Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com reports on the travails of the dairy industry:
If you ever felt like crying over spilled milk, now’s the time. Dairy farmers in the United States have dumped more than 43 million gallons of milk between January and August of 2016. This milk has been poured into fields, manure lagoons, and animal feed, or down the drain at processing plants. According to the Wall Street Journal, this amount of milk is enough to fill 66 Olympic-sized swimming pools and is the most wasted in at last 16 years.
The problem is that the United States is in the midst of a massive dairy glut. Farmers responded to a shortage two years ago that is now catching up with a nation unable to absorb the quantity of dairy being produced. Prices are so low – down 36 percent from in 2014 – that “many can’t even afford to transport raw milk to market at current prices.”
Which strikes me as a classical example of a positive feedback loop – a phrase to which most engineers respond with a twitch and a shake of the head: “Can’t live with that.” The problem is that the feedback loop of information is not properly modulated so that farmers know how many can go into dairy farming without flooding the market and forcing many of them out.
Of course, libertarians would just shrug and say this is a good thing, but in reality it’s inefficient and a depressing situation for the farmers involved – and which then leads to a scarcity situation down the road. Just think roller coaster, without the fun.
Not that I have any solutions to offer. The free market has brought many advances to agriculture, as with many other fields, but when it comes to food, rather than, say, computers, I get a little twitchy. I recognize that a mercantile system merely leads to stagnation, politicization, and eventually revolution; but the solution has its own host of fleas.
I only hope the fleas don’t carry the plague.
