On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019) | Hacker News Reader

On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)

blog.abevoelker.com

236 pointsddtaylor331 comments

I visited a dairy in Utah a couple of summers ago. 130 cows, 3 employees.

It's a fully automated facility, using equipment from Germany. The cows enter a stall, the machine milks them, gives them a treat, they move on. Employees get a text if a cow hasn't milked itself in a while... usually a tap on their shoulder is enough to get them to walk over to the machine.

Even yet, the person giving the tour said they don't make enough money selling the milk to sustain the operation. They also make high-end cheeses on-prem, and that's what keeps them in the black.

I've helped with an IT project for several large dairies in the US (1,000+ cows each). Like you said the cows practically milk themselves. They walk by themselves into the milk barn, one person attaches the automatic milking machines to each cow as they walk into a stall. The milking machine automatically drops off the udders when the cow is done being milked and they walk back out to their pen on their own. I was told the cows like to be milked because it's uncomfortable for them when they are full of milk. Most dairies milk their cows 3 times a day around the clock. One of the dairies I've been to has a round milk barn with a rotating floor with about 100 milking stalls around the outside edge, so the guy attaching the milking machines to the cows doesn't even have to move. By the time the cows rotate all the way around the building they are done, the milking attachments drop off and the cows walk out the door on their own and go back to their pens to eat. I've shown up at these places a few times unannounced and spent 30 minutes walking around looking for a person (other than the guy in the milk barn) to let me into the office. Many times there's two people at the entire dairy: the guy in the milk barn and a guy driving a tractor that drops the feed for the cows along the sides of their pens. Each pen has artificial wood floors kind of like trex decking material and sprinklers in the roof of the pen that run automatically several times a day to wash away the poop which drains into holding ponds. The holding ponds have machinery just like a waste water treatment plant: the solids settle to the bottom of the ponds, and the water is used for corn crops that are fed back to the cows. The manure is dredged from the holding ponds, dried, and distributed on the fields with tractors to fertilize the corn. The majority of food fed to the cows is corn silage, which is the entire corn plants ground up and composted/fermented in large covered piles for a while to make it easier for the cows digest. This makes the whole setup fairly self sustaining. If they need to, the dairies will buy feed, but they try to minimize that because it increases their expenses. Most of these large dairies own thousands of acres around the dairy that is almost entirely dedicated to growing corn to feed the cows. After being to these kinds of setups it's clear to me that there's no way a small operation could compete. If they could replace those last two employees with machines, they would.

I had to look that up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLjI_eixBQk

Yeah, the screen looks the same, I think the Utah dairy had a newer model.

They also mentioned that there were only 3 dairy farms in the state with any kind of automated milking machines.

I recall hearing that there is a glut of milk in the US because there are just too many dairy cows. Is this still true?

Don't forget rBGH.[0] Canada and the EU banned it, but thanks to big Pharma, you can get still get hormone adulterated milk in the US of A.

[0]https://www.organicvalley.coop/blog/rBGH-decoded-what-is-bov...

I'm opposed to the use of rBGH. Stating falsehoods doesn't help the cause.

The absence of evidence that rBGH ends up in milk isn't for lack of trying to find it.

I get organic milk because it tastes better. I suspect that means it's more nutritious, and further suspect that's because of the growth hormone, not the absence of some pesticides (but not others!) in the feed.

To preemptively correct a misconception which many people have: nutrition labels are based on what the government legally allows producers to claim, it isn't the result of some test performed on the food inside the package.

Just like a huge tomato doesn't have much more lycopene than a smaller one with the same genetics, it makes sense to me that most of the increased lactation from rBGH is just water.

Might be bad for the cows too, I mean I doubt it's good for them. But I consider it cheating and think we'd be better off without it.

I don't think I've seen milk that's not rBST free, even the cheap store brands. Where are you even finding it?

Organic milk is often UHT pasteurized which gives it a slightly scalded flavor. That might be what your tasting, rather than any nutritional difference.

Could be placebo, I grant you. 90% of my milk consumption is as yogurt, I get the UHT stuff by preference, so I don't have to scald it in the Instant Pot myself. The comparison is apples-to-apples along that dimension.

Your claim surprised me, so I've done a bit of looking into it, and it seems that milk from cows given rBGH/BST was never particularly prevalent, and has steeply declined over the past ten years! Also, the FDA never required the disclaimer about rBGH milk being found to be identical to non-rBGH, that's tacked on out of fear of lawsuit.

I guess next time I make yogurt I'll try the store-brand UHT and see what I think. Organic certification does have some animal welfare requirements which I support, but I eat almost a quart of yogurt a day and the difference could buy me dinner at a decent restaurant every month.

I will say that the difference between expensive eggs and cheap ones is completely obvious, while that between organic milk and the regular is subtle enough that I might just be fooling myself.

Organic milk tastes worse. It gets heated to a higher temperature for pasteurization

And I think even if you put on your milk container that it contains no rBGH, you legally have to put an extra note on there saying that rBGH is not proven to be dangerous.

Is there good scientific evidence that rBGH is bad for you? I don't know a lot about this, but my first guess is that "naturalness" / "organicness" partisans are opposed to it for reasons related to the non-scientifically-supported ideas they have that are rooted in purity instincts.

In the US, on every carton of milk that advertises itself as being rBGH-free, there's a statement mandated by the FDA, who was apparently lobbied by the industrialized farms who thought such advertising unfair:

"The FDA has determined that no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBGH-supplemented and non-rBGH-supplemented cows"

Sure, but that could be true or false. Granted, in either scenario people who use rBGH are incentivized to want it to be true. I assume the fact that it's on cartons at all is a loss for the industrialized farms, though.

Yes, but I think it depends on the location. At my local grocery store in Chicago, milk has been $2 per gallon ($0.53 per liter) for years, as long as you buy 2 gallons or more. When I was in Florida for a few months, I couldn't find it for less than $3.79 per gallon ($1 per liter) anywhere.

The cheaper milk in the upper midwest tastes better too, as it all comes from Wisconsin and Indiana where the cows can feed on green grass that grows naturally because it gets plenty of rain, etc.

I pay $5.69 the gallon in SF at grocery store.

Is there still that weird law that fixes the price of milk based on how far from Wisconsin it is?

Unlikely. The article mentions something that sounds related:

> This was in the heart of America’s dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away from here you were.

This sentence cites a WSJ article from 1997 [1].

BTW, California has had bigger dairy production than Wisconsin for decades [2].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB880411473424429000

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/01/561427862/is...

Hey, you know you may be right - I guess I just assumed about the source of the milk. Try this out: go to Aldi [1] and choose grocery pickup for anywhere in Illinois or Indiana, and you’ll see a gallon of milk for somewhere between $1.95 and $2.50 per gallon (depending on the store location). Click on the milk and you can clearly see the “Real California Milk” label.

[1] https://www.aldi.us/en/pickup-delivery/grocery-pickup/

As someone who’s spent a lot of time in and around farms. I even bought a farm last week!

This is an accurate depiction for the vast majority of farms. It’s an industry where you have a high over head cost (want to start raising cattle - $300k land, $50k equipment, $30k housing / barn, $20k fencing, $10k to start a herd - profit in 2-3 years). This scales well. Get some more land, you can keep the equipment running longer, concentrate cows, etc

I do think this creates overall a less healthy and productive nation. The reason I bought a farm was for my families nutrition. Food from the store has far less nutrition. Working on a farm teaches you hard work (as the article describes) and family bonds. We personally don’t plan on making much profit, if any.

All that being said, focusing on the niche is important. In Tennessee they produce grass fed cattle. Many farmers make profits with relatively small herds. I’m planning on planting a walnut or pawpaw grove, and raising elk.

Unique goods provide a way to make a profit without scale. This is like every industry.

I understand that you're probably estimating bare minimum costs, but getting started for half a million dollars is actually way more affordable than I imagined you would describe. That's comparable to what some people pay for a middle class suburban home near a lot of the mid-sized metropolitan areas around the United States.

That’s literally the cost I just paid lol

But yes, $500k is about the minimum. Plus ~40 acres. For grass fed beef you can raise probably 20 heads and buy supplementals. You might only make $5-10k up to maybe $30k (buying hay or leasing other land to grow feed) profit initially.

BUT it’s not a ton of work, really only feeding the cattle every other day, doing injections on the cattle and cutting / bailing hay 2-3 times a year. Average is probably 10 hrs of work a week.

When those trees I mentioned start growing in, I can net closer to $2-3k per acre. So closer to $60k profit on that 40 acre farm. That’s only one harvest a year, plus checking periodically. I can work a full-time job besides the 2 week harvest season.

Another important factor for me, was the protection from inflation. Food prices go up during inflation, so my farm is worth more. Further, what the farm PRODUCES is worth more. So I took out a loan and my loan will be easier to pay off from the production and be worth more when I sell. Effectively letting me leverage the loan to make more profit.

> Average is probably 10 hrs of work a week

> closer to $60k profit on that 40 acre farm

> Food prices go up during inflation, so my farm is worth more

> my loan will be easier to pay off from the production and be worth more when I sell

> I can work a full-time job besides the 2 week harvest season

Jesus Christ, I’m sorry to say this but you are in for a rude, violent awakening. Best of luck.

>Another important factor for me, was the protection from inflation. Food prices go up during inflation, so my farm is worth more.

this is a moot point because literally any other thing you invest it (short of maybe government bonds) protect you from inflation.

Not quite. Stocks, gold, Bitcoin, a house you live in (not rent) don’t produce anything (unless your stock has a dividend).

You want something that produces.

Say I buy $300k worth of gold, 10% inflation hits and there’s no change in demand and its now worth $330k.

Say I buy a $300k farm. 10% inflation hits and there’s no change in demand. It’s now worth $330k... but the value of production of said farm is also up 10%.

This makes an opportunity. If I take a loan on my farm in year 1, I can buy a larger farm (say on 3% interest). If inflation hits I can pay down that farm loan at an ever increasing rate. This allows someone to leverage the inflation and debt to make larger purchases.

It protects your INCOME from inflation. Not just your investments.

>Stocks, gold, Bitcoin, a house you live in (not rent) don’t produce anything (unless your stock has a dividend).

Houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent

Stocks: You're literally owning a share of a corporation that produces stuff. Producing a dividend (or buybacks) isn't guaranteed, but that isn't that much different than owning a farm, which can also fail to produce a profit (if costs exceed expenses).

What you're describing isn't specific to farms. If you take out a fixed-rate loan, you'll benefit from increases to inflation (since it makes the inflation-adjusted interest rate lower). This is true whether you use that loan to buy a farm, a house, gold, et cetera.

Other than the loan, it makes sense to work in real dollars (inflation adjusted) not nominal dollars (non-inflation adjusted). In real dollars, you $300k farm doesn't change in value and your income also doesn't change. In real dollars, gold (in your example) also doesn't change.

Gold is a poor and weird investment for a variety of reasons, but it's not like farms are magically better than other asset classes (like regular old stocks).

Even if the stock doesn't have a dividend, the stock rises to reflect when the company produces value.

The other inflating asset is the $500k real estate. Here in the midwest, 40-acre farms a few dozen miles away from cities are constantly being converted into 40-unit residential housing complexes that sell at $500k/unit. Zillow and comps in my neighborhood say that my 50-year-old suburban ranch, which I bought 5 years ago, is worth more than double what I paid for it.

Buy the farm at $500k, sell it for $1M in a few years to another farmer or a developer, and you'd make double the profit of the cow farm itself. Or spend $200/square (which is itself insane) to build houses on it for a total of $24M and, if current trends continue, sell them all at $1M each for $16M profit.

With that insane real estate market status, the cows and lumber at $60k/year are almost a moo point. It's like a cow's opinion, you know, it just doesn't matter. It's "moo".

Not that the current real estate bubble isn't guaranteed not to pop. But there are a lot of powerful people and institutions which are highly incentivized to pretend it's not a bubble and make every effort to keep it from popping, so I think it's unlikely to do so.

This isn't a bad gamble if don't mind running the farm if the bet doesn't pay off.

How on earth can you not know why those things protect you from inflation? Precisely because they are productive investments that return money in the future and that future money is higher, precisely because of inflation.

The mechanism that protects a stock and a farm from inflation is exactly the same which is why it's not a moot point, it's the entire reason why we have inflation as a policy goal. You're supposed to go out there, work and expand your business, hire people and make the economy productive again!

Couldn’t you feed a family high quality food for a few decades with $500k? This seems like a lot of effort if you aren’t planning on making a profit.

