Dairy farmers around here would be surprised to hear themselves as “high profit winners.” At the same time milk prices went up, feed prices doubled. Other inputs have also gone up in price (IE anything and everything hauled in or out by truck because of fuel prices; sawdust for bedding less available since the Recession closed lots of furniture and cabinet factories ...)
DH and I milked cows until 2003. We figure the margins now are just as tight ... only the numbers have changed.
When we sold out we were in the Milk Income Loss program for a year or so. We were just circling the drain. It cost us about a dollar a gallon to produce but we were being paid 75 cents per gallon.
If it looked like we could make a living again milking cows I think we’d give it a shot. But it doesn’t look that good.
Oh, one more thing ... a lot of the “family farms” have gone from 100 or so cows to 300 or 500. So maybe the herd-size caps needed to be tweaked.
I suppose you could have a herd of 300 with Mom owning 100 head, Dad owning 100 and Son owning 100 to get around the caps.
Not that anyone would do that ...
Over here, in upstate NY, it seems as if all the dairy farmers are selling their herds [to Texas -- cattle in demand because of the drought I've been told] and planting corn.
From one subsidy to another it seems to the outsider. Please don't take that wrong, I'm a great admirer of farmers. Just think they have to find a crop that doesn't require government regulations to make it profitable.