USDA And Farmers Agree: Dairy Safety Net Isn’t Working

This is a nutty topic. The number of cows have not decreased (only increased in many places) but the number of people that own them has decreased dramatically. It's simple really. Is it cheaper to ship thousands of products across the ocean in one large ship? Or one row boat per box which puts thousands of row boats in the ocean? Same thing with housing and maintaining cows. It's much cheaper in a very large barn. Six hundred foot to thousand foot barns are not uncommon. When you can drive in a straight line for a long distance and feed or clean hundreds of or thousands of cows in one pass. That is efficient. 50 cow dairies are hobbies farms in these modern times. America for many decades has produced so much extra milk that warehouses are full of cheese. The problem is bad that milk from Ca is dehydrated to powder milk and shipped over to NY and reconstituted to flood the NY milk market. Farmers in NY have been bitch en for decades about the practice. What that does is allow the buyers of milk (from the farmers) to tell the farmers that NY has too much milk and reduce prices.
Here is how you solve alot of these problems. Lets do what New Zealand does ? They sell huge amounts of cheese, milk and powder milk to Asia.
America is sitting on a cash cow for the country in our ability to create huge amounts of food and ship it out. Just like New Zealand does.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/americas-huge-cheese-surplus-what-to-do-with-1-19-billion-pounds-of-cheese_2069335.html

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=america+surplus+cheese&t=hb&atb=v78-1_b&ia=web

Thank you for the interesting read, growing up we milked 8 cows, 2 yrs. before I joined the military, we dropped to 3, separated out the cream, made more money selling the cream. The milk went to the pigs and chickens, and one dairy beef.

There is no such thing as a small dairy any longer. When I was in college I worked on a local dairy with 100 jersey cows. It was labor intensive but it was rewarding. I saw that dairy close because of the super dairies that were popping up. I am talking dairies that had 500-1000 or more cows. We milked once in the morning and the same cows again in the afternoon. These dairies run 24 hour operations to get the cows twice in a 24 hour cycle and are all automated except putting the milker on the actual teats. They are on a turntable where the cows get on on one side and are milked and when they get tot he other side they are put back out until time to milk again. These super dairies put the small farm dairies out of business as they just couldn't compete. The only small dairies that are left are the ones that make specialty cheeses and "organic" milk. It is a shame because they were part of Americana.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/21/wisconsins-massive-milk-operations-local-residents-collide/100423944/