Bates, 67, spoke to Militant reporters June 27 on the dairy farm in Washington County, northeastern New York, that she and her family have operated since 1967. For many years, she has campaigned with others to pressure the government and milk processing giants to pay prices for raw milk that would provide farmers with a living income.

Bates and other farmers emphasized that the recent hike in the price of milk on supermarket shelves does not translate into a bonanza for small producers on the land. It only benefits capitalist dairies and distributors, they said, while exploited farmers and workers continue to get the shaft.

“Efficiency isn’t the answer” to the sword of foreclosure that hangs over many farmers, Bates said. “We’re as efficient as you can get.”  
 
Decline in numbers of dairy farms
The steep drop in farms in Washington County is part of a national picture of declining numbers of working dairy farmers.

The Journal News, a newspaper in rural New York, reported June 1 that nationwide “the number of dairy farms has dropped by 17.8 percent between 2000 and 2003.” There are now 6,000 dairy farms in New York, it reported—16 percent fewer than in 2000.

The National Farmers Organization (NFO) reported in April 2002 that the number of U.S. dairy farms had fallen from 190,000 to 70,000 over the previous four decades. “The average output in 1960 was 648 pounds of milk per day for each dairy,” stated the report. “Today it is 4,978 pounds. But getting bigger has not helped those 70,000 remaining, who struggle daily with precipitously low market prices.”

To farmers caught in the squeeze between low returns from selling their products and rising input and equipment costs, the recent increase in payouts for raw milk have come as a relief.

“Most farmers are behind” following years of bad prices, Randy Jasper said in a June 24 phone interview. Jasper and his son operate a herd of 140 Holstein cows—the most common variety in the U.S. dairy industry—on their farm in Muscoda, near Wisconsin’s eastern border.

The average payout received by farmers for 100 pounds of milk was $20 in June. “That’s a good price,” Jasper said in the phone interview. Prices paid to farmers are usually listed by the hundredweight (cwt), which equals 11.6 gallons of milk.

“For a long time the price was $10 a cwt,” said Jasper. “Break-even for me is between $13 and $14.50.”

Figures from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for prices of Class III, or whole fat, milk, the kind produced by most farms, bear Jasper out.

The exchange is a futures market where the prices of cheese and butter are set. These figures are used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to establish the monthly payout to farmers—a figure then modified by Milk Marketing Boards in each state.

According to CME reports, the payout stood at $20.58 in May. Earlier this year and for the past several years, however, prices were much lower. In January farmers received $11.61, in February $11.89, and in March $14.49.

In recent years, whole milk mostly fetched around $10 or less a cwt, or 10 cents a pound. In its June 30, 2000, report, the CME noted that regarding prices paid to farmers “for the first half of the year, the Class III averaged just $9.56, the lowest half since 1978.”

In the year 2000 hard-pressed farmers in Wisconsin, California, Illinois, and elsewhere took part in a coordinated national milk dump to dramatize their demand that the federal government guarantee a base price of $14.50 a cwt.  
 
Working people pay more
In the last few months the money forked out by consumers—most of them working people—for milk and milk products has risen sharply. Over the year to May, for example, the recommended price of whole milk in metropolitan New York climbed 71 percent, to $4.18 a gallon. Another 25 cents was added in June.

“The stores increased the prices before the farmers ever got any raise,” said Vermont dairy farmer Dexter Randall in a June 26 interview. Farmers are paid one month after delivering their milk, and don’t know the price they will receive until then, he explained.

According to the May 22 Boston Globe, Christopher Galen, an official of the National Milk Producers Federation, said that supermarkets “often raise their prices immediately when the price farmers received for their milk goes up, but are much slower to lower them when the farm price falls.” The April 10 Hartford Advocate noted that Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal had instituted an investigation into alleged price gouging by dairy companies—“i.e. conspiring to keep the cost of milk high in the grocery store, even as the price paid to dairy farmers sank.”

Blumenthal said that in January 2003 “milk consumers are paying vastly more. Yet dairy farmers are receiving significantly less. Retailers and processors are reaping the windfall.”  
 
Decrease in dairy production
The farmers who spoke to the Militant agreed that their returns have improved the last two months, however belatedly, registering the relative shortage of dairy products over the past several years.

Among the factors behind this shortage, reported the Journal News, was the “rising demand for beef,” which has created “an incentive to slaughter dairy cattle.”

The New York paper also noted that the ban on import of cattle from Canada—a protectionist measure by the U.S. government under the rationalization of the possible spread of “mad cow” disease—means that “dairy farmers who normally buy 60,000 young cows annually from their neighbor to the north have been unable to secure cattle to boost their herds.”

The Canadian cattle are normally a large component of the 90,000 to 180,000 cows needed to renew the U.S. dairy herd in the United States, Larry Salathe, an economist with the USDA, told the Journal News. The herd declined by 100,000 head to 9 million last year. Salathe also said that many of the remaining cows are producing less because of a drop in supply of a hormone used to spur milk production.

“Nationally milk production dropped 2 percent in the first quarter compared with a year ago,” wrote Jeanne Naujeck in the Tennessean. “As of January 1 there were 77,000 milk cows in Tennessee, down 8 percent from the previous year’s count. Ten years ago there were nearly twice that many,” she wrote.

The journalist quoted Tommy and Wendy Lamb, dairy farmers in Arrington, Tennessee, who “have stayed afloat by working extra jobs to pay debts…. Wendy Lamb said no farmer will see the whole $18”—the official state price in May.

“Prices are paid based on amount of butterfat,” Lamb said, “and there’s an adjustment for location, as well as costs for hauling and advertising dues—those deductions could skim off several dollars.”

Naujeck noted that “staying afloat has been tough as farmers buy feed, fertilizer, fuel, land and equipment priced for 2004—with proceeds from milk prices stuck in the 1970s.”  
 
Rising costs for farmers
The increases in the prices charged by the big oil companies and the natural gas suppliers have both direct and indirect impacts on farmers. Fertilizers are based on nitrogen, which is produced using natural gas, while many pesticides have petroleum derivatives as their foundation. The gas price rise has affected the prices of all such commodities.

In addition, farmers noted that steel has doubled in price, affecting the parts they buy and the cost of repairs to equipment.

Above everything else, the farmers who spoke to the Militant said, they wanted to keep farming. At the same time, they said, a living and stable income for producers on the land should not be at the expense of those who buy their products.

Speaking to the Tennessean, farmer Rabon Bayless said the ups and downs of milk’s shelf price are “not good for farmers or consumers. We’d all be better off if prices would stabilize where farmers could make a living and consumers could pay a decent price for milk.”
 
 
Related articles:
Mississippi: Black farmers meet to press fight for land  
 
 
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