Former dairy farmers can now be found selling real estate or working at the hardware store or more likely, living elsewhere. 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.