Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink

8 Crisis: The “Border-Line” Problem

8 Crisis The “Border-Line” Problem ON A JULY MORNING in 1939, a crowd of dairy farmers gathered near the gate of the Sheffield Farms plant in Heuvelton, New York, at that time the largest milk receiving plant in the world.1 As members of the Dairy Farmers Union, these farmers had voted the night before not to deliver their milk to the plant. They formed a picket line at the plant gate as they tried to convince other farmers arriving with their loads of morning milk not to deliver as well. The strike closed the Heuvelton plant for over a hundred days. The Heuvelton plant was four hundred miles from New York City, but most of its milk went to the city’s fresh milk market. Since the 1920s, companies with “classified” pricing plans paid for milk according to its “class” of use; fluid market milk received the highest price. The same classified pricing system had become part of the recently established New York City milk market order.2 The order made classified pricing mandatory for those farmers who served the city fluid market. The right to set prices had already survived a series of court challenges. Now, supported by federal market order legislation, market orders became the established system of fluid milk pricing for the rest of the century. Dairy farmers were not entirely satisfied with the prices set under the order. In particular, farmers who were not members of the two major dairy cooperatives—the Dairymen’s League or Sheffield Farms—believed that the prices set favored cooperative members.3 However, dairy farmers in Heuvelton were not striking about the order. They had another problem: Sheffield was about to close this plant and twelve other plants in the northern New York counties, leaving many farmers in this area without access to the New York City milk market. Losing access to this market meant having to accept 165 a much lower “manufacturing” classified price for the milk these farmers produced. By 1939, the milk strike was an old and well-used tool for New York state’s dairy farmers. In fact, the first farmers to strike for higher milk prices were farmers in the Orange County dairy region Robert Hartley had visited a hundred years before in search of country milk. By the 1880s, city dealers had formed a price-fixing cartel called the New York Milk Exchange, and as a result, milk prices “began to fall steadily.”4 In response, the farmers formed the Erie Producers Milk Association in 1883 and withheld their milk from the New York market. In an action prescient of decades of conflict to come, the dealers “began immediately to take steps to prevent a recurrence of this situation by establishing other sources for their milk,” employing new systems of refrigeration that kept milk longer.5 The dealers’ response made the farmers’ cooperative associations comparatively ineffective, since the new dairymen coming into the field welcomed the [dealers] as the Orange County men had done earlier . In order to control the milk trade, the farmers had to remain united and to do this they had to get the new men into their ranks to prevent the destruction of their organization. This they could not do and thus soon fell to quarreling among themselves, distrusting each other, and criticizing their leaders.6 The happenings of 1883 echo down to the global agricultural political economy of the present day. Global “multiple sourcing” as a business strategy involves the structuring of production so that a multinational firm can buy a necessary product—whether orange juice or car components—in more than one place.7 The business literature praises such a strategy as giving the sourcing firm less “risk” and “uncertainty” and enabling regions to gain new sources of competitive advantage.8 Yet the risk multinationals face is the rise of prices paid through the political organization of producers, and the competitive advantage nations receive depends, to a significant extent, on their ability to quell producers’ price demands. Global multiple sourcing gives multinationals the ability to make their production regions compete with each other for the opportunity to supply the firm with this product. This competition often involves a “leap for the bottom” in terms of wages, child labor laws, environmental regulations, and other working conditions.9 166 CRISIS: THE “BORDER-LINE” PROBLEM In the interest of ameliorating these conditions...