They are everywhere. They live among us, as if they were normal humans.
They insinuate themselves into community life, with an aw-shucks kind of personality designed to lull us into accepting them as friends, as family, as flesh-and-blood humans.
But inside the silo, under the barn, back behind the water tower, they gather together when no one is looking, to plot their takeover, to plan the moment at which all our money will belong to them.
They are the dairy farmers.
For decades, they have nibbled at the margin, experimenting with various subsidies and government regulations and other techniques from outer space, designed to transport money from our wallets to their wallets, fat and happy in the back pants pocket of their blue jeans.
They have become more bold. Now, they are prepared to strike in one final blow against mankind, leaving us awash in milk and cheese, but without enough money left to buy cookies for the milk or crackers for the cheese.
These are troubled, dangerous times. The ominous clues are all around us.
First, there was the announcement in November that dairy farmers in Wisconsin would be getting $33 million in state funds to help them “compete in the global market.” God help us. They already control our world, these dairy farmers.
Some of the Wisconsin money will reportedly be used to produce more “whey.” As the dairy lobbyists put it, where there’s a will, there’s a whey.
In Massachusetts, the dairy farmers brought out their cutest cows to convince a “task force” to recommend that the legislature approve as much as $4 million in tax credits for the dairy farmers, in years when milk prices fall below the cost of production, which, of course, will be determined according to a dry, complicated formula that is tied to the cost of Saudi crude, multiplied by the Dow Industrial Average, and then quadrupled by dairy lobbyists working the State Capitol.
And then there is Connecticut, where dreamy “environmentalists,” led in four-part harmony by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, vow to “save” the family farmers. It will be expensive to save the family farms. Mooo, in cow language, means, give us subsidies and overpay us for development rights, in return for which we will continue to pretend that we operate as viable dairy farms.
Even those among us who seem so very human, so very normal, may actually be dairy farmers in disguise. There was state Rep. George Wilber, a Democrat from Colebrook, in a newspaper interview last year, bemoaning the decline and fall of local dairy farms, and frightening small children with the prospect of, yes, having to depend on Ohio for our milk.
“When local farms are gone, where’s the milk going to come from,” he asked with a plaintive moo. “What happens if there is some kind of disaster and you are going to be depending on milk coming from Ohio.”
Interesting issue, that looming threat from Ohio. For years, the dairy farmers in these here parts benefited from the Northeast Dairy Compact, a Congressional price-fixing scheme that propped up prices and, most importantly, kept evil, demon New York State milk out of New England. Now, we may have to go begging for milk from Ohio. It’s a marketing jungle out there.
Despite decades of state and federal subsidizing and coddling, the number of dairy farmers in the United States has shrunk by about 70 percent in the last 25 years. The romantic notion that we need local, “fresh” milk disappeared with the advent of air-conditioned trucks, a new-fangled invention that some politicians haven’t heard about yet.
Brace yourself. The rumor on the barnyard circuit is that 2008 will bring another aggressive round of lobbying from the dairy guys.
They will milk us. They will cream us. They will skim dollars from the government trough.
It’s udderly ridiculous.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
