For much of the 20th century, milk was a simple part of daily life in the U.S, as farmers raised cows, milkmen delivered bottles and children drank it at school. But those days are fading.
America has fallen out of love with drinking milk, as lower-calorie options have increased and people are replacing water bottles with milk cartons. Americans each drink an estimated 146 lb. of fluid milk in 2018, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service. That may sound like a lot, but it's down by 26% just since 2000.
The downturn has been tough on dairy processors like Borden and Dean, which buy fresh milk from farms and use techniques like pasteurization (巴氏杀菌) to create a consumer-safe drink with a longer shelf life. For the past five years, thanks to technology that increased milk production, fresh-milk prices were relatively low, which meant processors could still earn some money even despite the decreasing demand. But prices began going up again last year, squeezing the processors' already tight profits. "Declining sales in a thin-profit business is not a good recipe for success," says Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin.
Milk processors are also facing competition from big retailers, which have set up their own processing plants. In 2018, Walmart opened a milk-processing plant in Indiana to serve hundreds of stores in the Midwest, taking away approximately 95 million gal of milk-processing business from Dean Foods.
On the other end of the supply chain, dairy farms are facing trouble of their own. The low prices left small farmers struggling across the industry. The number of farm bankruptcies (破产) in 2019 was up by 4% from the previous year. "We're trying our best to hang on," says Mary Rieckmann, a dairy farmer in Wisconsin whose family has turned to GoFundMe to keep their century-old farm running.
