Dairies in Poland

Elisabeth Rosenthal in the NY Times has an article on the problems of Polish dairy farmers. In the good old days, before EU, each farmer had a handful of cows (literally, since they milked by hand). The cows and the people may have lived in the same building (separate rooms). Under the EU's bureaucractic, industrialized agriculture regime, hygiene and sanitation become important, so dairies must either expand and modernize (a road that leads to 6,000 cow dairies and robot milkers), or revert to subsistence agriculture.

An excerpt:

[Farms are]"...a victim of sanitary laws and mandates to encourage efficiency and competition that favor mechanized commercial farms, farmers here say.

That conflict obviously matters to Mr. Master. But it is also of broader importance, environmental groups and agriculture experts say, as worries over climate change grow and more consumers in both Europe and the United States line up for locally grown, organic produce.

For reasons social, culinary and environmental, small farms like Mr. Master’s should be promoted, or at least be protected, they say. They not only yield tastier foods but also produce few of the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

In part because Poland has remained one of the last strongholds of small farming in Europe, it is also a rare bastion of biodiversity, with 40,000 pairs of nesting storks and thousands of seed varieties that exist nowhere else in the world.

I think the European locavores/organic people can dream, but it's not going to work that way. The economic pressures are too great--first there will be consolidation of dairying. The modern world wants safety and consistency in its products and the best way to get them is through industrialized dairying. A few of the sons and daughters of the current dairy folk may be able to find organic/locavore niches, but only a few. (Look at France--over the last 50 years they've devoted much time and effort to preserving their agriculture, big subsidies and governmental regulation, but still the combinations and modernization has continued. Government can slow the pace and ease the pains of the transition, which I don't minimize, but not much else.)