“So what’s going to happen to your cows?”

I reflected for a moment. My decision to sell the cows and exit the dairy industry has not been made lightly. In the end, it has all boiled down to the stress of economics. Over the past seven years, the cost of producing a gallon of milk has nearly doubled. The cost of owning and operating a farm has skyrocketed, whereas the price paid to farmers remains at levels from three generations ago. Literally, I am being paid the same price for milk that my dad was paid in the 1970s.

I will miss the cows. The pursuit of agriculture would be fundamentally different if it actually paid. But, it does not. A livable wage in agriculture is a myth. Farms, meat processing plants, and the food industry holds half of America’s 10 lowest-paying jobs, and factory farms and meat processing plants are among the most dangerous and exploitive workplaces in the country. Farmers are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population — all of this, the hidden cost of cheap food.

The reality is, according to a July 14, 2021 article in The Guardian, only four companies control 65% of the American retail market. Corporate consolidation, mergers, lobbying, and scant regulatory oversight have directly led to food monopolies — the very concept we as Americans pretend to reject. Yet, practically everything we put in our grocery carts boils down to a handful of entities. Worldwide, according to Business Insider, the number of food monopolies is less than 10.

Irony is a dish best served cold. You will notice that the very symbol that is used to market food products is the very image that has been abandoned in the countryside and left to rot — the iconic red dairy barn. Slap the facade of a red barn, a coverall-clad farmer, and a few happy-faced barnyard animals on any label, and voila — you can literally market cancer, obesity, and tooth decay to children, and parents will blissfully sponsor it.

Before all the barns have collapsed into memory, you will notice that no two are ever alike. For the sheer volume of barns that still dot the American countryside, they are each as unique and specialized as the families they once supported — hence the concept of individuality.

There is a reason every dairy dispersal sale, collapsing barn, and abandoned farm hits like a gut punch. There is a reason we inherently feel sad when we see an empty barn collapsing in on itself from neglect. This feeling is less about nostalgia than it is about the subconscious recognition that the barn represents so much more. The barn represents economic autonomy. The barn is a symbol of personal ownership. The barn is quintessential agricultural individuality. The barn is of all of this — and what American Agriculture used to be before the food monopolies were allowed to take over.

And what has the barn been replaced with?

As “family” farms are consolidated into vertically integrated factories, the sacredness of individuality for the farmer and their livestock becomes a bygone concept. In his book “Wastelands”, which reads like a Soviet-era environmental and sociological crime thriller until you realize that it actually happened and took place in the U.S. Carolinas in the 2010s, Author Corban Addison writes:

“The Big Ag revolution has so transformed the economies of agriculture that a contract farmer in 2016 bears almost no resemblance to the Old MacDonald that generations of American children have sung about in their nursery rhymes. This iconic figure in our national landscape, a man whose wealth and virtue are grounded in the land, this independent patriot that Thomas Jefferson lauded as our “most valuable citizen”, has been reduced to a scabrous shadow of his former self. His farm has been turned into a machine, his animals into cogs and pistons. The modern contract farmer is a servant to his lenders and a pawn in the hands of global corporations that siphon off his labor and leave him diminished and dependent.”

Bingo. In reality, “Vertical Integration” in agriculture is nothing more than modern-day Feudalism, and nothing suffers more than the individuality of the farmer, the farm worker, and our animals. All of this, a criminal testimony to the legacy of those who tout the virtues of Big Ag.

I will miss my cows. I will miss seeing our small, multigenerational Brown Swiss herd grazing in the summertime. I will miss hearing the soothing melody of cowbells in the evening. I will miss their soft, inquisitive eyes. As a regional television reporter once remarked, “Your cows look so happy. All of the cows I film at larger farms just look terrified.”

Most of all, I will miss the individuality of the cows. No doubt, I will remember their names and their unique personalities long after the dispersal sale, and long after they are absorbed into the system.

There is a reason we feel a deep and personal sense of loss when we drive through the countryside and see farm after farm sitting empty. Know with absolute certainty:

For every individual barn that collapses, for every multigenerational, traditional family farm that is squeezed out of existence, the price of food must creep upward, while the quality of food must diminish.

— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.