cow under medication at any point of time. Otherwise they take classic milk. For high value breeds, like for specific cheeses or so it's worth to buy formula. But for your basic milk pissing holstein, probably not. I mean, formula is not free. Weaning is not 8 months anyways. I guess you could, just like some kids are breast fed until 4 yo... But a few months is enough. At 8 months they would not feed 100% on milk anyways, that would be an always shrinking part of the diet. So even in that scenario, the mother would still produce from 10-20L of milk and the calf would drink maybe 2L over a day. The narrative of the calf deprived of its mothers milk to feed humans just shows a laughable lack of knowledge of the milking industry, yet that doesn't stop people from talking out of their asses. Breeds are now so proficient they far exceed the needs of their calf.
• cryptica 6y ago
  I keep saying this and repeating over and over again... Yet keep getting downvoted. The monopolization of everything is caused by monetary policy. All these megacorps are not a natural phenomena. They are not competing on an even playing field. Even die-hard capitalists who read Ayn Rand and watched her interviews will understand that monopolization should not happen without government intervention. The current monetary policy (of printing money and then giving control of it to existing capital holders based on how much capital they have) is bound to lead to this highly inefficient economic situation... One which takes the entire economy on a downward spiral while essentially bribing rich people with free money to keep playing along... Thus we get increasing inequality. Then when the big corporations keep beating and buying up the competition (thanks to the disproportional amount of free credit that they have access to), they will claim that it's because they're more efficient (aka economies of scale) but in reality, the big players are just getting subsidized by free money from the government. Simple as that. Give me access to 1 billion dollars of credit over 50 years and even with no industry experience, I can bankrupt all competing small businesses in any industry and in any city I want... Possibly in the entire country depending on the country.
  • petermcneeley 6y ago
    How do you explain the railway monopolies?
    • cryptica 6y ago
      Monetary policy allowed a small number of people to accumulate a disproportionate amount of capital. This capital allowed them to lobby and influence politicians to give them the right to build and own a massive rail network. It simply would not have been possible for any group of people to build a rail network which traverses an entire country without serious government intervention. Think of the road/rail crossings that had to be built, bridges over rivers and other parts of the rail network which was built on public land... Think of the number of people who were probably forced by their local government to sell their land to build the railway on top... There was a lot of government intervention to make it possible. And the amount of capital required to build such rail network could only have been accumulated as a result of unjust monetary policy. The complexity involved in operating a large enough enterprise to accumulate that kind of wealth would simply not be possible on a competitive level playing field to begin with. On a level playing field, there would be too many profit opportunities for employees to quit and become competitors. There is clearly an artificial force holding everything together. That force is monetary policy. It used to be gold reserve debasement and now it's fiat money printing.
• ro-mx 6y ago
  Dead of agriculture in general happened to undeveloped countries like the one I am from a long time ago. You might not see it now but the next logical thing to happen is starvation of mass population, and a state of irrecoverable workforce, many of us around the world are doing the same, leaving the farms to go working on computers. Let me tell you this: you cannot eat bytes.
• Avernar 6y ago
  There used to be a time when every town had a dairy and also nice men who would deliver it to you in glass reusable containers and perhaps even have sex with your wife.
• jpollock 6y ago
  In New Zealand, the average dairy herd size on the South Island is 611 (414 nationally). In Wisconsin, it's 150. Looks like there's a lot of room for consolidation in Wisconsin. https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/special-reports/dairy-crisis/2019/12/06/industrial-dairy-impacts-wisconsin-environment-family-farms/4318671002/ https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/special-reports/dairy... http://www.siddc.org.nz/about-siddc/south-island-dairying/ http://www.siddc.org.nz/about-siddc/south-island-dairying/
  • u678u 6y ago
    lots of farms in the US have 1000+ cows. > According to the USDA's 2017 Census of Agriculture report, which is published every five years, most US milk cows (55%) reside on farms that milk over 1,000 cows. This is in contrast to twenty years earlier https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/sectors/dairy/Changing-Landscape-US-Dairy.html https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/sectors/dairy/Changing-...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• drewg123 6y ago
  My uncle owned a large dairy farm before he died. He loved farming, loved his cows ("the girls"), and loved farming enough to farm until he died, even though it was hard physical labor that had already taken a large toll on his body. The running joke in the family was that he made more from real-estate speculation than he ever did from farming. His farm was next to a major interstate and in the suburban expansion path for his metro area. He'd buy land and farm it when the price was low, and because he farmed it, the real estate taxes were negligible. He'd then sell it when the prices where high and use it to subsidize the farm. He died a millionaire, but lived in a ratty, falling down farmhouse and drove a 20+ year old car.