That’s fair, but two posits

(1) you can’t really get high quality food outside a lot of sourcing and effort. As an example, I grow purple green beans that taste better than any green bean I’ve every bought. You may be able to get that particular green bean from a specialty shop, but I’m doing this with 30 different plants on 1-2 acres. I can harvest and eat the plants the same day as well (which has far more nutrition).

(2) I shouldn’t have said no profit, I do have a plan to make it profitable. But that’s not the primary goal, nor would it be my primary job. I’m a software engineer by trade and can work remote easily. Further, I can later sell the farm and equipment. It’s likely I’ll make a profit there as well.

I'm in a fairly similar situation, albeit on a smaller scale (6 acres) and I do this for reasons you already mentioned (nutrition, inflation hedge) plus climate change. I have years of experience growing veggies in my backyard and I agree, it takes a lot of money to get the same quality food elsewhere, and some specialties are out of reach. It's also a lot of fun.

I'm also planning for retirement in the 2030s and I'm trying to funnel my software engineering money into a small productive farm/market garden that produces enough to make a small profit and hire some help when needed. I haven't found a good way to offset my initial investment costs as a beginning farmer against my regular income from my main job, but I just started to learn more about Schedule F Profit/Loss from farming. Any pointers on what to read or CPA recommendations are highly appreciated.

Greetings from Hardiness Zone 6, which I assume will turn into Zone 7 within my lifetime.

> you can’t really get high quality food outside a lot of sourcing and effort

To be fair, this is very dependent upon the region you live in. I live in a suburban area bordering on farmland, and so I can get piles of really good quality foods at my local farmer's market every weekend. There's farms naturally raising grass fed beef, as well. And a couple people that go out to the Pacific and catch fish and then sell it at the same farmer's market.

I imagine that's a bit of a luxury in some places, for sure, but I'd bet it's not that uncommon, either.

That $500K doesn't disappear. In a few decades the farm can be sold and you can get your money back (depending on changes in land prices).

But farms across the nation are failing and conglomerating. It just seems like he's investing in horses after the Model T has been released.

That's assuming it's their money to begin with (I'd assume it's a loan). With those numbers it takes about a decade to make it back — perhaps more with capital costs. That doesn't sound bad at all? What were you expecting?

I don’t know. It just seems inefficient to me. Farming is not enjoyable work for most people who do it so the whole plan just reminds me of Marie Antoinette’s peasant role play hobby.

Best of luck. I think you are about to get a very rude and brutal awakening when your dreams meet reality. Part of my family had the same dream and ideals. It nearly destroyed them.

Do you really need a whole farm just to provide nutrition for you family, even if it does have some livestock, or is there more to it than that? I remember reading about some amazing results that can be achieved on very small patches of land, with the right techniques, tools and planning. The official website is light on details, this article is better [2].

[1] https://www.themarketgardener.com/ [2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-04-01/a-model-for-pr...

I remember reading something about a square foot or three of tightly packed grow space (using vegetables that complement each other or whatever; I also remember reading about was it tiered gardening?) is enough to feed a person. My mother grows a bunch of vegetables in about ~3 square feet of space and while its not everything she eats (vegetable or otherwise), it does cover a good bit and she always has more of what she grows than she needs.

So if that's true, seems like a decent plot of land should be plenty for feeding a family yet still having some left over, at least for vegetables and maybe eggs.

If you want to keep other livestock (lettergram mentions grass-fed beef), then I guess you do indeed need an actual farm.

> a square foot or three of tightly packed grow space [...] is enough to feed a person

That seems insanely optimistic to me. I've done a lot of reading about people's attempts to feed themselves with home-grown agriculture, and it's way more difficult than many assume. I would multiply that square footage requirement about 1000x before even trying it-- and that's if all possible relevant research is implemented and everything goes smoothly.

I tried & failed to find an article I read a few years ago which broke down a whole bunch of the math behind this, but here is a video that matches pretty closely with what I've read elsewhere (despite being short on sources): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=926Z6wzf278

yes, I think I've come to the conclusion that around 1000m² per person should be enough to have a significant impact on food supply per person in a non-optimal, manual-labor based workflow. 1/3m² won't cut it as the mother of the preposter probably also ate a healthy dose of carbohydrates, proteins and fat which generally are not abundant in any typical "decorative" vegetables. And if you want to selfsustain your family you really need a lot (just look at the weight of military ready-made meals and think that you have to produce that (as a baseline) (x 365 x number of people supplied). Also in any urban setting, the supply of clean water will kill you faster than any lack of food.

> Food from the store has far less nutrition

Looking for a source, the best I found was

> Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

So choose your varieties wisely. That said, outside of poverty, malnutrition isn't really a problem in developed countries; overeating and obesity is the much bigger health concern.

I think he's glossing over the obvious. A friend of mine was just reminiscing about growing up in her family's dairy farm.

Every Saturday morning, every Sunday morning, every Christmas you get up to take care of the cows. Feel sick? You've got to get up and take care of the cows. Want to go on vacation? Can't, there's no one you can leave the cows with. It's a hard life - maybe a satisfying life in some ways but there are a lot of sacrifices.

The author points out that only one of his brothers wanted to take over the dairy. He doesn't point out that without that one brother with the insane work ethic the farm would have shut down years ago. It's not a sustainable business model.

I'm pretty sure the fact that it's impossible to turn a profit in any of the "family" small scale dairy farms is a little more important than how hard the work is.

And hard back-breaking work is not unique to farming. Plenty of restaurants or other small businesses basically run off owners and family giving dozens of hours of labor every week "for free"

> I'm pretty sure the fact that it's impossible to turn a profit in any of the "family" small scale dairy farms is a little more important than how hard the work is.

Why exactly is that important? I could not turn a profit running a family plastic casting business in the U.S. either. It's just not something that can be done competitively on a small scale. Seems like milk production isn't either. That's sad for people who want to do that as a profession. It's also sad that writing doesn't pay enough to employ everyone who wants to be writers, painting everyone who would rather paint, etc. Why is that a policy problem (besides the need to ensure these people have a soft landing in a destination profession that is economically viable)?

Because large agribusiness conglomerates extract their profits largely by creating negative externalities through pollution and underpriced illegal labor? That was kinda the whole point of the article. Government exists to create policy regulating externalities, and they're failing to do their job here.

Sure, that's true, but even in the world where large agribusiness was perfectly regulated, economies of scale would still favor them over small-time milk producers.

Pollution is a negative externality, I agree. Paying illegal immigrants to work in the U.S. is illegal, but it is not a negative externality. I'm also not convinced that small farms are better about either of these things than big ones are.

Sure it is.

The profit goes to the lawbreakers, the loss goes to the citizens of this country who can't do that job at a decent wage.

It's a classic negative externality.

The article included reports shows that the larger farms are responsible for more pollution, because the sort of techniques you use to handle the waste for 1,000+ cows are radically different than the ones you'd use to handle a small business herd. Search for the phrase "manure lagoon"

The article is about the "death of my family's farm". Not about whatever you think policy problems are.

If you read the article, the fact that it's impossible to turn a profit in a small family farm is more important than how hard the work is.

I'm really not sure at all why you want to turn this into a political argument.

I don't want to turn it into a political argument. It was my understanding that we were already having a political discussion, which I entered into.

For one thing, the article itself is overtly political -- which is fine and expected, because farming is politically fraught in much of the world.

For another, when you said "important" in your parent post, I had understood you to mean "important" in the sense of being generically important, like to society. I did not understand that you were referring solely to the importance of the issue from the perspective of the author of the article.

If you were trying to avoid a political discussion, then sorry. My mistake. Feel free to ignore my response to you.

The author didn't want to work on the farm regardless of profit. 2 out of 3 of his brother didn't want to work on the farm regardless of profit.

My friend would never go back to a farming life, nor would any of her siblings or cousins. It's just too much work in a world where there are a lot of fun things to do with your spare time. My friend mentors 4H students, but she also takes off on scuba-diving trips several times a year.

The proximate cause of the failing farm was that it's impossible to turn a profit!

They had a family member willing to do the hard work! "hard work" had absolutely nothing to do with this particular farm failing.

This isn't rocket science guys, I don't know why people insist on conjuring up phantoms to argue with.

You seem to equate hard work ethic with sustainability, this is false. You obviously have never experienced the joys of winters with nothing todo except read, learn, cook and play, because you worked insanely hard on the farm for 6-8 months of the growing season (being your own boss, but who cares about that).

A friend of mine is a farmer -- typical Wisconsin corn & beans. Those winters are spent finding other income sources. Some of his activities: Driving the big snow plows. Short haul truck driving on country roads in the dark. Repairing his ancient equipment. Being a local dealer for something or other. Same with any time slot that he can fill during the growing season.

An issue he faces is that he pays more for seeds and fertilizer than the big farms, and gets paid less for his crop. Many of the "obvious" ideas to produce specialized crops (organic, popcorn, soybeans for tofu) turn out to be boondoggles that lose money.

I'm not too sad for him -- his land is worth millions, he'll do OK. But the other thing is, he and I are the same age, and he looks about 20 years older. Part of it is that he's driven to do this. It's in his blood. He talks about "feeding the world" and so forth.

Being your own boss, yes. Turns out being a "farmer" looks a lot different if you own the farm, than if you don't.

> he looks about 20 years older

OTOH, my grandfather, who worked his own farm until he was deep into his 80s, is just about to celebrate 102. Up until a couple years ago he was still taking stairs two at a time, and winning corn shucking contests. Would he have made it so far, or in such good shape, if he had spent his life at a desk?

Does he look older just because he’s spent so much time in the sun? The sun will make you look like a raisin with excessive exposure.

> he looks about 20 years older

On the other hand, he might live longer as a result of the hard work.

At risk of stating the obvious, dairy cows do not have a growing season. Cows are a 365 days-a-year commitment.

This is not always the case. I recall learning during my youth that in Victoria, Australia, the heat cycles and pregnancies of the entire herd were synchronised to that it lead to a period of 6 to 8 weeks where no milking occurred at all.

That's not to say that there was nothing to do on the farm, or it was time to take a holiday, just that the cows did not need milking during that time period, so perhaps it was easier to relax a little.

There are also "contract milkers" who can be brought in for short stints of time, allowing the owners to take time off. Of course there is a cost to this, but I guess that just needs to be budgeted into the overall cost of the "holiday."

The poster upstream suggested there were 6-8 months of downtime with nothing to do. We've gone down to 6-8 weeks with no milking. There's still feeding and watering and of course monitoring a herd of now-pregnant cows with all the possible health complications that come from that.

I'm also relaying my friend's experience, not just speculating. In her circumstances, there was daily maintenance and no vacations. Perhaps her family didn't budget well enough.

My grandfather had a dairy barn, I'm aware of this. The community around it rebuilt it when it was burned, looked after it when he travelled across the country etc. Was it hard? Certainly. To suggest his (and his families) life was somehow less joyous than a 9-5 hacking l33t code all year is insanity.

The writer of the articles was very clear that _he_ found farming less joyous than "9-5 hacking l33t code". Your argument is more with him than with me.

The writer's other two siblings also found more "joyous" things to do. It isn't for everyone, and that is going to continue to be the reason that they can't survive against Big Ag.

Right. I don't have an argument with the writer, its a wonderful article, spot on. Yes my families work was largely pre-big ag. Nothing is for everyone. The trigger that looped me in here was the "not sustainable because hard work", I drifted to tangents too quickly.

I can't speak categorically, but I grew up around farmers (dairy, pigs, & crops) I've never known a farmer who took the winter off. Winters would be spent repairing and upgrading equipment, and prepping for the upcoming season, not just lazing around.

Winter is when my father only works 40 hours/week on the farm.

I always joke with people that farming is a great half time job, just pick which 12 hours you want to work. I also think the only people that want to start farming are those that have never done it.

Haha, right. I run into people on reddit all the time who idealize life on a farm. Right up until I remind them that even if it's -20F and blowing snow horizontally and you're sick with the flu, you still have to go out and take care of the animals.

Also, according to the BLS, one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in the country. If met plenty of farmers that have missing pieces.

what a strange point. "the obvious" is not that there's concentration of power but that farming is hard? what about small farms where many people are happy to continue working because they find it fulfilling?

Anyone who enjoys their job should work for free? How are they meant to pay bills? What are you saying?

im providing a counter-example to the OP's point, and saying that people choosing not to remain farmers is not a sufficient explanation for decline in the number of small farms. the author clearly proposes many other reasons. see other responses to the message.

