This results in fewer farms, producing more and more product, until the next technology comes along to perpetuate the cycle, hence the idea of the ‘treadmill.’The following is a summary of trends and themes documented in the literature about dairy production in the United States and Global North. Past and current geography research on dairy depicts an industry in flux, under the influence of capitalism, policy, and the environmental contexts of the region at hand. Here , I define and describe the six themes of transformation occurring in the dairy industry, and a seventh theme, the alternatives that have arisen in reaction to these dominant transformations.Intensification is a major buzzword in the world of agriculture, but it has varied definitions and applications. Fundamentally, intensification implies a change or transformation of the mode of production. In the original sense of the term, intensification is an increasing ratio between inputs and outputs; the variation in meaning exists in the consideration of different typesof inputs. While agricultural economists look at increasing production relative to inputs of feed, fertilizer or water, geographers consider land and capital to be inputs capable of intensification and use the term intensification to describe all manner of increased productivity or large-scale agricultural systems. Clay et al. define intensification in dairy as the increased milk output relative to inputs of feed, labor, land, or herd size, while Bojovic and McGregor describe the intensification of capital, land, and animals within the industry. The term is used to convey negative or increased impacts on the environment, because of the increased use of resources or pollution. The concept of “sustainable intensification” is commonly found in recent literature on agriculture, flood and drain hydroponics which is defined as increasing food production while minimizing the effects of production on the environment and not expanding the area of land used for agriculture .

The use of technological innovations in agriculture, as described in the background section, has been a key transformation to enable intensification and allow for capital penetration. Many of these technological innovations come in the form of machines, or practices that require the use of machines, like concentrated animal feeding operations , automated milking machines, or anaerobic digesters. The technological fix is a concept in agriculture and technology studies that describes the act of inventing a new technology to solve every new problem, which is often criticized for creating new problems of their own, and perpetuating systems that should be abandoned . Dairy technologies that may be subject to this line of criticism are anaerobic digesters or the recent research to use CRISPR to genetically modify the methane producing microbes in the cows’ stomachs . Mechanization contributes to enlargement and specialization in dairies by reducing the space or labor needed to feed and milk cows, as is the case with CAFOs or automated milking machines, and by encouraging investment and specialization in that specific stage of production.One of the hallmarks of change in industrial dairy production is the enlargement of herd sizes. The average number of cows per farm is increasing in the U.S., and dairy production increasingly comes from large farms, measured by farm income . Willis documents the dramatic enlargement of diaries that occurred in New Zealand between 1971 and 2001, where the number of cows increased 51%, the average herd size increased 128%. Enlargement is type of intensification – in which the input is the number of farms and the output is the herd size or amount of milk produced per farm. Enlargement both requires and allows for specialization and mechanization to occur by making the investment in technology and machines more affordable, thus encouraging more expansion thereafter.Specialization is the focus on fewer commodities or stages of production within each farm. In the case of dairy, operations specialize to only produce milk, purchasing their cows and feed from other sources, and selling milk to a processor. This involves enlarging herd sizes and investing in equipment that increases efficiency of milk production .

Specialization is related to horizontal integration, in which operations expand their production of milk by increasing their herd size or acreage. The opposite model is vertical integration, in which a single farm may breed, raise, milk, and slaughter their own cows, grow their own feed,manage their own pasture, or process their own milk, cheese, or butter. The process of specialization is stretching these stages of production across multiple operations, meaning that the raising, feed production, milk production and dairy processing each happens in a different location. As milk production, mechanization, herd sizes, and specialization all increase, the industry is consolidating. The number of dairy farms has been rapidly declining everywhere in the United States. Consolidation is happening across all agriculture in the US but especially so in dairy. As MacDonald et al. report, “the pace of farm consolidation appears to have slowed after 2007. In livestock, only dairy shows continued rapid consolidation” . Consolidation has not occurred evenly across the livestock sector; dairy, chickens, turkeys, and hogs are highly consolidated, while beef and cattle operations are not, suggesting that consolidation has more to do with the confinement style of raising livestock or the frequent milkings required on a dairy farm, than the species of animal itself. This consolidation may be due to smaller farms going out of business, merging with larger farms, or moving to other regions. Gould documents consolidation in dairy farms, co-operatives and processing facilities and argues that this high level of consolidation differentiates dairy from other agricultural sub-sectors. Cross characterizes the restructuring of dairies as a shift toward megadairies in California, away from the traditional dairy belt in the Midwest and Northeast. He also points out that Amish farmers are the ones who continue to run dairy farms at a small scale, speaking to the technology-driven industrialization of large-scale farms. The final trend observed in the literature about dairy is the discussion of regional shifts in where dairy is produced. The specialization of dairy production led to the creation of identifiable dairy regions in the United States, which have historically been in the Northeast and Midwest, also known as the ‘dairy belt’ . Scholars observe the trend of regional shifts in production both within the United States and on a global scale. Cross describes the shift from the traditional dairy belt in the Midwest and Northeast states out west to California and Idaho.

