Milk Money is a book that explores the plight and death of the American family dairy farm and behind story of milk industry based on its history and context.
This book was written after Kirk Kardashian, the author of the book and a senior writer at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, began taking his daughter to daycare at a dairy farm a few miles from his Vermont home. Kardashian was able to pay attention to more than just the price of dairy products.
The dairy farm was owned by the same family for generations, but the owners were toiling to make ends meet. Then his focus shifted to price fluctuation, dairy farm consolidation, government policies, and factory farming.
Kardashian examines why dairy farm cannot be stabilized, although milk is a staple commodity. He seeks to provide deep historical context of 12,000 years: from when farming was first started to the modern science of breeding cows with automated milking machines.
With the historical context, he also examines not only the roles of genetically modified food and artificial growth hormone but also the issue of immigrant labor, and how they affected the tragic death of small dairy farms.
Kirk Kardashian has written for a variety of publications, including Vermont Life, Bicycling, and Mountain Magazine and lives in Vermont, of which milk business is at the heart of the culture and economy.
Below is the author's discussion with PD Editor Walt Cooley how he first got interested in writing a book about the dairy industry.
