But, several years ago, the Times reported that Gary Hanman, D.F.A’s founder, had access to a private jet and earned thirty-one million dollars during the seven years that he was the co-op’s C.E.O. Kristen Coady, a senior vice-president for D.F.A., told me that “out of respect for privacy” the co-op would not disclose any salary or compensation information for any of its employees.
is not required to reveal how much its executives earn. And, unlike publicly traded corporations, D.F.A. has dozens of affiliates and joint ventures, but according to its most recent financial report only about a quarter of the co-op’s profits were paid directly to its farmer-members.
The law’s protections were intended to give small, independent farmers the right to collectively bargain prices for processing and selling their goods, but many large co-ops, such as D.F.A., have increasingly come to resemble corporations. Ramadhan, a former Justice Department antitrust attorney who led an investigation into the dairy industry, told me. “The agricultural industry is different than other industries because Capper-Volstead allows them to combine in ways that other individuals would go to jail for,” Allee A. They’ve been able to grow so big, in part, because of a 1922 law called the Capper-Volstead Act, which provides significant exemptions from antitrust laws for farmer-owned agricultural coöperatives. Nationally, the four largest dairy co-ops now control more than fifty per cent of the market. “Over time, they kept getting squeezed out,” he said. He added that, when he started farming, in the early seventies, there were a dozen local plants that he could sell his milk to. An enterprise with a single buyer, called a monopsony, typically means lower prices for producers. is the only available purchaser of his milk. “They have a ten-year exclusive contract with all the bottling plants within probably three hundred miles.” In other words, D.F.A. is there’s no other place to go,” a dairy farmer from the Ozarks, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. members and nonmembers alike have complained about the co-op’s growing market power. Pete Hardin, the editor and publisher of the dairy trade journal The Milkweed, told me, “It’s the poster child for agricultural concentration-and what Big Ag has become.”įor years, D.F.A. gained unprecedented power as both a milk supplier and buyer. Last year, its members, more than twelve thousand dairy farmers, sold fifty-six billion pounds of milk, about twenty-five per cent of the nation’s total, and the organization as a whole brought in nearly eighteen billion dollars in revenue. formed in 1998, out of a merger of four regional co-ops. In the spring of 2020, Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest dairy coöperative, purchased Dean Foods, the country’s largest milk processor, for four hundred and thirty-three million dollars.
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