On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
unfortunately the cow seems out of the barn for reasons other than legislation being missing.<p>Farmers have not adapted to changes in conditions and they had time to do so. The point of a union should not be to collute to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources to break monopolies in creameries, or pollution.<p>Any farmer should have seen the writing on the wall to have 1 creamery being their only customer, and develop options immediately. Their lifelihood depended on it!! Farmers can&#x27;t be kicked out of a coop they own. Too late for that.
Also, farmers should have pooled resources and sued to high hell all the pollutants and reported farms using illegal labor. Petition townsfolk to start class action sue pollutants. Hit where it hurts.<p>The article never talks about that. Only complaints about the law (which incidentally, should have not happened if farmers had been proactive at getting their communities to unite against the pollutants).<p>Instead of putting bad actors out of business, this article seems to state that small farmers were not successful in petitioning - via legislation - to become bad actors themselves. Unfortunate.<p>Legislation seems to have gotten small farmers in trouble, legislation will not come to the rescue now. Legislation is for the big guns. They are not that.