factory

I thought my last column in Graze might interest some of you:

      My ongoing association with Graze has put me in the position of having a by proxy association with all of you, many of whom are dairy farmers. I have often thought that I have learned more about my farming and its main livestock feature, which is hogs, through my tenuous connection with graziers and dairy farmers than through any of the hog connections available to me. This is because the hog industry is dead in the water, and has been for several decades now. Practitioners are more interested in finance than in understanding the hog and its possible relationship to the farm and the land. Dairy is following that route now about two decades later and it occurs to me that as many of you become outcasts or outlaws in your own occupation, as have I over these last years in regard to hogs, you might be interested in what is happening just a state or two over from most of you, to improve your understanding of the world being forced upon you.

     I heard of the latest happenings in Wisconsin’s dairy industry piecemeal, as we hear most things in these times of instant and sometimes irresponsible communication. First came a note over Facebook from a former 4H kid and neighbor who currently lives in Wisconsin of dairy farmers being pushed off the truck. Then later came the news that the processor involved was Grassland Dairy Products and that they were cutting people off without notice because Canada had changed its interpretation of dairy products for import and was no longer willing to identify the ultra filtered Grassland milk product as an “ingredient” at the border, allowing tariff free import and then call it “dairy” at the Canadian processing plants, enabling the plant to use it in cheese manufacture and undercutting Canadian dairy prices.

      Politicians got involved of course, yelling about restraint of trade and patriotism and such and I am not going into that. What is more important in my view is the item that kept popping up in the news reports to the effect that Grassland was bankrolling a 5000 cow dairy expansion in Wisconsin while it was cutting off its own supplying farmers and blaming Canada. We are once again being rolled. I recognize the symptoms from the hog wars. If it is not “no one wants to raise pigs” it is “we don’t have enough pigs” to “we need a steady supply” and then “we have too many pigs to buy your pigs.” Then there is “you need us to keep your feed mills, vet services, markets open”. They teach this crap in public relations school, I swear. It applies everywhere people are producing anything independently to cover corporate efforts to tear that system apart.

      Here are some things you should know. 5000 cow expansions are pocket change. I live here on the northern prairie in the I-29 sacrifice zone. A bit over ten years ago, a dairy factory supposedly “owned” by a Morris family, about fifty miles north of here, expanded into this neighborhood. They built a 3000 cow factory and called it Dublin dairy (the name of the township). It is six miles from the farm here. Several years later, they started another one, this one called Dublin Two, and positioned three miles from the first. It features ten thousand cows. Somehow, at the same time they got permission from authorities to expand the first one from 3000 to 10000 cows. Last year, about ten miles east of the second factory, another ten thousand cow establishment went up. This one is called Meadow Star, though what exactly it has to do with a meadow is difficult to see. I can’t wait to hear what the PR geniuses will come up with for a name of the fourth one, being built just two miles from our farm. I hear the bulldozers at work every day this spring. When they get it up and running, it too will be ten thousand cows. That makes forty thousand milking cows and the young stock that go with it (Chippewa Calves is what they call that establishment, the name of my county). This is all within perhaps twelve miles end to end. 

     I don’t know if they are done building yet. Neither do I know what the money source is. I am pretty certain it is not local. The milk goes to a plant across the state line in South Dakota (lower wage structure and labor standards than Minnesota)

      The last two factories have local sponsoring farmers, on whose land the facility is built, usually eighty to one hundred or so acres. These farmers shepherd the project through permitting. Some of the motivation for building seems to be access to the manure. The first two were initiated by the family in Morris (Riverview Dairy), but all four seem to be linked. It is all the same template. The farmers involved are large crop operations, virtually the only farmers we have left unless you want to count the hog factories. These farms currently range from three to eight or nine thousand acres. Additional huge crop farms are linked in from the start through a series of contracts for feed, be it a relatively small supply of alfalfa hay or a huge tonnage of corn silage as well as corn for grain. Some of the younger generation of these farms supply the custom cutting and harvesting that go with the harvest. 

     These same farms and others contract to get the manure, which is all liquid as the fiber portion is dried and reused as bedding. The manure pipes are laid out in the road ditches and inserted through culverts for miles in all directions to get the product to the land where it is knifed in. Typically the Environmental Impact Statements call for four thousand plus acres to spread the material. The factories often claim to have more than that lined up. Mother Nature, of course, is still in charge of the rain and will decide whether any of these acres are actually accessible in the fall when spreading is typically done. That fact doesn’t appear in the EIS.

      There is a blueprint for these things. And I think it was laid out only after careful social study of this rural area and its people. Note that these efforts have all the influential farmers on board at the start. These are the six or eight wealthiest farmers in each county, those folks that the federal representatives know very well they must please. Increasingly now, they have control of the state legislature as well. They are the county commissioners. They sit on the Soil and Water Conservation District, making sure it does nothing. They are on the Extension board, what is left of it and control township boards and village councils.

      The rural working people, meanwhile are in the midst of a fifty year slide in income, population, influence and well being. They are scared of sliding further. As I pointed out several months ago in this space, the towns are shutting down, the schools are shrinking and each year it gets more difficult to keep the state government from cutting funding further. There is little or no opportunity. Kids move away. Depression and drug abuse climb annually. A few locals will get a chance to drive trucks for the dairy factory, as everything moves and must move around these establishments, except of course, the cows. There is simply nothing left in the way of gumption to attend public hearings and speak up for a level playing field for smaller farms and a decent regard for people’s homes and lives. All four of these factories went in without a ripple of protest.

      Assuming this last establishment follows suit, all of these factory sites include bunkhouses. There are three per site, they are two stories and about eighty feet long each. They would house perhaps eight families each. It seems likely to me that these were built to ensure some separation of the workers from the people in town, thus damping down race hatred. The crews on the sites are all brown skinned. These include staff veterinarians trained in their home countries, giving the lie to the story about saving local vet services. I don’t know if the employees are legitimate immigrants or if they are here illegally. I am not going to get involved in that. 

      And these factories are now of a size to be “too big to fail” which will leverage whatever government help turns out to be necessary in any severe downturn. This is what you in dairy are up against. All I can say is that were it not for our family’s efforts starting two decades ago to maintain control of our pork as nearly as possible to the table of the eaters, our farm would not be viable today.