Posted on 10/14/2012 11:23:39 AM PDT by thecodont
The nation's drought and high corn prices are devastating California's $8 billion dairy industry to the point where farmers can't afford to feed their cows - and their professional trade organization has been regularly referring despondent dairymen to suicide hotlines.
Experts in the industry estimate that by year's end California, the largest dairy state in the nation, will have lost more than 100 dairies to bankruptcies, foreclosures and sales. Milk cows are being slaughtered at the fastest rate in more than 25 years because farmers need to save on corn costs. According to the Western United Dairymen, a California trade group, three dairy farmers have committed suicide since 2009, despairing over losing their family's dairies.
"I've never seen it as dire as it is now," said Frank Mendonsa, a Tulare dairyman who serves on the Western United Dairymen board. "Pride is just eating these guys up. People are calling me and asking me what to do. It becomes like a counseling session to stop people from hurting themselves. But it's not just losing our jobs that is driving the desperation. We're losing our houses, in some cases the same houses that our grandparents lived in, and we're losing our entire identities."
The problems started in 2009, when milk prices bottomed out and grain prices soared, partly due to the government's ethanol mandate. Congress is requiring that gasoline producers blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol, made from corn, into the nation's gas supply by 2015. Dairy farmers were forced to borrow against their land and cows to make their bills.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Calif-expected-to-lose-100-dairy-farms-3946897.php#ixzz29IaSB7WG
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Locally there's a big ad campaign for Meatless Mondays. The ads say that cattle are being treated inhumanely and contribute to environmental pollution, so people should skip eating meat once a week.
The MM Web site cites the health and environmental benefits angle only. The environmental reasons cited are: carbon footprint, water usage, and dependence on fossil fuels.
Vette 6387, I can’t tell whether you live in CA as you have not identified a state of residence. I do live in CA, and I can tell you that dairy farmers are being pushed out of this state by both population expansion, state regulation and state taxes.
The San Gabriel Valley used to be full of dairy farms. I worked in an electronics company located on Arden Drive in El Monte which was formerly the Arden Dairy ranch. Those dairies then moved out to Chino. Once Interstate 15 was built, tract homes were built surrounding the dairy ranches. So, the dairy farms moved farther out to areas in the Hemet Valley where once again tract homes are being built next to the ranches.
As with the agricultural farming in the Central Valley which is being driven out by absurd State of California water regulations, so too will the CA dairy ranches eventually migrate out of state. Just one more industry killed by CA politicians.
As a farmer myself this makes me want to cry.
The drought this summer has devasted a lot of corn,soybean,
and alfalfa fields.Know a guy who raised alfalfa in
Arizona for sold to California dairies.Said hes glad
he sold the farm 8 years ago and moved here to Tn
We`re seeing the slow death of agriculture in California
NO Problem ALL OF Mexifornia is being MILKED by the democrats..
Mexifornia is indeed animal farm <<- you know like in the book!..
If you say what book.. then you are one of the Cows.. and not a Donkey at all..
” Most regulation on farming is at the Federal level, so show us where the State is involved.”
http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/dairy/proposed_regs.html
Farming is not an easy job and Americans are still doing it. The dairy business is the hardest of all, 24/7, rain or shine and Americans are still doing it. When we tax and regulate our farmers out of existence we will become subject to the whims of politicians and foreign producers. There will be no attraction for Americans to become dairy farmers. Wake up America.
Calif. expected to lose 100 dairy farms,
but gains 100 fairy farms in San Francisco.
Calif. expected to lose 100 dairy farms,
but gains 100 fairy farms in San Francisco.
When the San Gabriel River Freeway (Rte. 605) opened in 1966, it ran through dozens of square miles of dairy farms in the lower San Gabriel Valley. Cerritos used to be known as Dairy Valley, and La Palma was Dairyland until the late 1960's. By the early '70's, all the dairy farms were gone.
Because the dairies attracted so many flies, newly-established housing tracts in dairy country were soon followed by lawsuits by the new homeowners against the farmers. In the 1960's and 1970's, a lawyer who effectively represented the farmers in such cases gained a reputation as the "fly attorney," but he was ultimately unable to save the dairies.
Safeway has its’ $5 Fridays. This Friday it was ribeye for 5 bucks a pound. This $21 “Value Pack”had 3 HUGE steaks in it. With 2 glasses of that merlot I ate a whole one-about 1 and a third pounds. Delicious. I can still do it!
There's also a hemp seed milk--an opporunity for those marijuana farmers of Mendocino County to cash in.
