As the World Churns

“Brad Watson, 41, awoke without an alarm at 5:30 a.m., strapped on his headlamp and headed to the barn.” Watson was doing what he, and generations of family members before him, had been doing since before the Civil War: Running his dairy farm in Northern Pennsylvania. But even for family traditions and businesses that seem like they will go on forever, there is a season, churn, churn, churn, and for the Watsons, it had become impossible to make enough bread to keep their butter business going. “The average Pennsylvania family dairy farm was earning about $20 for every 100 pounds of milk — and that same amount now cost more than $30 to produce.” It offered little solace that the Watsons are hardly alone. “The number of dairy farms in the United States had fallen to fewer than 25,000 from a peak of nearly 700,000 in the 1970s. Milk prices had barely risen in half a century, held down by overproduction and a handful of large corporations that dominated the dairy market. The costs of running a family farm had skyrocketed by as much as 500 percent. Brad had supported Donald Trump in 2024 in part because Trump promised to change all that by becoming ‘the most pro-farmer president you’ve ever had.’ Instead, new tariffs had cut into Brad’s potential export market and the emerging war in Iran had sent gas and fertilizer prices surging by as much as 70 percent. He was losing thousands of dollars each month and falling behind on his feed bill, until he made the call he’d been dreading his whole career. He dialed up an auction house to arrange the Watson family’s final dairy sale last month.” No one captures these American stories better than Eli Saslow. NYT (Gift Article): The Last Days of Butter Ridge. For the auctioneer, this was a familiar story (“In the last decade, he’d helped run dispersal auctions for Brian’s brother, his cousin and his uncle”), although Brian Watson’s last day working his dairy farm was less bleak than many. “His career had unfolded against a steady backdrop of bankruptcies, accidents and tragedies: the New York farmer who shot all 51 of his dairy cows and then turned the shotgun on himself; an Amish father who suffocated with his two sons after becoming trapped in their grain silo. In 2018, a Wisconsin farmer had sold his cows at auction, taken a part-time job at a grocery store and then killed himself with a note in his pocket. ‘I’m a dairy farmer,’ it read. ‘I want my old life back, but I can’t get it anymore. Everything I do fails.'”