Posted on 09/22/2009 7:08:29 AM PDT by george76
Six Colorado dairies have filed for bankruptcy protection this year amid banking problems and low milk prices.
Four of the banks had loans from Greeley-based New Frontier Bank, which collapsed in April...
Bob Winter, a member of the Colorado Farm Bureau, says he believes more Colorado dairies are preparing to file for bankruptcy protection
(Excerpt) Read more at gjsentinel.com ...
Low milk prices? We pay $5.49 a gallon for the pure stuff.
Makes ya wonder why Obama had milk cows slaughtered, eh? Just like FDR......
And chickens,too. Let Cherries rot on the tree...won’t let water to the farmers in California......
You ain’t seen bad, but it’s comin’.
That no water to farmers in Calif even has the local DUmmies mad.
Not much national media .
Are the individual dairies listed anywhere online?
"Pure stuff"?
Milk around here is in the $2.50 a gallon neighborhood. (Wyoming/Colorado)
Organic Dairies will continue to make money. They are not tied into the government dairy plans. Some people like milk with out the puss.
My father in Law came from a dairy family. Back in the day you could make a living with 20 dairy cows, they all had pasture time and ate grass.
Not that I have seen.
2 for $4.00 here in Wisconsin and our dairy guys are hurting real bad too...farmers of all types are taking it on the chin.
The Cooperatives Working Together herd retirement program is industry-funded and is designed to reduce milk production in the United States which would then improve prices. Under the program, dairymen submit a bid on the number of cows they want to retire. They are paid that amount based on the previous 12-months production of those cows, which are then sent to slaughter. The dairy producer also is paid the value of that cow that goes to slaughter.
As example, if a dairy has an average production of 20,000 pounds per cow, and the bid was accepted at $5 per 100-pounds, then he would be paid $1,000 per cow plus the value of that cow when it is sold at slaughter. Members of CWT pay the cooperative 10 cents per hundred pounds of milk produced, and the cooperative then decides whether to use that money in a herd retirement program or to use it for some other program, such as milk product export enhancement.
In the mid 90’s small family dairies were going out of business because of age. Comes along the California Mega Dairy concept, and begins locating the 3000 cow dairies all over southern Kali, then to New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. Most of the Mega operators were making a million dollars a month on the high prices plus the government support price. Now that they have oversaturated the market, and the prices are slipping, they want to whine. It is only natural selection. Milk plants, ice cream plants, and cheese plants have gone up all over the Great Plains to try to utilize the milk glut. Once the fat cats get trimmed back to one dairy each instead of 4-5 of the Mega Dairies, then stability will return to the market. But, alas, the poor fellows wont be able to make but a quarter million dollars a month then. Such is capitalism.
The poor dairy farmers haven’t found out yet how to “milk” they system! LOL!
Nice post.
Add to that the fact that we are increasingly a nation of people of color. Most people of color cannot tolerate milk & milk products past their youth. I just read the other day that more adults (I assume they meant more Caucasian adults) were becoming lactose intolerant. We’ve got a ton of aging baby boomers, who may be becoming more lactose intolerant as they age. There’s just less need for milk.
Cows milk is for cows. We were never meant to drink cows milk past the time you might need it if mother’s breast milk were unavailable. Plenty of cultures in the world get by without it.
Need ‘milk?’ Drink almond, rice, or soy milk.
THose cultures generally can’t afford cows, which is why they don’t have cows milk, the drink and eat goat milk instead.
I’m not all so sure about there being less need for milk. There is some lactose intolerance, yes, the main problem is oversupply. There is way more milk coming on than there is market, and the Mega operators are busy building more bigger dairies. Fly over the Texas panhandle at night and look down at the glowing milk barns. It looks like a city down where it ought to be dark fields.
You wont find any of that fake milk in my house. Milk is milk, it comes from cows, not soybeans.
Pure stuff = no additives, no hormones, no antibiotics
I think there are Mennonites or like group hereabouts who make this product available.
Cooperatives = Communism
No wonder they’re losing money.
I drink it because there's enough problems with growing old. Don't need all those extra chemicals to further mess with my system.
But why overproduce if the need isn’t there? Supply and demand would tell you to limit production until it gets back in line with demand.
The need wasnt there but the price was there. If you were making a million dollars a month, would you care if someone like yourself didnt agree with it? Hell, no. So, what you get is what you have now. The Supply and Demand is regulating itself. But, the Megas are setting on hundreds of millions of dollars, and if they have to cycle through it for a year, what is ten million? Study your economics a bit more closely.
I asked a question because I am unfamiliar with the industry. No need for the snark.
I have no idea what a snark is, but I do know how economics work. What you have are the Megas protected by laws that they wrote, which translates into guaranteed government price supports. Milk price may be $8.50, but the price support payments guarantee them much more than that, and even more if they deliver an occasional load to certain higher priced areas such as Las Vegas, or Chino, California plants. If they do that, then they get the California price support instead of the local price support. They care little about supply and demand, it is cash on the barrel head now.
The bank that carried their paper failed, and that likely did not help them out once the auditors went through the books. The question then becomes who did what to whom? Is this a local issue, or is this an example of things to come for the industry? If you look at a map, you will see the dairies in the story are in the urban sprawl of the front range, and within a very few miles from them is an MSMA in excess of 15 million people. I dont think it is a demand problem as I study it more, it is just a cleansing of the gene pool. In the last 5 years, there were a couple dairies in the Muleshoe, TX area, a couple more in the OK panhandle, and a couple more in western Kansas that went under because of poor management, and no one heard anything about that other than locally. Yet, the Megas continue to build. As long as there is the opportunity for them to pocket a million dollars a month from those dairies, then that will be the guiding light, not supply or demand or anything else. Those who cant compete in that cut throat industry will simply get kicked unceremoniously to the curb. Their properties will be picked up cheap by another Mega, and the facility will be back in business with 3000 new cows in a few months, but managed profitably.
You had a couple of the Megas that didnt take root in your area, didnt you? They have since been bought up by others and are now back in business? The ones by Boise City are back up now, and another one has been built a mile or so south of them.
What amuses me is this talk about organic milk. Milk is milk. It is secreted by the milk glands of mammals. All that organic talk that applies to the formula is that the cows receive no medication, and are not fed any feed that has had chemicals applied to it. I would say that in the industry that is impossible. I dont know who is kidding who, but you haul hay, and you and I both know that that there is no way of telling if that hay has been sprayed or not. I’m not picking on you, I’m just saying we both know the industry, and absolute organic term applied to any commercial dairy is misleading, as you cannot have a thousand or two thousand or three thousand cows penned in such close proximity and not have to control disease and pests with chemicals. Grass run? Funny. I wonder how many square miles of grass it would take to run 3000 cows in our area? Can you imagine trying to get them all in to milk twice a day? Ok I’m amused,,,catch me on the flip.
I've been around confined livestock all my life and know that even pastured animals will pick up parasites from birds, wild animals and each other over time. Some they can live with albeit reduced production and others will kill them. Sometimes in a horrible fashion.
As far as the hay goes, it is pretty much an honor system no matter what kind of certificate is held. There is a dairy near here that has it's own hay fields and they are way out in BFE but they cannot positively say there has been no spray drift come in on it from fields nearby. So I would have to agree with you. Want totally organic, you better have a large dome...
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