At the request of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report detailing the impacts of consolidation in dairy cooperatives on the farmers they represent. The report highlights power imbalances and reduced farmer earnings as a result of consolidation, as well as a wider range of farm sizes and geographic diversity in the membership. A slew of mergers, most notably the quadruple merger that formed Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) in 1998, have whittled the number of dairy co-ops down from 1,224 in 1964 to 118 in 2017. As dairy cooperatives get fewer in number and larger in size, they represent a broader range of farmer-members, oftentimes
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