NYT weighs in on dairy supports

The wide and fluctuating gap between what farmers get paid for milk and how much it costs them to produce it has caught the interest of the editorial writers at The New York Times.
The Times — which confesses its opposition to price supports and farm subsidies in general — today says dairy farmers in the northeast are a special case. Here’s the whole editorial. It’s definitely the view from 30,00 feet up, showing more concern for the loss of farm LAND than farmers:

In the Northeast, with farms different from the huge factory dairies found in much of the West, the cost of milk is a land-use question. Farmers here still run relatively small herds, and they raise their own feed crops. This kind of dairy is a relatively benign use of the land, a means of protecting open space, a form of stewardship that is more acceptable than most others. We think it is right to keep the state’s dairy farmers on their farms, even if we are not happy with this way of going about it.