Four-thirty in the morning felt numbingly cold in southern Idaho when it was Rosa’s turn to usher the cows into the milking parlor. Striding through the dairy farm’s open lots, she tried to balance speed with caution. April showers and the hooves of roughly 2,000 cows had transformed whole sections of the lots into a slippery goo of dirt, dung and urine. The muck stuck to her rubber boots; it was treacherous. On at least one occasion, she had fallen in it.

“If you don’t know how to skate, you learn here,” she told me in Spanish. “This is better than an ice rink.”

Her headlamp sliced images out of the dark as she walked. Cows rising grumpily from the dirt. Cows chewing feed piled along fences. Cows defecating as they sauntered from one side of a corral to another, their swollen udders bulging several inches behind their haunches. She nudged most of them along just by clapping her hands, shushing loudly or flapping her arms like a duck.

Close to the milking parlor, things got tricky. The goo was thicker here, where hundreds of cows passed every hour, and Rosa needed the animals to squeeze together inside a holding area. She stepped in closer to smack haunches, then darted back before the cows turned in response. She was small, and they were huge. Their backs came up to her shoulders — each of them weighed at least 1,000 pounds. There are a lot of ways to get hurt on a dairy farm, and being crushed by cows is one of them. The animals are languid and gentle, but they startle easily. In a panic, they can move fast.

Rosa’s boss, a man named Peter, allowed me to follow her around the dairy because he believes that more people need to understand how economically precarious America’s production of milk has become. The problem, as Peter sees it, is that the price of everything in America has gone up except the price of milk. In the 1980s, a tractor cost him roughly $60,000, the federal minimum wage was $3.35 and his first hundred pounds of Class III milk — the kind used in making yogurt and cheese — sold to a processing plant for $12.24. Since then, many of his expenses have doubled or tripled. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Peter says, his costs soared, and they still haven’t come down. Fuel-tank fittings that cost him about $2,000 in 2014 now run $13,000. Mechanics who once charged $60 an hour now charge $95.

Yet the farm value of milk has been dropping since the 1970s, if you adjust for inflation. For consumers picking up a gallon at the supermarket, this is a blessing. It’s the reason long-term inflation for store-bought milk is roughly half that of other foods in America. But for Peter, it’s a tragedy. When we talked this past spring, the selling price for a hundred pounds of Class III milk hovered around $15.50 — roughly $3 above where it was 40 years ago and a 55 percent drop in real value.

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