Creeping across the pasture land. Got dirt on
the boots and a working hand. From the milk house
home to the auction call. These are the folks
standing strong and tall. Yeah, this is... Welcome
listeners back to the Bullvine Podcast. This
is the place for real stories from the real people
shaping the dairy industry. And today we have
a story. We really do. We aren't just talking
about, you know, cows or crops today. We're talking
about a story that, and I'm being honest here,
it really stopped us in our tracks when we were
digging into it. Absolutely. It's a history lesson,
sure, but it's one of those lessons that kind
of punches you right in the gut. Because it is
so, so relevant to exactly what's happening in
the milk market right now. You're right. And,
you know, this is the kind of conversation that
reminds you why you even got into dairy in the
first place. Yeah. It just cuts through all the
noise, you know, the milk checks, the fluctuating
prices, the endless policy debates. It gets right
down to the core of survival. It's about who
holds the power in this industry. And maybe more
importantly. Yeah, more importantly, who keeps
the lights on. And when we say keeps the lights
on, we mean that literally and figuratively.
We're doing a deep dive today into a source called
Dairy Barn Lights, co -ops, genetics, and community
leverage. That's a great piece. It really is.
And to kick things off, I just want to throw
a number at you. $30 million. Now, that's a lot
of money today. Yeah. But we have to be so careful
not to just gloss over that figure. We need to
put this in context. Okay, set the scene. We're
talking about 1973. Exactly. In 1973, a group
of New England dairy farmers negotiated $30 million
in premiums. And that was in less than two years.
Just let that sink in for a second. $30 million.
But, you know, help us picture this. Because
1973 wasn't exactly a picnic for the rest of
the economy, was it? Not a picnic is a... probably
the understatement of the year. You have to remember
what was happening, not just here, but globally.
The Arab oil embargo kicks in. So energy prices
are just... Through the roof. I mean, everything
that runs on diesel, on gas, your costs just
exploded overnight. On top of that, you have
inflation starting to gallop. Towards double
digits, yeah. Right, galloping towards double
digits. Feed costs are becoming volatile in a
way that, you know, the previous generation hadn't
really seen before. And right in the middle of
this... this economic firestorm, you have this
group of New England dairy farmers. Who are historically.
Historically fragmented. Yeah. Stubborn. Famously
independent. And somehow they managed to pull
$30 million in premiums out of the market. And
we really need to be specific about what premium
means here. We're not just talking about the
federal order minimums, are we? No. And that
is the absolute key to this whole story. The
federal order. sets the floor. It's the safety
net. It's the safety net, exactly. These farmers
negotiated for over -order premiums. This is
money that the processor did not have to pay
by law. They weren't obligated at all. Not at
all. They paid it because they had to. Because
these farmers, led by a man named Louis Longo,
had created a supply chirp point that gave them
actual real... market leverage. And that's what
the source calls the audacity of it. It is. Because
usually when costs go up, the farmer just eats
it. It comes right out of your margin. Here,
they force the market to eat it. When you adjust
for inflation, you're looking at something like,
what, $180 to $200 million in today's purchasing
power. Wow. Going directly into the pockets of
family farms in the Northeast. This wasn't a
subsidy. This was not a government program. This
is a pure transfer of power. Okay, so that leads
us to the central mystery that we really need
to unpack today. How? How did a disorganized
group of what economists call price takers just
flip the script like that and become price makers?
And maybe the bigger question. The more important
one, yeah. Why does this article suggest that
we're forgetting the very lesson that made that
$30 million possible in the first place? Because
if we forget that lesson, it's not just about
losing a premium, is it? No. It's about who actually
keeps the lights on in the barn. The source material
makes a pretty heavy claim here. It says that
we're at risk of turning those lights off ourselves
if we don't understand the mechanics of leverage.
