> 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). I

> 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/