The Chief earlier posted on an article From the London Sunday Telegraph examining the apparently perilous state of the British dairy industry, and noting that the UK’s losses have resulted in some gains right here in Moody County, SD.

Now comes a piece from the Times of London, commenting at some length on the same situation.

How dairy herds yield the milk of human blindness

Should anyone ever want a perfect example of what short-termism has done to the world, they just need to go and look at a dairy cow. If they can find one. The domestic British milk industry is in tatters, systematically dismantled over recent years by a retail food industry that has pushed farmers to the edge by paying them less and less for their product.

The mantra is familiar to us all. Give the customers what they want. Give the shareholders what they want. And hell mend the future � if anyone even considers it, given they don’t teach anything over the immediate horizon at most business schools. So vicious has been the squeeze that as many as a third of family dairy farmers have now quit, dispersed their herds and sold their farms. Spirits have been broken, generations of family history binned. Those who struggle on with their 14-hour days and their 4am starts do so on incomes from milk of as little as £5,000 � well below the poverty threshold and just a fraction of the average wage.

And, while this process has been going on, did anyone care? Did its longer-term economic significance register? No, of course not, because we, the public, take a limitless supply of milk totally and utterly for granted; and indeed there is probably a significant proportion of the modern population that believes it is sourced from a tap somewhere.

Sadly, there’s more. Looks like they really are getting to have a serious problem.