So to understand how they got that money, we
have to go back, way before 1973. Way back. We
have to go to a vocational agriculture classroom
in Connecticut, decades earlier. Picture this
scene. It's the late 1940s. It's an old classroom,
right? The air is thick with the smell of chalk
dust and, you know, oiled wood floors. Desks
that have probably been carved into by generations
of bored kids. Exactly. And sitting there is
the protagonist of this part of our story. A
young Louis Longo. But he's not the industry
titan Louis Longo yet. He's just a kid. And the
source paints this picture so vividly, it says
he's a tired farm kid. I'm tired. He's been up
since way before dawn. And he's been milking
by hand. Milking by hand. I mean, just stop and
think about that. That's a level of physical
exhaustion that most people today, we just can't
even process it. No. You're not watching a robot
arm attach itself. You are the machine. Your
hands, your back, your shoulders. So he's sitting
in this classroom smelling like the barn, probably
struggling to keep his eyes open. And the article
says he was working for vacuum and gutter chain
money that they didn't have yet. I love that
phrase. It's incredible, isn't it? Vacuum and
gutter chain money. It just perfectly captures
that transitional era. You knew there was a better
way. You knew the technology existed. Gutter
cleaners, vacuum milking machines, all of it.
But you couldn't afford it. Not yet. You had
to break your back with a shovel and a bucket
to earn enough money to buy the thing that would
stop breaking your back. It's the perfect description
of being the manual labor engine working toward
an automation you can't afford yet. So he's sitting
there, exhausted, and his teacher does something
that changes absolutely everything. That's a
pivotal moment. He slides a book across the desk.
Not a breeding guide. Not a crop manual. An economics
book. And the quote from the teacher, it's just
timeless. He tells him, make sure you read all
you can about economics, because there's only
one thing certain in the world, and that's change.
That one moment, that one book, it's the catalyst.
It's the spark. Louis reads it and he has this
profound realization. He realizes that farmers
are, in his words, disorganized. That's the word
he used. He realizes the fundamental trap of
the entire industry, that farmers are price takers.
But I want to challenge this a bit because we
hear that term price taker all the time. Isn't
that just the free market? Why is dairy so special
here? It is the free market, but dairy is unique.
It's unique because of two things, perishability
and fragmentation. Okay, break that down. Okay,
so if you make widgets, right, and the... price
for widgets drops. You can just put the widgets
in a warehouse and wait for the price to come
back up. Or you can just cut production tomorrow,
tell the factory to make fewer widgets. Exactly.
A dairy farmer can't do that. You can't just
walk out to the barn and tell a Holstein to stop
making milk because the price dropped on the
CME. No, she has to be milked. She has to be
milked twice, maybe three times a day. And that
milk has to move. It has to get on a truck and
go to a plant within 48 hours or it spoils. So
you have absolutely zero bargaining power. You're
on a biological clock that never stops. Precisely.
You are holding what is essentially a distressed
asset every single day. And that is what makes
you a price taker. It's that feeling, isn't it?
Of opening that milk check that someone else
wrote. And seeing all the deductions, the basis
changes, things you never agreed to and realizing.
You have zero recourse. You can work harder than
anyone else. You can be the best herdsman, the
best agronomist in the whole county. Doesn't
matter. But you have no control over the revenue
side of your ledger. None. It is the definition
of powerlessness. That feeling of working harder
and harder, but just staying in the same place
or even falling behind. And Louis Longo, as a
kid in that classroom, he realized that the only
way to change that, the only way to become a
price maker was to get organized. He saw the
problem was structural, not individual. But before
we get into the mechanics of how he did that,
we need to acknowledge the cost, the personal
cost of that kind of leadership. Because Louis
didn't just wake up one day and decide to lead
a revolution. He also had to run a farm. Right.
And the source makes a very important point about
this. It talks about the family behind the person.
Louis eventually builds his herd up to 350 cows.
Which was massive for that time in that area.
Huge. But he's spending his nights in meetings.
He's on the road, driving from farm to farm,
trying to convince these stubborn, independent
guys to work together. So who's running his farm?