  • newthrawywhodis 6y ago
    This is one of the only real ways to make money as a small farmer, the others being agro-tourism (pick your own), hospitality (airbnb, events etc) or most difficultly direct to consumer farm sales. >He died a millionaire, but lived in a ratty, falling down farmhouse and drove a 20+ year old car. To some people this is a feature, not a bug. He also probably wasn't surrounded by 100 nosy neighbors.
• Sytten 6y ago
  Even here in Canada with regulation we see the same consolidation happening. The quotas of production have become so expensive that it is not possible to start from scratch. In the case of my familly the cows were sold in 1989 because it was either growing the farm or selling. Now we produce only corn & soybean and despiste our ~100 acres it is not enough to sustain one person without a side job. There is not much money to be made in agriculture for small farms, that's why I am a software engineer.
• jasonv 6y ago
  I visited a dairy in Utah a couple of summers ago. 130 cows, 3 employees. It's a fully automated facility, using equipment from Germany. The cows enter a stall, the machine milks them, gives them a treat, they move on. Employees get a text if a cow hasn't milked itself in a while... usually a tap on their shoulder is enough to get them to walk over to the machine. Even yet, the person giving the tour said they don't make enough money selling the milk to sustain the operation. They also make high-end cheeses on-prem, and that's what keeps them in the black.
  • laszlokorte 6y ago
    I had to look that up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLjI_eixBQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLjI_eixBQk
    • jasonv 6y ago
      Yeah, the screen looks the same, I think the Utah dairy had a newer model. They also mentioned that there were only 3 dairy farms in the state with any kind of automated milking machines.
  • BitwiseFool 6y ago
    I recall hearing that there is a glut of milk in the US because there are just too many dairy cows. Is this still true?
    • anonAndOn 6y ago
      Don't forget rBGH.[0] Canada and the EU banned it, but thanks to big Pharma, you can get still get hormone adulterated milk in the US of A. [0]https://www.organicvalley.coop/blog/rBGH-decoded-what-is-bovine-growth-hormone/ https://www.organicvalley.coop/blog/rBGH-decoded-what-is-bov...
      • NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
        Is there good scientific evidence that rBGH is bad for you? I don't know a lot about this, but my first guess is that "naturalness" / "organicness" partisans are opposed to it for reasons related to the non-scientifically-supported ideas they have that are rooted in purity instincts.
• aurizon 6y ago
  This is all exacerbated by the decline in birth rates. Milk marketing promotes milk as a nearly perfect food - and it is, but it is costly for the ~6% of nutritional content in milk, (skim and 2%BF being lower). I only use milk for tea and often a gallon sours before I finished - so I switched to superfiltered bagged 3 packs, as the sealed ones last a month in the fridge. So you have super cows making more and a populace drinking less - it does not augur well...
• u678u 6y ago
  I'm torn on this, my uncles and grand parents were all dairy farmers with their own farms. I work in an office behind a computer every day. I dont envy them at all.
• intrasight 6y ago
  If an article was titled "On the death of my family social media service" would resonate? I assume not. Wouldn't these also be true: labor of love; work 24-7; can't take a vacation. Why does our society treat family farms differently than other businesses?
• m463 6y ago
  I think there's one thing to mention - this has been happening for a long long time. In my family tree, there were lots and lots of farmers, and now there are no farmers left. Looking backward along your family tree you'll probably find the same, probably like something in this blog post. I think this is the graph that might describe it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture#/media/File:Transition_from_agriculture_to_developed_economy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture#/media/File:Transi... I think we have to sort of figure out not only the loss, but the gain.
