When I was a boy there were dozens of dairy farms in Biddeford and likewise in Saco across the river. They’ve all been disappeared now, while Maine has gone from thousands of “farms shipping milk” to 138.

Back in the 19th century, farmers got organized and entered the public policy realm. Those quaint old Grange halls that we drive past today were once radical outposts of populist activity, in opposition to the Robber Barons and their “Money Power.” Grangers favored regulation/popular control of the banking system, and of the railroads. Together with other organizations like the National Farmers Union, and various state Farmer-Labor Parties, such ruralist advocacy led to what I vaguely remember as a better world where farmers “Raise(d) less corn and more Hell.” All those pesky clod-hoppers/hay-makers needed better farm equipment. Their relative prosperity supported a growing industrial base, mechanizing and increasing agricultural output for urbanists who got attached to eating three times a day.

In “Crisis by Design: A Brief Review of U.S. Farm Policy,” (1987) Mark Ritchie and Kevin Ristau reported that rising costs and falling prices “caused a series of rural depressions and panics in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Seeing these economic crises as a threat to their survival, family farmers organized political movements to protect themselves.” Realizing the need for a better national policy, “one that set prices and control(ed) production at the national level,” led to the McNary-Haugen Bill. It was “passed by Congress three times in the 1920s but vetoed twice by President Coolidge and once by President Hoover.”

As usual, the rural depressions finally engulfed the entire nation. With the New Deal Democrats now holding congressional super-majorities and the presidency, the Commodity Credit Corporation was established. It featured what was called a “parity pricing program.” Under this system farmers were able to recover their cost-of-production from a “market” that “balanced supply with demand.” People got fed. Farmers got paid.

It had to go. So it did.

Ritchie and Ristau again: “Although this parity legislation was crucial for saving family farm agriculture, it conflicted with the economic interests of a number of powerful corporations and banks. … (F)armers with stable, secure incomes were less likely to borrow large amounts from insurance companies or banks” to compete against each other in a predatory market.

In preparation for the post-war world, 1940s corporate planners developed strategies for lowering farm commodity prices to below the cost of production. The “Committee for Economic Development,” in their “Adaptive Program for Agriculture” proposed a “program that would involve moving off of the farm about two million of the present farm labor force, plus a … large part of the new entrants who would otherwise join the farm labor force in the next five years.”

The new regime was to be “large-scale, vigorous, and thorough-going.” It was implemented.

Supporting the program, agriculture economist Kenneth Boulding wrote, “The only way I know to get toothpaste out of a tube is to squeeze, and the only way to get people out of agriculture is likewise to squeeze agriculture. … If you can’t get people out of agriculture easily, you are going to have to do farmers severe injustice.”

Presently the Maine Milk Commission is charged by law to regularly analyze the cost of producing milk here. As always, the latest 2023 study is limited to “Short Run Break Even” (SRBE). Capital costs (land, buildings, equipment purchase) are not included. Neither is “return on investment” i.e. “profit.”

Just figuring SRBE, Maine dairy farmers generally lose money with every “hundred weight” (100 pounds) of milk they ship when compared to the “market price” they receive. And, as a former executive director of the milk commission explained to me years ago, it’s the same across every sector of agriculture in the state.

This decades-long structural squeeze easily explains why Maine’s dairy industry has declined from 4,600 farms in 1954 to 138 today. It also helps explain why farms in the non-dairy industry increasingly resort to theme-park “agri-tourism” hustles, or bear the costs of “value-added” and direct-to-consumer retail in order to keep going.

The recent pausing of USDA conservation funds has gotten some media attention as producers go public about the impacts on their operations. But other than mentioning the tight margins facing farmers there isn’t much interest in exploring the catastrophic economics of American agriculture or its calculated design and enforcement.

Maybe because I was born up the road from a Grange hall I got a proximity-dose of populist temperament. Or maybe it’s because I can read. And count.

But the structural squeeze that was imposed on farmers decades ago has now been generally imposed on most of the non-farming population as well. It wasn’t — it isn’t an accident.

But it’s wrong.

Richard Rhames is a Biddeford farmer.