His family, he credits them explicitly in the
source. He says, I was lucky that I had the family
that would run the farm. His sons were home doing
the milking. He had people running his other
businesses, a gravel operation, a milk hauling
business. It just creates this image of a hidden
team, you know? You see this all the time in
dairy, all the time. Whenever you see someone
who is a quote unquote leader. The person who
gets quoted in the magazines, the one on the
co -op board, the one speaking at the conference.
There's someone back home. There is almost always
a spouse back home doing the evening milking.
There are kids feeding calves before they get
on the school bus. It's a family enterprise.
The source even mentions the guilt that comes
with it. The guilt of the meeting. Yeah. That
feeling of driving away in the pickup truck while
everyone else is pulling their boots back on
to go out for another round of chores. That is
a very, very real dynamic. And that is a form
of community, too. Yeah. It just happens inside
the four walls of the farmhouse. You simply cannot
have industry leadership without that kind of
domestic support. It just doesn't work. Okay,
so Louie is in Connecticut planting the seeds,
building this leverage. But I want to pivot now
to another story that the source material brings
up. It touches on the same idea of loyalty and
community, but from a totally different angle.
A very different angle. We're going from a Connecticut
barn to a candy company in Illinois. The Curtis
Candy Company. Makers of Baby Ruth and Butterfinger.
Which I had no idea had this massive farm division.
Oh, it was huge. In Cary, Illinois, they were
serious players. The source says they had grand
champion cattle in every single dairy breed one
year. And as part of that, they had an artificial
insemination in an AI division called Curtis
Breeding. But then, as it so often happens, a
crisis hits. The founder dies. The company gets
sold to a huge conglomerate, Standard Brands.
And usually, when a big corporate merger like
that happens, what's the first thing to go? The
weird agricultural division. Exactly. It's a
rounding error on the balance sheet to a massive
company like Standard Brands. They wanted the
candy bars, the distribution, the brand names.
They did not want the cows. So usually the local
history gets erased, the technicians get fired,
the lab closes down. It's just asset liquidation.
Box it up, sell it off, move on. But this time
was different. There was a twist. And her name
was Dorothy Schneering. The widow of the founder,
Otto Schneering. And this is where the story
gets really... Just incredible. I agree. When
the company was sold, she insisted on a clause,
a specific legal clause in the sale agreement
that gave her the option to buy back the AI center
within six months. Just imagine the pressure
in that moment. Immense. She could have just
taken the payout. She could have walked away
a very wealthy woman and just, you know, retired
to Florida. But she doesn't. She exercises the
option. She buys it back. And she becomes the
president of an AI company. We have to stop and
put this in the context of the era again. This
wasn't 2024. Not at all. Women in agribusiness
leadership were, for all intents and purposes,
invisible. They weren't just rare. They weren't
in the headlines. They weren't on the boards.
For her to step in as president, and not just
as a figurehead, but as the person actively keeping
the doors open, that was a radical act. A radical
act of loyalty. What do you think was going through
her head? I think she looked at the people. The
source specifically mentions the lab staff, the
technicians, the office team. These were people
from her community. Her people. Her people. If
she doesn't buy it back, their livelihood is
gone. The institutional knowledge is gone. The
whole thing just disappears. She proved that
community isn't just a nice word you put on a
brochure. It's a business strategy. It's a business
strategy. She kept the talent together. She kept
the lights on. And the source draws a direct
line from what Dorothy Schneering did then to
a more modern parallel. Dr. David Faber and TransOva
in Sioux Center, Iowa. Right. Now we fast forward
to 1980. Another crisis period. A terrible one.
We're talking about high interest rates, 18 -20
% prime rate. The farm crisis is looming on the
horizon. Farms are starting to fail. And right
in the middle of this, here's Dr. Faber starting
an embryo transfer business. Which at the time
must have seemed like absolute science fiction
to most farmers. It was weird science. It was
a luxury. I mean, think about it. If you are
struggling just to pay the feed bill and the
interest on your operating note, why on earth
would you pay for something like embryo transfer?
