Curds & Woe

The film clips that flashed across the nation's TV screens seemed like replays of the Depression. As thousands of members of the militant National Farmers Organization pitched in for the first widespread milk strike in 35 years, countless thousands of gallons were destroyed, and scattered violence rocked the usually peaceful valleys and villages of the nation's dairying country. Milk, the blandest beverage of all, overnight had become the most combustible fluid in 25 states.

In Falmouth, Ky., 400 farmers flooded the main intersection with their milk; in Paul, Idaho, thousands of pounds* were dumped, symbolically, in front of a bank. Scores of fields in a score of states were churned into lacteal goo by the deluge, and in New Jersey--where farmers and their wives and children walked through a snowstorm to deliver their complaints to the state-house--nearly 1,000,000 Ibs. still warm from the cow, turned a Sussex County snowfield into curds and woe.

Shades of Poppaea. Health officials in Indiana made the bizarre complaint that rivers were suffering from milk pollution. In Daleville, Ind., two women frolicked for photographers in 400-gal. milk baths--a higher-cholesterol ablution than anyone has enjoyed since Nero's wife, Poppaea, took a daily dip in asses' milk. In several towns, striking N.F.O. farmers bought up milk in stores, dumped it along with their own.

Frequently, direct action was taken to see that milk of nonstrikers did not reach the market. Bullets were fired into tank trucks to drain their cargo; others were balked by masked men, who sometimes destroyed the trucks along with their loads. Dynamite exploded in front of two houses in Michigan, a barn was burned in Southern Ohio, a hog house and 40 pigs went up in flames in Wisconsin. All milk going into Detroit was held up while health officials checked out a report--untrue, as it turned out--that it was laced with arsenic. Some truckloads were diluted with kerosene; in Marshall County, Tenn., at least one was spoiled with garlic.

The basic issue, of course, was money. While the average price of 8-c- to 10-c- a quart that dairymen receive for their milk has not changed for two decades, their production costs have risen markedly. This has forced thousands of farmers out of business. In Wisconsin, the nation's biggest dairy producing state, dairy farms shut down at the rate of 90 to 100 a week last year. The N.F.O. reasoned that if it could hold enough milk off the market, it could break the cycle and raise farmers' prices by 2-c- a quart.

A Little Lovemaking. By week's end, the strike had proved largely unsuccessful, though a few dairies closed and milk disappeared from store shelves in Nashville altogether. While more farmers endorsed the strikers' aims, many disapproved of their methods and ignored threats of violence. "As long as there are people going hungry anywhere," protested Wisconsin Dairyman William Blank, "I don't think any food should be willfully destroyed." Moreover, about half of the milk produced nationwide normally goes into such byproducts as cheese, butter and ice cream, so that distributors with ample inventories were able to bottle all the fresh milk they needed to meet housewives' needs.

Charles Shuman, head of the conservative--and much larger--American Farm Bureau Federation (TIME cover, Sept. 3, 1965), chided N.F.O. members for misdirecting their protest. Shuman, who blames most agricultural ills on Washington and the Department of Agriculture, jested that the farmers should not dump milk but should use it to paint the White House fence instead. Shuman suggested that farmers would get higher prices by bargaining with food processors through cooperatives than by depending on federal subsidies. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman took a different tack, suggesting that "perhaps consumers should be prepared to pay a little more." Though he talked of promoting "a little lovemaking between the housewife and the farmer," Freeman had the near-impossible task of raising the farmer's price for milk while keeping it at the present levels for housewives. That would require far more love than Poppaea ever received from Nero--who, in a fit of rage, eventually kicked her to death.

* Dairymen customarily measure their product by weight rather than volume: one gallon equals 8.6 Ibs.

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