California’s dairy farmers were struggling to regain profitability. Then came the trade wars

Devin Gioletti, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in this Central Valley community, was outlining for me the trajectory of the dairy industry in California, the nation’s largest. He was alluding back to when the industry was still growing and milk prices were rising, and his family farm was expanding the herd and investing in advanced equipment to raise the productivity of its thousands of cows. Things look different now. The industry, including his farm, has been unprofitable since 2014, when prices peaked. Since then, the average producer price for raw milk has fallen by almost one-third, to less than the cost of production. – Story linked below