Farmers still facing same challenges three decades later

The above selected quotes from my column over the past 28 years imply that the dairy farm situation seems to have not changed all that much: Too much milk, farms leaving dairying and those that remain producing even more milk. Of course, there were the good times for dairying when the producer price rose for a period of time before again sinking—it is often claimed that dairying has a 3-4 year cycle of ups and downs. Looking at the Class III milk prices since 1980, I found highs after a period of lows: in 1983 ($12.49); 1989 ($12.37); 1998 ($14.20); 2006 ($15.39); 2007 ($18.04): $2011 ($18.37);  2014 ($22.34) and 2017 ($16.17) and a $1.50/cwt lower since."Why don’t they get out of business if the economics are so bad?" my city friends sometimes ask. Well, many have—from 32,500 dairy farms n 1991 to 8,100 today. That’s a lot.