38
Bloomberg Businessweek March 2, 2020lure drivers off Interstate
5 at Exit 220, about 70 miles
outheast of Chicago, the
roadside ads lean hard on word-
play. A metal corncob the size of a
speedboat carries the words, VISIT
EAR OFTEN! A sign with a cow on
it promises A DAIRY GOOD TIME
FOR THE FAMILY! Another bill-
board shows a wide-eyed kid with a
fruit-flavored ice cream in his hand:
BERRY TEMPTING!
You’re in for even more of this sort
of thing if you take the exit. At the
BP gas station, the little food market
inside is called the Dairycattessen.
There’s Central Bark, a green area
to let your dogs run around in, and
an adjacent Cowfé where you can
get cheese sandwiches and milk-
shakes. The water tower is mottled
like a Holstein, but just about every
other structure in sight conforms to the red-and-white motif
of the classic American barnyard. Among them is a hotel with
two towerlike extensions painted to resemble grain silos and
an indoor pool with a slide that looks like a big wet cow’s
tongue. These attractions, however, are for later, after you
visit another barnlike building two doors down. On its face,
big white letters in a Playskool-esque font announce: YOUR
ADVENTURE STARTS HERE.
This is Fair Oaks Farms, an Indiana tourist attraction
designed to entertain road-weary families and deliver them
back to the highway reassured that American agriculture is
headed in the right direction. With more than 33,000 cows
that pump out some 300,000 gallons of milk daily, it’s also
quite a bit more. “Welcome to our home, a functioning
Modern farm, where our Animals are the center, led by a
team with country Charm,” says a sign by the counter where
you buy tickets for the tour. “There’s nothing here that’s
hidden.... Everything here is from the heart. If you’re ready
for Ag-venture, Fair Oaks Farms is the place to start.”
The grounds are immaculate, and if you’re in the mood to
celebrate milk—“the most wholesome food on earth,” accord-
ing to the recorded script that’s broadcast on the bus tour—
you’ll probably love it as much as Cargill Inc., Land O’Lakes
Inc., and other corporate partners apparently do. But outside
of these 19 acres, in much of the rest of rural America, dairy
hasn’t been celebrated much in recent years. Instead, it’s been
agonized over, lamented, even eulogized.
In Wisconsin alone, between two and three family dairy
farms go out of business every single day. (Some of these farms
still operate, but no longer as dairies.) That rate has held steady
for about three years, which is particularly striking given how
few farms remain left to fail. In the early 1970s, the state had
more than 75,000 dairies. Today it has about 7,400.Across the western border in
Minnesota, officials recently reported
that the median household income
rose last year to about $68,000,
roughly 10% higher than the national
average. Dairy farmers had nothing
to do with it. In 2017, the median
income for a dairy farm dipped just
shy of $44,000 in the state. In 2018, it
plunged all the way down to $14,697.
Half of Minnesota’s dairy farmers
failed to break even for the year.
There, too, thousands of dairy farms
have simply vanished.
In the midst of this mass extinc-
tion, a counterintuitive fact remains
true: Americans are consuming more
dairy products than ever before, pri-
marily because yogurt and cheese
have compensated for a steady drop
in fluid milk consumption. Americans
consumed 646 pounds of dairy per
person in 2018—the highest consumption rate in 56 years.
As small farms fold, the balance of production tilts further
toward huge, efficient, industrial dairy operations that can
more easily weather price downturns and manage a razor-
thin profit margin through the power of scale. Places, in other
words, like Fair Oaks Farms.
“Thirty years ago, when I got started, if you would have
asked me what a large farm was, I probably would have said
15 or 20 cows, something like that,” says Mark Stephenson,
the director at the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy
Profitability. Now a concentrated animal feeding operation—a
CAFO, as factory-style farms like Fair Oaks are known—can
house thousands or even tens of thousands of cows. Today,
more than 53% of America’s milk is produced by less than 3%
of its farms. That helps explain how, in the face of a massive
reduction in the number of total dairies, the U.S. continues to
produce more milk and cheese than the market consumes—
in 2019, America’s cheese surplus reached 1.4 billion pounds.
“People still have this image of red barns, of cows in the
field,” Stephenson says. “We’ve all been there—it’s an image,
and it feels like a warm hug, somehow, and that’s what you
want to think of when you think of a dairy farm. But that’s
not the reality anymore.”erywhere you look at Fair Oaks, you’ll find
omething that imitates, if not exaggerates, the pre-
ise strain of countrified charm that industrial agri-
culture is often blamed for destroying. It makes a direct and
unabashed attempt to tap into those warm-hug feelings with
facsimiles of the homespun and pastoral, while at the same
time celebrating the efficiencies that come from the advances
that replaced them. The tour guides plug a notion that at
times contradicts the imagery: Industrial-scale dairies may beYager at his farm in southern Wisconsin