Government Milk Bailouts

In the last few weeks I have heard numerous news reports about how dairy farmers are having trouble staying in business, how demand for milk and milk products has dropped, how the industry is losing money, etc. Every time I hear it mentioned it is in the context of a federal program to bail out dairy farmers for the loses they are taking, and all I can do is ask myself why? Demand is low for dairy, this brings the price down. The low price puts some of the dairy farmers out of business, and supply goes down so the price equalizes. Of course, this isn't even calculating the fact that milk is already a heavily government subsidized industry, with government price suports and loss protection schemes all over the country. Milk farmers already receive large amounts of federal subsidization, and if they can't survive that environment, it sounds like we have too many dairy farmers.

Lets not forget, the vast majority of milk cows in this country aren't the pristine cow in a pasteur you see on the side of your milk container. The animals are actually generally kept in a large indoor building, ranging in size from a few dozen to hundreds of cows living in potentially multi-level buildings. These are Confinement Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO's for short. These colossal “farms” apply industrial principles to livestock. The animals are fed the cheapest possible diet, consisting largely of corn based feed laced with antibiotics and growth hormones and numerous other supplemental materials. This causes 2 things, 1. cows that grow unnaturally fast considering they are barely able to move, and 2. cows that produce a substantial amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is emitted by the animal at far higher rates due to its inappropriate diet. This is a major problem because animal emissions will apparently not be affected by the cap and trade bill, so we have to rely on changing consumer habits to reduce everyone's carbon footprint. This is confounded if the government overrides the environmentally friendly decision to drink less milk, ensuring the farmers continue producing in the same quantities even when demand is low.

(This video is intense, don't watch it if you have a weak stomach. Yes, it is narrated by Alec Baldwin, in case you were asking yourself that when listening.)


In reality this system is part of a larger problem in which federal agriculture policy is slowly poisoning us and hurting our health. To see this in action all you have to do is go to your neighborhood budget grocery store, whether its a Walmart or a Weis, and look around at what everything is made of and how much things cost. Predominantly soybean, corn, beef, and a few other products seem to be omnipresent and simultaneously extremely cheap. This is due to a federal subsidization regime that has been completely hijacked by corporate interests. Farm subsidies by and large go to the biggest companies, because they are often on a per acre or per head basis. This means that by having as much land as possible farmed in as cheap a way as possible large farms manage to soak up tons of federal money originally intended to help farms survive the great depression and further economic hardships since. The funny thing is, due to lobbying, these now useless subsidies are lining the pockets of major agricultural businesses and can't seem to be eliminated from the federal budget.

Of course, not only is this a massive example of corporate welfare, its actually bad for the environment as well. Corn and soybean are intensive crops to grow, and they are often genetically modified organisms to make growing them as cheap as possible. They are planted in massive quantities, producing a dangerous monoculture, and are very resource intensive to produce. Corn is especially bad, soaking up a lot of water and soil nutrients to produce a vegetable which our bodies can barely process in its raw form. The corn is then rendered into oil or sugar, or even ethanol. Pulling nutrients out of the soil and using up water supplies means corn's dominance has a very real affect on everyone. For example, since corn is so nutrient hungry, large quantities of fertilizer are used to grow the plants. This in turn is washed into the streams and other bodies of water, causing eutrophication in our waterways.

But even beyond the fact that corn is bad for the soil and the water, its also not healthy for large scale human consumption, as it is generally rendered into sugar products which are delivered to most Americans on a daily basis. People drink water with corn syrup in it. They eat sugary candy that's mostly made of corn. Corn manages to make its way into a substantial number of products, and those that don't contain corn often contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil. These two products, sugary syrup and chemically altered oil are a large portion of the unhealthy direction the American diet has been going in for a long time. Because these products are heavily federally subsidized, it turns out that the government is inadvertently (or intentionally if you consider they were lobbied into this by the industry) driving the unhealthy habits Americans have been developing for a long time.

The truly embarrassing thing about this government program is that, even if we wanted to change our ways, these harmful practices would still go on, because the industry is completely propped up. As you can see with the dairy example, whenever one of these industries gets in trouble, the government steps in to make up the difference, undermining the very real choices being made by the American people. If we are expressly saying we do not want to consume a food product which isn't good for us or the planet, there isn't any reason to continue production at unsustainable levels. Even worse, I haven't even gotten into the fact that CAFO's manage to skirt many regulations about their overall impact, often gathering massive quantities of unprocessed cow feces in one place, spraying it on surrounding grasslands to the point where the grass becomes toxic for animals to eat, and sometimes just letting the feces leak into groundwater and streams. All if this is done despite the fact that if the waste was human, it would require dozens of processing plants for each large CAFO. What this really means is the farms have incentive to grow to unsustainable and unhealthy sizes without having to make up for their increasing impact. If you were to add the cost of the damage caused by these farms, they wouldn't actually be able to compete on price, and Americans would have a better idea of the real cost of their food.

In the end, all we can do is try to counteract the force of the lobbyists. If enough environmentalists make a point of lobbying on this issue, eventually it will start to gain traction and media attention. While vegetarianism and veganism are still considered fringe movements, we are growing and as we interact with the environmental lobbies on our side we need to focus on issues like this, which affect everyone on a massive scale and cause very real harm to the world around us. It is time for the movement to turn its eyes to agriculture and sustainability, because if we don't make changes now, we may not be able to later.