Dairy Industry: Industrial and Craft Farms: 1980 to 2010

The dairy industry, in one sense, was larger at the end of the twentieth century than it ever had been in previous years. The value of products shipped annually by the fluid-milk industry alone (including fluid milk, yogurt, cream, and cottage cheese) was over 23 billion dollars. While the numbers of dairy employees, plants, farms, and cows were all declining rapidly, total production and production per cow were growing just as quickly. In general, dairy farms in the 1990s and early 2000s have become larger and more industrial at an amazingly fast pace. In 1998, there were more than forty thousand fewer dairy farms than in 1993, but the total number of dairy farms with more than two hundred cows rose by 590. Smaller dairy farmers who wanted to survive had to choose either to grow or to develop alternative marketing and production strategies, such as organic production. Concentration was also occurring among dairy-processing companies. In 1997, there were 405 fluid-milk-industry companies in the United States, 120 less than just five years earlier.