On New Year's Day 1999, dairy farmers
were receiving 37.3 cents for each quart
of milk that they produced. This year, they
will be netting under 21 cents per quart.

(Remarkably, the retail price of milk has
gone up, not down. Every dairy farmer has
been betrayed by the monster they themselves
created.)

Consumers are not buying the dairy industry's
enormous milk-mustache propaganda campaign.
Fluid milk consumption is decreasing, and farmers,
in a panic, are breeding and raising more cows and
injecting their living milk machines with increased
amounts of genetically engineered bovine growth
hormones, just to keep up with and out-produce their
neighbors.

When demand decreases, and supplies increase...
well, you get the picture. Rock bottom prices
result.

The dairy trade is a deteriorating industry,
and its universe is now spinning out of control.
If not for billions of dollars of un-American-like
welfare in the name of subsidies, the entire dairy
industry would become bankrupt. Every dairy farmer
in America is on this new form of American welfare,
and a once proud dairyman's dignity has been
stripped by the fact that he can no longer stand
on his own. Your tax dollars continue to bail out
those who produce pus with hormones and glue for
America's children.

These days, dairy farmers complain that the
prices they are getting for milk have hit rock
bottom. They cannot get any lower, can they?

In November of 2002, farmers received $9.84
for every hundred pounds of Class III milk.
Class III milk is used for making cheese.

PREDICTION

On Friday (January 3, 2003), the United
States Department of Agriculture will
deliver a punch to the gut of all milk
producers by announcing that December
milk sales averaged $9.75, nine cents
lower than November's unprecedented lows.

Compare that to December of 1998. Just
four years ago, dairymen were receiving
$17.34 for every 100 pounds of milk that
they pumped out of their cows. That's
$7.59 difference. A cow can produce 30,000
pounds of milk per year. A herd of 100
cows can produce 3 million pounds of milk
for a dairyman. That difference in net
income represents a loss of $228,000 to
such a dairy farmer.

Advice to dairymen: It's time to let go.
The future is in soymilk. Fortunes wait
to be made. You don't have to feed, milk,
or shovel manure from a soybean. Soymilk
is nutritious, unlike body fluids from
diseased bovines. Even Dean Foods, America's
largest dairy processor, recognizes that
their future rests in soy profits. One visit
to any American supermarket will reveal that
soymilk and soy yogurt are pushing cow's milk
products aside, and Dean Foods has captured
the major market share of soy.

Now is the time for all good dairymen to do
one of two things. Convert to soy or sell to
a real estate developer.

Your days are numbered.

America was once home to millions of dairy farms.
Today, it's just 78,000. Next year, the number
will be in the 60,000 range. Next decade, 20,000
or less. I do not expect to live to see the day that
dairy farms become extinct like dodos, but I will
live to see the day that only dumb dodos continue
to drink cow's milk. Faced with increased
scientific evidence that milk does not do the
body any good, it amazes me that any person of
sound mind would continue to touch the stuff.

Today's horror of doing business for dairy farmers
scars the psyche of third and fourth generation
children who will one day leave the farm. There is
no future in dairying, both from a financial and
moral perspective. Milk betrays the animals, who live
in slavery and die horrible deaths, and milk betrays
human consumers, whose health becomes compromised by
such use as a food.

Robert Cohen
http://www.notmilk.com