America's Dairyland, no more

La Crosse County's Dairy Breakfast has been cancelled this year. Apparently nobody stepped forward to host the annual breakfast, which would ordinarily draw thousands of people out into the countryside to eat breakfast and tour a working dairy farm. The dairy breakfast's FB cancellation announcement is a muffled cry for help:

"We have lost a large number of dairy farms in the past few years, and especially in the last year alone. Those that remain are busy putting their efforts into getting through each week-- one day at a time." 

Wisconsin's license plate reads America's Dairyland. Yet nearly 20 percent of the state's dairy farms ceased operations in the last five years. Last year, a whopping 10 percent of those that remained did the same. There are now fewer than 8,000 dairy farms remaining, down from-- if you can believe it-- 100,000 operational dairy farms in the state of Wisconsin in 1960. Why? Because dairy farmers-- conventional farmers, at least-- are presently earning only three quarters of what it costs them to produce their milk. They haven't made enough to cover costs for five straight years now.

When I hear of the dairy breakfast being cancelled, when I see FB pictures of farmers loading their cows into auctioneers' trailers, when I read the poignant articles like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal's from a few months back-- I can't help but detect a pervasive sense of helplessness. In the back of my mind is an interview with a land-grant university ag professor in the dairy farming episode of Neflix's series Rotten. He says something to the effect that the dairy industry is changing, and that farmers will just have to adapt.

It's more of an observation of fact than a prediction, at least for the conventional industry. It's not the dairy industry that's dying. Despite an overall decline in dairy consumption, dairy is still an $88 billion industry here in Wisconsin. It's just that the milk is being produced on fewer, and far larger, farms. The farms that are making it are doing so by getting big. The economy of scale permits them to negotiate better prices on everything from feed to veterinary medicine. Again, it's not so much the dairy farming is dying as it is that dairying is dying as a way of life for a significant number of Wisconsinites. Again, the professor's comment is mainly a statement of fact. Dairy farmers will adapt, at least those few who survive.

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On the other side of town from us, the Plain-folk, as the Amish call themselves, have small, carefully tended garden plots and greenhouses. Many sell furniture, as well as maple syrup and fresh produce in season. Their signs always say, "No Sunday sales." Their children walk the side of the road barefoot, and there are so, so many buggies, especially on days when the Amish gather for worship, or the evenings when the young couples are courting.

Travel a little further down the road, however, and suddenly the idyllic, pastoral farms of the Plain-folk give way to a massive manure pit and several sprawling, industrial structures with massively-scaled fans constantly circulating the air. It's one of the largest mega-dairies in the region, the dairy supplier to a regional chain of filling stations. A few thousand cows spend their lives confined to these buildings, where they are milked in an 80-cow rotary parlor three times per day. A cow steps onto the platform every 7.8 seconds; 400 cows step on and off that platform every hour.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not contrasting the idyllic little farms of the Plain-folk with the local mega-dairy in order to condemn anybody. It's just such a glaring example of our changing countryside that it haunts me every time I pass by. To emphasize, the family that runs this mega-dairy is in at least their third generation farming the land. They're pillars in the local community. They've succeeded in a changing industry, and they're poised to survive. So I'm not trying to demonize them in any way.

Yet if dairies like theirs are the future (and again, the future is already largely here, since most milk nationwide is already produced in larger-to-mega sized dairies), the question becomes: What exactly are we sacrificing?

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As far as the answer is concerned, I have lots of thoughts running through my head. There is a thoroughly depressing must-read piece over at The American Conservative focused mainly on Iowa's pork industry, which is now entirely industrialized. The result in Iowa has been the utter decimation of rural communities-- ghost towns, closed high schools, massive increases in rural poverty, crime, and drug addiction. Yet there's more, too. There's the economic divide between the urban and the rural, between the parts of the country that matter politically and the parts that are referred to derisively as "fly-over country." There are the massive-scale recalls, the inhumane treatment of animals, the pollution that results from stockpiling of manure, the total lack of understanding on the part of most folks of what food is and where it comes from, etc., etc.

There are so many reasons why we should want more farmers and smaller farms. It's not just about preserving a way of life for a small percentage of the population or "saving the family farm." Rather, more farmers means that rural communities are not drained by urban flight, and that everybody, whether they're farming or not, is closer to their food. I am firmly convinced the industrialization of farming is the source of many, many woes.

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By the way, since the dairy farming is already so scaled up, the answer to stabilizing the number of Wisconsin dairy farms is not so simple as drinking more milk. Something drastic needs to change in the way milk is priced that will give preferential treatment to smaller farmers. There have been many proposals in recent years that have failed to gain traction. But the proposal of the NFO featured in this Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel article seems simple enough that it could be rallied around. It calls for a two-tiered system that would add $4 to the pay price per hundredweight of milk, up to one million pounds per month. That would give farms with up to 300 cows a competitive edge matching the competitive edge that mega-farms get due to the economy of scale.

More will follow on these matters, of course, in future posts.