On the dairy side:
According to Ziemba, it costs him and farmers like him $20 to produce 100 pounds of milk, but the market price for that 100 pounds is just over $10. By milking 175 cows, seven days per week, Ziemba produces 10,000 pounds of milk per day and says he is losing thousands of dollars as a result.
“We’re losing between $15,000 and $20,000 every month,” he said. “We’re working seven days a week to lose that. We start at 4 a.m. and get done around 5 in the afternoon, seven days a week. Obviously, it’s not going to go on for too much longer. We’re just going to have to sell out. You can only lose money for so long.”He said he hopes the government might do what it did decades ago and set a basement price for milk that the state would make up for should the market drop below that price.
Whatever profit is being made off of farm commodities is not reaching farmers:
Ziemba said he recently read an article in an agricultural trade magazine that said if the price of milk had stayed consistent with the cost of inflation over the last 20 years, then farmers would be paid $45 per 100 pounds of milk they produced — 4.5 times higher than they are paid now.
Ziemba also pointed out that, as the price farmers get for milk has dropped, the cost of a gallon of milk in stores either stays the same or goes up.
Hmm. Where could that profit be going? Maybe the processors? Anyone in Lynn have an update on the situation with the milk processing facilities up there? Have there been changes since they were bought up by Texas-based multinational Suiza Foods Corp. in 1998? Since the criminal tax conspiracy, I mean.