It just feels like a massive risk. An incredible
risk. But the why behind their success wasn't
just about the technology, was it? No, the source
makes that very clear. It was about trust. The
source emphasizes this over and over. Transoving
didn't grow just because they have the cool new
tech. They grew because they started small. They
were helping local farmers, their neighbors,
multiply their best genetics. It required the
community to trust them. To trust them with their
very best, most valuable cows. Absolutely. And
on the flip side, it required the staff to stick
around when things didn't work. Because in the
early days of ET, or early AI for that matter,
Things went wrong all the time. Constantly. Protocols
fail. Cows don't settle. Embryos don't freeze
right. If you don't have a team that is willing
to grind through that failure day after day,
you never get to the breakthrough. You never
get to the point where IVF is just a standard
practice in the industry. Speaking of things
going wrong. This brings us to my absolute favorite
part of the entire source material. I think I
know where you're going with this. The sheer,
unglamorous, logistical nightmare of early genetics.
We're talking about parachutes. We are talking
about parachutes. This is a story that, I mean,
you almost can't believe it's true, but it is.
Bob Boves, who was with Curtis Breeding back
in the day, he tells this story. And to understand
why they were literally throwing things out of
airplanes, you have to understand the biology
they were fighting against. Right. This is pre
-liquid nitrogen. Pre -cryopreservation. So we're
talking about fresh liquid semen. Exactly. Back
in the 1940s and 50s, the extenders they were
using, these egg yolk citrate buffers, they gave
them a viable window of maybe, if they were lucky,
24 to 36 hours. That's it. That's it. The moment
that collection happens at the stud, the clock
is ticking on motility. The cells are dying.
You don't have the luxury of a cryotank sitting
in the corner of the barn for three weeks waiting
for a cow to come into heat. No. If you're a
technician in rural Indiana and the bull you
need is in Illinois, you need that sample now.
And remember, there's no interstate highway system
yet. There is no FedEx overnight. There's no
UPS. The infrastructure to move sensitive biological
material that fast simply did not exist. So the
parachute wasn't a marketing stunt. It was a
supply chain solution born of pure desperation.
Okay, describe the process. The source says Curtis
Breeding Service hired local pilots with little
planes like Piper Cubs. They'd fly a route, literally
a milk run, but for genetics. And the technician
would be waiting in a field. How did the pilot
know where to drop it? The technician was told
to lay out a big white sheet in their front yard.
Yeah. That was the target. The pilot would fly
over, spot the white sheet, and just drop the
package attached to a small parachute. I can
just imagine the margin for error there has to
be huge. Well, the source tells the story of
the mishap. Of course it does. The pilot is up
there looking for a white sheet. He sees a white
rectangle in a yard down below. He circles, lines
it up, and drops the package. Bullseye. Perfect
hit. Except... Except it wasn't the target sheet.
Oh, no. It was a housewife clothesline full of
her fresh, clean white laundry that she had just
hung out on a Monday morning. No! So you have
this package of bull semen and, you know, whatever
farm -grade packaging they were using, probably
some manure on it. Smashing into pristine white
bedsheet. The sheer horror of that moment. But
you have to pause there and think about the real
cost of that failure. It's not just a cleaning
bill. No. That's misdeeds on multiple farms.
That's a genetic delay for an entire community
of herds that were counting on that delivery.
That's real money lost. And yet they didn't stop.
That's the point. They didn't shrug and say,
well, I guess AI is too hard. Let's just go back
to using the herd bull. No, they refined the
drop. They mapped the routes better. They kept
going. It just shows this relentless, almost
stubborn drive to modernize. Even when the technology
was. Barely ready for prime time. And if parachutes
weren't enough, they tried pigeons. The pigeons.
This one absolutely blew my mind. We're in Japan
now. Yes. The island of Hokkaido, the northern
island. They needed genetics from a stud in Tokyo.
But again, some problem, different continent.
The clock is ticking. You can't get a truck or
a train there fast enough. So, homing pigeons.
They strap tiny thermoses of semen to homing
pigeons. You are kidding me. They strap thermoses
to birds. Tiny thermoses. The pigeons flew the
genetics from Tokyo hundreds of miles north to
the island to beat the expiration clock. And
did it work? The source says, and this is a direct
quote, the conception rates were fair. Fair.
