Dairyland in Distress (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Dairyland in Distress (2019)

projects.jsonline.com

34 pointsnkurz56 comments

This a is a global trend: 'The quiet suicide epidemic plaguing French farmers' (1) + ‘Europe loses 1,000 farms per day’. Meanwhile mega-corperations are receiving millions of European subsidies.

(1) https://www.france24.com/en/20181026-suicide-epidemic-plagui...

(2) https://www.agriland.co.uk/farming-news/europe-loses-1000-fa...

>There is no more quintessential image of Wisconsin than a red barn with a herd of cows grazing in a green field against a blue sky.

This traditional farm cannot compete with modern operations of 30,000 cows or more. It's too bad, because dairying fit in well on farms with land that was not good for plowing and cropping. Marshy or sandy land was used for pasture and hay meadows. Now you rarely see small herds of cows in pastures along the highway. Marshes are either drained or left unused.

When people complain about flooding problems in the Midwest, I wonder if they realize how much of our land has been tiled and drained for farming.

Wetlands act as a sponge to keep water where it fell and slow its movement to the main arterial rivers.

Habitat destruction is honestly something that concerns me much more than carbon emissions.

Too few people recognize grazing land as destroyed. Very often it used to be bog, forest, grassland supporting many wild species (before the soil was pumped full of nitrates) etc. A big grassy field can be an ecological wasteland.

Grazing is one of the healthiest things for soil and grassland as long as it's not overgrazed.

True - the land around me has tons of fertilizer applied to maximize grass production and is grazed or cut for hay and silage. It supports very few wildflower species though. Take hay cuts for a few years and you can restore it though.

https://twitter.com/collbradan/status/1166416101997273089

Definitely true.

People also seem to forget the Red River basin (e.g., North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba) that flows north to Hudson Bay was a massive lake about 10,000 years ago called Lake Agassiz. So its periodic flood pattern is expected. The topography today is a flat flood plain. Because of the lake bottom history, the soil is extremely fertile. But the cities Fargo, Grand Forks, and Winnipeg are not well placed to avoid flooding. Floods happened in the early 1800s before the arrival of settlements, wetland draining, plowing, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1826_Red_River_flood

For those not familiar with midwestern US agricultural parlance, "tile" refers to underground perforated pipe used to make soggy ground more amenable to farming. In other areas it is called a "french drain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_drain

It is used on more than just wetlands, though in all cases it speeds the movement of waters to main arterial rivers.

Off topic: the URL ("jsonline.com") is short for "Journal Sentinal Online", not "JS Online" or "JSON line" as my brain insisted on parsing it.

Maybe this results in replacing much of our dairy consumption with more environmentally sustainable plant-based alternatives?

(Not almond milk, which is worse, but oat, hemp, and pea based milks and yogurts are much less taxing on the environment.)

The current push for plant-based alternatives to everything reminds me of the effort to replace butter with margarine and tallow with vegetable shortening.

I believe the consensus these days is that butter is superior to margarine health-wise. Wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in rendered animal fats for cooking as well at some point.

The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat).

The whole idea behind margarine was a chemist figured if cows could get fat from plants, he could skip the cow and just get the fat from the plant. Very similar to current thinking on vegan meats, etc.

Except it turns out that the end product was loaded with trans fats that turned out to be super bad for you. Oops.

I would expect most meat alternatives to run into similar issues as we study them more.

> The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat).

While that's true as far as it goes, the reality is that most animals are not farmed that way; they're fed largely stuff grown on land that could be used to farm crops for humans (and indeed often stuff that humans can eat directly).

Crop land is more intensive than grassland. To grow crops today profitably, you have to use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. So cows for example largely eat grass. They also get some hay and some silage (which is made from the stalks of corn, inedible for humans). Even soy beans, which are used to feed pigs and chickens, only about 20% of the bean is useful for human consumption so they already extract that (soybean oil) and use it in many products. The rest is used for meal, and fed to livestock.

Most immediately this is the result of the trade war with China. The government has been pumping tens of billions into the agg industry. But most of this money is funneled to the big players to keep them from complaining too much, and it does nothing for the supply-side. So the small/mid tier producers have been hit especially hard.

It could be that long term trends were headed this direction anyway, but the trade war has been devastating to the industry.

How would the trade war with the Chinese bring this about? Asians are generally lactose intolerant.

It's really not despite some popular papers covering that angle. Milk prices have been in a long downward trend long before Trump as dairy farms continue to consolidate into megafarms and vertically integrate.

Wow, this is amazingly comprehensive and in-depth reporting. Wish we had more of this, especially on topics I was close enough to that it made sense to read the whole thing.

