For the first time in my journalist life, I am sitting down with anger and disgust in my heart and voice.
Because the most loyal, the most hard working, the most essential citizens who supply the first essential food – milk – are being treated with contempt, dishonor, and loss of money by the so-called leaders of government and the too-fat and well-fed citizens.
America’s dairy farmers have been left out in the cold.
Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has the price of milk, relatively speaking, been as low when compared to the cost of living, cost of production and rightful exception of profit than today.
It is with disgrace not only to the thousands of farm families who, in many cases have been producing milk for three, four or five generations in succession, but to the people – the citizens – who fail to protest this shameful condition and permit it to exist.
While Congress busted guts to shell out billions of dollars to bail out corrupt Wall Street and big city gamblers what did it do for the real people of this nation?
Nothing.
They just created billions of paper dollars – debt – to bail out Wall Street gamblers who went right back to their shady and corrupt actions.
And our new president? His first action was to fly around the world, on tax-payer debt "money" and display what a good ol’ boy he was. And where are we today?
To paraphrase an old song, “St. Peter don’t you call me for I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.”
Now let’s get real, folks.
Once a long time ago, my wife, Helen and I were part of a nation wide group of farm folk – food and fiber producers all – who paid our ways to Washington D.C. to “educate” our senators and congressman.
Did we? I leave it to you. One Congressman brushed us aside by saying, “I would not care if we did not have any farmers, just as long as we have supermarkets.”
How can a sane person deal with such pure stupidity?
The answer, “You cannot penetrate the brain of an idiot.”
So, where does that leave us on our original topic? Our dairy farm industry is valiantly trying to make the best of a very difficult problem. How can dairymen survive on milk that is on the market at half the true cost of its production?
Longterm it cannot, for a large number of folk who have fought the good fight cannot do so any longer. They sell their cows, their once-shining equipment will gather rust for many years, along with memory of the good years. Others will retire with Social Security.
And the others? Their cows will be sold and perhaps go into another herd where 5,000 or more cows are milked the clock around, where the milk goes directly from the cow to a refrigerated truck that leaves for a distant city and another truck pulls in to load more milk in a matter of minutes.
My personal life, spanning from 1924 to the present, has seen and enjoyed the dairy business from start to finish, until just three years ago. I have seen it in its glory days, when my father’s registered cows from Jersey Island were milked on this old farm, and the best ones were taken to state fairs in the Midwest. Those were the most exciting days of my life, loading our show cows and bulls for train escort from one state fair in the Midwest to another, for eight months of the year.
Today? Only memories. I wish the old days were back so others could enjoy the thrills and excitement that I had.
Alas. That can never be, for the good old days will never return. And even as I write these words, some greedy dude who will never pet a calf or milk a cow will buy another thousand or two thousand cows, give them an ear tag instead of a name, and become a living producer of milk for some family a thousand miles away.
As far as I am concerned, it is a prostitution of the grandest, greatest era of life in the United States.
I rest my case.
