When
Lorraine Lewandrowski drives from her Herkimer County dairy farm to
her law office each day, she notices the changes happening across
rural upstate New York. “When I grew up here, we had 30 or 40 farms
in our neighborhood,” she says. “We had a local hardware store,
machinery dealers, two dentists, two doctors. We had a vibrant rural
town. Now we don’t have that.”
Today,
she says, roadsides are dotted with “for sale” signs. Farms sit
vacant, their owners having relocated to urban areas in search of
work. Once-pristine barns have become dilapidated after years of low
prices left farmers without money for infrastructure upkeep. The
closest city, Utica, is the sixth-most
distressed city in the country, with about half of the adults
unemployed and more than a quarter of the population living in
poverty.
Depressed
farm prices are impacting farmers across industries nationwide. Since
2013, farm income has fallen by more than 50
percent, and median farm income for 2018 is projected to
be negative (-$1,316,
to be exact). But dairy farmers are arguably being hit the hardest,
as they face a fourth year of milk prices that are well below the
cost of production. The resulting stress has become so pronounced
that the Agri-Mark Dairy Cooperative, which manages milk sales for
its member farms, sent farmers suicide
hotline numbers along with their milk checks earlier this
year.
Today,
it costs a farmer approximately $22 to produce a hundredweight, or
one hundred pounds, of milk. But the market price for milk is
significantly less. While the price of milk constantly fluctuates,
farmers are currently paid as low as $15 per hundredweight—30
percent less than the cost of production.
Farmers
and organizations are calling on legislators in both the House and
the Senate to draft Farm Bill legislation that addresses the current
farm crisis. While the U.S. Senate Farm Bill is expected to be
introduced as soon as this week, the House version will be brought
back to the floor for a second time on June 22, after 30 Republicans
joined all 183 Democrats in defeating the bill in May. In a National
Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) press release that applauded the defeat
of the House Bill, board president and fourth generation dairy farmer
Jim Goodman said, “This bill missed a key opportunity to fix the
ongoing crisis in the dairy sector and the downturn in the farm
economy. With the bill’s defeat, Congress can now go back to work
to draft a true bipartisan farm bill—one that is supportive of
family farmers, rural communities, SNAP recipients, and the
environment.”
The
release builds on an April letter that
the NFFC—along with 50 other organizations—sent to Secretary of
Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Congressional leadership of agriculture
committees, demanding that attention be paid to the dairy crisis
before more farms are lost. “Small, family-run dairy farms play a
vital role in the rural economy while providing a safe, affordable
food to consumers. If the current cycle of low prices and contracted
dairy markets continues, we will see virtually all of these farms go
out of business, with serious impacts on the economic and social
health of rural America,” they wrote.
The
groups proposed setting an immediate floor price of $20 per hundred
pounds of milk, an emergency measure that would rescue dairy farmers
on the brink of losing their operations. The groups also proposed a
shift in dairy policy to ensure a balance between supply and demand,
known as “supply
management.”
Supply
management policies were first implemented after the Great Depression
to stabilize the market. The supply of agricultural products was
coordinated, and strategic reserves of commodities were stored to
supplement American food supply during times of poor yields. If
supply began to overburden reserves, farmers were paid by the federal
government to take land out of production to avoid flooding the
market.
But
in the 1970s, agriculture made a swift about-face. Earl
Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture during the Nixon
Administration, famously took the approach of “get big or get out.”
He encouraged farmers to produce as much as they could and dangled
the promise of foreign exports for any overages. The new era
encouraged farmers to take out loans to lease more land and buy
equipment built for larger scale operations. But increased production
led to a dip in prices at the same time that the U.S. enacted a grain
embargo against the Soviet Union. The dominos began to fall—market
prices crashed, interest rates skyrocketed, loans were called in. By
the mid-1980s, the Farm Crisis—the biggest farm crash since the
Great Depression—was in full swing. As a result, tens of thousands
of farms were lost, and many rural communities experienced a forced
exodus of its residents.
Some
worry that today’s agricultural recession too closely echoes the
lead-up to the 1980s Farm Crisis: oversupply and falling crop
prices, rising
interest rates, family farms rapidly going out of business, and
now a looming trade war that could impact over
90 agricultural exports. And as dairy farmers face a crisis that
has reached emergency levels, the idea of supply management is being
resurrected, appearing on the lips of farmers and experts as an
approach worth discussing. It’s not without controversy, of course.
Those opposed to it say the policy allows government to unnecessarily
interfere in private marketplaces. But supporters say it would steady
the volatile dairy market by keeping milk production in relative
balance with demand.
NFFC’s
Goodman says, “Supply management is a long term fix. If we really
wanted to look forward and say, ‘We don’t want this crisis to
happen again… what steps can we take to prevent it?’, then supply
management would be one of those.”