Considering the delivery method was a bird, fair
is an absolute miracle. It's incredible. It just
highlights the grit. We look at a modern semen
tank or a sleek IVF lab today, and we just take
it for granted. We forget that it all started
with guys throwing boxes out of rickety airplanes
and strapping tubes to birds. It shows that innovation
is messy. It's always messy. It's logistical
nightmares. It's constant failure. But the community,
the technicians, the pilots, the lab staff, the
farmers, they refuse to accept. good enough.
And that refusal, that is a form of power too.
So we have the grit of the genetics pioneers.
We have the loyalty of Dorothy Schneering. Now
let's go back to Louis Longo and the hard economics
of it all. Yes. Because all the grit in the world
doesn't matter if you aren't getting paid a fair
price for your milk. Exactly. So Louis has done
the hard work. He's organized the farmers, but
that organization needs a legal framework to
operate with him. Right. You can't just be a
mob. No. And the tool he used was the Capra -Volstead
Act. We need to explain this because people hear
co -op and they think of their local farm supply
store or maybe an organic grocery. But the Capra
-Volstead Act of 1922 is, I mean, it's essentially
the Magna Carta for agricultural cooperatives
in the United States. What does it actually do
in simple terms? It gives farmers a limited,
and I stress limited, exemption from antitrust
laws. Basically, in any other industry in the
U .S. If Ford, GM, and Chrysler all got together
in a room and said, hey, from now on, we're all
going to sell cars for a minimum of $50 ,000,
take it or leave it. They'd be arrested. They'd
be arrested for price fixing. That's illegal
collusion. But farmers, because of that perishability
and fragmentation we talked about, they need
to collude just to survive. Right. So Capra Volstead
says, in effect, if you are actual farmers, you
are allowed to get together, market your product
jointly, and set a common price. without us arresting
you for price fixing. There are rules, of course.
It has to be democratically controlled, benefit
the members. Correct. But it's the legal breathing
room, as the source calls it, that makes a marketing
co -op possible. So without Capra Volstead, Louis
Longo would have been a criminal. Absolutely.
With it, he was a negotiator. So he uses that
tool. He organizes the Connecticut milk producers,
they merge with other groups, and they form a
unified bargaining block. And then comes the
payoff, 1973, the breakthrough. They go to the
processors, and with the leverage of a unified
supply, they negotiated premiums that amounted
to $30 million. And again, let's be clear, this
was money that went directly from the processor
to the farms. Yes, the source puts it into real
-world perspective. That's money for fixing the
barn roof that's been leaking for five years.
That's money for buying a new line of heifers
to improve your genetics. That's money that keeps
the next generation on the farm because for the
first time, maybe they see a future in it. It's
not just numbers on a spreadsheet. It's viability.
It's hope. And this is the big twist in the story.
This is the warning. Louis Longo had a reflection
later in his life. He said, we lost the premiums.
And it's so important to understand why they
lost them. Yeah. Did the government step in?
Did the processors find a loophole? Did consumers
revolt over prices? No, none of that. He said,
and this quote is just devastating. It is. We
lost the premiums because farmers went out for
nickels and gave up the idea of getting a dollar.
Went out for nickels and gave up the idea of
getting a dollar. That just hits hard. It's the
nickels versus dollars tradeoff. And for anyone
listening to this today, this is the most critical
part of this entire deep dive. This is the core
intellectual argument of the whole piece. OK,
let's break this down very carefully, because
on the surface, if someone walks up to me and
offers me a nickel, I want the nickel. It sounds
rational. It sounds perfectly rational, but it's
the classic prisoner's dilemma applied directly
to milk pricing. Okay, walk us through the mechanics.
How does one farmer or a small group of farmers
taking a bonus check actually end up lowering
the price for everyone else in the region? Because,
you know, on the surface, that can sound like
co -op propaganda. It can, but it's just cold,
hard math. It's all about utilization rates and,
crucially, the cost of balancing the market.
Balancing the market. What do you mean by that?
