Milk Men: The Life and Times of Dairy Farmers

After watching this Documentary, I wanted to save up money and buy my own farm. Always been a hard working honest man. Seeing the families and their relation to one another, makes one proud of the farmers.

This documentary isn't necessarily about the glory life of the dairy farmers life, but rather of how much the industry has evolved and what they have to do now compete against large corporations that are seeing a huge profit to be made. You wouldn't think that dairy farmers are over billion dollar industry with so much development and strategies being used to enhance and enrich the farms and the way they have to work. Also never realized how easy it is to lose everything in one bad season.

Milk Men: The Life and Times of Dairy Farmers is an insightful look into the life's of every day farmers and their ability to sustain not only the business that was passed on to them through the family, but also trying to get the new generation to understand the fundamentals behind being good milk men, as well as their ability to always adapt and not fall behind the corporations.

I give this Documentary a solid 7.5/10

"Milk Men" explores the rarely seen world of dairy farming, showing us the everyday relationships between the farmer, their family, and their cows with warmth and realism, which in turn reveals the larger truths of the complicated dairy industry. Director Jan Haaken introduces us to four farming families and depicts the struggle of the dairy farmer today with nuance. Examining the financial, technological and industrial challenges of an industry that has been both demonized by animal rights groups and romanticized in images of red barns and pastures dotted with black and white cows, this film shows how changing times have put dairy farms in a particularly vulnerable situation – the small farm is a dying breed among its consolidating neighbors. Captivating aerial images give an extraordinary comparison between large and small farming operations and beautifully filmed farm work shows feed, muck and cows from the neutrality of a farmer's perspective. As the film explores farming culture, we see that perhaps no generational rift is as prominent and challenging as those where the future of the family farm is on the line. At the heart of this film is Haaken's ability to build trusting relationships with her subjects, allowing them to speak candidly from their perspective, and "Milk Men"'s strongest moments may be when there are glimpses of the painful, evolving relationships between sons, daughters and parents struggling to find common ground for the future of the farm. At times, what makes this film the most compelling is its empathetic and honest depiction of the farmers' pride in their heritage and their determined strides to preserve that heritage in the ever-changing world. Full of death and life, and leaving lingering questions about the nature of progress and the responsibilities of the next generation, "Milk Men" is educational and heartfelt, thoughtful and intimate, and gives us a lot more appreciation for the complex origins of a glass of milk.

Getting to know the people on the ground in any profession helps you understand the industry as a whole, and Jan Haaken has allowed her viewers to do just that. This documentary focuses on the families, the men, women, and children working to keep smaller family farms running in today's fast-paced world. Professor Haaken beautifully captures the human side of an industry struggling to adapt to new technology while at the same time staying true to time-honored practices and traditions.

I particularly enjoyed the variety of people Professor Haaken spoke with. From young adult children of dairy farming families grappling with what it means to inherit a farm in today's economy to a seeming dairy tycoon, insisting tens of thousands of cows and numerous employees still count as a "family farm," everyone has a different story but inevitably come up against the same worry: how to stay afloat in an uncertain business. Where is dairy farming headed? It's hard to say. But it is important to remember that the industry is made up of people, each with their own hopes and struggles. This documentary is a poignant reminder of that fact.

DOWN ON THE FARM. On Monday evening I headed downtown to the Whitsell Auditorium at the Portland Art Museum, ducked around a couple of goats cavorting by the sculpture garden near the museum's side entrance (truly: this occurred), and ambled downstairs to see "Milk Men: The Life and Times of Dairy Farmers," the first of three documentary films in the Northwest Film Center's miniseries "NW Tracking Farm Edition: Animal Husbandry." Not the sort of subject you might expect in a self-proclaimed urban utopia like Portland, maybe, but if you strip away its recent hipster veneer the city has long and deep ties to the rural communities of the Northwest. Portland filmmaker Jan Haaken's documentary explores the urban/rural split by basically ignoring it, digging deeply into the beliefs, longings, and economic realities of family dairy farming, which for many urbanites must come as a revelation, almost like a visit to a foreign country. The work is long and hard and difficult (and wet and muddy): in modern farming, one is truly tied to the land. In the world of "Milk Men," easy biases fall away as the backbreaking complexities of a way of life reveal themselves. Haaken is a skilled and honest documentarian, not tipping the scales but letting her subject speak for itself. A lot of the filming happens to take place in my old stomping grounds of Whatcom and Skagit counties in northern Washington state, and so a lot of it looked familiar to me, and yet as a townie I never really knew the totality of my farm friends' lives. Milk Men gets to a fair amount of that, and it's fascinating.

I recently had the pleasure of viewing the film Milk Men: The Life and Times of Dairy Farmers. This documentary about the lives and business practices of small dairy farms was eye opening.

Little did I know about the business of dairy farming before watching this film. In recent years dairy farming has become a multi-billion dollar industry fueled by large production and corporately owned massive organizations. Gone are the days of the small dairy farmers with a few cows, the way most Americans visualize it.

The filmmaker was well educated in the issue and obviously did their homework. The story is easy to follow and the interviews are top notch. I recommend this film to anyone. You do not necessarily need to be a film lover or even well versed on the dairy farming industry. This film will teach you all you need to know.