Holy cow, what a mess

Having messed with the bulls and gotten the udders, dairy farmers trudge now buckets and stools in hand to the government barn where taxpayers stand waiting to be milked again. As regular as the rooster’s crow is the cry of the dairy crowd for a little help.

The trouble this time is the cows. There are too many of the things. That’s the product of farmers’ monkeying with the bulls’ stuff, using technology to sort chromosomes in the name of increasing the ranks of females.

Three years in the shadows of that innovation, tens of thousands of brand-spanking new cows are flooding the fields, an event unfortunately timed with the dairy industry taking a plunge to the bottom of the pond. The annals of animal husbandry will show that Jacob’s enterprise was spottier, but the latest result for dairy farmers is a larger dud. The land is flowing with milk but no money. The high supply generated by the swelling cow herds keeps prices low, so some farmers are selling the white stuff at prices lower than production costs.

Enter feds on white horses. Lawmakers from dairy states brokered a deal Wednesday to inject $290 million in direct aid to milk farmers and another $60 million to buy up surplus cheese and other dairy products in hopes of pushing up prices. This is part of federal comedy dating to the 1930s.

Revisit that era and one discovers that the nationalization of the economy that so many fear under President Barack Obama actually began under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1937, what’s known as the Federal Milk Marketing Order system was created to set minimum prices for dairy products. Some people, rational sorts, might call this price fixing.

A dozen years later came the Milk Price Support System under which the government promised to buy cheese, butter and nonfat dry milk, ensuring high demand and the high prices that go with it. As a result of this meddling, prices crippled farmers’ ability to compete on the world market – a problem that persists even today – so the feds galloped in again, tossing out subsidies to encourage farmers to deal abroad. Still, American farmers struggle in the global market.

Let’s encapsulate it all: the feds fix prices, setting them artificially high, which, by the by, hurts American consumers, and farmers, too, because nobody across the ponds wants U.S. milk, and so in the end farmers still can’t turn a profit and consumers pay more. Voila! Let’s make a spotted cow.

Naturally, if banks, carmakers and people who take out mortgages they can’t afford get a bailout, farmers should, too, and so they’re getting theirs again. It’s perhaps fitting that in this case, through a bit of nearsighted genetic engineering, farmers helped manufacture their own quandary.

The feds have been doing a splendid job of that for 70 years. Government mixes with markets utterly fail the way metaphors do with one another, and so once more, cows come home to roost.