The "obvious" is that operating a family farm as a profitable business is hard. Harder than three of the four adult children in the article are willing to work.

That doesn't mean there aren't people who want to do it, that means that a lot of family farms are going out of business because there aren't enough people who want to do it, regardless of external pressures.

that conclusion doesn't necessarily follow though. the proposed thesis by the article author is difficulty of having enough cattle to break even. you need to make enough to grow your operation, which is difficult given that you rely on external factors like creameries. the only reason you only have your family's labour to rely on could also be the difficulty of scaling up.

I think the article writer is glossing over the difficulty of keeping a farm in business without the external factors. My experience, growing up in an farming area, is that the kids of farmers are relieved when the farm is sold to a big conglomerate.

If the author cared so much about the farm, nothing stopped him from going back and dedicating his life to keeping it running.

apologies if i'm coming across condescending or am missing your point but i'm having difficulty comprehending how the author staying on the farm would've fixed anything about the trend towards monopolization fuelled by corporate subsidies and other forms of preferential treatment coupled with those larger actors facing limited responsibility for any of the consequences to surrounding communities and environment?

Bread and games rarely make for good business-models. A lack of bread makes for food riots, so even the most dysfunctional states keep that resource over-flowing and artificially under price pressures.

In germany you are not even allowed by law, to convert surplus grain into energy by burning it. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getreideverbrennung#Deutschlan...

For fermenting it you need a expensive license. Nobody is even pretending that this is a free market and even the most hardcore Neo-libertarians do not call for it regarding food.

The price fluctuations visible are usually the pearl-diving. All market participants dive for the pearls, aka the lowest possible price and hold their breath. Those who cant keep up, float to the top and are devoured by those who are still alive. Every round there are fewer and fewer small participants. Rinse and repeat, until only a few monopolistic giants are able to establish a price cartel.

unfortunately the cow seems out of the barn for reasons other than legislation being missing.

Farmers have not adapted to changes in conditions and they had time to do so. The point of a union should not be to collute to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources to break monopolies in creameries, or pollution.

Any farmer should have seen the writing on the wall to have 1 creamery being their only customer, and develop options immediately. Their lifelihood depended on it!! Farmers can't be kicked out of a coop they own. Too late for that. Also, farmers should have pooled resources and sued to high hell all the pollutants and reported farms using illegal labor. Petition townsfolk to start class action sue pollutants. Hit where it hurts.

The article never talks about that. Only complaints about the law (which incidentally, should have not happened if farmers had been proactive at getting their communities to unite against the pollutants).

Instead of putting bad actors out of business, this article seems to state that small farmers were not successful in petitioning - via legislation - to become bad actors themselves. Unfortunate.

Legislation seems to have gotten small farmers in trouble, legislation will not come to the rescue now. Legislation is for the big guns. They are not that.

Agriculture was the first victim of the red/blue phenomenon. Agricultural and trade policy is all about government supported grain industry. For the dairy farmer, they are stuck between regulatory reform that dramatically increases the supply of milk by creating a national market, while their downstream supply chain partners are allowed to consolidate and form monopolies, because American legal theory is insane.

I live in upstate NY from a former dairy producing region. I’m aware of 5 different dairy processors that were within 30-40 miles of my childhood home. Now there is one larger company.

It’s only getting worse. The push for meat-substitutes will just lead to even more consolidation, and start introducing supply risks down the road. The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted, and climate change will affect the Southern California miracle in the desert. In the meantime, the well-watered, prime farm I worked on as a teen had most of the topsoil stripped and sold, and there is a subdivision with 40-50 houses on it.

> The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted

An overwhelming majority of farm land in the Midwest is not irrigated, with Nebraska being the only significant outlier.

"The Ogallala Aquifer underlies parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. From wheat and cows to corn and cotton, the regional economy depends almost exclusively on agriculture irrigated by Ogallala groundwater. But according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), producers are extracting water faster than it is being replenished, which means that parts of the Ogallala Aquifer should be considered a nonrenewable resource."

In large areas, the water level has dropped more than 50 feet. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...)

Each of the circles in these satellite images is an irrigation system. Many are a mile in diameter.

* https://goo.gl/maps/5m82TyPRSHnQ2xCx9

* https://goo.gl/maps/wveD2BaP8Stp66yw7

* https://goo.gl/maps/yXL2gWEXq9fmz4jj6

* https://goo.gl/maps/VbhjEKYgWhaqgEHR6

* https://goo.gl/maps/erC76vZx34Rhzt9VA

Most of those states are not considered to be in the Midwest.

McGuire answered this concern.

The other one I forgot to mention is the topsoil erosion from brain dead farming practices, which is now in or on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Yeah, be careful with that.

You also need to worry about soil salinization, where irrigated land becomes less productive.

There is another danger that is not being touched upon.

Once things consolidate, the overall system becomes massively more fragile.

Think 2008 with a few very big multinational banks. A crisis basically brought the market to its knees. Contrast this to restaurants.

We have had covid restrictions for months, but yet, 2/3rd of the independently owned are finding ways to operate. They are the epitome of resilience.

Imagine if we had a big problem and a bunch of monsantos failed. 2008 style collapse...but this time of the food supply...

It already happened. We couldn’t get flour at retail, because of the supply chain breakdown of paper bags.

Consolidated industry + strategic sourcing = low resilience.

> Consolidated industry + strategic sourcing = low resilience.

This happens everywhere in all industries. Incentives problem. Also agency problem at work.

Current American-style capitalism absolves responsible leadership from low-incidence, high-impact events. The Overton Window has continuously shifted the low-incidence rate from 1 in every extremely-high-number-of-years (sometimes measured in centuries), to in some instances 1 in every single-digit years. They aggressively tout returns to shareholders in the past, then throw up their hands and yell, "Hoocoodanode!?!?!".

To compound matters, there is a malignant, Karen-style American management trend I see where those who do plan ahead and execute on that plan are actively punished when the plans fall short in any way. The response should be: "Wow, I'm sure glad we saved/profited/benefited during that adverse event/period from planning ahead and setting aside, let's work together to figure out how to improve those cards even more because it is obvious it is a winning hand."

Instead, these Karen managers jump down the throats of those who made the hard decisions. First, at the time they made the decisions, for "wasting shareholder resources" on "long shot, unprofitable, black swan" events. Then again when those decisions pay off, they don't sit down and shut up, much less help everyone learn from their error in judgement by admitting to it. They double down to hide their judgement error, by finding flaws in planning ahead, harrumphing indignantly, "Well...you should have known it would turn out like this!"

This is how 3M leadership, despite committing funding towards entire factories and their attendant staffing and logistics chains in mothballs for manufacturing PPE in a crisis, for years, despite successfully onlining them during the pandemic, despite that entire product line hardly being a blip on their 10-Q's, still got raked over the coals by backseat drivers who wanted nothing to do with that entire process when it was being set up but during the pandemic demanded perfect execution.

That kind of "summer soldier and sunshine patriot" leadership of being scarce when the hard decisions are made and being loud to be perceived as "in the know" when reality doesn't mesh perfectly with the results of hard decisions taken many years in the past is extraordinarily toxic to American business, and is a massive cultural failing of American boards to recognize and excise these negative leadership styles.

This also is why ebullient, optimistic, positive leadership styles are so coveted by long-term, sustainable, effective leadership teams. Such teams are in the minority (though ever-so-slowly growing), which is why the adverse dynamics are found in so many industries.

> In the meantime, the well-watered, prime farm I worked on as a teen had most of the topsoil stripped and sold, and there is a subdivision with 40-50 houses on it.

Americans are addicted to (boring) houses in the suburbs and cars, it's such a shame.

One man's boring is another man's idyllic.

One man's ecological wasteland is another man's ecological wasteland.

Gotta admit, I'm not sure which you'd call the ecological wasteland -- the urban area, or the suburban area. Because I'll tell you what, we have a heck of a lot of biodiversity in this suburban area, far more than downtown.

Yes. A lot of people enjoy having a safe yard for their kids to play in and where they can have friends and family over for a cookout. They also enjoy not sharing walls with noisy neighbors who fight and/or play loud music at all hours, not having heavy traffic in the area, and so on.

In the case of the property I’m thinking of, it was land continuously farmed since the Dutch colonized New York. It had a barn built in the 1670s. The farm was prosperous until about 1997, when it ceased to be economically viable.

It seems strange to me that a “one shot” subdivision with a 50 year lifespan is the only viable economy use for that land.

Lina Khan may have been appointed just in time then.

You're completely ignoring market inefficiency, as if a distributed desire for something better can simply be summed into creating a viable competitor. The tech equivalent is proclaiming that if you really don't like Google/Apple/Facebook/etc control, go start your own. It completely ignores that doing so takes an extraordinary amount of effort over a long period of time, and any serious competitor is likely to end up bought out by the bigger business before it can affect the market.

I'm generally apprehensive any time someone says "there ought to be a law", but the article lays out a well-sourced case. The economy and big business are directly opposed, and having a distributed economy is much more important for us human beings. Perhaps price controls aren't the answer (and would actually further benefit the large farms that are killing the economy), but something needs to be done unless we want to end up with farming monocultures that will some day decide it's more profitable to not supply us food. The right answer is probably antitrust breakup, and a statutory limiting of mergers going forward.

>I'm generally apprehensive any time someone says "there ought to be a law", but the article lays out a well-sourced case. The economy and big business are directly opposed, and having a distributed economy is much more important for us human beings. Perhaps price controls aren't the answer (and would actually further benefit the large farms that are killing the economy)

Your statements that I quoted above are almost a perfect counter-argument to show why the suggestion in the last sentence of your comment will not work in practice. It will be shot down by vested interests finding loopholes after a few years, if not sooner. IMO a deeper solution is needed. And no, I cannot give one off the top of my head. Nor am I qualified to do so. But even laymen to an area can see potential flaws if they are obvious.

Possible deeper solutions are to end the centralizing trickle up economics of ZIRP, or to stop time. But either one of these is less likely to happen than targeted anti-trust. I get the idea that the market simply sees regulation as damage and routes around it, but that defeatism is also a large part of our national psyche that lets ourselves be divided over surface issues while capital buys loopholes. We've been sold this unsustainable ratchet strangling humanity as some kind of inevitable progression, and at a certain point we've got to say enough is enough and push back within the paradigm rather than thinking we can escape it.

>reported farms using illegal labor.

I'm from Mexico, but I've always suspected the reason the US Democratic Party supports immigration is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor. They piggyback on antiracist and antinationalist activism to advance the interests of big agriculture.

If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing.

Although tbh this is all I know of American politics from reading internet threads, haha

"If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing."

They do.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cargill-inc/summary?id=D000...

It's not Democrats, it's business owners needing that labor. The Republicans are equally bad in practice, it's their rhetoric that is tougher.

> is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor

Doesn't immigration also create industry which then creates jobs?

Since immigrants are much poorer on average, they spend less than the native population, and often cost more in welfare etc. So the costs of immigration are borne by taxpayers and native low wage workers, while large corporations and business owners reap the benefits.

Yes.

But, lowering tariffs also lets cheap chinese assembly line shoes be shipped to the US for 80 cents less than what it costs to manufacture on shore.

The 80 cents saved does not matter to the shoemaker who lived to sell shoes all his life, has 2 kids and a mortgage, and suffers early retirement due to unfetted globalization.

The obvious solution would be to give everyone jobs. Surely there is something to be gained from not letting unemployed people sit around doing nothing.

Immigrants can only increase demand that is less than the value of their wages. There is diminishing returns in adding more people to a situation.

> The point of a union should not be to collu[d]e to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources

These are just different words for the same thing.

You can have cooperation without price-fixing.

Ultimately the problem is the price...

I'm seeing a resurgence of competition on quality too. I personally purchase organic grass fed glass bottled milk from local farms. Sounds snobby and onerous, but it's available at any Whole Foods.

Quality food is truly worth it. Milk should not be a commodity. I know it's a bit more expensive, but I promise eating quality reduces the need for quantity.

Our bodies are starving on this poorly made junk commodity food.

The other half of the article's issue: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

"Between 1960 and 1998, the average share of disposable personal income spent on total food by Americans, on average, fell from 17.0 to 10.1 percent, driven by a declining share of income spent on food at home."

In 2019, it was 9.5%, with modest decreases on spending for food at home and increases in spending on food away from home.

