Milk Wars

This history of the American dairy industry argues that traditional family dairy farmers are at the tail end of an extinction event. They could not halt the forces driving consolidation or fight off the special interests scrambling for a bigger slice of the dairy dollar. Those interests included Teamsters, mafiosos, and state and federal regulators and activists, some of whom worked to impose "marketplace magic." Others were determined to "Let Dairy Die" in the cause of combating global warming.

Some parts of the milk story are new, most are not. A pure milk movement champion wrote this in 1913, a time when nearly every one of the nation's 6.4 million farms was home to at least one milk cow: "The crowding-out of the small farmer is not to be lightly regarded, for he has human rights and society must grant him economic justice." That has not happened, a fact that is among the root causes of a toxic polarization that is not only partisan but geographic--rural red America v. urban blue America.