Los Angeles was the first county to industrialize dairy production ; the number and size of milk cow herds expanded to supply the rapidly expanding demand for dairy products. By 1925, Los Angeles County was the leading producer of milk in the state, driven by population growth after World War I. The high cost of hauling fresh milk long distances meant dairies were located near the demand for the milk. Scientific advancements in breeding, urbanization squeezing available land for grazing, and the introduction of drylot feeding by Dutch immigrant dairymen also drove the industrialization. Drylot feeding, also known as corral feeding or zero-grazing –essentially the practice of concentrating cows into a small acreage and bringing their food to them – was revolutionary for California dairy production . This practice succeeded in California because the abundance of local agricultural by-products like sugar beets and citrus and the availability of cheap hay made drylot feeding affordable, actually increasing milk production per cow compared to grazing . A quote from the 1946 book California Agriculture written by the University of California College of Agriculture faculty exemplifies this well.The Great Depression almost sank the dairy industry in California; surplus production, price cuts, and unregulated competition between processors, retailers, and farmers became known as the Milk Wars of the 1930s. The government stepped in with a Federal Milk Marketing Order to help regulate national milk prices, but Californians, both farmers and distributors, argued it was a local issue, pushing instead for state legislation.
The Young Act of 1935 set minimum prices for fluid milk in California, stabilizing the industry and increasing profits for farmers . California would maintain its own price regulations under a state MMO, indoor grow rack resulting in less aggregate milk produced , until 2018 when the dairy industry voted to move to the federal MMO . The new stability from the state MMO allowed farmers to invest in new technologies. This included upgrading facilities to have stainless steel and tile for sanitary improvement and, more importantly, introducing machines that milked cows with a vacuum pump connected to a cooler for immediate processing. These upgrades reduced the labor required for milking and enabled herd sizes to grow significantly in number . As urban expansion in Los Angeles increased land values, farmers were able to sell their dairies at high returns and move east towards the Valley, often choosing to buy more land, build new dairy structures, and expand their herds. This cycle of urban encroachment, farm relocation, and herd expansion reoccurred several times during the 1930s and 40s in Los Angeles County, until eventually most of the dairy had moved to San Bernardino . For the same reason 40 years later, dairy farmers in Marin established the first agricultural land trust to protect family farms from urban development pressures in the Bay Area . Between the 1970s and 2000s, California production rates accelerated, surpassing Wisconsin as the leading producer of milk in the 1990s with almost 20% of the U.S. total production . This acceleration is attributed to unique geographic features of California that created ideal conditions for growth, despite several setbacks related to land prices, water availability, and the relatively late start for the industry . The warm climate allowed for large herd sizes without the need to house them indoors during the winters; the nearby crop production of high quality alfalfa and fruit or vegetable by-products, especially almonds-hulls, that helped minimize costs of feed; the geographic isolation of the state requiring sufficient in-state processing facilities; the large and diverse population creating demand and labor for the industry; and the early adoption, or rather invention, of dairy science technology, have all helped bolster and accelerate dairy industry expansion .
Throughout the past two decades, California remained the leading dairy producer in the country and became known for its “megadairies” of more than a thousand cows in a herd . The technological developments and huge herds established a new mode of production for dairies, unlike anything attempted by the traditional dairying states in the Midwest and Northeast. Yet the industry in California is still heterogenous. Organic dairy production is heavily concentrated along the coasts, in Marin, Sonoma and Humboldt, while conventional dairies and concentrated animal feeding operations dominate the Central Valley. Despite the large size of the farms, 99% of dairies are considered family farms1 . The environmental impacts of dairy production are primarily methane emissions from enteric fermentation and manure storage, water quality impacts due to nitrogen and phosphorus excretion from manure lagoons, and water and land use for feed production . California has implemented mandates for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. While California’s agriculture sector makes up a smaller share of GHG emission compared to transportation and energy, its emissions have more than tripled since 1990 . There are currently efforts to reduce methane emissions in dairy production; with state programs that incentivize anaerobic digesters for manure, or alternative manure management practices like composting or separating solids; as well as increasing the productivity per cow to reduce the GHG footprint per unit of milk produced; and research into feeding seaweed supplements to reduce methane gas from digestion . Water quality impacts are acutely felt in the San Joaquin Valley, as drinking water is contaminated with nitrates from agriculture, including manure from dairy concentrated animal feeding operations , which is associated with higher rates of disease and cancer . In Marin County, Conflict over land use for grazing is exemplified by tensions between conservation efforts to re-establish free-ranging tule elk in Point Reyes National Seashore and the long-term beef and dairy producers in the designated pastoral zone . The unique history and geography of California has both supported and challenged the expansion of the dairy industry into the modern day giant of milk production. The following literature review looks at structural changes in dairy production in California, the United States and globally through the lens of political economy.
