Pastures are reverting to woods or being converted to golf courses. It never was easy being a dairy farmer. But now it s next to impossible, because the price farmers are getting for their milk doesn t cover the cost of producing it. As a result, most dairy farmers, like other farmers, are just about broke. Most small farms survive only because someone in the family has an off-farm job.
Family farmers don t have a speck of job security.
Nor is there a trace of a minimum wage. And, like other workers, farmers can point the blame at corporate America, which has managed to get our government and global institutions to tilt the world s rules in their favor. The flip side of Delaware County might be northern Missouri, where Premium Standard Farms, the country s third largest swine producer, slaughters more than two million hogs a year. The company raises the pigs in hundreds of football field-sized metal buildings that sprawl across 45,000 acres. The hogs waste is washed into large dirt cesspools, then pumped onto adjacent crop fields, often finding its way into area streams.