So this is a complicated question with a very complicated answer (click through to the full convo); this question spurred by a particular criticism I have of American dairy.

Here comes a thread... https://twitter.com/pasturespolitic/status/1317958681905029121

First, some background. The dairy crisis is most pronounced in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is largely unceded territory belonging to all sorts of Indigenous people, and was populated by Europeans after a particularly brutal series of genocidal massacres...

The farmers in crisis in Wisconsin are largely the descendants of those invaders, whose farmlands are quite literally the bounty of genocide. As a result, the depth of my sympathy for their plight probably couldn’t float a Dixie cup...

And if you’re rolling your eyes and thinking “here we go again with the SJW poor Indians crap,” then congratulations, we understand each other: I feel exactly the same eyerolling exasperation RE: “here we go again with the poor farmers crap...”

The key difference, of course, being one group subjected to physical extermination and exclusion from landscape, and the other reaping the inevitable harvest of a violent mass-seizure of land then subjected to feudal primogeniture to extract profit from it. But to the point...

The key question here is: can settler-colonial farming remain upright, at all, without a backbone provided by the federal government. And the answer to that question is a categorical “no.”

Because while much of the discussion around the dairy crisis focuses on consolidation and a lack of competition among milk processors, dairy got it self in trouble WAY before consolidation started to metastasize...

Dairy has been in a state of massive, structural oversupply for at least 20 years. Farmers, taking the advice of banks and the federal government, responded to crashing prices by getting bigger, producing more, and crashing prices further still...

That’s right. The same class of people that believe in Q-anon conspiracy theories and f*ck-the-government Reaganism... listened to the government’s advice to look freshman-level, common sense supply and demand economics in the eye and say, “meh”...

Farmers leveraged their once-considerable assets to adopt not a creative or entrepreneurial solution to cratering prices... they simply chose (keyword -> CHOSE) the path of least resistance: more cows. B/c the same federal government they swear can’t be trusted... told them to.

Now, they’re in real trouble. Consolidation is just the lid slowly closing on a coffin that dairy producers happily jumped into when I was in high school. But the key problem, despite consolidation, is still oversupply...

Now, dairy farmers want the same welfare grain/bean farmers get that allow them to occupy vast swaths of stolen land producing a product that nobody wants in anywhere near the quantity offered...

They want a higher milk floor. They want supply management. They probably want a milk-equivalent of ethanol. They want trade policies that dump excess milk in Asia, Africa, and the global south and crash the domestic markets of developing countries cuz f*ck em...

They want either a.) to be paid to produce less, elasticizing down to the market’s real size, or b.) have the power of the government scale the market up by force, like it does with soybeans and, especially, corn...

What they didn’t want to do, and now CAN’T do because they’re leveraged to death, is pivot or integrate. Because f*ck that; we been milkin’ since great-great-great papaw got this land for shootin’ that Meskwaki r-skin in the back in the Black Hawk War, n’ we gon keep milkin...

So the question is now - that farmers are in this position, stolen blood-wealth over-leveraged and without options except for Federal action ranging from direct payments to trust-busting - what’s my sentiment on saving the small American dairy farmer? That sentiment is...

I don’t give a single shit.

The same number of shits they give about #landback, #blacklives, family separations, LGBTQ rights, etc. Wisconsin farm country gladly, knowingly, reliably votes a giant middle finger toward every group of struggling people on Earth every four years...

So f*ck em. I don’t want my taxes to prop up bad bets made by colonizer fail-sons so they can keep pumping milk nobody wants to drink.

I want it to un-ass land from failed farmers & return it to Indigenous people to feed the folks - even the White ones! - on that landscape...

My sentiment is that White settler ag has destroyed Turtle Island’s landscape having been here for less than 2% of its human history.

My sentiment is that people who can imagine the end of the world but can’t imagine the end of extractive capitalism shouldn’t be in charge...

My sentiment is that farmers got their chance, and then got it again, and again, and again, and that their repeated failures with their bloodsoaked inheritance isn’t a public concern unless the public concern is White supremacy...

My sentiments are these:

My sentiment is the Indian Wars aren’t over. /THREAD