> Milk should not be a commodity

neither should food, water, or shelter but here we are

No, it isn't. The price is never the problem. It's like saying that when someone stabs you only the pain is the problem. The problem is that you are wounded, not that you are in pain which is just a symptom.

Get this into your head. The price is just a convenient fiction that lets us organize efficiently. If the price is too low then that means other competitors are working far more efficiently than you do. If the price is too high it means that the market isn't efficient enough. The price is just the messenger, it's a whisteblower that only speaks the truth. If you shut it up, it's like wearing a blindfold. You have gained nothing. There is also a limit to how efficient a market can be, if your price limit is so low that it's not physically possible to be efficient enough to even enter the market you can expect supply to shrink. If you put a price minimum then you allow inefficiency to creep in because you mandate that being efficient below a certain point is illegal.

How does this reflect physical reality (yes, the market isn't physical reality, it's just information that is used to organize physical reality)? Physical reality tells us that we have too much milk. The excess milk has to be consumed or production has to be reduced. You have to do either of these things.

The problem is that cooperatives turned into monopolies, becoming inefficient. So it is both a price and organizational problem.

I think we’ve generally agreed that slavery is morally wrong and people should be paid for their work.

> I think we’ve generally agreed that slavery is morally wrong and people should be paid for their work.

This is a non sequitur? Slaves are all, without exception, paid for their work. In most cases, though with some exceptions, they're paid at least partially in currency.

What would you be cooperating to do?

can't speak for gruez, but a couple off the top of my head:

-set standards that all members abide by, potentially bypassing "tragedy of the commons'-style coordination problems

-share information which, in a more cutthroat environment, would be considered "trade secrets".

Not sure how these would apply to the dairy industry specifically; it just seems overly broad to say that price fixing is the only plausible form of cooperation.

Look into the effects of your ideas, and you'll see them wind up in rising prices. Your first example, excluding industry members who don't meet a particular standard, is one of the most typical forms of "colluding to raise prices" you could possibly think of, often expressed in the form of professional certification.

The only things an economic organization can do are raise prices and lower costs. For a labor union, costs are labor; from the consumer end the workers' "lower costs" mean less work is being done, which shows up as higher prices for consumers.

By arguing from the standpoint of raising or lowering prices you're being very reductive. Doctors form trade associations too, and yes the prices for a certified doctor are much higher, but the quality of care is also standardized and usually higher to match. OP wasn't making the point that industry associations don't raise prices. OP was pointing out that most industry associations are formed to try to make things better. And that might result in increased prices, but that's a side-effect and not the goal.

Setting standards and price fixing are different things. You can have fair competition within a marketplace with rules and standards. Price fixing is when all sellers agree to not sell below a certain price, which is a problem pretty much regardless of a marketplace's rules.

Farming as a business gets idealized in the US and there's often this concept of a good old days when family farming was profitable and stable.

But historically speaking farming has always been a boom and bust industry. Even during the land rush days in the US the amount of space granted per farm was barely enough / not enough to scrape by, even at that time.

Now everything is so heavily tied up with legislation to try to recreate appropriate market conditions that I suspect whatever the actual market would be without all that legislation is an unknown.

I grew up around folks trying to scrape by on their family farms living at the whims of markets that can make or break them over the course of just a few years. As much as I like the ideal of the family farm, I'm not sure it is, and not sure it ever was a good way to make a living (outside some exceptions).

I agree nostalgia can cloud judgement but there has been a fundamental shift in the nature of farming in the last few decades.

Btw, this is a perspective from Europe - the same thing has happened with family farming here. While I didn't grow up on one, I spent a lot of time on my grandparent's farm.

Farming has never been easy but the amount of capital required (represented by land, livestock and machinery) to run an economically viable farm has increased enormously increasing the risk. By viable I mean profitable enough to provide an average family with a median income.

My grandparents raised 4 kids, putting 3 of them through 3rd level education and never really wanted for much purely on income from a 90 acre farm. All their neighbours and the entire landscape was covered with family farms of this size plus or minus. What's left now are some old bachelors barely surviving or part-timers (who generally inherited the land) with "real" jobs who keep some dry stock or rent out their land to big producers.

It's sad to see a way of life disappear but I don't see any alternative. From an economic perspective, it can only be supported by transferring income from others to small farmers. This is effectively what happened in the past through higher prices paid for agricultural produce. As a share of disposable income, spending on food is a fraction (well under 10% in the west) of what it was in the past - which hurt the poor disproportionally.

Yeah I'm fairly skeptical about trying to turn the tide of efficiencies and market forces in this case. It really seems to just be shuffling deck chairs and with some bad consequences.

This seems fairly inextricably tied to a heavy reliance on cereal crops & soy. If fruits & vegetables were a higher portion of our collective diet, more small farmers could be supported (produce being less mechanized) and while food spending would increase, our collective health might improve at the same time.

It's not really possible to produce enough calories for the population by focusing on fruits and vegetables. Only cereal and starch crops can do that. This has been true ever since humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and it won't change in our lifetimes.

Also even produce farming is increasingly automated. For example there are already working prototypes of strawberry picking robots; within 10 years those will be in widespread use on large farms.

A meager 9% of the US population hits the recommended 2-3 cups of vegetables a day. I'm not talking about doing away with grains.

It's true produce is increasingly automated. The viable scale still seems much smaller though.

I think hanging your hat on 'well produce will just make more' if the market shifts towards that is a bit fragile.

Generally farmers have been really good at increasing output across the board... often driving prices way down.

Probably a good idea diet wise, but generally not a tried I'd expect would save many farms for long. We've seen increases in other types of farming boom and bust time and again after flooding the market with product.

Yes, if you compare farmers with actors, they seem to have similar problems with stability of employment, low pay, and hard working conditions. In both cases these are partly caused by unavoidable factors about the industry, partly caused by ruthless suppliers, customers, investors and so on, partly caused (let's be honest) by the fact that many people make a lifestyle choice to do those professions, and will put up with poor conditions to keep on doing so.

However, we constantly hear about the rough deal farmers are getting and how important it is to do something to help them. And we never hear this about actors.

You don't need Shakespeare to live

Well, you don't need steak either, but both things are considered extremely important to human life and our society.

> Farming as a business gets idealized

And I understand that in case of plant growers. In case of livestock exploiters I dont see what's so "cool" about it.

I guess I was speaking more generally but as far as livestock there's certainly plenty if idolizing that too, even if some don't.

Stinking animals, caged or fenced up, slaughter looming over their pitiful existence. Nope. No glamour there as far as i see.

Your distaste for it really doesn't have much to do with if it is or isn't idealized.

That also what I'm saying: I have a distaste for it, I cannot believe this is romanticized.

Have you heard of "cowboys"?

As a vegan, I am concerned about the cruel treatment of farm animals. Losing family farms only aggravates the problem in this price race against the bigger actors in dairy production.

While dairy is not strictly necessary for grown ups, I recognise that it will be present for some time so we should care about how it is produced. Dairy should be more expensive than it is now, similar to what happens to meat.

Mind you, activist veganism is one of the biggest reasons family farms are being destroyed all over the world.

Basically, low quality food is flooding the market, and getting purchased by the poorer population, that don't feel they have a choice in what they eat, because they eat whatever is necessary to fit in their budget.

Meanwhile people that CAN afford to buy high quality food from family farms, don't, because of activism convincing them that doing so is evil, specially any farm that has anything to do with animals, this results in things that are actually really bad, like climates where wool is an excellent product have the farmers fail due to lack of demand, and instead people start buying plastic-based clothes, that contribute to plastic pollution.

Or in Brazil: people love to blame the animal industry there for the fires, but it is not so simple, the massive areas being deforested ilegally are often used to produce soybeans, that are on an evergrowing demand due to two sources of demand compounding:

1. As family farms die, cattle instead of eating grass (something that in Brazil and some other countries was important, as some places only grow grass, and not other plants more useful for direct human comsumption), people switch to factory animal farms, that require rations, that are often made of soybeans.

2. Meanwhile the upper strata of society is switching from high quality meat (that would eat grass) to eating soybean-based products (like soybean milk, soybean-based meat, etc...)

I think many activists have their heart in the right place, but they don't understand they are causing more problems than fixing them, the soybean industry is massively destructive, incentivizing it is extremely bad idea.

final note: Remembered other major source of soybean usage... when in the 60s and 70s there was this massive media campaign against usage of animal fats for frying, people switched to soybean oil to fry instead, Brazil also produces massive amounts of that, and I know many people that personally use soybean oil because they honestly believe it is healthier to them and better for the environment than using butter, pork fat, etc...

> activist veganism is one of the biggest reasons family farms are being destroyed all over the world

You're going to have to provide some substantial evidence to back that up. In reality, family farms are actually being destroyed by factory farms[1][2]. This is the case with most industries - smaller operations cannot compete or get bought out by larger players.

> massive areas being deforested ilegally are often used to produce soybeans

If you are concerned about deforestation due to soy production, pointing to vegans as the main culprit is misguided at best and misleading at worst.

If you care about preventing deforestation from soy, then you should know that around 70-75% of the world’s soya ends up as animal feed for cows, pigs, chickens and farmed fish[3] "In 2017, Brazil produced 16.3 million tons of soymeal for its domestic market, and more than 90 percent of that became animal feed, with 50 percent used as chicken feed, 25 percent as pig feed, and 12 percent for beef and dairy cattle feed."[4]

1. https://sentientmedia.org/family-farms-and-the-rise-of-indus...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american...

3. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publication...

4. https://news.mongabay.com/2019/01/brazilian-hunger-for-meat-...

A fall in the demand for high value meat dosn't itself affect demand for low value meat. That makes no sense.

On Brazilian soybeans. Most of the soybeans produced there are actually used to feed livestock. American vegans will be eating American Soybeans not Brazilian ones, so there's no real connection there. Even if there are a ton of Brazilian Vegans, it will take a lot fewer soybeans to feed them directly than it would feeding them via meat anyway. Same for vegans anywhere, surely you must know this?

I'm not even a veggie, but I can't deny the environmental argument is very strong.

You will be happy to learn that the majority of soybeans fed to live stock, so if you are worried about the environment, soy is better than meat.

I suggest you look into the data behind soy production and usage: most of the soy that is produced in the world is fed to animals which people then eat (which is highly wasteful compared to directly eating the soy) and so if you care about the environment, eating soy products is much, much better than eating animal-based products.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

Livestock farming is terrible for the environment and has a huge carbon footprint, partly due to the extreme amount of land it uses.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Did you know that the soybeans planted there are 100% to feed cattle?

Untrue, a significant amount, perhaps even most of it, is exported to China to feed pigs. 73% of Brazilian soybean exports go to China, I wasn't able to find figures on domestic vs export consumption with a cursory search.

Doesn't really undermine your point, except that if you want to save Brazilian rainforest by reducing meat consumption, you'll need to take it up with the Chinese.

Milk production is up every year, so I think you are wrong. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194937/total-us-milk-pro...

> Basically, low quality food is flooding the market, and getting purchased by the poorer population, that don't feel they have a choice in what they eat, because they eat whatever is necessary to fit in their budget.

This has everything to do with capitalism and large corporations selling 99c (meat) burgers with fries and cola with hardly anything healthy in them at the cost of the environment, workers, and other aspects. It’s not a recent phenomenon either. So your starting claim about activist veganism causing problems and continuing to this paragraph immediately after doesn’t make sense.

Yes.

Then better quality farmers have two choices: becomea competitor for mass-quantity farmers and rely on practices like feeding animals with soybeans, or focus on the high end market...

But vegans convinced people on the high end market, to not buy those products.

The article we are commenting on, already explained all the other reasons for death of the small dairies, I just added one more, it felt to me the article done enough to talk about government regulation and whatnot, and I didn't need to repeat it.

Considering the replies I had here, maybe I was wrong on that.

I think it is ridiculous to blame vegans for this.

> While dairy is not strictly necessary for grown ups, I recognise that it will be present for some time so we should care about how it is produced. Dairy should be more expensive than it is now, similar to what happens to meat.

Dairy and meat is part of a healthy diet. While not impossible to do without, health problems often develops with time. That's why most people (84%) who adopts a vegan diet at some point in their lives, returns to eating meat and dairy again. The first years on a plant diet are usually great, almost everyone feels better than ever. Then after 5-10 years many will experience a steep decline in health, both physical and mental that is resolved with returning to animal products. Of course eating too much animal products and not enough plants will also make you sick, that goes without saying.

So yes, agree very much that we should care how it is produced.

> Dairy and meat is part of a healthy diet.

