California dairy farmers were seeing profits before trade wars
TURLOCK — “The overall feeling is that we hit ‘peak cow’ five or six years ago.”
Devin Gioletti, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in this Central Valley community, was outlining for me the trajectory of the dairy industry in California, the nation’s largest. He was alluding back to when the industry was still growing and milk prices were rising, and his family farm was expanding the herd and investing in advanced equipment to raise the productivity of its thousands of cows.
Things look different now. The industry, including his farm, has been unprofitable since 2014, when prices peaked. Since then, the average producer price for raw milk has fallen by almost one-third, to less than the cost of production.
For a few months this spring, it looked as if milk prices were finally turning around. Then came the tariffs.
Starting at the beginning of July, Mexico and China imposed tariffs on U.S. dairy products in retaliation for Trump administration trade belligerence. China, which had been developing as a promising new market for U.S. dairies, imposed new tariffs on dairy products almost across the board as Trump moved to place 25 percent tariffs on up to $50 billion in imported goods; combined with existing tariffs, the levies now reach as high as 45 percent on some products. Trump added 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese imports in August, with a threat to raise them to 25 percent on Jan. 1.
Meanwhile, Mexico, retaliating for Trump tariffs aimed at forcing a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, imposed 25 percent tariffs on U.S. cheese. Although the agreement has been modestly renegotiated, the tariffs are still in place.
Those moves have left dairy producers feeling like collateral damage in a war they had nothing to do with. Wisconsin may bill itself as “America’s Dairyland,” but California is the leading dairy state in the union, with the most cows and highest production. California dairies had made great strides in opening new foreign markets, in part by exploiting the benefits of NAFTA and by focused approaches to China and other Asian markets.
“Two decades ago, this industry was largely domestic,” says Rachel Kaldor, executive director of the Dairy Institute of California, a statewide trade association. Now, with a third of its production exported to trading partners that are “exercised about tariffs being thrown on their products and want to retaliate, we look like we’re going to be vulnerable,” she says.
“These are markets we’ve been working on for years,” says Annie AcMoody, chief economist for the trade group Western United Dairymen. Dairy producers fear that while they’re shut out of the markets, competitors from Europe, Australia and New Zealand will take the opportunity to strengthen their foothold. “Once you lose a market, it takes time to get it back,” she says.
For Gioletti and other members of California Dairies Inc., the state’s largest dairy cooperative and the second-largest in the U.S., the trade war with China has had a direct effect: “We no longer sell any products into China since the middle of this year,” says Rob Vandenheuvel, the co-op’s vice president of industry and member relations. That means the loss of 6 percent to 9 percent of its sales of milk powder. “We’re down to zero there.”
The Trump administration hasn’t paid much attention. The White House announced a plan this summer to provide up to $12 billion in relief for all farmers affected by the tariffs, but only $4.7 billion has been set for payments thus far, including a mere $127 million for dairy farmers nationwide. “That’s a nice symbolic sympathy payment,” Kaldor said, “but it won’t do much to restore markets that have been lost.” Nor will it do much to cover the estimated $1.5 billion in losses the nationwide dairy industry expects to incur this year because the tariffs have pushed dairy prices down.
Agriculture faces untold challenges all over the state, but dairy farmers arguably have a tougher time of it. Livestock has to be cared for more intensively than field crops. On top of the environmental restrictions confronting all farmers, dairies must deal with regulations governing methane, a greenhouse gas produced by cow digestion and bubbling up from the manure spread into pits to be dried for fertilizer. New state rules will regulate how much groundwater farmers can extract, posing another potential limitation on their business.
Labor has gotten scarce. Even though Gioletti’s workforce is mostly foreign-born, it’s not immigration enforcement that’s causing the scarcity, he says, but demand from a surging construction sector that’s outbidding him. (He says he pays an average of $12 an hour, which doesn’t include benefits such as health coverage but does include free housing.)
Then there’s the price of farmland, which has been driven higher by encroaching residential development in Southern California and the suitability of land now devoted to dairies in the Central Valley and Northern California for high-value crops such as almonds. That’s prompted scores of dairies to convert to tree crops in recent years. The number of California dairies has shrunk to 1,331 at the end of 2017 from nearly 1,600 as recently as 2012. Expectations are that by the end of this year the number will fall below 1,300.