The early coronavirus supply-chain disruption hasn’t stopped the dairy industry from increasing production this year. USDA reports that South Dakota squeezed 12% more milk from its cows last month than it did in September 2019. Our milk cow count was 139,000, up 10% from September 2019.
Looking at the 24 biggest dairy-producing states, USDA reports that milk production was up 2.4% last month compared to last September and has beaten last year’s production numbers every month except for May:
The spring coronavirus disruption appears not to have driven a long-term culling of our milk herd. The big-24-state cow total dropped just 0.33% from March to June and has since rebounded. Our milk herd has remained larger than last year’s in every month of this year.
South Dakota was the nation’s 17th-largest milk producer last month. California filled the most milk jugs—3.3 billion pounds—followed by Wisconsin with 2.5 billion. Idaho, New York, and Texas each produced over a billion pounds of milk in September.
In Numlock News, Walt Hickey wrote a scathing paragraph on the state of farming under the GOP. It’s clear that trump and his GOP enablers have turned farmers into beggars for government handouts.
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Farming
The amount of farm income in the United States rose from $76 billion in 2017 to $103 billion in 2020, but it’s not like the production of crops are getting any better: much to the contrary, it’s the federal subsidies that have exploded, from $12 billion in direct government payments in 2017 to $37 billion in 2020, while non-government income is flat, slightly rising from $64 billion to $66 billion over the same period. Government payments — rather than, you know, putting seeds in the ground and then turning that into food, or growing productive industrial precursor chemicals like “corn” — accounted for a third of all farm income, up from 21 percent four years ago, part of USDA policies to blunt the impact of trade wars and the pandemic.
Jacob Bunge, The Wall Street Journal
All that while family dairies go under and the state encourages mega dairies. Just drove by a giant new one south of Humbolt. New one in Plymouth Co Iowa looks like a small city just sprang up overnight. Don’t see a cow but see HUGE buildings and HUGE silage piles.