Tuesday, 18 April 2017

Wonkbook: The great dairy war that will test President Trump

By Caitlin Dewey SHEBOYGAN, Wis. – Seven generations of Gar... | Sponsored by FedEx
 
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Luke Gartman, center, along with veterinarian Eric Rooker, right, and veterinary student Brandon Debbink, left, help a newborn calf at the Gartmans' family farm in Sheboygan, Wis. (Darren Hauck for The Washington Post)

By Caitlin Dewey

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. – Seven generations of Gartmans have birthed calves in this barn, a white-roofed, red-sided structure within a short walk of the land the first Gartmans are buried on.

But the bull that Luke Gartman, 36, pulled into the world on a recent Tuesday morning was a special one. This calf — steaming and soggy and apparently unbreathing, before Luke began to poke his face with straw – could be one of the very last calves born on the Gartmans' farm.

The family has two weeks to find a new dairy processing company to buy their milk and sell it into the market. The contract with their existing buyer was just canceled, the latest casualty of an increasingly acrimonious trade war with Canada over the price of ultrafiltered milk, an ingredient in cheese.

"We could be in a situation where we have to sell the cows," said Gartman's brother Matt. "If we're to that point of May 1 and have no solutions — well, we would no longer be a dairy farm."

The dispute — which has played out in surprisingly barbed remarks across the normally friendly northern border — illustrates the enormous complexity of fulfilling President Trump's promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the free trade pact with Canada and Mexico.

Read the rest on Wonkblog.


Chart of the day

In a major revision, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has dimmed its projections for the economy if a tax-reform plan advocated by Republicans in the House is enacted. Max Ehrenfreund has more.

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