1. Develop a "value-added" dairy brand 2. Wait for Coca-Cola to buy your business 3. ??? 4. Profit!

https://www.fooddive.com/news/coca-cola-acquires-full-owners...

Brown, sticky, sugary, water is not a good product for a health conscious future. A future where people learn from an early age the perils of too much sugar. A future where governments limit the sale of such goods.

Coca Cola needs to diversify.

Then again, dairy seems like an awfully bad segment to get into given the issues it faces.

Who am I to judge the brass over there though? I'm sure they paid some consultants eight figures to tell them that this was a good idea.

> Coca Cola needs to diversify.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands

I was about to say, Coca Cola is the epitome of a well diversified, but focused company.

> “ Brown, sticky, sugary, water is not a good product for a health conscious future.”

The 8oz/240ml bottle of strawberry milk pictured in the article contains 170 calories and 10g of sugar... A perfect fit for Coca-Cola’s portfolio.

This looks like consolidation of small (family owned) farms into larger (corporate, maybe multinational) operations.

im not convinced this is an entirely bad thing as it seems the US has had a glut of dairy for quite a while. Here in the United States, we put cheese on everything and its slowly killing us. We largely started this trend when the USDA began eschewing whole milk in favour of skim. As a result, dairy farms simply redirected their waste fats to the production of cheese and cheese-like products instead of limiting their production as a whole. Efforts to tackle childhood obesity have zeroed in on things like sugary chocolate milk and unhealthy dairy products (aerosolized cheese and processed cheeses in general) to quantifiable success.

I also question whether the newspaper for the largest dairy producing state in the US is capable of covering the issue without bias. "fake milk" and "fancy water" are a few key phrases that concern me. The coverage also seems to try to have its cake and eat it too...highlighting the urgent need for Latino workers (a critical requirement almost exclusive to industrial farming) while bemoaning the struggles of small farms as "the industry" which is actually in turmoil.

Disclosure: I am a vegetarian, and derive a nontrivial amount of calories from dairy.

A couple of years back I had a rather abrupt dietary change due to some health issues. One of the key parts was the total elimination of cheese from my diet. I began to say to myself, "Props to those National Dairy Council guys," because cheese was everywhere I looked. It is kind of impressive, really.

I am not against labels like "fake milk." If anything, I find myself increasingly annoyed by products that are not what they actually claim to be: silk that is not really silk, milk that is not actually milk. I'm quite okay with linguistic prescriptivism when it comes to product names.

> I am not against labels like "fake milk."

I agree, anything other than full fat human milk that is non-homogenized and unpasteurized, with no additives (vitamins or otherwise) should be labelled fake milk.

Call me an anarchist, but as long as it comes from a mammal I have no problem with it being labeled "milk".

I detect an anti-marsupial bias.

Marsupials are mammals.

Me and my wife were actually joking the other day that at some point there's going to be a human milk industry. We envisioned something similar to the places you can go to sell your blood plasma.

There already is a network of sorts where lactating moms will donate milk to hospitals and mothers that can't nurse for whatever reason. [1]

[1] https://uichildrens.org/mothers-milk-bank-iowa

There was that human-milk ice cream in the UK around 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Gaga

I don't know how well that turned out.

I am anecdotally aware that human milk for infants goes for $5/oz (which seems crazy when you tally up how much milk an infant can drink in a day).

Yep. Labeling things milk that resemble milk is not a recent trend and I think it's a shallow excuse for people to attack non-dairy milk. Those people have no problem with milk of magnesia, milkweed, or milk thistle.

Is coconut milk OK?

As a product, I am sure it is useful or tasty or whatnot, but I don't think it is milk.

Is it labeled as milk? I always see coconut water, which is closer to the reality of coconut juice

Yes. Coconut milk is both the water and coconut oil/flesh. Common for cooking.

That is a different product. coconut milk is thick, creamy, fatty and used in Thai cooking. I know no other word for it.

In the 50s the US held huge stocks of "surplus cheese" that was bought up by the USDA price support programs. When it was close to going bad, it was shipped in large blocks to schools, where it was made into some of the nastiest mac-and-cheese on record. (Not sure whether the mac was made from surplus wheat.)

But government policy makes sense when you consider that a prime objective of government is to ensure an abundance of cheap food to feed the population. Shortages result in rapidly increasing prices, discontent among the poor, and then to demonstrations, riots, and general disorder.

Shortages in production can be widespread and severe. Examples include the Rocky Mountain locust plagues of the 1870s, the 1930s droughts of the Dust Bowl, and the current shortage of pork in China due to Swine Flu. Greening disease is threatening the Florida citrus industry. UG99 stem rust is a threat to wheat.

Therefore, government policy must be to encourage significant overproduction of food in normal times, with the surplus being either exported, eaten, or discarded.

