Three-part package explores Missouri dairy industry

Kathryn Hardison of The Missourian, KOMU-TV and KBIA-FM have collaborated to produce "Evaporating," a stellar three-part package exploring the Show-Me State's dwindling dairy industry.

In the first piece, Hardison reports that consumers who care about locally grown food may have a hard time finding local milk: "Missouri is in a milk deficit. There isn’t enough milk to meet all of the state’s dairy needs — fluid milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream. Missouri is already importing milk from other states for consumers, and that trend will only continue as its dairy footprint becomes smaller." The number of cows in the state has decreased from 27.8 million in 1945 to 84,000 in January 2018, the lowest number in more than a century. Some of the local shortage is because most milk processors in Missouri are cooperatively owned and move milk where it gets the best price.

The second piece is about the trend of consolidation that Missouri dairy farms have seen in recent years, and why that means fewer young people are getting into the business: "Larger dairy operations skew the economies of scale that small dairy farmers are so used to operating on. There's an oversupply of milk in the country, and milk prices are falling. The cost of becoming competitive is much larger than the size of the paycheck. The job is too labor-intensive to interest a young person."

The third piece explores what life is like for small dairy farmers and the financial pressures they face as they try to adapt to the modern dairy market. Third-generation dairy farmer Sean Cornelius told Hardison "Our cost of living has gone up so much, and our cost of what we sell has gone down; it’s just the reality is it takes more units of that small margin to be able to make a living."