Image by Fozzeee via Flickr
Round bales are what I'm playing with at this time of year, using a garbage-truck style loading system and flat spoons to hold 20 6' diameter 5' deep bales per load : up to 14.3 Tonnes, or 16 Tons.. Drought has driven up the price ( $120/bale a couple of miles from here! $70 bales have actually been sold instead of asked, however. 'Normal' would be more like $40-60 ) and killed quantities. Locally yield is about 1 bale per acre...instead of 4 to 6. Poor market price from previous years, loss of PMU barns for female hormones from horses, Mad Cow Disease and export to the U.S. drying up over past years have changed the grassland and herds of cows to fields of grain.Hay price is rather academic : first you have to find some.
Independent Farmers Feel Squeezed By Milk Cartel
The price of raw milk paid to farmers has dropped to its lowest level in 40 years. Dairy farms are going under across the country, and a few dairymen have grown so desperate they've taken their own lives.
As the crisis deepens, criticism grows that dairy giants are trying to monopolize the industry, to the detriment of independent farmers and consumers.
Shorty Miller owns a small dairy in central Texas. Like nearly every other dairy farmer in America, she's angry. Milk prices in the supermarket have come down only slightly, but the price she gets for the raw milk from her Holsteins has dropped nearly in half.
Borden milk is $3.99 a gallon. Oak Farms, which is bottled locally, is $3.49 a gallon, and that's a sale price," Miller says, pointing to cartons of milk in the dairy case at Brookshire's Grocery in McGregor, Texas.
How long can Miller's dairy hold out being squeezed the way it is?
"Depends on how long the bankers will work with us. If we want to put up everything we've worked 40 years for, we can hold out a little longer. But do we want to?" Miller says. "I don't think the American public realizes where the milk comes from. Or what they're going to do if we don't have fresh milk."
Joel Greeno runs a dairy farmer near Kendall, Wis., and also founded a medium-sized dairy co-op. An activist for family farms, Greeno is one of many dairy farmers who accuse Dairy Farmers of America is hurting independent farmers.
As the dairy industry concentrates into fewer and fewer players, some farmers complain it's killing off independents and reducing options for consumers who want to buy locally.
And they're speaking out.
Rebecca Goodman and her husband run a 120-year-old dairy in Sauk County, Wis.
"We all worship at the altar of the free market — that's what we're taught as good Americans," Goodman said on the air. "But I don't know what is free about a handful of companies controlling the process from beginning to end."
In the 30 years Hardin has been writing about the dairy industry, he has chronicled the decline of the family farm and the rise of "Big Milk." Hardin believes the fundamental problem with the dairy industry is a lack of honest competition and too little government oversight.
Milk By The Numbers
22.2 billion — Gallons of raw milk produced annually by American dairy farmers
21 — Gallons of milk consumed annually per capita in the United States
4,600 — Number of dairy farms that have been closing each year for the past two decades
648,000 — Number of dairymen in America in 1970
60,000 — Number of dairymen left in America today
104 — Percent of growth of large dairy farms (more than 2,000 cattle) between 2000 and 2006
$12.5 billion — Net sales of Dean Foods, nation's largest processor of fluid milk, in 2008
31 — Percent gain in Dean Foods' profits in second quarter of 2009
40-50 — Percent drop in prices paid for raw milk to dairy farmers in 2009 compared to 2008
2 — Number of California dairy farmers who have committed suicide in 2009
Sources: USDA, Dean Foods, National Milk Producers Federation, NPR interviews with dairymen
"That's why we have reached, in my opinion, the point we have reached, where farm prices are so abysmal," Hardin says. "And we know the money is in the marketplace — we see what the consumer's paying for these dairy products. If the farmer would get a fair share of that, we wouldn't be having this discussion."
Pass the prion: Inherited mutation leads to spontaneous prion infectivity
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/pass-prion-inherited-mutation-leads-spontaneous-prion-infectivity-24454.html
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Employer Health Insurance Costs Keep Rising
Big insurers surveyed by Aon Consulting figure the cost of health coverage provided by employers will rise more than 10 percent between spring of this year and next.
Your boss might make you pay more to get coverage, reduce your benefits or dole out a smaller raise (if anybody even gets those anymore).
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The price of our power needs to represent the cost of creation – namely we must include the environmental cost of production and the externalities they cause. In the case of a coal-fired power station, this would incorporate the environmental impact of extracting raw coal, its delivery and the cost of carbon and pollution produced. Renewable energy sources should not be excluded from this examination – we must also lay the same ground rules and establish the environmental cost of a solar field or a new dam. It is only when we can accurately measure the true holistic cost of the power we consume that we can start to determine its value. It is only when we understand the true value of consuming energy that we can judge what constitutes wise usage. If it suddenly costs $100 more to fly from New York to San Francisco (because the true cost of producing energy at 37,000ft has a greater cost), it would better enable the consumer to make a decision about the value of their journey.
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