Harrington et al. describe the movement of large dairies into the plains of Southwestern Kansas. Gould names the expansion of dairies in Texas, Idaho, and New Mexico as concurrent with the reduction of dairies in traditional dairy states, such as Vermont, where organic dairy farmers resist pressures to expand or sell . Dairy production on a global scale is also expanding into the Global South as Western diets and higher rates of milk consumption are adopted in East Asian and African countries . All these observations of the regional shifts of milk production are described alongside processes of consolidation, specialization, enlargement, indoor vertical farming mechanization, and intensification. Finally, although the topic is beyond the scope of my research, the many alternatives to the structural transformations that are observed in dairy literatures in the United States and beyond must be addressed. Alternative production trends include sustainable intensification, multi-functionality or vertical integration, and agroecology , as well as regenerative and organic dairy production and increasing disruption from the rise of plant-based non-dairy milks . These all come in reaction to the negative environmental, human, and animal impacts of intensive dairy production and fall under the “better milk” or “less milk” narratives for the future trajectories of milk . In California, Marin and Sonoma Counties are the region with the strongest collective effort to produce milk alternatively to the industrial model of the rest of the state . In summary, dairy industries in the United States and Global North have undergone, and continue to experience, significant transformation. Six dominant themes of transformation discussed in the literature are intensification, mechanization or technological innovation, enlargement, specialization, consolidation, and regional shifts. Evidence of these transformations are seen in the trends of milk production and number of operations derived from the following methodology and analysis. To understand the changing geography of the dairy industry in the California, I used data from the USDA Census of Agriculture and California Crop Reports to map changes over time in milk production and number of dairy operations across California’s 58 counties. Previous work on dairy in California has typically focused on policy, natural resources, environmental footprints, and other factors related to milk production for the state as a whole , though some work has been attentive to regional differences in production and the typology of production systems found within the state . In 1896, Wickson wrote a report for the USDA titled “Dairying in California” which included a hand-drawn map of the dairying areas of California . So far, there has been no study of regional changes in dairy production over time in California. By mapping data at the county level, this research reveals spatial patterns and regional variations in California’s dairy industry obscured by typical state-level summaries of milk production.The United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service publishes annual crop reports from the California County Agricultural Commissioners. These reports compile the total production, acres, yields, prices per unit and value of many agricultural commodities from each county in California.

The data are available for every year from 1980 to 2020 for download from the USDA NASS website under the California County Ag Commissioners’ Data Listing . The most recent year’s report was partially incomplete at the time of this study. Some counties were absent from the data and had to be interpolated using the average of the years before and after each missing year. Data collection and reporting is the responsibility of each individual county, and not standardized in either definitions, data collection, or reporting, so the way values are measured or aggregated may have differences across different counties and years. It is not possible to readily know the differences in method or definition. The crop reports also do not disclose any information about farm sizes or the number of farms, so production values are the sum of all operations’ production at the county level, and prices are the average price. This obscures any nuance between different operations, but for a state-wide analysis like this one, these crop reports offer the best available data on agricultural production by county on an annual basis. The Census of Agriculture is the only source of uniform and comprehensive data about agricultural producers, acreage, activities, and sales in the United States. In recent decades conducted by the USDA, the Census of Agriculture is a national survey of all agricultural activities, operations, and producers, conducted every five years that attempts to collect information from every relevant farm operation. The most recent agricultural census, for 2022, was still being conducted at the time of this study, therefore 2017 was the most recent year available. The Census Bureau began collecting data on household agricultural activity in 1820 as part of the national decennial census. From 1840 to 1950, a separate census of agriculture was collected the same year as the national census, until it was switched to a five-year interval in years ending in 4 and 9, and then again in 1982 to years ending in ‘2 and ‘7. In 1997, funding responsibility shifted to the USDA, but questionnaires and mailing are still carried out by the Census Bureau. The census captures dairy in a few ways, including Milk – Operations with Sales, Milk – Sales in US Dollars, and Milk Cows Inventory, but it does not have a definitive count of active dairies. Operations with milk sales may differ from operations with milk cows in a given census year if the operation is going out of business and still has milk to sell but no longer has cows on site. Farms may also have a family milk cow, or a cow as part of a child’s 4-H project. In these cases, the farm may have other activities but not be engaged in milk sales and therefore not be considered an active commercial dairy farm. For the purposes of this study, I chose to use operations with milk sales to capture most of the active dairies from each year.