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.
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.