Not actually true. For centuries, the traditional Chinese diet did not include dairy and minimised meat consumption too. The oft-trotted-out trope of calcium in dairy is misleading (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/calcium-and-milk...) and even relatively small amounts of meat and dairy increase the possibility of prostate cancer (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18398033)

Speaking as a vegan of over 10 years, who is mentally sharper and healthier than I was a decade ago, I also don't agree with the "steep decline in health, both physical and mental". I do agree that certain nutrients, such as B12, need to be supplemented, but the Institute of Medicine recommends that everyone over the age of 50 supplement B12 whether vegan or not.

>> The oft-trotted-out trope of calcium in dairy is misleading (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/calcium-and-milk...) and even relatively small amounts of meat and dairy increase the possibility of prostate cancer (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18398033)

From your link:

While calcium and dairy can lower the risk of osteoporosis and colon cancer, high intake can increase the risk of prostate cancer and possibly ovarian cancer.

It increases the probability of developing some diseases and lowers that of developing others.

I don't have the source handy and couldn't be bothered looking for it... its my understanding that dairy is not necessary in a human diet. It doesn't contain anything that isn't easier or healthier to get from other sources and in some cases isn't really beneficial either. Studies have also shown that milk is not a good calcium source, either (although a very quick google didn't find sources to back that up, so maybe its not accurate). The advice I heard from one doctor was: if you enjoy dairy, consume it in moderation, but don't rely on it for nutrition.

Where does 84% come from? Would love to see a cited source, so I can understand your point better.

Re: health without meat & dairy: B12 and other vitamins missing in vegetables are also missing in our meat, which is why all chicken, pigs, and cows are fed B12 vitamins in their feed.

If you stop eating meat and dairy all together, you have to supplement B12 - but most Americans are B12 deficient either way, similar to vitamin D.

Finally - eating meat and dairy also leads to health problems, see: heart disease. I know it's complex, but dairy is definitely not a required part of a diet, and is why humans don't feed their young human milk after infancy.

> While not impossible to do without, health problems often develops with time.

I beg to differ here. I'm allergic to all dairy products (protein allergy), and I haven't had any problem keeping a healthy diet.

Dairy isn't at all necessary for survival after you're able to eat and digest solid food. In fact, most mammals and 65% of humans develop lactose intolerance by adulthood.

Meat? That's a bit more difficult to replace in a completely vegan diet without vitamin supplements.

More FUD from vegetarian haters. Please stop. Yes, 15 year old US vegans can be insufferable, just like libertarians who discover Ayn Rand at the same age.

In India it is estimated that 23-37% of the population is vegetarian or vegan [1]. In a country of 1billion, that's like an entire vegetarian United States. It is absolutely fine to live a life as vegan/vegetarian.

Also interesting you don't seem to have done any research on the health issues caused by eating red meat and dairy. Want to give that a go?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43581122

> [health problems are] why most people (84%) who adopts a vegan diet at some point in their lives, returns to eating meat and dairy again

How did you come to that conclusion and what data do you have to support it? The overwhelming majority of ex-vegans I know did so because of either convenience or missing specific foods.

As a human who is concerned with the treatment of bull (male) calfs born on dairy farms and their treatment for the production of veal, I have absolutely no clue why being a vegan has any pertinence. Why is it such common practice to insufferably proclaim one's ethos as a vegan?

In all seriousness, the conditions under which bull calfs for veal production is abhorrent, and I have great difficulty in balance sympathy for the plight of dairy with the practices of the industry. While the article mentions CAFOs, which are the largest contributors to veal production, I'd been hard-pressed to find a family run dairy farm in my home, midwestern state, which didn't at the least sell their bull calfs to outfits that do produce veal.

Next time you see that on the menu, take a moment to think about where it's coming from and how it's made.

> the conditions under which bull calfs for veal production is abhorrent

To you!

To me (also vegan) any animal in a cage is abhorrent. I want to be free and wild and I also want all others to be free and wild. Maybe some humans deserve to be caged for their behavior. Animals can never be guilty...

> Next time you see that on the menu, take a moment to think about where it's coming from and how it's made.

Exactly. Was someone (NOT something) caged? Was a baby taken away from a mother, right after birth, in order to steal (=take what is not given) the milk that mum produces for baby?

And after this consideration: go for one of the plant options on the menu!

Here's what I don't understand about this reasoning: many of the animals you're defending -- such as cows -- have been domesticated to the point of relying on humans for survival. For these, the choice is not "live in captivity, or live free", it's "live in captivity, or not at all".

My question is therefore: were you unaware of this, or do you prefer the disappearance of (e.g.) cows over their captivity?

Most vegans would support the extinction of domesticated cows over their forced inpregnation and commodification.

These domesticated cows aren’t necessary for keeping the ecosystem in balance, and any cow we don’t breed into existence won’t suffer. There aren’t a group of unborn cows being sad that they never got a chance to exist.

There isn’t a strong reason to support cow breeding for the sake of cows existing.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-09-07

So you support genocide ;)

This is yet more the kind of nonsensical, insufferable drivel that turns people away from rationally thinking about their food. Someone's preference for how and what they eat contributes nothing to conversation, and exists only to project a belief of superiority and collect pats on the back from like-minded thinkers.

If a sentient AI with superhuman intelligence were observing us, they would be utterly puzzled at the amount of waste and destruction we perpetuate through the meat & dairy industries for no reason other than ephemeral perceived pleasure through our taste buds.

If "someone's preference" - a completely subjective thing - is objectively less efficient and more harmful than doing something else, we can and do intervene to discourage such practices. No one should have to apologize for promoting something clearly better.

If you love meat and are willing to burn the planet down so you can keep eating it, fine. But don't pretend it's a choice without consequences or that it's necessary.

Humans like eating meat because it is nutritious. It is not just a random preference and it is not something that anyone can just switch off, therefore it is not a matter of morality, as you are trying to portray it ("If you love meat and are willing to burn the planet down so you can keep eating it...").

It is possible our taste for (cooked) meat gave us an evolutionary advantage that made us who we are today:

However, accessing more calories was not the primary reason our ancestors decided to cook food. “Scientists often focus on what the eventual benefit is, rather than the immediate mechanism that allowed our ancestors to make the choice. We made the choice because of deliciousness. And then the eventual benefit was more calories and fewer pathogens.”

Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. “In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we’ve needed to eat in the past,” said Dunn.

In particular, people who evolved a preference for complex aromas are likely to have developed an evolutionary advantage, because the smell of cooked meat, for example, is much more complex than that of raw meat. “Meat goes from having tens of aromas to having hundreds of different aroma compounds,” said Dunn.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/07/how-early-hu...

A superhuman intelligence would, basically by definition, have no problem understanding why an evolved being enjoys foods which it specifically co-domesticated itself with. After all, I understand that that, and I'm not superhumanly intelligent, also by definition.

I said co-domesticated and I mean it: a substantial number of humans of European and Nilotic descent have a mutation which makes them able to digest raw milk well into adulthood. I have to rely on the cultural technology of fermenting milk with lactobacillus, sadly.

Or it would be wondering why we don’t eat any piece of meat we possibly can in order to maximally extract nutrients from our surrounding environment.

> Someone's preference

It's not a personal choice (preference) when it cause another being to suffer (caged, artificially inseminated (raped), babies taken away, fed horrible food, etc.)

Thinking that it IS a personal choice, to me, puts one on borderline insanity: total disdain for other forms of sentient life.

I hope the taste of that meat/dairy/eggs makes it all worth it for you. I cannot imagine taste bud pleasure trumps ethics.

>> I hope the taste of that meat/dairy/eggs makes it all worth it for you. I cannot imagine taste bud pleasure trumps ethics.

You are putting a morality spin on something that has a biological basis. Humans like the taste of meat because it is a very good source of necessary nutrients. It is possible that our preference for meat and dairy (in particular, fermented dairy, like cheese) has provided us with an evolutionary advantage that has made us who we are today:

Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. _“In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we’ve needed to eat in the past,_” said Dunn. (My underlining)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/07/how-early-hu...

For every vegan that posts, there is also the insufferable drivel of someone that is above veagns. The person that has to tell the world they will continue exploiting and abusing animals because vegans are annoying. Not sure why you act like you are adding so much rich information to the conversation by complaining about a vegan.

At least in USA, veal consumption is low enough that most of those surplus bulls are slaughtered as "mature" steers at ~20 months of age, not as calves. (Some people may not consider that much of an improvement!) Also there is sexed semen, which avoids the issue completely.

This is fascinating. I've spent some time looking into the sexed semen, had no knowledge that was a thing prior. Thank you for sharing that.

>As a vegan, I am concerned about the cruel treatment of farm animals.

For a somewhat malicious counter point... if the entire world stopped using dairy and beef, the cow as we know it would quickly go extinct. They have no natural habitat, they can't take care of themselves, and they make really lousy pets.

It is a somewhat similar story with elephants. They make lousy pets as well and selling ivory is illegal. So the best they get is being shoved into smaller and smaller chunks of dedicated public land.

"For a somewhat malicious counter point... if the entire world stopped using dairy and beef, the cow as we know it would quickly go extinct. They have no natural habitat, they can't take care of themselves, and they make really lousy pets. "

Reframing factory farming as a conservation measure is a very cyncial view. That's top notch spin doctoring and worth a long career in lobbying.

"the entire world stopped using dairy and beef, the cow as we know it would quickly go extinct"

Lots of animals are not used for meat and dairy and are not extinct. Sure, numbers of cows would be massively reduced but that also frees up pasture. Pasture could be converted to habitat for wildlife and support a more diverse set of species.

I can only speak for myself, but I don't care if the number of cattle are reduced to a tiny fraction of the population they once were, if it means more biodiversity.

> For a somewhat malicious counter point

I don't think you understand what vegans (typically) actually object to.

I don't understand this focus on "species" in the abstract over the individual members of the species.

> if the entire world stopped using dairy and beef, the cow as we know it would quickly go extinct

So what? Why should the cow exist for the sake of existing?

The dairy industry isn't the best to attack on animal cruelty. While there are bad actors within it, it's a small amount compared to it as a whole. Low stress cows produce noticeably better quality milk. This isn't a secret in the industry.

Wheat, soybean, avocados, palm oil and more are just as bad for the environment and animal life due to commercialization. Monoculture industrial farming is inherently unsustainable. High density growing of a single type of organism that requires outside resources to be brought it. Artificial fertilizer production isn't ecological either. The pest control required, and I'm not talking about bugs, I'm talking about rodents, birds, boar and deer, is pretty harmful for not just the animals, but for the regional ecosystem.

"Let's just make food more expensive for people! I decide what people should eat and when even though the purchasing power of the average individual is shrinking as is!" As an omnivore, I have to tell you, "slow down there Stalin". Then again, you're not wrong. You need less farmland if you starve enough people to death. Guess you're a fan of population control? Historically speaking, on average, anyone that advocates for the limiting of general food distribution to everyday people don't become well known as humanitarians or "good people".

You choose to be vegan, good for you. But don't pretend industrial farming of soy, peas and avocados don't have blood on their hands. The only vegans who can lay claim to the moral high ground are the ones that permaculture grow their own food. They get my respect, big time, since they're not virtue dieters.

There were a news article this fall about how demand for more ecological produced dairy and meat has gone down while public opinion about ecological produced dairy and meat has gone up. The explanation provided there is that while people increasingly care more about how the dairy and meat is produced, those same people are also reducing their consumption.

This seems to be an area where pollution control and stricter regulation in regard to animal health is required in order to see improvements. In addition, human trafficking has become common practice in many cheap labor industries, to the point where the police has stopped investigating because otherwise they would have no resources to spend on areas which are more politically valuable. Many workers are forced to work or end up not getting paid, and then scared into avoiding the police in fear of violence. Work safety and health care rarely exist, and in the case of farm workers and construction there is few if any support system to help victims.

Also, ecological production has suffered several scandals, quality problems and marketing snafus that have lead to it decreasing in popularity or getting less ecological:

E.g. there have been scandals around contaminated ecological ("Bio-" in Germany) eggs because chicken droppings more easily contaminate eggs when nests and cages are larger and more free-range. Ecological vegetables had acceptance problems because the lack of pesticides meant that the looks were less appealing in the supermarket, leading to the increased use of "green" pesticides (that is, "naturally occuring" poison) and barrier methods that harm wildlife like nets and foils. Ecological meat has also consistently over-promised and under-delivered on the customer-apparent quality of the product. You just don't notice if the steak you are eating came from a happy cow...

