Jeanne Carpenter of Madison runs a blog called "Cheese Underground," on which she extols the virtues and creations of Wisconsin's many cheesemakers.

For cheese lovers like me, it's a fun place to go to learn more about how cheese is made and get tips on the latest endeavors of area cheese artisans. As a writer devoted to cheesemaking who grew up on a dairy farm, Carpenter understandably has a soft spot in her heart for the farmers who produce the milk that is eventually turned into that great food we know as cheese.

What's happening to those farmers these days, though, troubles her deeply.

Last month in a blog post that also ran as a Cap Times op-ed column, she wrote movingly about their plight, which has many of our farmers losing $100 per cow every month.

"That means Farmer Wayne and his family down the road who are milking 80 cows are losing $8,000 a month," she said. "I can't imagine working 18 hours a day only to dig myself deeper into debt."

She quoted a Loganville dairy farmer named Pat Skogen, who told her in an e-mail: "The cost of production of milk is around $18 per hundredweight. For a family living wage, we should be receiving $25-$35 per hundredweight of milk. We are losing thousands of dollars each month. It is not the weather, floods or poor business sense. It is not supply and demand. If we received half of the $3.69 you might spend for a gallon of milk, we would be at $21/hundredweight. So where is the other half going?"

So Carpenter looked into where it's going.

She noted that Dean Foods Inc. in August posted a 31 percent increase in second-quarter profits over the same period last year, "helped by lower costs for raw milk," according to Reuters.

Kraft Foods Inc. also reported a nice increase in second-quarter profits: 11 percent better than the same period last year.

ConAgra's consumer foods business produced dividends that hit 41 cents per share, compared to 18 cents last year.

Jim Goodman, a Wonewoc dairy farmer whose columns appear occasionally in the Cap Times, made a similar point in a column that appeared on several websites, including counterpunch and civileats.com.

Whether the farmers win or lose, Goodman noted, the agribusiness corporations come out ahead. Over the past 60 years farmers have seen competition steadily disappear as corporate mergers concentrated all aspects of agriculture in the hands of a few multinational corporations.

"Any farmer knows that the corporate owners of seed, chemicals, fertilizer and the buyers of grain, livestock and milk always seem to make a profit; farmers do not," wrote Goodman.

And when farmers suffer, as we all know, so do the rural businesses that depend on those farmers.

Thanks to the efforts of Wisconsin's senior senator, Herb Kohl, and Congressman Dave Obey of Wausau, some help is on the way. A compromise was reached last week to send aid to qualifying dairy farmers and to buy up some surplus cheese in hopes of raising prices. But that's just temporary aid.

As Jeanne Carpenter pointed out, our legislators and our Congress must come to grips with the crisis that envelops our dairy farmers. We cannot let them suffer and disappear at the hands of a greedy few, who know they can produce bigger profit margins by putting the squeeze on the most vulnerable - the dairy farmer.

If we don't act, control over more and more of our food supply will be in fewer and fewer hands. And we all know what that will mean for the future.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times. dzweifel@madison.com

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