USDA Bails out Big Dairy AGAIN!

Another day, another USDA dairy industry bailout. This is the second such bailout in just a few months. Like the first, USDA gave $20 million to Big Dairy.

As if this political season didn’t offer enough insanity, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) just announced ANOTHER $20 million bailout of the overstuffed dairy industry. What is happening here?

I was reading the news yesterday while eating lunch (even though I wrote last week about how it’s bad for our health!) and was shocked to see that the USDA is again using millions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the dairy industry. This is the second such bailout in just a few months.

Vox has written a great article that dives deep into the dairy industry in the US and how we got to our current abundance of dairy. How much abundance do we have? It’s over a BILLION pounds of dairy just hanging around in storage facilities across the country. The article says everyone would need to eat another 3 pounds of butter, cheese and milk each year (in addition to the 36 pounds eaten on average) to get through the surplus. But these numbers don’t factor in those of us that don’t eat dairy. So omnivores and vegetarians would need to eat… like, 50 pounds to make up for our vegan team here at Eat Drink Better!? 

This surplus is bad for humans (since the excess is promoted via checkoff programs and donated to food banks), bad for animals who are used and abused in the dairy industry, and bad for farmers, who have seen their income reduced drastically in the past few years, up to 35% according to the Vox article.

Rather than rehash my previous article about the bailout, I will encourage you to read the following articles to see how we’ve gotten to this point in our industry, and how we all lose when the government supports industrial animal agriculture.

1. Read the Vox article that looks into how dairy pricing has created an overabundance of dairy foods in the country.

2. Read about how the dairy industry pushes these foods on consumers via ‘checkoff’ programs and ad campaigns.

3. Learn more about why we don’t need dairy for our health, and how it might actually be bad for us. In our archives you can learn about the animal protein and cancer connection and why high dairy consumption is bad for your bones, and how to learn to live without dairy. 

cow image from BigStock