Farm Side research was enough to make me cry this week, as I worked on a column a few yards from our empty cow barn. Taken in total, bookmarks saved over the week amount to a bushel and a peck of sadness and hard times for hard-working people who did little to cause this situation.
I'm grateful that the mainstream media has finally taken notice of what is happening in the dairy industry, but it is too late for far too many.
The first farm in this story once belonged to my late best friend's family. So sad to see the parlor we often took the 4-H kids through, back when they were learning about dairy, on television for such an unfortunate reason. We all spent a lot of time in those very barns just a few years ago, teaching kids, talking to our friends, admiring their cattle, and enjoying their dogs.
This article tells the same story in perhaps less emotional terms. "Sell out as fast as you can."
Here's another.
Locally, empty barns have become the norm unless they are Amish or big enough to ride out such a precipitous downturn. The boss recounts who owned each place when we drive by. What was once a vibrant community of small farms is fading fast, although our county is fortunate to still have a fairly strong farm economy and a good many well-run dairy farms still, including the one on our old friends' place.
This situation spills into every aspect of the rural economy, from the closing of independent grocery stores, soon replaced by national chain convenience stores, to local folks who lose their farm jobs as milk checks contract.
Prices for beef and hay go down too, as more and more farmers try to use their lifelong learning to stay in some form of agriculture. It's ugly and grim and probably not going to stop soon.
Incredibly sad and I feel so helpless.
ReplyDeleteHeartbreaking, indeed! What can be done to slow this economic disaster for family farms? What are the causes and what can be done? I was thinking similar thoughts a couple of weeks ago when I drove through a number of once-bustling small towns in the Adirondacks, towns that used to have hardware stores, a food/general store, and at least one family-run tavern/cafe. All shuttered. I drove for over two hours before I could find a place -- a Dollar Store! -- to buy something to eat. Is this all because of on-line shopping and the big-box stores? It sure seemed sad.
ReplyDeleteJan, honestly seeing the young farmers in our friends' barn, my late very best friend in the world's barn, I had tears in my eyes. No one understands what they are losing when the farmers leave the land. All of our three kids are so in demand for jobs because they have a strong work ethic, the ability to problem solve, and the know-how to do so many things, simply because they grew up on a farm. They may be the last generation that produces a lot of kids with those skills. farmers are going out across the board as far as age and size of operation is concerned. 40,000 cow dairies, 40 cow dairies. 70 year-old farmers, 27 year-old farmers. The Soviet Union killed all their farmers and relied on imports or went hungry until they could kinda, sorta, rebuild their farming infrastructure. They are still working on that. I thought America would be smarter, but I guess not.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline, a huge aspect of the dairy disaster that is rarely discussed anywhere but among farmers, is that the largest milk cooperative in the country became a profit driven entity, utterly out of the control of its farmers, and fell in with companies that buy milk, in probably the ugliest example of a monopoly on land or sea.
DFA bought up or controls virtually all processing facilities in the nation. Thus if a farmer isn't under their contract they can't sell milk because there is no one to buy it. They also forced small cooperatives to either join them or go out because they had no market. That is what hit us the worst. We have to have a small truck pick up the milk because of our driveway and they drove our coop out.
Then Wal*Mart undercut DFA to start their own gigantic milk plant in the Southwest, and hire their own farmers to supply it. DFA keeps prices low because they can sell milk to Dean and other companies they collude with to the profit of the big companies. They cut lots of farmers because they lost Wal*Mart as a customer.
I buy milk exclusively from Stewart's, which is independent of both, and has it's own farmers, all of whom are local folks, mostly in Saratoga County. Plus they make the best milk in the state. This long, long post barely touches on the issues behind the mess. It is complicated and has been slowly building for decades. If you are really interested I can come up with a LOT more information on the issue. lol