• benjaminmaccini 6y ago
  This was written in 2019. There is another thread, but this is my first time reading. So I understand; - Milk prices are going down due to a decrease in the cost of production + overproduction. - Farmland availability is decreasing because CAFOs are incentivized (required?) to buy more land. Property value is also decreasing for farmers near CAFOs. - Small farmers operate on decreasing margins. - Small farmers lack protection against rising overhead costs, this was historically done through co-ops, however these co-ops have grown to be massive conglomerates and fail to serve the underlying communities. - CAFOs are the leading pollutants of water sources. They are also the leading consumers of ground water. - There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of small farming operations. Bad economic policies lead to public health and cultural crises. I can't help but draw some parallels to what has been happening in the Rust Belt (Hillbilly Elegy is a great read for this topic). It's insane how little I know about food economics and scary how much of an impact it has on communities, especially impoverished ones.
  • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    > It's insane how little I know about food economics and scary how much of an impact it has on communities, especially impoverished ones. America mostly stopped caring about the welfare of rural Americans sometime around WWII. There have been some brief blips (Appalachia 68, farms 78) but generally - concern for Americans to sustain themselves ends at the edge of metro areas. Neither pols, nor press nor most of us are interested in a meaningful way. To be clear, my assertion isn't an invitation to pit the rural poor against the urban poor. It's to highlight how Americans tend to be particular about which Americans merit their concern. For schlubs like me, that might be understandable. But for those folks who's actual job it is to look out for everyone - rarely caring about the welfare of some Americans (who are in real and sustained trouble) is just systemic neglect.
    • ska 6y ago
      > Neither pols, nor press nor most of us are interested in a meaningful way. I'm not sure that's true - it's just that overall people are much more interested in cheap food. Agriculture has been pulled into a race for the bottom here for a while, and small farms & rural communities are a nearly unavoidable casualty. The basic math here is easy, the moment labor becomes a significant contribution there is pressure to reduce it, which means either worse pay for the same work, or figuring out how to be more productive with less labor (automation, scaling) or a mixture of both. Overall there is a lot of concern with being able to keep a food supply going, but that doesn't' translate to caring about e.g. family farms remaining viable.
• harshaw 6y ago
  My Uncle started with a "family" farm in up state new york, maybe milking 80-100. Over the years as my Cousins took over, it turned into a commercial farm where they milk over 1000. The scale is pretty massive: from the barns that go on forever, to the giant pools of manure, the horizontal bunkers that store the sileage. They adapted I suppose - and because its a 3+ family farm with plenty of workers they can get time off from the grind. My Uncle, however, for years was the sole owner and worked his ass off 7 days a week. Its taken him a very long time in his retirement to be able to enjoy his time.
• mjparrott 6y ago
  I'd encourage anyone with advice for the farm industry to work 1 week on a farm if they haven't before. Many probably were born and raised on it but if you weren't, it'd be worth it.
• rl9 6y ago
  I had a similar upbringing, but in Canada. A lot of this rings true. Our family doesn't farm anymore,but for different reasons. Still, the pressure to go big or go home exists north of the border, too. I think Adam Smith nailed it back in the 1700s, when he noted that farmers could not take advantage of specialization. They're capitalists and labourers and landlords and semi-professional veterinarians and commodity traders all in one. Without specialization, they're unlikely to ever be very wealthy relative to the amount of labor and capital they input. The bigger farms can actually hire dedicated mechanics and accountants and such, so it's no surprise they get a better return on investment. That would probably remain true even if they didn't engage in shenanigans like undocumented laborers and excessive pollution, though no doubt those practices help them pull even further ahead. On a different note, since supply management was mentioned, I can't resist linking to this program: https://youtu.be/3d-FlQHoHpU https://youtu.be/3d-FlQHoHpU Short argument against supply management: it's a regressive tax on people who buy milk, cheese, butter and yogurt.
• mbrodersen 6y ago
  This is basic supply and demand in action. Farmers that don’t automate and scale up to be competitive will go out of business. The same thing happens in any market unless regulation/rules/monopolisation change the market conditions.
• imtringued 6y ago
  Deflation strikes again. Where exactly is hyperinflation supposed to come from if farmers are overproducing food?