Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

Foreword

F o r e w o r d Vermont’s early agricultural history was dominated by the farming of sheep, for the mills of New England required wool for spinning andweaving.Butbythemiddleofthenineteenthcentury,sheepand wool production was on the decline, and Vermont’s fertile valleys andpasture-richhillsmadethestateanidealsiteforraisingcows.By the end of the nineteenth century, there were 35,000 dairy farms in Vermont.Themilkthatthecowsonthosefarmsproducedwasused for cheese and butter, which were shipped throughout the region. Fluid milk was sold locally. Vermont’s rural communities and its working landscape were formed by dairy farms. Its rural communities, and its working landscape , continue to be shaped by dairy farms today. Kirk Kardashian looks closely, carefully, lovingly, and at times critically at dairy farming. He has done what a good journalist, a good researcher, needs to do. He has started from his experience, and tried to understand it—fully. In the preface he recounts the original experience that led him to write this book: the family that provided day care to his daughter worked a dairy farm, and fluctuating milk prices made their lives precarious. He quickly learned that the lives of most family dairy farmers are precarious. What, he asked himself, is going on in the world of dairy? How can prices shoot up—eras of profitability when farmers can afford viii Foreword to buy new tractors and to fix up their barns—and then suddenly plunge, so that they cannot pay for those tractors or the loans they took out for their barn repairs? For example—and this is a statistic that I did not get from this excellent book but from a report issued by the universities of Wisconsin and Missouri—the U.S. all-milk price in May 2008 was $18.30 a hundredweight; a year later it was $11.60. (Milk at the farmstead is measured and sold by the hundred pounds, not by the gallon.) Kardashian looks at individual farmers and the difficulties they encounter even as they engage in a pursuit they love, working the land and tending to their cows. But he also takes us back to the origins of dairy farming, to the first men and women who raised cows for milk fifty centuries ago. Vermonters, and Americans, were good at raising and milking cows, and eventually more milk (a perishable product) was produced than was being consumed. Enter the federal government, whicheitherboughtsurplusmilkorsubsidizedexports,andhelped ease dairy farmers through their crisis. Government intervention has continued, since small increases or decreases in milk production often lead, in a “free market,” to wild price swings. And farms, unlike businesses that can slow down or increase production, often face a stark choice: when prices drop, and loans are called in, they all too frequently must be sold. And then, suddenly, there is not enough milk, and the price of cheese and milk to consumers rises rapidly. These huge fluctuations help no one but speculators—not consumers, notdairy-based businesses,nottractorsalesmen—and they particularly do not help or sustain farmers. My own view is that the best dairy policy is to develop a system of supply management, so that dairy farmers never severely overproduce or underproduce,therebystabilizingpricesandensuringa sufficient amount of high-quality dairy products for our country. It is my hope that we in Washington can produce legislation that will givefarmerstoolstoslowthegrowthoftheirherdswhenmilkprices are high—yes, there are profits to be made in the short term, but Foreword ix the slightly longer term result is always an oversupply of milk and milkpricesthatgointofree-fall.Supplymanagementcurbsexcessive growth of dairy herds when prices are high. And when prices are low, a modest cushion for farmers can provide protection against a hard and destructive landing. Under legislation I proposed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working with dairy farmers on a producer board, would setarateforhowmuch farmerscouldboost production according to U.S. demand. I think it makes sense that, if we can manage supply so that it is never too high or too low, huge price swings should disappear. And our family famers will live with a security—that hard work and good farming will bring reasonable returns—that eludes them today. Milk overproduction is caused by too many cows being milked, but it also has to do with dramatic changes that have transformed dairy farms over the past decades. How is it that individual cows today produce much more milk than cows in the past? Kirk Kardashian will tell you, and his recounting of the improvement...