Kickass and disappearing farms

Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper–who grew up on a small Wisconsin dairy farm, in lamenting the plight of the state’s dairy farmers who are going out of business at the rate of about 70 each month.  “Go big or get out” seems to be the mantra.  Most Wisconsin cows are now milked by undocumented immigrant labor as corporations build multi-thousand-cow operations that bring their own special problems of environmental and community abuse.  Big corps, like Walmart, having destroyed the business vitality of small-town Wisconsin, are now invading the state’s bucolic countryside.  In Wisconsin these days it is better to be a corporation than a farm boy.  Now the farm boy has to be concerned about what to do with his life.  Back in the keeper’s day, a significant farm boy worry was how to make the family sedan fit to date a town girl after it’s back seat area had been used to transport veal calves to market.

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