I believe in choice. The government should just give every family a cow and be done with it. Then, it’s your choice — milk or steak.
That’s because the ranchers can come back. As long as they still retain some herd genetics and the land, they can rebuild. Many of those Texas ranchers didn’t lose their land - they own that outright and they own a bunch of land.
The California dairy model is so capital-intensive that most of these guys are pretty heavily leveraged and they depend on making a pretty thin margin on a very big cash flow. In many cases, they have a note on the land, which they’ve used to build more buildings or facilities, a revolver they use for month-to-month expenses like feed and with the prices of feed. When the margin on that monstrous cash flow goes negative, they’re bleeding like stuck pigs - and not all at once in a seasonal event like the rancher. I’m talking every single day, they’re bleeding cash out their eyeballs.
When we sold hay to California dairymen, the hay would leave our outfit at about $140/ton, then get $40/ton of haulage tacked onto it, or about $170 to $190 by the time it got to the dairies.
Right now, thanks to the feed shortage across the entire western US, even rough hay is up near $200/ton, and to get hot alfalfa hay into those dairies, you’re looking at prices over $260/ton. And, NB, this is the CHEAP time of year on hay. Come February, when hay stocks start getting low, the price will go up - and this year, I’d expect dairy quality hay in Chino to be upwards of $350/ton, delivered, assuming diesel prices stay stable, which they’re not.
Now, let’s talk about diesel costs: Diesel costs hit the dairyman to get his milk hauled off and hay and feed trucked in. Ranchers get hit on diesel costs while putting up their own hay, getting hay trucked in (usually only once/year) and shipping their cattle (usually only once/year). Dairies have to haul in hay there in California every week. Those 8,000 cow dairies don’t have a lot of land on which they can store hay, so they have a few “trainloads” (double trailer) pulled in every couple of days. Every dairy cow eats somewhere about 20 to 30lbs of hay per day, so if you’re running a 8,000 head dairy, that comes to 120 tons/day, or about four double-trailer trucks of hay per day. Ranchers don’t have that kind of cash bleed.
Now the diesel cost spikes are kicking you in the head - hard.
Here in Colorado, I’ve seen on-road #2 diesel go from $4.09 to $4.39/gal in three days. The last jump was from $4.24 to $4.39 overnight. When diesel goes over $4/gal, the US economy shifts into low gear in a hurry. The moron economists blather on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about gasoline prices.
Well, here’s the hard truth that none of these moron academics realizes or admits:
Come Thanksgiving, you get to Grandma’s house on gasoline.
The turkey gets there on diesel fuel.
Right now, diesel costs are going to kick a whole lot of small businesses in the head - hard.
When we got into farming, I didn’t know whether we wanted to be in row crops or field crops (we eventually chose dairy hay), but the one thing I was really sure of was that I never wanted to be a diaryman.
Being a dairyman is the closest thing to slavery we have left in the US. You’re wed to those cows three times a day, every day, come rain, shine, getting sick, being injured, you name it, the cows have to be tended to. The only day when you can throw down your hands is the day after you shipped the last cow.
Congress mandates ethanol in gas —> Dairy farmers committing suicide.
Nice.
Please forgive my ignorance and thank you in advance for your patience. Dairy farmers then don't have the acreage or extra cash to devote to hay/alfalfa production, right? Ranchers don't have the feed expense because their cattle are range-raised and then finished with corn in the feedlot, correct?
If there is a hay shortage by February, what about corn silage, or is that still used? What effect, if any, do the ethanol laws have on the production of corn silage for cows?
That happy cow stuff is propaganda. I visited California in May and observed several dairies. They are actually cow prisons. The cows are restricted to a fairly large fenced area in which they ate and crapped and gave milk. The ground is churned mix of mud and crap surrounding large feeding sheds....... deplorable.
Out side the fence are large, very large, immense, hay storage areas.
I was of the opinion the cows ate hay, not corn. The hay storage and visible hay in the sheds gave no indication of corn.
The cows that escaped from Wisconsin escaped into slavery of deplorable conditions
“Save a Cow - Ban Ethanol”
“Eat Corn, Drink Milk, Ban Ethanol”
I used to work on a dairy farm here in Michigan. The cows mostly ate hay with a bit of silage. The cows were pretty happy because the silage was corn mash from a distillery.
Yes, everything politicians tinker with eventually turns to crap. Of course, just try ending either ethanol mandates or milk price supports and see how far you get, and Republican farm state pols are just as bad as the Democrats on this score.
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