The Ranney family’s 50 Jersey cows and the rocky hillside farm where they graze in southern Vermont are for sale. "It's the hardest decision I have ever made in my life," Philip Ranney told the Brattleboro Reformer. The family is getting out of the dairy business that has been a way of life – for seven generations – since 1796.  George Washington was president then. Vermont had joined the union just five years earlier. "There's no money in this. I am in as much debt as I can handle. I don't see how anyone can make it," Ranney told Reformer reporter Howard Weiss-Tisman.

Senate Bernie Sanders has called what’s happening to Vermont dairy farmers “a disaster in the making.”

The senator met this week with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack about ways to raise payments to farmers. 

Sanders also brought Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney, the antitrust division chief, into his office to request “a very serious look” at Dean Foods Inc., which dominates some two-thirds of the New England milk market. While Vermont farmers struggle to stay afloat, Dean Foods made $76.2 million in the first quarter of 2009, a 147 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. "I don't think it takes Sherlock Holmes to see a connection between the two," Sanders said.

To read the Reformer article, click here.

To watch the senator’s remarks, click here.

To read the senator’s letter to Secretary Vilsack, click here.