Be it recession or exuberance, no economic cycle is immune from the march of the New England dairy farmers.
Cows in hand, the craggy farmers march on their state legislators and congressmen, looking for love — or, at least, some kind of price-fixing scheme or tax break or other government-sanctioned conspiracy to raise the price of milk for New England consumers and ease the angst of competition from such foreign lands as New York State.
Across the nation and even across New England, many if not most of the schemes have weakened or disappeared over the years as the miracle of refrigeration has weakened the argument that if local dairy farmers disappear, our babies will be stuck drinking Coke and Pepsi products. Well, no, most of the nation’s milk comes from Wisconsin and New York and California.
If New England suffers a dairy crisis, we would at worst be at the mercy of refrigerated trucks traveling on Interstate 95 from New York State, bringing us cheaper product.
What are the Connecticut moo-cow handlers to do? Their farms are too small to even hope to be competitive with out-of-state mega-farms — and they are stuck in a high-cost region that provides them little natural market advantage.
Preservation Appeal
What the Connecticut farmers have going for them is that they are cute — at least compared with the hedge fund guys in Greenwich. Who would you rather bail out in a pinch?
But how to do it? What would be the justification for taking money away from some of us to give to farmers in a state that is not known for its farming to produce a product readily available elsewhere, probably for less money?
These farmers are pretty smart. Don’t let their straw hats fool you. There they were last month at the state Capitol, singing and dancing for the “Speak Up for Agriculture” movement sponsored by the American Farmland Trust.
Notice the sponsor. The farmers aren’t extolling the virtues of local product any more, except to crank up some publicity for local farmers markets that sell vegetables to those hedge fund guys in Greenwich. No, the name of the subsidy game for farmers in the Northeast today is preservation — not necessarily preservation of cows and corn, but preservation of land that might otherwise go to build grandiose mansions owned by newspaper publishers and people like that.
Oh, sure, there might be a “No Farms, No Food” banner up at some of the farm rallies in the Northeast, but everybody knows better than that. The way to send subsidy dollars to the farmers today is to take money away from the rest of us, give it to the farmers to keep up their pretend farms, all in return for a promise that they won’t sell to someone who might build a subdivision where the big, red barn sits.
Not My Backyard
For Connecticut, the deal is almost perfect. Connecticut farmers are selling what Connecticut grows best: snob appeal. Afraid that some developer will come along and spoil the view from your veranda overlooking the pastoral setting? Give the farmer a subsidy, tax break, tax credit, or something sufficient to keep up the farm, as if it were an agriculture museum. Thus, no mansions or even worse, three-bedroom ranch houses.
It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the good old days, when the Northeast Dairy Compact price-fixing conspiracy just gave the dairy boys enough money to keep on milking the cows and the consumers.
They’ve found a different, if not necessarily, better way. We like our open space, and we’ve got a good sense of humor about farmland preservation.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