I fully agree there exist problem with the ecological branding, and with eggs in particularly the standard is a bit shoehorned. In eu, ecological egg is mostly about how many chicken live per m^2, which is non-obvious by the name.

For non-ecological egg in EU, the minimum standard is 16 hens in the small space of 6 cm^2 minimum per hen and cage. That to me is animal cruelty. Ecological egg has a minimum requirement of 6 hens per m^2 when inside, no battery cages, access to daylight 24/7 and outside access for half the year and then with 4m^2 per hen.

There is also addition requirements for the feed but it feels so much less important than simply not having a cage where each hen has 6cm to stand on.

>>> In addition, human trafficking has become common practice in many cheap labor industries, to the point where the police has stopped investigating because otherwise they would have no resources to spend on areas which are more politically valuable.

I'm sorry what.

It was in the local news a year or so back. If they go to any construction site, they will find so many cases that they won't have resources to do any other work related investigations for the rest of the year. As such they decided to stop doing it for the unforeseen future. From the politicians, they mostly want the companies to self regulate. Human trafficking for labor is costly to enforce and is not something which wins votes, and the shortage in low wage workforce has trickle down effects on political goals that they do care about.

The situation is very similar in areas of farming (as the article describes), fishing, foresting, and cleaning.

Are you using "human trafficking" when you mean "hiring workers who lack documentation"? These are not the same thing, and I don't believe anyone who knows enough English to have encountered that term would make that mistake.

70% of all human trafficking is for forced and exploitative labor.

Lets take an example. 30 workers get transported over the border as seasonal workers to work at a farm. They live in small building without heating or running water, and barely have enough food. 3 months goes by and they have still not get paid, and when food stop arriving they decide to go to the police.

The owner of the farm claim innocence, as they simply hired contractors. There is even a ongoing legal case between the farm owner and this contractor because the work has been less than what was agreed and paid. The farm owner has been living in a different country for this whole period and never seen the workers, and the pickup for the produce was handled by a different contractor.

The police now have 30 unknown persons from multiple countries and without passports. The workers want to get their pay, and also food and shelter. They are do not want to get sent back home with nothing. The police will now have to do a lot of hard work, social service will have to address the humanitarian situation, and the criminals are very unlikely to be caught, fined and sentenced. It will cost a lot of money and resources for the government, with nothing that they can use political to show for it.

Under the laws I live on, this is human trafficking. There are an unlimited amount of variation this, but the key aspects are exploration under coercion, abduction, fraud, and deception. There are those that like to think the problem is just a few missing documents, but in practice there are victims being coerced and forced into doing dangerous work with little or no pay, and then treated with disinterest by the rest of society.

What?

My uncle owned a large dairy farm before he died. He loved farming, loved his cows ("the girls"), and loved farming enough to farm until he died, even though it was hard physical labor that had already taken a large toll on his body.

The running joke in the family was that he made more from real-estate speculation than he ever did from farming. His farm was next to a major interstate and in the suburban expansion path for his metro area. He'd buy land and farm it when the price was low, and because he farmed it, the real estate taxes were negligible. He'd then sell it when the prices where high and use it to subsidize the farm.

He died a millionaire, but lived in a ratty, falling down farmhouse and drove a 20+ year old car.

This is one of the only real ways to make money as a small farmer, the others being agro-tourism (pick your own), hospitality (airbnb, events etc) or most difficultly direct to consumer farm sales.

>He died a millionaire, but lived in a ratty, falling down farmhouse and drove a 20+ year old car.

To some people this is a feature, not a bug. He also probably wasn't surrounded by 100 nosy neighbors.

My niece is (was) a Milkmaid in Switzerland. Her family dairy farm sold off all the cattle a few years ago when the state de-regulated milk.

I remember the cattle were pastured across the road. There was an underpass for the cattle to get from barn to field and back. In the evening they would begin their trek, the herd gathering and filing through the underpass. Each cow would take her place in the barn, in a stall with her name, ready to be milked.

To be sure, they re-purposed the land and farm. The national polo team practices in the field and stables in the barn. So that's some income. But not the same.

My niece is a teacher now.

In New Zealand, the average dairy herd size on the South Island is 611 (414 nationally).

In Wisconsin, it's 150.

Looks like there's a lot of room for consolidation in Wisconsin.

https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/special-reports/dairy...

http://www.siddc.org.nz/about-siddc/south-island-dairying/

lots of farms in the US have 1000+ cows.

> According to the USDA's 2017 Census of Agriculture report, which is published every five years, most US milk cows (55%) reside on farms that milk over 1,000 cows. This is in contrast to twenty years earlier

https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/sectors/dairy/Changing-...

Even here in Canada with regulation we see the same consolidation happening. The quotas of production have become so expensive that it is not possible to start from scratch. In the case of my familly the cows were sold in 1989 because it was either growing the farm or selling.

Now we produce only corn & soybean and despiste our ~100 acres it is not enough to sustain one person without a side job. There is not much money to be made in agriculture for small farms, that's why I am a software engineer.

On one point the article has made.

Canadians are really really unhappy with their milk system, they have some of the highest priced milk in the entire world and they despise it.

"probably through a supply management program similar to what Canada has" is a nonstarter for cityfolk. It would mean $4 milk.

To my knowledge there are still functional family dairy farms here in Ontario. And the cost of milk, about $4.80 (Canadian) for 4L, and butter (hovering between $3 and $6 per pound - we buy it on special, it stores well in the freezer) is really not an issue even for our family of four. So far so good. I'm glad to pay it if it keeps family farms in business. I grew up on a dairy farm in Germany (in the pre-quota days).

The issue is the quota system. A quick google says it's hovering around $25K Canadian for the right to ship one kilogram of butterfat (whole milk is about 3.5% fat) per day. This means the quota tends to be a farmer's single most valuable possession, and it protects idyllic family farms (good) but makes it prohibitively expensive to get into the business.

All in all, you can drive around in Ontario's farm belts and they still look pretty traditionally prosperous. We must be doing something right.

It's actually not true that family dairy farms in Ontario are doing well. If you look at actual data (search for "D056 Number of farms with shipments of milk by province"), you'll see that the number of independent farms in Ontario has declined by 29% since 2006. You see the same long term trend in every province.

At one time long ago, the quota system was billed as protecting the family farm, but in practice now it drives the death of family farms, as people with quotas slowly sell out to large producers and new farmers cannot enter the marketplace because of the quota cost wall. Ontario currently is tied with Quebec for the cheapest quotas in the country, but getting started in the industry is still impossible without huge investments beyond the reach of young farmers (e.g., the upfront cost just to buy just the quotas, not the land or the cows, for a small 100 cow venture in Ontario is currently $2.4 million -- compare this with someone else in this thread who managed to get a whole farm up and running in the US, including land and his herd, for around $500k USD).

>All in all, you can drive around in Ontario's farm belts and they still look pretty traditionally prosperous. We must be doing something right.

By having laws that force consumers to subsidize the businesses of special interests?

That is a common purpose of laws. Most laws in a "modern" society are probably some form of that. As special interests go, dairy farmers seem more ethically defensible than armaments manufacturers. I wish my nation were more like Canada.

From my perspective (being Canadian, and having enough money to purchase milk) the price is fine with me. No one in my family drinks milk. My kids have it with cereal, and I use it for cooking. A price of $5 CDN for 4L of regular milk, and $9 CDN for 4L of organic milk is just high enough to ensure that it is drunk in moderation. Using Walmart, I chose Plano, TX and the price of 1 gallon of Walmart brand milk costs $2.41 USD which converts to $3.05 CDN so Canadians pay a $2 premium. I purchase 4L every 2 weeks, so I pay $48 more per year to have a milk system that benefits the farmers, and their neighbours. I'm OK with that. Plus that extra $2 ensures that Canadian milk doesn't contain growth hormones which are permitted in the USA.[1]

[1] https://bcdairy.ca/milk/articles/does-milk-contain-growth-ho...

It amounts to about a $150 dollar a year tax (more with the more children you have). Only, the tax goes to 13,000 producers, so it's a regressive tax that penalizes the poor.

https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/suppl...

We have rather cheap milk here in Germany, because it's heavily subsidized.

But right now plant based alternatives are on the rise. I didn't buy milk for years now.

Canadian here, very happy with the milk quota system. Despite all the media hoopla, I don't actually know anyone who cares about it. And I live in a city.

Also a Canadian. Likely most people don't care about it because they don't really know about it, and the additional price that goes to subsidizing farmers is also not material for many people. Also, many who live near the border make a bi-monthly trek into the US (pre-covid) to buy milk, eggs, and gasoline.

re: >> "I don't actually know anyone who cares about it" see: https://imgur.com/gallery/BTOog

I remember the first time I saw cheese prices in the US and almost cried. A 1 kg block of good cheese was like $20-30, not $60-90.

Costco is our salvation here in Ontario. Cheese prices are high, yes, but about 1/2 at Costco compared to anywhere else. They have good selection and quality. Reference is a 500g block of Jarlsberg at currently $9.50 Canadian. Expensive, but still affordable.

Officially, US cheddar seems to be trending about $12/kg ($5.50/lb). I actually pay a lot less, ~$12.50 for a 4lb block (Walmart).

ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236863/retail-price-of-c...

Decent cheddar is £7 / kg in the UK & that’s ignoring the cheap stuff.

Once you're above the grade of "cheese" that I'd suppose Europeans wouldn't recognize as such at all, even our low-end actual cheese in the US is incredibly expensive compared to (Western, at least, IDK about the rest) Europe. Not sure why.

In Singapore, a liter (not gallon) of fresh milk starts from about $3. Then again, neither the Chinese nor Malay populace historically drinks the stuff.

I lived in Singapore for two years, and over that whole time was never able to choke down more than a swallow or two of the... liquid that was sold as "milk" there. The cheese selection, however, was much better than that available in USA.

I don’t buy dairy at all because of how expensive it is here. A cheap block of store brand cheddar cheese costs $5. A 2L carton of milk is around $3, or I can get a 4L jug for $5. A small container of sour cream is $3. A single 100g Greek yoghurt cup is $1. Huge waste of money.

Big dairy in Canada is really powerful to the point where it’s impossible to get elected as Conservative party leader without supporting the dairy cartel.

That's equal to or less than what I pay in the US. Seems to me the Canadian system doesn't drive up costs that much.

I love how this article mentions Canada’s Dairy Cartel. They make it seem like such a good thing. It is not. We pay very high prices for milk and dairy products. I would rather a free market where those who can provide cheap and quality get the market share. Instead there is no competition the system is really screwed and definitely not endorsed by all Canadians. One gallon of milk costs us about $6Cad. Mean while if you have a good year and your cows really produce well you are only allowed to bring to market there set amount you produce. So yes Canada has a dairy cartel that price fixed and regulates the entire market but is allowed.

My Uncle started with a "family" farm in up state new york, maybe milking 80-100. Over the years as my Cousins took over, it turned into a commercial farm where they milk over 1000. The scale is pretty massive: from the barns that go on forever, to the giant pools of manure, the horizontal bunkers that store the sileage. They adapted I suppose - and because its a 3+ family farm with plenty of workers they can get time off from the grind. My Uncle, however, for years was the sole owner and worked his ass off 7 days a week. Its taken him a very long time in his retirement to be able to enjoy his time.

I think there's one thing to mention - this has been happening for a long long time.

In my family tree, there were lots and lots of farmers, and now there are no farmers left.

Looking backward along your family tree you'll probably find the same, probably like something in this blog post.

I think this is the graph that might describe it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture#/media/File:Transi...

I think we have to sort of figure out not only the loss, but the gain.

This was written in 2019. There is another thread, but this is my first time reading. So I understand;

- Milk prices are going down due to a decrease in the cost of production + overproduction.

- Farmland availability is decreasing because CAFOs are incentivized (required?) to buy more land. Property value is also decreasing for farmers near CAFOs.

- Small farmers operate on decreasing margins.

- Small farmers lack protection against rising overhead costs, this was historically done through co-ops, however these co-ops have grown to be massive conglomerates and fail to serve the underlying communities.

- CAFOs are the leading pollutants of water sources. They are also the leading consumers of ground water.

- There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of small farming operations.

Bad economic policies lead to public health and cultural crises. I can't help but draw some parallels to what has been happening in the Rust Belt (Hillbilly Elegy is a great read for this topic). It's insane how little I know about food economics and scary how much of an impact it has on communities, especially impoverished ones.

> It's insane how little I know about food economics and scary how much of an impact it has on communities, especially impoverished ones.

