Posted on 10/04/2009 4:43:10 PM PDT by 10Ring
Dairy farmers are pressing federal antitrust regulators to investigate why large food companies are making hefty profits while farmers are going broke.
The average dairy farm in the state lost about $100 per cow per month this summer, according to the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.
With more than 1.25 million cows in the state, it means the industry is losing roughly $4 million a day.
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Feingold said he wants the Justice Department to reconsider the 2001 Dean Foods merger with Suiza Foods that helped make Dean the nation's largest milk processor and distributor. He also wants antitrust regulators to review Dairy Farmers of America, a dairy cooperative that controls about 30% of the nation's milk supply and sells milk to Dean Foods.
"My goal is not to pinpoint a villain. But some of the major players are going to have to be part of the examination," Feingold said in an interview last week.
That's largely because farmers, who received about $20 for every 100 pounds of milk they produced in 2008, have seen the price cut in half this year. In layperson's terms, 100 pounds of milk equals nearly 12 gallons.
Some farmers have cashed out their farm equity and savings just to buy cattle feed and pay their utility bills. Entire herds have been slaughtered as part of a national program meant to reduce milk supplies and increase the amount that farmers receive in their milk checks.
(Excerpt) Read more at jsonline.com ...
Russ was really there for Dean Foods' stockholders when the stock plummetted in 2007-08. What a d-bag.
Milk is cheaper than it’s been in a long time at the grocery store. I’m paying $2.39 a gallon.
Living in somewhat of dairy country, I feel the farmers pain.
They bought tons more cows, milk supply went up big time, demand did not. That means price went down. Obviously. The milk companies and stores didn’t cut their shares of course because the farmers were taking the lower prices.
So of course lets not try a little more capitalis, lets try politics.
Boo freakin hoo dairy farmers. Get leaner and meaner or go out of business. Imagine that, farmers actually having to compete on the free market. Oh the humanity!
Did you ever read what FDR ordered during the dustbowl??
He destroyed crops, plowed under farms, dumped the milk, slaughtered the animals not for human consumption. ALL to raise the price of food. During the Great Depression.
Deflation means there's not much sense in producing the product, because you can't sell it at a profit. So businesses close down, workers get laid off. It makes Obama smile.
Don’t give Hussein any ideas...
He destroyed crops, plowed under farms, dumped the milk, slaughtered the animals not for human consumption. ALL to raise the price of food. During the Great Depression
2 for $4 usually at the store here in Milwaukee.
They can thank the POTUS and their Congress for screwing them.
Big customers like to dictate price.
Every been around a modern dairy farm?
Obviously not. They’ve increased production and slashed expenses to the bone.
I know. I used to sell hay to dairy farmers.
Their problem is that they have very long price discovery cycles. The middle market and end market run on JIT inventory control, while the dairy farmer has cows bred for nine months in the future, contracts for replacement heifers another nine months into the future after that.
This is yet another example of how modern economists and business analysts have their heads firmly up their posteriors.
There’s deflation everywhere you look.
And in the last four weeks, the bond yield curve is signaling more deflation to come.
Maybe we can get a neo-New Deal going. That'll really help. /s
They are not just the customer. Banks won’t lend to dairy farmers because they know the farms are hopeless. The farmers, therefore, get loans from the dairy companies. This makes it very hard for the farmers to get “uppity” about price.
We need to lose a large percentage of the dairy farms in this country so the healthy ones can succeed and the free market can start to work again.
Yeah, maybe we should outsource milk production to China. You must be an MBA. If you learned it in B school it must be true!
$1.57 at Walmart.
No, what we need to do is stop extending credit to Dutch dairymen coming over from Europe to set up 8,000 cow dairies here in the US on cheap credit. That’s what has flooded the market with cheap milk.
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