Many
supporters of supply management point to the success of Canada’s
dairy program, in which farms own shares in the market and are
required to increase or decrease production according
to demand. The group Dairy Farmers of Canada maintains that the
system provides farmers “a predictable and stable revenue.” In an
email, Lewandrowski wrote, “The Canadians seem to be doing very
well for the rural economies with their [supply management] program.
Drive around Ontario and you see pretty well maintained farms with
new equipment. Drive over the border into rural NY, and you see miles
of empty farms, barns falling down, and people struggling to live.”
Mike
Eby, Board Chairman of the National Dairy Producers Organization and
a former 7th generation dairy farmer from Pennsylvania, says it’s
necessary to control the amount of milk in the marketplace, but
doesn’t believe it should or will come through government
intervention. Instead, Eby thinks the solution lives within dairy
cooperatives, which currently represent 80
percent of U.S. produced milk, primarily through memberships
with farmers.
Eby
says, “Either farmers control the amount of milk they produce, or
the excess will control the number of farmers that produce it… We
look to the farmer and say you need to own this problem as well,
because if you can’t own the problem, you can’t own the solution.
In order to own the solution, your only hope in doing so is to
utilize the cooperative you already own.” Eby and his colleagues
say the cooperatives “are in the perfect position to monitor the
marketplace and ask their members to respond accordingly” by
producing more or less milk based on demand.
While
small and mid-sized dairies are going out of business, the number of
bigger farms—including those termed mega-farms or concentrated
animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—are growing across industries
ranging from hogs to grain, tree nuts, vegetables, eggs, and dairy.
And modern agricultural policy is shifting to favor these large
producers by favoring anti-regulatory policies and awarding the
majority of farm subsidies to the biggest and most lucrative
operations. Goodman maintains that Wisconsin’s dairy farmers “have
been duped into producing too much milk” through expansion
grant programs, laws favoring large dairies, and a commitment by
Governor Walker to grow the state’s annual milk production to 30
billion pounds by 2020.
Additionally,
as processors get bigger, farms must grow to match the higher demand,
or leave the business altogether—a pressure amplified last March,
when Wal-Mart
announced the construction of their own dairy plant. The
announcement resulted in the second-largest dairy company, Dean
Foods, abruptly severing contracts with more than 100 dairy farms in
eight states. Farmers fear that Wal-Mart’s model will gradually
expand across the country, edging small producers out almost
entirely.
In
January, the USDA reported that
the number of licensed dairy farms dropped to 40,000. This represents
a 3 percent decline in a single year, and a loss of 17,000 dairy
farms—30 percent—over the last decade. But while the number of
farms decreased, the number of milk cows and milk
production increased.
This discrepancy represents the consolidation of the market, a
restructuring that has changed the face of agriculture over the last
three decades. In a new report, the USDA found that
“by 2015, 51 percent of the value of U.S. farm production came from
farms with at least $1 million in sales, compared to 31 percent in
1991.”
Goodman
says the dairy crisis is hitting the smaller farmers much harder, as
larger producers can often afford to weather periods of low prices.
“Even if they’re getting paid less per hundred pounds of milk,
they can just produce more milk to make up the difference,” he
says. “And they’re relying almost entirely on immigrant labor, so
they know they can pay a lower wage, which also feeds into things.”
In
an interview with Heritage Radio Network, Lewandrowski said, “I
would like to ask the processors: How do they ensure sustainability
for their farmers who supply them? Most of the processors pay rock
bottom prices, and some of them have the farmers bidding down each
other. It’s kind of like Hunger
Games for
farmers.”
Lewandrowski
and her sister, who together operate a 60-cow dairy, use the income
from their off-farm jobs to supplement their farm income.
Lewandrowski works by day as an attorney, and her sister is a
large-animal veterinarian. “I’m lucky I have another way to make
money,” she tells me. All around her, neighboring farmers are
facing increased stress and tough decisions driven by a market with
no rebound in sight. “Just about everyone I know has an off-farm
job, or is taking on more debt.”
In
her work as an attorney, Lewandrowski is “inundated with farmers.”
They need help navigating logging or hunting contracts to make extra
money, or selling a piece of land, or getting released from their
mortgages. She helps with divorces and estate plans. “I just had
one farm liquidate their whole herd,” she says, the surest sign
that dairy farmers are facing desperate times.
Frustrated
by the lack of support for farmers, Lewandrowski has become a vocal
presence on
social media. She uses it to amplify the realities facing rural
communities and, specifically, the stress being felt among dairy
farmers. In April, she tweeted to her 25,000 followers:
“Went
to Walmart late at night. Kid at cash register told me he’s a dairy
farmer, works the night shift to make $.”
“I
hang onto happier days ahead. A farmer neighbor collapsed from stress
today. We all went over to do the chores.”
“Feeling
very bitter today as every last farmer in my area struggles for their
life.”
>> The article above was written by Debbie Weingarten, and is reprinted from In These Times.
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