In yet another effort to explain the 2025 changes to the Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMOs), a mid-June headline in a widely respected farm newspaper carried this news: “Milk pricing explained: ‘New negative’ is actually a positive.”
Astonishing as that reality-defying headline is, the story’s second paragraph adds to its disbelief in a trainwreck of insider jargon. It reads in its entirety:
“Within each respective FMMO, a location adjustment is added or subtracted from the base zone prices for plants located in counties with Class I differentials higher or lower than the base county. The increase in Class I differentials changed the Class I uniform producer price, and [producer price differential] relationships within FMMOs.”
I can’t explain any of that. When I asked a dairy economist (who asked for anonymity) to explain FMMO changes, he offered this unpasteurized view: “Processors, not dairy farmers” are in charge of milk pricing today and nine out of 10 of today’s dairy farms may not survive the rapidly approaching shakeout.
Little wonder that the big bulls in today’s dairy sector speak in pickled tongues behind the barn; they don’t want their neighbors to know what they know.
The same can be said about the dysfunctional U.S. Agency for International Development food programs. Here’s how the Council of Foreign Affairs recently described the mess left by Elon Musk and his teenage Department of Government Efficiency employees last year:
“After DOGE dismantled USAID in 2025, the United States’ oldest emergency food aid program – Food for Peace – was moved to USDA, an agency with no crisis-response expertise. Now, Food for Peace is sending U.S.-grown commodities to nonemergency countries, bypassing Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan – all places in or barreling toward famine.”
Meanwhile, the State Department sits idle. Worse, “according to conservative estimates, … 750,000 people have died as a result of the cuts” and “millions more will die in the coming years.”
Elon Musk, however, is alive, well and adding to his wealth, currently estimated at over $1 trillion. Just how wealthy is the butcher of USAID?
Oxfam, the worldwide humanitarian organization, “has estimated that a 10% tax on Musk’s $1 trillion fortune would generate enough revenue to end extreme poverty worldwide for one year” or, closer to home, Musk could fund USAID’s entire food aid budget for at least 500 years.
So why is he so revered when the largest, lasting impact he will leave on this planet – and Mars too – is the hunger, poverty and deprivation he not only didn’t attempt to alleviate but actually fueled?
Part of the answer is that most of us are so overwhelmed by a constant barrage of untested and untrue social media baloney that we truly cannot tell fact from fiction.
For example, a recent report funded by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in Action – a faux-farm group made up of Big Ag and commodity checkoff organizations – “predicts the U.S. could lose roughly 30 million corn acres by 2050 if new sources of feed demand are not found and the ethanol blending rate remains at 10%.”
More to the point, Progressive Farmer explains, the report predicts that “New markets, such as year-round E-15, maritime fuels and aviation fuels, could pave the way for farm profitability and rural prosperity.”
“Could” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because after 40 years and more than $500 billion in federal farm program payments – and an ethanol industry swaddled in government security blankets – ethanol has yet to deliver “farm profitability and rural prosperity” to America.
So why does Big Ag continue to offer 1980s ag policy solutions to a world almost 50 years down the road where nearly everyone but Big Ag is mostly just scraping by?
Wait, the question is the answer, right?
This article originally appeared on Farmers Advance: Three honest questions answers needing three honest answers
Reporting by Alan Guebert, Farmers’ Advance / Farmers Advance
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Alan Guebert, Farmers' Advance | USA TODAY Network
