Dairy farmers in Hungary placed the severed heads of 12 cows in front of the nation's Agriculture Ministry Thursday as part of what is a worldwide protest against low prices for milk producers. The farmers also dumped milk on the street and were promptly charged with defacing a public space. Farmers in the European Union, as in the rest of the world, are selling milk for considerably less than what it costs to produce. 

These kinds of protests and fights are happening all over the world, including Tasmania.  Here's a story from this week about a Pennsylvania family facing low milk prices.  Dairy herd buyouts have been held to try to reduce the herd in the U.S. in order to reduce milk supply. “The past year has been the most difficult since I began farming in 1973,” said Paul Toft, a Rice Lake, Wis., dairy farmer and president of the Associated Milk Producers Inc. “Some say these times rival those of the Great Depression.” 

What's bad for the producer on the farm, however, is good for the processor. Dean Foods Co. announced this week that its third quarter net income jumped 32% as the cost of milk declined. The company, the nation's largest dairy processor, increased its profit estimate for the full year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is looking into claims by U.S. farmers that a lack of competition in the milk market is keeping prices low. 

The recession is putting the squeeze on rural public transportation.

Job losses are increasing the number of rural people in Georgia who want to use public transportation, according to the Associated Press. But the economy is also making it harder for local governments to pay for transportation systems.

The main source of funding for rural "dial-a-ride" programs is the Federal Transit Administration. This funding has increased in the last three years. But local governments in Georgia are having a hard time coming up with the remaining funds to keep their systems running.

"The recession is making riders out of laid off workers who never depended on public transportation before, but now need it for everything from a doctor's visit to a job interview," reports the AP.

" 'They may have a car, but they just don't have the gas money,,' said [Southwest Georgia Regional Commission director Dan] Bollinger, who's seen ridership go up roughly 15 percent since the recession started."

Meanwhile, a group working on reauthorization of the federal transportation bill says Georgia's rural transit problem is part of a national trend of increased public transit ridership in the face of shrinking budgets.

When the federal government brought electricity to rural America, it worried more about cost to farm families than construction. There's a lesson here for broadband.

Free mail delivery began nationally in 1863. It began in 44 northern cities. (The South was not the place to begin a new federal program at that time, to say the least!) Following the Civil War, the service grew to other urban residents. Providing mail delivery to rural areas was debated, and in 1896, Congress allocated funds to test rural delivery in West Virginia. People loved it and the service spread.

The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum has put up a very good on-line exhibit showing (and telling) the history of rural delivery. It can be found here.

Great pictures and good history. Rural delivery allowed rural residents to receive newspapers (and weather reports.). Interestinly, one of the early proponents of rural delivery was John Wanamaker, a Philadelphian who created the modern department store. Doing without rural delivery, he noted, "obliges people to go or send for mail, and that means, in the winter or stormy seasons, and for families of aged people, the depredation of going w/out letters & periodicals (hardly less valuable) that lie in post offices for long periods not called for. We shall look back with astonishment before many years that the present system had to be suffered so long."