This is the beginning of Barry Estabrook’s truly great “A Tale of Two Dairies,” about the problems facing America’s dairy farmers: “Stars pierced the clear, cold, predawn sky last January 19 when Dean Pierson, a fifty-nine-year-old dairy farmer from the hamlet of Copake, New York, headed out of the house to milk the fifty-one cows on Hi-Low Farm, as he did every morning, and as his father, a Swedish immigrant, had done before him … Although he was married with four children, Pierson worked the farm alone, which meant that he had to toil virtually every waking hour. Even so, with milk selling for far below the cost to produce it, no matter how hard he worked, Pierson kept falling further behind. That morning, he intended to end the problem.” It gets better from there. [PDF; Gastronomica via Barry Estabrook/Twitter]
