As small farms fold, the balance of production tilts further toward huge, efficient, industrial dairy operations that can more easily weather price downturns and manage a razor-thin profit margin through the power of scale, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported. In Wisconsin alone, between two and three family dairy farms go out of business every single day. (Some of these farms still operate, but no longer as dairies.) In the early 1970s, the state had more than 75,000 dairies. Today it has about 7,400. Across the western border in Minnesota, officials recently reported that the median household income rose last year to about $68,000, roughly 10 percent higher than the national average. Dairy farmers had nothing to do with it. In 2017, the median income for a dairy farm dipped just shy of $44,000 in the state. In 2018, it plunged all the way down to $14,697. Half of Minnesota’s dairy farmers failed to break even for the year. There, too, thousands of dairy farms have simply vanished. In the midst of this mass extinction, a counterintuitive fact remains true: Americans are consuming more dairy products than ever before, primarily because yogurt and cheese have compensated for a steady drop in fluid milk consumption. Americans consumed 646 pounds of dairy per person in 2018 — the highest consumption rate in 56 years.
While record rainfall made it difficult to plant corn and soybeans until long after the typical growing window had passed, President Trump’s long-running trade war cut off farmers’ access to China’s enormous market and commodity prices remained in the doldrums, the Agriculture Department estimates that 2019 was farmers’ most profitable in five years. The estimate is a result of the Market Facilitation Program, or the government's farm bailout, the Washington Post reported. Without government assistance, U.S. farm income would have fallen about $5 billion from its already-low 2018 level. So the $14.5 billion in bailout funding announced so far represents a substantial reversal of fortune. About three-quarters of the funding already has been distributed. “If you look at the prices, the weather and the trade imbalances, you’d expect the farm sector to be in a terrible spot,” Montana State University economist Eric Belasco said. "It’s not.” Most farmers benefited from the bailout, Belasco said, but because bailout money is distributed based on acreage and not farmer’s need, about half of the money (47 percent) went to the largest 10 percent of operations. According to 2018 data, more than 70 percent of farm households had a high level of financial risk in 2018. But of those that qualify as very large (median income $756,000), only 25 percent fit into that same category.
The closing days of 2019 find small farms pummeled from every side: a trade war, severe weather associated with climate change, tanking commodity prices related to globalization, political polarization, and corporate farming defined not by a silo and a red barn but technology and the efficiencies of scale, according to an analysis in Time. It is the worst crisis in decades. Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies were up 12 percent in the Midwest from July of 2018 to June of 2019; they’re up 50 percent in the Northwest. Tens of thousands have simply stopped farming, knowing that reorganization through bankruptcy won’t save them. The nation lost more than 100,000 farms between 2011 and 2018; 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone. Farm debt, at $416 billion, is at an all-time high. More than half of all farmers have lost money every year since since 2013, and lost more than $1,644 this year. Farm loan delinquencies are rising. Suicides in farm communities are happening with alarming frequency. Farmers aren’t the only workers in the American economy being displaced by technology, but when they lose their jobs, they are also ejected from their homes and the land that’s been in their family for generations. Even large companies are facing unprecedented challenges; Dean Foods, a global dairy producer that buys milk from thousands of small farmers, filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 12, and is seeking a sale, a move that could further hamper farmers looking for places to sell their milk.