It's important for people to acknowledge this. Governments have a strong incentive to ensure food is cheap because starving citizens revolt.

Here in the United States, we put cheese on everything and it's slowly killing us.

That's the result of frantic efforts by the dairy industry and their enablers at the USDA.[1] The USDA is buying up cheddar cheese, even.[2] They try to dump it on school lunches.

The "cheese with everything" push has reached the point that over half the items on the Dunkin' Donuts menu now contain cheese, and the brand is renaming itself "Dunkin".

Talk about entitled welfare queens...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/11/q-and-a-w... [2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/content/usda-cheddar-cheese-purchas...

It's also worth mentioning that the US dairy industry in aggregate operates at a ~40% net loss [0, p9], and Wisconsin dairy farms have collectively lost money every year since at least 2005 [0, p16], before accounting for subsidies. US taxpayers are paying for all of the health consequences you mentioned.

Disclosure: I am vegan. Also, I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, and I derived a nontrivial amount of calories from dairy throughout my childhood and early adulthood.

[0] http://www.greyclark.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/US-Subsi...

You seem to think that dairy is going away or something. That's not what's happening. Yes, dairy consumption is trending down a bit for various reasons, but hasn't changed a great deal.

What has changed is the consolidation of dairy herds into mega farms. Small and medium farms go bust while the mega farms increase their herd size (the overall milk production doesn't change a great deal).

So dairy will still be around, but as current trends continue, the milk will come from a Wal-Mart megafarm with requisite massive manure lagoons and high capacity water pumps, trucked by a Wal-Mart truck to a Wal-Mart creamery, and sent to a Wal-Mart distribution center and then Wal-Mart store for purchase. Instead of the traditional way of coming from independently-owned dairy farms, processed by cooperative creameries, etc.

While comprehensive, this reporting is very shortsighted -- I don't see how one can ignore the horrifying image of hundreds of cows locked in mechanical milk-extraction machines, while only reporting on the very narrow Wisconsin industry. Clearly health, animal-rights and environmental awakening is also a factor pushing more consumers to prefer plant-based milk (soy, almond, etc.) which influence the cow-based industry.

That's not an accurate image of dairy farms, at least based on the large farm I visited. Cow productivity is strongly influenced by the quality of life of the cow. Stressed, stick or otherwise unhappy cows produce less milk and as a consequence, farmers put a lot of effort into keeping them healthy and happy. The particular farm I visited used milking robots produced in the Netherlands. Cows spent their days outdoors and would visit the milking robot on their own when they decided to. The robot would also clean the cow, give it a snack and record some some basic health data.

The only thing that seemed inhumane to me was how calves would be separated from their mothers so early. Just a few weeks (days?) after being born, they were shipped off to a separate location a thousand miles away.

95%-99% of farm animals in the US are born, raised, and die in factory farms [1], i.e. they are born into constant unimaginable suffering and die a gruesome death. These stats are about the same throughout the Western world.

Cows and other farm animals who are raised in relatively "humane" captivity, like the one you're describing, are an anecdote.

[1] https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...

The analysis behind that link suggests 70% of US cows live on factory farms.

They use a cut-off of >150 cows on a dairy farm or >225 cows on a beef/veal farm = factory farm. The supporting sheets indicate that they take a simple 75% of the Small farm (300 head or 200 head for beef or dairy) maximum size as their cutoff for a factory farm. It doesn't explain why they use such an unsophisticated metric to define many small farms, and all medium- and large-sized farms, as factory farms.

That lack of sophistication makes me skeptical of these numbers.

While it's entirely possible that's a reasonable article, my first impression is to ignore it

- "amimal rights think tank Sentience Institute"

- popup that asks "do you love animals"

- image a a crying cow

It reeks of an extremely biased article to me. I mean, that doesn't mean it is such, but my "links from shitty news on facebook" meter certainly labels it that way.

kind of a bad title given the fact that dairyland is not a word but is the name of a major insurance company. “dairy land” would have been better.

Wisconsin considers it a word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

Well, animal agriculture has no future and the sooner farmers realize that, the better for us all

I wouldn't go as far as saying it has "NO future". I think we are seeing a correction right now. From an over-reliance on animal agriculture and hopefully start transitioning to a more balanced relationship with animal agriculture.

Maybe. Still doesn't seem like the best investment :)

I seriously doubt it, but am curious to hear an explanation of why people think this?

Well, it's terribly wasteful in terms of resources. And so, compared to just using plants where possible (like with alternative dairy, plant-based meats etc.): 1: it's not sustainable ecologically (compare: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions); 2: it wouldn't be sustainable economically if not for the subsidies

Please don't post generic flamebait to HN. It leads to generic flamewars, which are predictable and boring.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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