A co -op's power, its entire reason for being.
comes from its ability to handle all the milk
all the time. The good and the bad. The good
and the bad. It has to take the surplus milk
from a long holiday weekend that nobody wants
and turn it into storable products like powder
or butter. At the same time, it has to make sure
the fluid plants have exactly what they need
every single day. That balancing act costs a
tremendous amount of money. It's the overhead.
It's the stainless steel, the dryers, the staff,
the logistics. Right. It's the cost of maintaining
a stable market for everyone. Now, a private
processor comes into that same region. They don't
have that responsibility. They don't have to
balance the whole region's supply. They just
want milk for their one plant. Exactly. They
just want enough high -quality, low -somatic
cell milk to run their cheese plant at 100 %
capacity. They want the easy milk, so they cherry
pick. And how do they do that? They go to the
large, efficient farms located conveniently close
to their plant, and they whisper in their ear,
they say, hey. Leave the co -op. Ship directly
to us. We'll pay you 20 cents, 50 cents, maybe
even a dollar per hundredweight over what the
co -op is paying you. And if I'm that farmer
and I'm looking at a $200 ,000 feed bill and
a banknote that's due, that 50 cents isn't greed.
No, it's survival. It looks like a lifeline.
And you take it. You take the nickel. Well, here's
the math. Here's the math. When you, the large,
efficient farmer, pull your high -volume, consistent,
easy -to -haul milk out of the co -op pool, what's
left in that pool? The co -op is left with the
harder to market milk, the smaller farms, the
farms further away. Exactly. And it's still stuck
with the full fixed cost of those balancing plants.
So the co -ops per unit cost of handling milk
just went way up. Way up. And more importantly,
its bargaining leverage in the marketplace just
went way down. They can no longer walk into negotiations
with processors and say, We control 90 % of the
milk in this region. You will pay us a premium.
Because they don't control it anymore. They only
control 60 % now. The processors know they're
weak. They know the co -op is desperate. So the
over -order premiums, the very ones that Louis
Longo fought for, they just vanish. So you, as
an individual, you gained a 50 -cent bonus on
your milk check. But the base price for the entire
region, including your own, drops by a dollar
because the collective leverage is gone. That's
the dollar you lost. That is the dollar. And
Luis Longo watched this happen in real time in
the 80s. He watched that solidarity. He built
Fracture farmer by farmer. And he watched the
premiums they fought so hard for just evaporate.
He called it going out for nickels. It's such
a harsh lesson. And the source ties this directly
back to the idea of community. Because resisting
that temptation, resisting that nickel, it requires
a huge amount of trust. It's all trust. You have
to trust that your neighbors are also resisting
it. You have to trust that everyone is holding
the line together. And trust is the currency.
If I don't trust you to hold the line, then my
most rational move is to grab what I can for
myself before the whole thing collapses. It becomes
race to the bottom and everybody loses in the
end. This brings us to the final and maybe the
most powerful section of the source material.
It's where it reframes community, not just as
a tool for business leverage, but as literal
survival. The section is called The Ripple Effect.
Yeah, this part of the piece really moved me.
We talk about co -ops and contracts and premiums,
and it can all get very dry and academic. But
community is also what happens when the lights
go out for real. The source uses this really
haunting image to describe that feeling of isolation.
It calls it the blue light at midnight. Can you
describe that for us? It's a picture of, you
know, a woman in agriculture. She's sitting in
her dark kitchen. Everyone else in the house
is asleep. The only light in the room is the
blue glow of her phone or her computer screen.
And she's just staring at it. She's staring at
it. And she's typing a message into an online
support group because she doesn't know if she
can keep the farm going. She doesn't know who
to talk to. She feels completely and utterly
alone. I think we've all been there. Or we know
someone who has. The isolation of dairy farming
can be absolutely crushing. But then the source
talks about the response she gets. It's not her
family. It's not her banker. It's strangers.
Other farmers. Other farmers. Hundreds of miles
away. Typing back at two in the morning saying,
me too. Or have you try this. Or just hang in
there. We see you. The source calls this the
hidden team. The hidden team. It's all the soft
stuff that actually determines the hard outcomes.
