by Tom Laskawy For those who need a handy case study on the insanity of our agricultural subsidy system, I give you the dairy industry's solution to falling prices caused by a "milk glut": kill the cows. Cows aren't assembly line robots who can be switched off when their output isn't selling. They need to be milked every day. So when you have a subsidy regime that tends to encourage over-expansion when times are good (to cash in on high prices) and over-production when times are bad (through payments that offset losses and provide an incentive for farmers to attempt to recoup as much as possible), you apparently discover that the only exit runs through the slaughterhouse. Dairy subsidies are further complicated by the fact that the consumer market is heavily regulated (to smooth out price volatility, natch). Unlike most agricultural subsides that tend to depress retail prices, milk prices can remain artificially high at the same time as producer prices are dropping. By the way, if you want to peek into the backroom and see what kind of legislative saugage-making a single dairy operating outside the regulated milk market can touch off, take a look at this WaPo piece from a few years back (when the GOP was still in charge of Congress). As for the poor cows, Rob Inglis at TNR's The Vine and Greg Sargent have all the details. But suffice it to say that this food-related issue struck some lobbyists as a great addition to the stimulus (although somehow I don't think Tom Philpott would have approved). In the end, Appropriations chair Rep. David Obey stopped Ag chair Rep. Collin Peterson's attempt at including a dairy cow "retirement" amendment in the House stimulus bill while GOP Sen. John Cornyn got it tossed in the Senate (I guess Republicans can still get things done after all). But who put the pressure on? Which representatives of sustainable agriculture rose to the occasion in this potential fiasco? Why the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, of course! That's right. It was a Big Beef vs. Big Milk throwdown. The thought of 300,000 head of cattle getting dumped onto the meat market terrifies me. I can only imagine what it did to the NCBA. Reform, anyone?
