Americans Could Pay $7 For A Gallon Of Milk If US Goes Off 'Dairy Cliff'

[KurtNYC]

8. The price of milk is artificially low because

as you cite the business is now dominated by large players. Milk is broken down for shipping and then re-made into 1%, skim, 2%, etc. So every diary farmer must compete with the lowest cost producers regardless of where they are.

Add to that most grocery stores sell milk at a loss, below what they pay for it because American consumers assume that the price of milk at each chain store is the best indicator of ALL the prices in the store.

If milk goes to $7 many people will stop buying it and will give their children generic soft drinks instead and that will be a huge downgrade in the nutrition of the nation's children.

Don't want to "think of the children"? How about the farmers....?

Still, a long, cold winter, a farm village fallen on hard times, is the backdrop, not the explanation, for what happened to Dean Pierson on Jan. 21. Sometime after finishing the morning milking, Mr. Pierson, 59, a dairy farmer who grew up on High Low Farm on Weed Mine Road in Columbia County, which his father bought when he was an infant, did something no one will ever entirely explain. He took a small-caliber rifle and went through the barn he built about a decade ago methodically shooting all 51 of his milking cows in the head.

He left a note on the front door that warned the reader not to go inside but to call the police. Then he sat down in a chair and killed himself with a single rifle shot to the chest. He left behind a short suicide note scrawled on scratch paper that made reference to his depression over personal and financial issues. He expressed his love for his family but said he was “overwhelmed.”
...
“And that helps too,” he’d say grimly about the small sawmill he operated, a summer crop he’d put in, anything to keep his head above water. He did virtually all the work himself, the morning milking before sunrise, the afternoon one 12 hours later and all the work in between. Fifty cows is pushing the limit of a one-man operation, but he pushed on, machines breaking down around him until he did, too. And surely, other farmers say, he shot the cows because they needed to be milked and without him there, who could have done it? For him, perhaps, death seemed the only answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/nyregion/04towns.html?_r=0