Because when the barn burns down, and sadly barns
do burn down, who shows up at three in the morning?
It's not the private processor who is offering
you that 50 cent premium. They're not driving
the fire truck. They're not even calling to see
if you're okay. No, it's your neighbor. It's
the guy you might have argued with at the last
co -op meeting, but he's there with a stock trailer
to help you move your cows to safety. booked
solid for two weeks, but says, I'll be there
in an hour. It's the nutritionist who sits at
your kitchen table with you and helps you rework
the entire ration because corn prices just spiked
and you're broke. That right there, that's the
list of lights. The people who keep your actual
barn lights on when everything else has gone
dark. And that is the ultimate argument the source
is making. You cannot survive as a price taker
in a silo. If you isolate yourself to chase a
nickel, You might get the nickel for a while,
but you might find yourself completely alone
when you really need a dollar. Or when you need
a fire truck. Or a shoulder to cry on. It's such
a powerful reframing. We tend to think of business
and community as two separate things. You know,
business is the hard numbers and community is
church and potlucks. Right. But in dairy, the
source argues they are the exact same thing.
Your leverage is your community. Your resilience
is your community. So we've traveled from 1973
New England. to clothesline mishaps in Indiana,
to the high -tech labs of Iowa, and all the way
back to that lonely kitchen table at midnight.
It's a hell of a journey. It really is. All right.
Someone is listening to this right now. They're
on their tractor. Maybe they're in the skid -steer
cleaning pens. They're thinking about their own
contracts, their own co -op, their own neighbors.
What do they sit with from all this? What's the
practical application? I think there are two
very concrete things to take away from this source
material. The first one is practical and it's
about contracts. From now on, every time you
look at a milk contract, any contract, you need
to ask two questions, not just one. What are
they? Question one is the easy one. It's the
one we all ask. What does this do for my cash
flow today? The nickel question. That's the nickel
question. Yeah. But question two is the hard
one. It's the one we often forget to ask. And
it is, what does this do to my community's bargaining
power tomorrow? That requires a huge shift in
mindset. That asks you to think about the dollar,
not just your nickel. It does. It requires you
to think beyond your own fence line. But if you
only ever answer question one, you are living
Louis Lando's nightmare. You are chasing the
nickel and you will eventually lose the dollar.
And the second takeaway. The second one is more
personal. The source calls it the list of lights.
It suggests you actually do this. Take out a
piece of paper or open the notes app on your
phone and write down the names of the people
who would show up if disaster struck your farm
at 2 in the morning. Your real community. Your
real community. And then you look at that list
and if that page is blank. Wow. If that page
is blank, that is your immediate to -do list.
That is more important than culling a cow or
fixing a fence. You need to build that network.
You need to go to the meeting you were going
to skip. You need to check in on a neighbor you
haven't talked to in a while. You need to become
a light for someone else. Because you cannot
survive this industry alone. You can't. It's
impossible. That's incredibly powerful. It's
not just about economics. It's about resilience.
It's about building a web of support that can
withstand the shocks that are inevitably coming.
It is. The future of dairy. It belongs to the
people who show up for each other. Whether that's
in a co -op meeting fighting for $30 million
or in a neighbor's yard picking up ruined laundry
after a failed parachute drop. It's the same
spirit. It's the exact same spirit. I love that.
The source had another great phrase, the cost
of not shrugging. That refusal to just accept
that this is the way things are. That refusal
to believe that we're powerless. Exactly. We
are only price takers if we choose to be. That's
the lesson from 1973. That's another story from
The Bullvine Podcast. These are the people building
the future of dairy. And reminding us of the
past that built us in the first place. You can
find more stories just like this one at www .thebullvine
.com. Next time, we're going to be teasing a
profile on a breeder who is taking a very, very
different approach to genomics. You won't want
to miss it. It's a good one. So subscribe wherever
you listen so you don't miss it. See you down
the road. Stay safe out there.