"Let's take a look at Mike, a dairy farmer producing a white agricultural substance called milk. Mike has 30 cows, and he gets about $10 per hundredweight (about 12 gallons) for his milk (which is less than farmers received before World War II).

In order to maximize his return, he has modern Holstein cows and he feeds them lots of grain. So he may get 190 hundredweight per year from each cow, which works out to a total yearly income of $57,000, most of which is eaten up with feed and vet bills. [Note from Gaia-Tree: If he grows his own grain, then patented seeds, fertilizers, instecticides, herbicides, equipment financing, equipment maintenance, storage facilities, a granary, fuel, and power take the place of feed.]

His wife Lynne has to work off-farm to bring in some cash and obtain health insurance.  They live just above the poverty line. If they are in debt (50% of farm income goes to financing debt) and the prices drop even a little bit, or their cows produce less than expected, they lose their farm.

What does this mean for communities and local employment?

If just 10 percent of the U.S. population bought milk, butter, cream, and cheese directly from farmers, as well as all the other products produced on the farm, we would need about 75,000 hundred-acre farms, each with 30 cows. If each farm generates an annual income of $200,000, the total revenue is $15 billion, year after year, much of which stays right in the local community.  (If the whole country did this, the total would be over $1.5 trillion, or 8 percent of the current Gross National Product.)

You see now why the original and basic source of wealth is cattle. Cattle are the stock of the stock market, and the word capital is derived from the Latin for heads of cattle.

As for employment, let's assume that the 75,000 farms employ three people full time. Maybe these people consist of the farmers themselves (husband and wife) plus one older child, or the couple and one hired person.  The resulting total employment will be 225,000 individuals.  There is also the multiplier effect, usually given as a ratio of 2.7.  That is, for each direct farm employee, there will be 2.7 indirect employees. Thus, the total employment created (direct plus indirect) is 832,500 people.

If we add to milk and farm products other items that could be produced locally – healthy soft drinks, bread and other bakery products, sausage and broth, lacto-fermented vegetables, and so forth, we would see an unbelievable explosion of local prosperity, a small town renaissance.

We'd see a return of small, local clothing and shoe factories.  With the right technology, we can also make paper from hemp, locally and in an environmentally friendly way.  Craftsmanship would flourish: furnituremaking, carpentry, home building, dressmaking, gourmet cuisine, art and music.  Medical bills and insurance costs would decline, and there would be employment for all. In fact, a shortage of labor would result in a decent living wage for anyone willing to work.

You have two cows, not genetically manipulated and produced through natural breeding, who feed on fertile green pastures and produce delicious high-fat milk. They are cheerfully milked by your round-faced children with naturally straight teeth and wearing pure cotton clothes, colored with natural dyes and produced in the nearby town.  The cows give birth to calves every year, and soon you have a herd of 30 cows, all producing delicious healthy milk.

Out-of-work orthodontists gather up the manure in the milking shed and distribute it on your pasture, in which happy chickens run around, turning over cow paddies and eating bugs to produce nutrient-rich eggs.

You make naturally yellow butter and a delicious cheese. You feed the whey and skim milk to your small herd of hogs, which they thoughtfully turn into bacon and lard for cooking.

Reformed FDA officials help you make lacto-fermented juice from the fruit grown in your orchards and pickles and chutneys from your garden produce.  All these products you provide in your on-farm store to farm shareholders, many of whom are grateful survivors from the lowfat era.

You make more money than you can possibly spend on your family and so donate to local schools, theaters, symphony orchestras or opera companies.  You also build a nice house on another part of your farm where another family lives, and you pay this family handsomely to help with the work.  That in turn allows you to take a big vacation twice a year and learn how people live in other parts of the world.  "Missionary" groups teach sustainable economics to people living in other countries, and every year two foreign exchange students come to help out on the farm.

Soon there are 200,000 farms. These farms create an explosion of prosperity at the local level. Small towns revive, and along with them, small businesses.  Every town produces a distinctive lacto-fermented soft drink, and every town supports several great restaurants.  Fast food places transfer into local hands; new owners cook french fries in tallow or lard.  Unemployment disappears, and everybody makes a decent wage.  No one uses pesticides on their farms, so the chemical companies close down that part of their operation.  Many corporate employees are freed from the system and find better pay and more fulfilling work with local businesses or on farms.

It becomes more profitable to put land just outside cities and towns into dairy farms rather than houses, and urban sprawl gives way to green spaces.  Wealthy farmers and wealthy small businessmen put their money in local credit unions; the power of international banks wanes, and so does their influence in Washington.

This new wealth is real, so there is no longer any need to wage war to keep the economy afloat.  The health crisis resolves, and inner-city hospitals are torn down and replaced with inner-city dairy farms, supplying fresh milk to resident families.  School lunch programs feature milk and products of local farms.

Because children are now eating real food, their brains get wired properly; they are filled with curiosity and learn easily; teaching becomes a joyous profession once again.  Happy, well-nourished children contribute to an artistic flowering – music, painting, literature, dance, and the drarnatic arts flourish.

Eventually, there are 200 million people drinking farm fresh milk.

And all of them live happily ever after."