Fundamentally, agriculture is the production of living things, relying on plants, animals, and life sustaining ecological elements like water, soil, air, and sunlight to grow food, fiber, and fuel. For the entire history of humanity, and even in a modern capitalist society, agriculture and access to food has been, is, and will continue to be essential to the function of society. The expansion of agricultural production and the planned food system has enabled the development of all other sectors of the economy and society. With fewer people producing food as their occupation, ebb and flow system producing more of it is both necessary and opportunistic. The study of food and agriculture is undertaken by many disciplines; biologists, chemists, economists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers – this long list exemplifying its complexity and importance. Within the discipline of Geography, and sometimes overlapping with other social sciences, there are several sub-disciplines that attempt to capture and explain the relationships between environmental, economic, political, social, and cultural factors that converge in the production of food. These sub-disciplines include political economy of agriculture, political agroecology, rural agrarian sociology, black food geographies, and sustainable agriculture and food systems, etc. For understanding California’s milk production, I am interested specifically in literature related to: agricultural production, rather than supply chains or consumption; animal agriculture, although CAFOs rely wholly on feed from corn, soy, and hay growers, and benefits from crop production by-products; and industrialized operations, although there remains a small amount of small-holder dairy operations in the state. For understanding the realm of industrialized animal agriculture, that which California milk production lies within, the political economy of agriculture is the most appropriate sub-discipline to contextualize the structures that shape change in the dairy industry in recent history.The political economy of agriculture is a cross-disciplinary concept that deals with the relationship between agricultural production and structural forces. “The political economy of agriculture investigates how “structural changes” in agri-food systems shape the means of production, thereby constraining and/or enabling producers’ decision-making ”. Political economy of agriculture is rooted in liberal and Marxian traditions and the belief that capitalism is the organizing force for agriculture in the U.S. The clearest difference between political economy of agriculture and political ecology of agriculture is that the former focuses more on structures, while the latter leans more toward individual agency and also tends to emphasize topics of environmental conflict and ethics. The following subsections describe three themes of agrarian political economy related to structural changes that shape dairy industries: capitalist penetration of agriculture, productivism, and the treadmill of production.In the production of living things, agriculture presents natural barriers to capital penetration. The Mann-Dickson Thesis states that “[c]apitalist development appears to stop, as it were, at the farm gate” which is to say that the unique nature of agriculture and food production, such as the perishability of food or the long production time compared to labor time, hinder the accumulation of capital in agriculture.
In the pursuit of surplus value, capitalism must transform and subvert these natural processes into a source of productivity, a process known as the real subsumption of nature . In the United States, dairy operations have overcome natural barriers to capital such as perishability, long production time, and waste in the following ways. Fluid milk is highly perishable, which presents many risks to the producer. “The more perishable the commodity is and the greater the absolute restriction of its time in circulation as a commodity on account of its physical properties, the less it is suited to be an object of capitalist production” . Standards for sanitation and food safety, and the interest of prolonging the shelf life of milk, led to the invention of pasteurization and refrigeration. Too little time on the shelf is coupled with too much time for production. The long production time of has been shortened with concentrated feeding to increase weight gain and shorten time until puberty, and the use of hormones to increase the imminence and volume of milk production. That said, unlike most other agricultural products, milk production requires daily ‘harvesting,’ increasing the labor time. Finally, the production of milk inevitably coproduces manure and methane as waste. This becomes problematic under intensified conditions, requiring removal and creating sources of pollution. The generation and concentration of manure produced in large dairy operations is dealt with using flush systems to waste lagoons, resulting in water pollution and methane emissions. These three examples of agriculture’s unique properties that hinder capitalist penetration, but are still overcome with certain interventions, or sub-sumptions of nature, set the stage for the other transformations that have occurred in the dairy industry, detailed below. The concept of productivism, or the emphasis on increasing agricultural production above all else, appears frequently in the literature about dairy production in the Global North. In 1993, Lowe et al. defined productivism as “a commitment to an intensive, industrially driven and expansionist agriculture with state support based primarily on output and increased productivity”. Jay describes how productivist sentiments shaped the New Zealand dairy industry to expand rapidly in the 1980s, resulting in dual pressures to maintain its economic efficiency while reducing its environmental impact. In their summary of three different narratives about the preferred trajectory of milk production in the Global North, Clay and Yurco situate the growth of the US dairy industry in the 20th century as the result of productivism after World War II, couched in language about growing a nation through growing strong bodies with “more milk”. Attitudes of productivism manifesting as the intensification of milk production were, and continue to be, the catalysts for multiple other forms of transformation at the dairy farm and industry.The treadmill of production is a concept coined by Cochrane to explain how economic pressures to lower prices and competition with other producers keeps agribusiness in a constant state of the pursuit of growth. Schnaiberg built on this concept in 1980 by applying the treadmill of production to explain the increasing demand for natural resources resulting in increasing environmental degradation . The use of new technology or resources by early adopters eventually brings a boost in production, which allows that producer to eventually lower their prices, making their product more competitive on the market. To compete, other producers must also adopt the new technology or increase in resource use, until eventually most producers have either invested in the technology or gone out of business because they could not produce enough compete.