America mostly stopped caring about the welfare of rural Americans sometime around WWII. There have been some brief blips (Appalachia 68, farms 78) but generally - concern for Americans to sustain themselves ends at the edge of metro areas. Neither pols, nor press nor most of us are interested in a meaningful way.

To be clear, my assertion isn't an invitation to pit the rural poor against the urban poor. It's to highlight how Americans tend to be particular about which Americans merit their concern. For schlubs like me, that might be understandable. But for those folks who's actual job it is to look out for everyone - rarely caring about the welfare of some Americans (who are in real and sustained trouble) is just systemic neglect.

> Neither pols, nor press nor most of us are interested in a meaningful way.

I'm not sure that's true - it's just that overall people are much more interested in cheap food. Agriculture has been pulled into a race for the bottom here for a while, and small farms & rural communities are a nearly unavoidable casualty.

The basic math here is easy, the moment labor becomes a significant contribution there is pressure to reduce it, which means either worse pay for the same work, or figuring out how to be more productive with less labor (automation, scaling) or a mixture of both.

Overall there is a lot of concern with being able to keep a food supply going, but that doesn't' translate to caring about e.g. family farms remaining viable.

For those curious, CAFO stands for "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation". I was unfamiliar with the term and had to look it up.

See link for more details (found in Wikipedia sources) [0]:

> A CAFO is another EPA term for a large concentrated AFO [animal feeding operation]. A CAFO is an AFO with more than 1000 animal units (an animal unit is defined as an animal equivalent of 1000 pounds live weight and equates to 1000 head of beef cattle, 700 dairy cows, 2500 swine weighing more than 55 lbs, 125 thousand broiler chickens, or 82 thousand laying hens or pullets) confined on site for more than 45 days during the year. Any size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway is defined as a CAFO, regardless of size. CAFOs are regulated by EPA under the Clean Water Act in both the 2003 and 2008 versions of the "CAFO" rule.

[0]: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plan...

Fortunately for me, some US producers have managed to create a sustainable business model, while providing great (if old fashioned) product: https://blog.goodeggs.com/blog/straus-family-creamery-pionee...

Straus milk is not cheap at ~$9 per gallon, but we don’t consume a lot and the quality is simply amazing. Still haven’t figured out what it is, but regular cheap US milk makes me incredibly sick to the point that my DR diagnosed me with lactose intolerance, except I noticed when traveling to continental EU, I never got sick even when accidentally eating something with dairy. Turns out I can have milk and milk-based product just fine, but something about the regular US milk was like poison to me. Tried the A2 bandwagon - didn’t work. I can’t now recall how I stumbled on Straus product, but it was life changing and I really hope they continue to survive!

I'm also willing to pay more for milk I perceive as better. That seems to be the way forward...distinguish your milk as something better than what's usually found at the supermarket. The farm near me places emphasis on their breed of cows.

Fun fact: newborn cows are switched from their mother's milk to an industrial milk formula just five days after their birth, instead of the normal weaning period of 8 months, so that humans can drink the calf's milk.

Far from an universal truth from my experience as a veterinarian

Really? Tell me: what is the typical time your patients wean their calves? Because it literally cannot be 8 months, because then there is no milk left to sell. So what is the weaning period, and what are the calves fed before they start grazing?

EDIT: Nevermind, I just went through your comment history. You seem to be a lot of contradictory things. Like, both male and female.

For meat breeds, the veals stay under the mother. If it's for veal meat, they can be bred very late without being weaned at all nor having a diversifying diet (and have iron deficiencies for it but they're slaughtered soon enough), to maximise the mass of veal meat. Basically, they're raised by the mother. Maybe formula if there's a problem with the mothers production but not otherwise. And these breeds are not milked for human consumption anyways so .. ?

For dairy breeds, considering a good holstein makes 50L of milk per day and a veal drinks 2-5L per meal (2x a day) depending on age, you've got a lot of milk left. And since most medications make milk improper for human use, this is the milk that's given to a calf, past the first milking (colostrum, which is too fat to be suited for consumption anyways), bc there will most probably be at least one cow under medication at any point of time. Otherwise they take classic milk.

For high value breeds, like for specific cheeses or so it's worth to buy formula. But for your basic milk pissing holstein, probably not. I mean, formula is not free.

Weaning is not 8 months anyways. I guess you could, just like some kids are breast fed until 4 yo... But a few months is enough. At 8 months they would not feed 100% on milk anyways, that would be an always shrinking part of the diet. So even in that scenario, the mother would still produce from 10-20L of milk and the calf would drink maybe 2L over a day.

The narrative of the calf deprived of its mothers milk to feed humans just shows a laughable lack of knowledge of the milking industry, yet that doesn't stop people from talking out of their asses. Breeds are now so proficient they far exceed the needs of their calf.

> Fun fact:...

Fun is weird where you are. What are your amusement parks like?

I'd encourage anyone with advice for the farm industry to work 1 week on a farm if they haven't before. Many probably were born and raised on it but if you weren't, it'd be worth it.

> It seems hard to believe but at one point it was possible to make a decent living as a dairy farmer with a small herd (what’s now considered small, anyway). In 1981 my dad had a herd of 82 milking cows and he cracked the top 50 in all of northwest Wisconsin’s 22 counties for average milk production.

> As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the “farmers” are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation.

Mirrors a lot of what my family went through. Grew up on a cattle ranch in the 80s... ranches were already 5-10x larger than they had been the generation before. Efficiency and capitalism and finding better ways to solve problems... totally get the reasons for the consolidation. Just sucks for the people. Farmers and Ranchers have been a dying breed for so very long now. And replacing the family farm with a factory farm -- practical or reasonable or not -- it just seems so... offensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E

Interesting with the dairy cow milk production graphs since the 1970s. Probably belongs on this list.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Dead of agriculture in general happened to undeveloped countries like the one I am from a long time ago. You might not see it now but the next logical thing to happen is starvation of mass population, and a state of irrecoverable workforce, many of us around the world are doing the same, leaving the farms to go working on computers. Let me tell you this: you cannot eat bytes.

It's difficult but I'm not sure what the alternatives might be. The largest dairy farms can cut costs in ways which would not be practical for small farms because the capital expenditure (robotised milking parlours for example) or the market power (being able to negotiate on feed prices). The mega lots with thousands of cows can sell milk for less than it costs a small farm to produce it.

The only available option is specialisation. Build a brand around products manufactured on site, cheeses and butters for example. Diversification, I've been on two ex-dairy farms, one now produces mostly beer and the other is an ice cream based tourist attraction.

You forgot the most important advantage of scale:

Just barely comply with the letter of the law or be in the gray area, have a legal team that makes you harder to pick on and then wait for the regulators to figure out that the small guys are the easy targets.

One of the main characters in Serotonin (Michel Houellbecq, 2019) is a French dairy farmer watching his family's business slowly go bankrupt. It's a ficitonal version of a simlar set of events, causes and consequences.

Thanks for mentioning the book, on my reading list now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_(novel)

This is all exacerbated by the decline in birth rates. Milk marketing promotes milk as a nearly perfect food - and it is, but it is costly for the ~6% of nutritional content in milk, (skim and 2%BF being lower). I only use milk for tea and often a gallon sours before I finished - so I switched to superfiltered bagged 3 packs, as the sealed ones last a month in the fridge. So you have super cows making more and a populace drinking less - it does not augur well...

This is basic supply and demand in action. Farmers that don’t automate and scale up to be competitive will go out of business. The same thing happens in any market unless regulation/rules/monopolisation change the market conditions.

I had a similar upbringing, but in Canada. A lot of this rings true.

Our family doesn't farm anymore,but for different reasons. Still, the pressure to go big or go home exists north of the border, too.

I think Adam Smith nailed it back in the 1700s, when he noted that farmers could not take advantage of specialization. They're capitalists and labourers and landlords and semi-professional veterinarians and commodity traders all in one. Without specialization, they're unlikely to ever be very wealthy relative to the amount of labor and capital they input.

The bigger farms can actually hire dedicated mechanics and accountants and such, so it's no surprise they get a better return on investment. That would probably remain true even if they didn't engage in shenanigans like undocumented laborers and excessive pollution, though no doubt those practices help them pull even further ahead.

On a different note, since supply management was mentioned, I can't resist linking to this program: https://youtu.be/3d-FlQHoHpU

Short argument against supply management: it's a regressive tax on people who buy milk, cheese, butter and yogurt.

Is it even worth it to make cheese anywhere else than France, Switzerland and Italy mountains?

You can make good cheese in the United States, cheese is really about the recipe (and how much cream was left in the milk).

There just is nothing like the culture of cheese production, US foodstuffs are awful quality because the general public buys it up for some unknown reason.

Wait. You just wrote that if America implemented a supply control system that milk prices would increase to $4/g with the implication being that increase in price would be unacceptable. Now you wrote that "US foodstuffs are awful quality because the general public buys it for some unknown reason." You can't have your cake and eat it too. Most likely the public has gotten used to low prices for low quality products. I have had amazing cheese in Vermont and it was expensive - probably because the producer had to use more milk fat which is more costly.

Raw milk cheese is typically easier to produce and far tastier. However, as far as I'm told, it is illegal in the USA. So there is a simple reason: Your fear. ;)

Supply control increases prices without increasing quality. High quality dairy gets even more expensive.

Agreed. I didn't suggest that supply control increases quality, and yes it does increase price. However in Canada it appears that the increase in price has returned a benefit to the consumer by the gov't restricting the use of certain drugs.

I have relatives who run an organic farm, which is rather large and industrialized for a farm that has the official German "bio" label. They make their own cheese as a side business, but it is only sold locally. This way they can charge a higher price and there are no middlemen, so it is profitable. But I doubt this would scale.

We were on holiday in France skiing for a week once and the hotel dinner included 4 different local cheeses each night - none were repeated of the course of a week.

It wasn't exactly a smart hotel (2* I think) but the food was sublime.

Some of the cheese they sell in France would be classified as a biological weapon in Germany. They are awesome.

Equally, Limburger would be classed as a biological weapon in France, and I dare say, the world. Brevibacterium Linens for the ... eeeugh.

(but, good cheese)

Nope. There are many French cheeses like that. Munster, livarot, époisses ...

For years, we had a few goats, and made our own dairy and cheese. It worked fine, at the price of having to do some extra chores each day. So I'm not sure what you are measuring to define if it is "worth it".

I was just being sarcastic I guess.

Anyway, I don’t believe in high volume, low value dairy products as sustainable. They aren’t even good products.

I am perfectly fine with homemade cheese from the backyard goats.

Portugal, Spain, Greece and the rest of the Balkans, Romania, UK, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands also make, eat and export plenty of cheese.

While I can appreciate the author's nostalgia, I cannot really agree on some of the criticism:

The manure problem is a problem at any size of farm, the amount of manure per cow is somewhat constant. So concentrating all the cows in some factory farm doesn't really make anything worse as long as the total number of cows is somewhat constant.

The undocumented immigrant labour problem isn't as big a problem as the family farms' systemic problem of child labour and child exploitation. Which the author glosses over in his point of view.

To feed a growing population on earth, we do need industrial farming. Maybe not so much cattle. But in general, higher efficiency and more professional operations should be applauded. Yes, that means that family farms will be gone at some point.

> the total number of cows is somewhat constant.

But the number of cows isn't constant. The entire premise of the article is a demonstration of how large numbers and power laws work in economics.

> To feed a growing population on earth, we do need industrial farming.

Do we? That's a massively contested debate. See: (Neo)Malthusianism.

> But in general, higher efficiency and more professional operations should be applauded

These aren't virtues that one should blindly laud if the net result is externalizing costs towards the commons: society and ecology.

What's the point of being able to feed 8 or 9 billion people on the planet, if quality of life for the majority of those individuals is rather low?

The article rightly points at the glaring moral questions beneath all of this.

>> To feed a growing population on earth, we do need industrial farming. > Do we? That's a massively contested debate. See: (Neo)Malthusianism.

On the one hand, you dismiss my population growth argument as "Malthusianism" (which I don't consider a counter-argument at all, it is just naming things).

But on the other hand you acknowledge that we cannot just feed ever more people:

> What's the point of being able to feed 8 or 9 billion people on the planet, if quality of life for the majority of those individuals is rather low?

So on one hand you are dismissing my argument as Malthusian, on the other hand you are making a very Malthusian argument yourself.

My argument would be: I agree with you that mankind needs to shrink and right-size so the then-sustainable population can have some level of comfort for everyone.

