Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Support Your Local Dairies

June was American Dairy Month and because I do a radio program that focuses on agriculture and sustainability, someone from the St. Louis District Dairy Council got ahold of me. Would I like to do a radio program on dairy? Sure. Wonderful, they said, we’ll set up a time and send you a script.

Whaaaa? A script? What happened to my curious questions and your intelligent answers?

So that’s business as usual for today’s media. Set up a time and read a script. As they might say, “That way, we can be sure that the message gets out (in the way we want).”

A couple of years ago, I decided to play along and record the dairy spokesperson as they ran through their patter. The messages were predictable: Dairy is good for you. Nutrients in every swallow. Cheese is great for school lunches. Louis Pasteur invented a way to heat milk up and kill icky bacteria. After heating and cooling, “pasteurized” milk is safe to store as long as it is refrigerated. Recent advances, which means ultra-high heating, have made milk shelf-stable.

The interview was predictable. But I couldn’t use it. Nothing about farms and, after all, I live in a place where dairy farms once were common. And they did their own pasteurizing and bottling. We could name the farms that supplied the milk, ice cream and cheeses that we enjoyed around here. Now they are gone.

According to Farm Aid, “In 1934, some 5.2 million dairy farms dotted America’s countryside … today, fewer than 28,000 licensed dairy herds remain. Along with this loss has come farm foreclosures, hard economic times, a rise in the rate of death by suicide among farmers, and a migration out of rural communities.”

So, to hear their story, I wanted to talk to a real dairy farmer. I got ahold of National Family Farm Coalition and they found one.

This farmer, from Wisconsin (America’s Dairyland, according to the license plates) is part of a three-family farm with several hundred cows and around a thousand acres of grain and hay to feed them. As this farmer explained, the family didn’t really intend for their farm to get so big and intense, but as years passed, more family members wanted to come home. From a hundred cows, the farm grew to 200, then 300, and, well, you can see where this is going.

But counting cows in the hundreds is so yesterday. Today’s family farms are competing with farms owned by stockholders, and these facilities are getting bigger and bigger. One in Minnesota boasts 10,000 cows, which means that their ecosystem supports 10,000 cows and at least an equal number of calves. A dairy in Arizona boasts 70,000 cows. That’s Arizona, maybe America’s most arid state. The dairy is hogging so much water from the aquifer that wells are going dry, and neighbors have moved away.

These giants are committed to, or even owned by, a corporate processor. In the case of my Wisconsin farmer, like most of their neighbors, they sell to a corporate processor that comes every day to pick up milk and take it to town to make the products we know and love. I’m not sure which corporation they send to—Dean’s, Prairie Farms, Land O’ Lakes, Unilever, Conagra. From the plant, it is distributed nationally.

Dependence on a corporate processor puts the farmer in a scary place. When a milk pickup route becomes unprofitable for the processor, they’ll move out and leave the farmers without a market. So, the corporations depend on farmers, but just until it becomes unprofitable.

And yet, the corporations have consolidated and thrived partly due to national advertising that is paid for by the farmers. Dairy farmers pay into a national checkoff program that’s responsible for the “Got milk?” ads that we saw in all the magazines. However memorable and effective it was, the tagline didn’t help farmers. Checkoff money has long been criticized as taxation without representation.

Part of the checkoff money goes to regional organizations like the St. Louis District Dairy Council. Looking at their website, I can see that they have lots of educational materials for schools, but nothing that mentions the plight of their family farms. That’s the corporate messaging that we hear in the media. That’s the script they offered me.

To resist this system, a few farmers have gone to on-farm processing and developing their own label. Most farmers don’t have the nerve, the labor pool or the money to buy equipment and go this direction. Still, the few here in the midwest are producing superior foods at a decent price and keeping the profits that corporate players would otherwise take.

So here’s a way that consumers can actively save farms: Support local brands and enjoy milk you can trace back to the place it came from.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2023

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