A Productivity Revolution Is Wiping Out (Most) Dairy Farms
Dairies are closing partly because of changing consumer tastes and trade tensions, but mainly because the industry is continuing a century-long consolidation.
Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Almost 800 dairies have closed in Wisconsin in the past 12 months, which sounds bad. Over the past 75 years, though, the state has been losing dairies at an average rate of more than 2,000 a year. It has only about one-quarter as many dairy farms as it did just 25 years ago. In other words, dairies shutting down in Wisconsin is not some new thing.
As is clear from the above chart, the percentage losses have increased sharply over the past two years. The nationwide rate of dairy closings, while not available on a monthly basis and usually not as high as the Wisconsin rate, also jumped to 6.9% in 2018 from 3.9% the year before (and a compound annual rate of 3.8% over the previous decade), so talk of a dairy crisis in Wisconsin and elsewhere — and the role that oat-milk drinkers and President Donald Trump’s tariff wars may be playing in it — is not unwarranted. Still, this crisis has to be understood within the context of a dairy industry that has been consolidating for more than a century.