Manure isn't a problem if you free range your animals, have landscape structures to prevent runoff and have other animals that eat bugs in the same space such as chickens. Then it just contributes fertility to the land.

Children working their family farm are learning real skills. Learning how to produce food is vastly more important than american history or most of the literature they would learn in school.

Industrial farming is stupid, and totally unnecessary. Using permaculture and silvopasture, you can produce much more (and more nutritious) food in the same space, while improving (rather than destroying) fertility. If done right, you don't need pesticides, your animals don't need antibiotics or dewormers, and the whole thing mostly runs itself aside from a little pruning/herding and a lot of picking. The only downside to these methods is they take some time to get going, and they require knowledgeable farm workers rather than dirt cheap migrant laborers or a combine.

> Manure isn't a problem if you free range your animals, have landscape structures to prevent runoff and have other animals that eat bugs in the same space such as chickens. Then it just contributes fertility to the land.

I would contest that. Animal manure runoff has always been a problem to e.g. brooks and rivers and only in recent years has the legislation started to prevent some of the more problematic practices. Like grazing all your cattle on a soon-to-be-flooded grassland next to the river. Nitrate pollution of the ground water is also more pronounced in German areas where free-range animals are more common.

> Industrial farming is stupid, and totally unnecessary. Using permaculture and silvopasture, you can produce much more (and more nutritious) food in the same space, while improving (rather than destroying) fertility. If done right, you don't need pesticides, your animals don't need antibiotics or dewormers, and the whole thing mostly runs itself aside from a little pruning/herding and a lot of picking. The only downside to these methods is they take some time to get going, and they require knowledgeable farm workers rather than dirt cheap migrant laborers or a combine.

If it were only farmer's knowledge that is required, farming industry would do it in an instant, considering the significant advantages you named.

I would guess that either the methods you mention are far more labour-intensive as well as requiring more qualified labour. Or that the advantages aren't really that significant. Industrial agriculture is hunting for every bit of efficiency gain, and lots of businesses are looking for an edge any way they can. So it seems strange to me that the methods you mention aren't used in any significant amount.

If you aren't running a ridiculous number of head per acre and you have swales cut into your land to control runoff, manure is absolutely not a problem.

Permaculture + Silvopasture is labor intensive at harvest for sure, because you can't just run a tree shaker or tractor down rows, but you need to forage through a food forest which requires some knowledge and care. The bigger downside for industrial farmers is that instead of one product you can unload to a co-op easily, you have 30+ crops you need to find a market for.

In my experience a lot of farmers are fairly set in their ways. Even 100% win solutions like no till planting with cover crop grazing are being taken up very slowly.

> The manure problem is a problem at any size of farm, the amount of manure per cow is somewhat constant. So concentrating all the cows in some factory farm doesn't really make anything worse as long as the total number of cows is somewhat constant.

I wonder if this is true. Perhaps the real problem is the concentration of such a large amount of waste in those manure lakes.

I don't have any fixed evidence or numbers, but recalling my youth working on a 200 - 250 cow dairy, the animals were strip grazed in paddocks during the day and night. They would therefore mostly defecate in the paddock, on the grass, spread across a wider area and acting as a natural fertiliser.

There was a small manure pond with wastewater from the dairy itself, but this was not large.

Problems with large manure lakes intuitively seem more likely as the nitrates and other nasties are concentrated, something which doesn't seem as bad with the same amount of manure spread across a grassy paddock.

> I don't have any fixed evidence or numbers, but recalling my youth working on a 200 - 250 cow dairy, the animals were strip grazed in paddocks during the day and night. They would therefore mostly defecate in the paddock, on the grass, spread across a wider area and acting as a natural fertiliser.

This is something the author mentions in passing: Almost everywhere, farms are required by law to have a certain amount of land per piece of cattle to spread the manure on. So as long as that certain amount of land is large enough and the spreading happens sufficiently often, there shouldn't be a problem. If there is a problem, current regulations need to be updated. That land requirement will also naturally limit the total amount of cattle that is being raised.

This is indeed the case. On the other side of the same issue, the loss of large mammals in the wild slows down the natural cycling of nitrogen and this has a knock-on effect that leads to further loss of biomass. This has been an issue since the start of human civilization but intensive herding of animals certainly did not help.

Currently kids spend a lot of their time working in schools; I'm guessing working on farms might be better or worse depending on the farm and the school, but I don't know much about it. Where can I learn more?

This logic seems wrong.

By definition pollution is a problem of location and concentration.

On family farms (and my own), manure is used as fertilizer. On factory farms most manure is disposed of and animals fed on grain.

Children of parents on a family farm is hardly exploitation. Paying illegal immigrants sub minimum wage to squeeze additional profit out of the land certainly is a bigger problem.

Do we need industrial farming if it's driven by big capital? If the industry is happy to damage the environment, flout labor laws, harm animal welfare is it worth it? Personally I think the cost is too high and if anything, food is too cheap now.

> Children of parents on a family farm is hardly exploitation.

How so? I know it often isn't against labor laws because there are specific exceptions for exactly that case. But in any other circumstance the same thing _is_ considered exploitative.

Answered below but there is a difference between a full time job and doing chores around a farm.

If you can't see the nuance in that then I suggest you visit a family farm some day.

> The undocumented immigrant labour problem isn't as big a problem as the family farms' systemic problem of child labour and child exploitation. Which the author glosses over in his point of view.

He doesn't gloss over it, he glorifies it as "family bonding" or something. It's disgusting.

Let's not be overdramatic. Working on farms as a kid is how the overwhelming majority of humanity lived for literally thousands of years. Not every kid working with his family is exploited or abused; I can think of quite a few of my teenaged peers from "difficult" backgrounds who got on the straight and narrow only when they were finally allowed to work.

How? Helping on a family farm has been done for generations.

A corporate exploiting Illegal immigration is a preferred solution? Interesting values.

Owning slaves was also done for generations, so not sure what your point is.

Both are bad, but according to my values exploiting children is somewhat worse than exploiting adults, yes.

Do you classify helping with chores around the house as child exploitation too? As on a farm, kids have chores. They're not working night and day.

Do you have ANY idea how chores on a farm look like? Hint: it's nothing like vacuming or taking dishes out from a dishwasher. It's lots of hard work. Dealing with excrements and dangerous animals (even a cow or pig is dangerous in confined spaces).

Chores around a house are an educational tool and may be considered beneficial. On a farm, you get lots of additional "chores" on top. Where the "chores" are hard labour, often dangerous, at times early in the morning before school and in an amount where you do replace paid workers. A household does work without a child doing chores. A family farm won't be profitable without the free labour from the children. There is a reason farming families do have a larger number of children compared to the average. And while, yes, it has been this way for millenia, times change. If it weren't on a farm, with the same amount of "chores", child protection would get involved in an instant.

They often work _way_ more than other children. If your kid is doing "chores around the house" for hours every day, it's exploitation too.

I'm torn on this, my uncles and grand parents were all dairy farmers with their own farms. I work in an office behind a computer every day. I dont envy them at all.

Great write up OP! Love hearing first hand accounts of the “get big or get out” directive that probably caused many unintended second and third order effects

Deflation strikes again. Where exactly is hyperinflation supposed to come from if farmers are overproducing food?

If an article was titled "On the death of my family social media service" would resonate? I assume not. Wouldn't these also be true: labor of love; work 24-7; can't take a vacation. Why does our society treat family farms differently than other businesses?

previous discussion about this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368542

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320335 with 1 comment from the author, pointing to this thread which started the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942467

buy raw milk from a local family farm. its one of the best ways to spend your money

And now the land will continue to be gobbled up by the Gates foundation and trust. Unregulated capitalism winner takes all regardless of industry. Monopolies and patients on life and genetics as far as the eyes can see.

Don't forget China: https://foxsanantonio.com/news/yami-investigates/chinese-win...

There used to be a time when every town had a dairy and also nice men who would deliver it to you in glass reusable containers and perhaps even have sex with your wife.

I keep saying this and repeating over and over again... Yet keep getting downvoted. The monopolization of everything is caused by monetary policy. All these megacorps are not a natural phenomena. They are not competing on an even playing field.

Even die-hard capitalists who read Ayn Rand and watched her interviews will understand that monopolization should not happen without government intervention. The current monetary policy (of printing money and then giving control of it to existing capital holders based on how much capital they have) is bound to lead to this highly inefficient economic situation... One which takes the entire economy on a downward spiral while essentially bribing rich people with free money to keep playing along... Thus we get increasing inequality.

Then when the big corporations keep beating and buying up the competition (thanks to the disproportional amount of free credit that they have access to), they will claim that it's because they're more efficient (aka economies of scale) but in reality, the big players are just getting subsidized by free money from the government. Simple as that.

Give me access to 1 billion dollars of credit over 50 years and even with no industry experience, I can bankrupt all competing small businesses in any industry and in any city I want... Possibly in the entire country depending on the country.

How do you explain the railway monopolies?

Monetary policy allowed a small number of people to accumulate a disproportionate amount of capital. This capital allowed them to lobby and influence politicians to give them the right to build and own a massive rail network.

It simply would not have been possible for any group of people to build a rail network which traverses an entire country without serious government intervention. Think of the road/rail crossings that had to be built, bridges over rivers and other parts of the rail network which was built on public land... Think of the number of people who were probably forced by their local government to sell their land to build the railway on top... There was a lot of government intervention to make it possible.

And the amount of capital required to build such rail network could only have been accumulated as a result of unjust monetary policy. The complexity involved in operating a large enough enterprise to accumulate that kind of wealth would simply not be possible on a competitive level playing field to begin with.

On a level playing field, there would be too many profit opportunities for employees to quit and become competitors. There is clearly an artificial force holding everything together. That force is monetary policy. It used to be gold reserve debasement and now it's fiat money printing.

Why don't struggling dairy farmers convert to beef production? Seems to me it would be much less labour intensive and more profitable. Obviously if every struggling dairy farmer converted to beef it would drive prices down. I think people are eating less dairy in general than in past times. I am not lactose intolerant but I don't think I have had milk or ice cream for at least a year. I do eat cheese and yogurt so maybe that (more than?) counterbalances my lack of milk consumption.

With regard to the manure issue there are various ways to handle it. Some modern barns are set up with trenches running along the stalls, the stalls can be periodically washed into the trenches, and the trenches drain into a giant holding tank. Manure can be used as a nitrogen source for fields fertilisation or it can be anaerobically digested for methane which can be used as a source of energy.

Because beef uses feedlots with grain as well, and have the same manure lakes.

The beef industry has figured out that cattle fatten up far faster on grain, so they leave the cattle out for I think it's 12 months to basically grow to their "adult" size, then put them on grain for a few months to fatten up.

They have it precisely timed, because the cattle basically die on the all grain no silage diets they get, or would if they don't get sent to the abattoir literally a fortnight before.

> Why don't struggling dairy farmers convert to beef production? Seems to me it would be much less labor intensive and more profitable.

Love these comments.

Clearly someone who has never been on a dairy farm vs. a cattle ranch. =P

So for dairy, you normally have smaller pastures (less land) and keep your cows fed hay and expensive foods to help keep them producing high quality milk.

For beef production, you'd normally have large pastures for cattle to graze on grass. More land, more naturally occurring (cheaper), but lower caloric-dense food.

Big call out... there are different kinds of cows for milk and beef. Holstein's make milk, Angus make hamburgers. There's a huge list of types of cattle... each have their own pros and cons for beef vs. dairy production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cattle_breeds

To support the "more land" approach, you have horses to move the cattle around between pastures. You also need equipment to put up hay for the winter (buying hay is expensive).

You can go the feedlot route, but that's more the "finishing school" for beef production. Not a lot of margins at small scale. Dangerous to keep too many cows together too, from a disease perspective.

As a rancher, since you've got a tractor anyway for hay production, and ample land, you may want to plant a few fields of corn, wheat, millet... anything to sort of help cover costs of all the expensive equipment and cost of land. And you're not bound to a rigid daily care schedule for the cattle.

Ranchers have spurts of work... more cows, living outdoors, so harder calving seasons... more work for branding and such, more time fixing fence for bigger pastures. Put ranchers and dairy farmers in a room... they're different people. They may look similar, but they're just wired differently.

You invest a small fortune in the milking facilities, if you run a dairy operation. You invest in land if you're a ranch. They're not like "oh, let's just flip a switch and it's converted."

Anyway I'd write more but just because you have cows, doesn't mean it's at all interchangeable.

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