Jim Goodman, an organic dairy farmer in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, sold his cows in June.
“Dairy farming is little more than hard work and possible economic suicide,” Goodman wrote in a Washington Post piece about his wrenching decision to stop milking on the dairy farm his family has run for more than a century.
The last few years have been full of grim news in the rolling green hills of America’s Dairyland, where low milk prices and competition from bigger and bigger dairies are putting an average of two family farms out of business each day.
“For my wife and me, having to sell our herd is a sign of the economic death not just of rural America, but also of a way of life,” Goodman added.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis recently released a report on the eighty-four farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota that filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy in 2018. (That’s a small portion of the farms that have gone out of business, since Chapter 12 is a relatively obscure process.) The number of such bankruptcies had more than doubled from four years earlier. About 60 percent of those ill-fated farms were in Wisconsin, still called “America’s Dairyland” on state license plates, despite the fact that California surpassed Wisconsin as the nation’s top milk producer in 1993.
The Eau Claire Leader-Telegram notes a key difference between Wisconsin and California: “The average dairy herd in Wisconsin is 153 cows, compared with 1,300 in California.”
Across the country, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are taking over as family farms bite the dust.
“It’s a lot noisier,” Jim Goodman told me when we spoke on the phone. “It’s just big machines roaring—not what you think of in the countryside.” Goodman knew all forty-five of his cows by name. On CAFOs, with many hundreds of cows, “You don’t really know them. You just see their rear ends.”
There’s more at stake here than the idyllic milk-carton picture of red barns and happy, grazing cows. The consolidation of our food supply should worry everyone. As Goodman points out, “The whole model is so dependent on a few things: cheap labor, intensive chemical use, and manure being heavily spread.”
In fact, as a handful of massive corporate farms manage more and more of our food supply, everyone is vulnerable to the ill effects.
The consolidation of our food supply should worry everyone.
“If something goes wrong, the whole food system could crash, and there wouldn’t be much left,” says Rebecca Goodman, who is married to Jim. “It’s a food system that doesn’t make room for calamity.”
A state study recently found that 42 percent of drinking-water wells in southwest Wisconsin are contaminated with bacteria and chemicals, likely because of manure runoff from CAFOs.
The race to the bottom in rural America is spurring a general decline in our health and well-being. But rarely are agricultural issues front-page news.
After the 2018 elections, a lot of news coverage focused on the growing divide between urban and rural voters—which had the effect of further exacerbating that divide.
“It really bothers me that on social media, when someone says farmers are really hurting, you see the response: ‘They deserve it—they all voted for Trump,’ ” says Sarah Lloyd, an active member of the Wisconsin Farmers Union. “Even if it were true, revenge politics don’t look good on us,” she adds. “And it’s not true. The rural vote is not monolithic.”
“I think rural people are angry because all the attention is focused on the urban areas,” says Rebecca Goodman. “And now they are getting negative attention. Categorizing rural people as Trump voters just feeds people’s anger.”
After all, she adds, “Trump duped disenfranchised people in urban areas, too.”
Urban and rural people have not always been on opposite sides, politically. The Progressive was founded as a voice for a rural, populist, Midwestern progressive movement. Page through old issues of this 110-year-old magazine, and you’ll see articles on milk prices and the fight small farmers led against monopoly and consolidation.
That political movement, largely forgotten now, used to be at the heart of progressive politics. It could be again.
Just ask U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, self-described “girl from the Bronx,” and a social media star among millennials. Daily Show host Trevor Noah, another urban millennial icon, interviewed twenty-nine-year-old Ocasio-Cortez after she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Older, establishment Democrats worry Ocasio-Cortez is “scaring away Midwestern voters,” Noah said. “She needs to temper her message.”
Noah gave Ocasio-Cortez an out, adding that, of course, she doesn’t represent the Midwest. But Ocasio-Cortez didn’t take it. Instead, she described a huge rally she attended with Bernie Sanders in Wichita, Kansas.
“I think what we need to remember is that it was the Midwest that was the source of the progressive movement, originally, in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez told Noah. She gave a brief history of farm/labor organizing that propelled the New Deal, and added, “That came from the Midwest, and I believe that it will come from the Midwest again.”
Conditions are certainly ripe.
“People say ‘Get over it,’ ” Jim Goodman says of the death of the family farm, “just like we got over that we don’t have manufacturing left in many parts of Wisconsin.”
But he doesn’t accept either of those losses, or a dystopian vision of low prices, low wages, a ruined landscape, and big profits for a handful of giant corporations, as the only possible future. “At some point,” Goodman says, “these things are going to crash. It’s not sustainable.”
“If we have to keep things cheap because that’s all people can afford, well, I think people need to be paid more.”
The Goodmans and Sarah Lloyd are part of a food sovereignty movement that envisions a better life for all Americans, with local food at the center of it.
Sarah Lloyd, an active member of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, describes her family farm as “hemorrhaging money.”
They are pushing back against a system that treats food as a commodity traded on the world market. Instead of corn and soy planted fencerow to fencerow as cheaply as possible, they want to see supply chains of small farms feeding the people in their local region, with state support.
Globalization is such a beast that it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of overcoming it. But there are things that can be done on the state and local level to support food sovereignty, a more livable life, and better stewardship of the Earth.
In Wisconsin, where Democrat Tony Evers has just replaced Republican Governor Scott Walker, the Goodmans see some hope for policies that might begin to reverse the decline of rural America and their beloved way of life.
“First of all,” Goodman says, “you can enforce the rules.” The Walmart effect on organics, with a handful of huge farms taking over the industry, is possible in part because the federal government turns a blind eye to flagrant violations of organics rules by gigantic farms.
Even on the state level, environmental protections that would address massive manure spreading and chemical use are a good start. And there could be more in support for farms that get away from the bigger-is-better model.
Rebecca Goodman remembers the arms-race mentality that kicked into high gear after Wisconsin lost its status as the Dairy State. Producing as much milk as possible, to compete with California, became an obsession for agribusiness and state policymakers.
Since that time, overproduction has accelerated, along with an emphasis on global trade and dumping excess product on the rest of the world. State agricultural grants now focus on increasing production. A saner policy would be to protect Wisconsin’s small, artisanal cheesemakers.
There is a market for local food, Lloyd notes.
“Consumers have so much power,” she says. “They demanded non-GMO food and organics. I want them to ask the produce manager or the dairy case manager at the local grocery store if their suppliers pay farmers a decent price. It could make a difference.”
And Lloyd is hopeful that dairy farmers can pressure milk co-ops to band together and impose controls on oversupply, to stop the glut of milk that has led to years of low prices.
Lloyd, like Goodman, is a dairy farmer. Her family’s farm is “hemorrhaging money,” she says. “My eighty-eight-year-old father-in-law is still driving a tractor. It’s not sustainable.”
Still, Lloyd is holding on to hope, traveling to Washington, D.C., for hearings on sustainable agriculture organized by Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont.
“The Democrats sold rural people a sack of BS when they said international trade would benefit everyone,” says Joel Rogers, founder of the progressive policy group Center on Wisconsin Strategy. “They have to offer rural people something to recover from that.”
If we are going to have a more progressive future, politicians have to start taking rural issues seriously. And they must address a declining quality of life, exacerbated by policies supported by both Republicans and Democrats, that plague rural and urban areas alike.