Star of “Farmer Wants a Wife” Forced to Give Up His Farm

Last week, Australian dairy farmer and reality TV show star Adam Nelson took to Instagram to alert his many fans and presumed admirers that due to pressures in the dairy world, he’s being forced to give up the farm. Literally. The full post:

The reality of the last week is slowly sinking in. In one foul swoop, thousands of farming families have been left high and dry with no where to turn. 10 years of building a life and business for myself, has been ripped out from under my feet and has left me devistated, disheartened and extreamly dissapointed. Along with many others to come, my cows have left my farm and my business shut down at the hands of Fonterra. #dairycrisis #showaussiefarmerssomelove #supportaussiefarmers #saveourfarmers #youthindairy #shameonyouFonterra #shameonyouMG #loosingageneration #lifelineaustralia #beyondblue #farmersunite #farmeradam

A photo posted by Adam Nelson FWAW 2016 (@farmeradam_) on May 14, 2016 at 1:33am PDT

 

There’s a lot to unpack here, even setting aside the typo of “loosing a generation” and the strangeness that he tagged his own Instagram account in a caption.

Americans may be familiar with the dairy pricing crisis going on right now worldwide; it’s been a bizarrely good year for dairy, driving prices down, and coupled with strange doings across the world (the Russian embargo, the European financial crisis), dairy products are hitting rock-bottom prices.

This is very bad for farmers, though, especially small farmers, who are often not able to survive at such rates. Nelson particularly takes Fonterra to task, an organization in Australia and New Zealand, which serves as a gigantic cooperative of dairy farms. Fonterra recently announced that it would be slashing its asking price from $0.55AUD per liter to $0.15AUD per liter, an announcement that will make it fantastically difficult for dairy farmers to survive. (The fact that Fonterra’s CEO recently secured a raise, bringing his salary to more than AU$4.6 million per year, probably didn’t help the cooperative’s standing with farmers.)

Much of the dairy world’s upheaval is due to forces that will be temporary; the Russian embargo won’t last forever, and milk prices jump and fall fairly drastically. But that’s of no real consequence to farmers like Nelson, who simply can’t sell milk for such low prices and make it to next year.