George,
It is rather difficult to think of cheese,liquid milk and butter as something political, but those who operate in 
the market are always looking to expand their profitablity on the backs of producers, that is primarily what 
drove cheese and butter production west. Those who wanted to take advantage of the farmers in up-state New York 
to supply fresh milk to the Eastern Seaboard cities discovered farmers had a little more marketing sense than 
taking whatever was offered to them, especially when they started to talk to each other in terms of pricing. My 
understanding is this is what created the cheese business in the farm regions of New York, a way to convert milk 
into something that could be sold locally and reduce the supply of available milk until they got something like 
parity for their production. The middle man's response was to buy cheese in Ohio and flood the market, driving 
the small towncheese market out of business. The same for butter, I really do think the fix was in to give John 
Stewart the gold medal for overall best butter at the centenial exposition in 1876 at Philly. 
Borden and his evaporated milk also turned into a political hot potato, he could can his milk whenever the prices 
for wholesale milk were cheapest and sell it for high prices to emmigrants who lacked refrigeration in the cold 
water walkups and tenements. 
Industrialized farming has been with us quite a while, and has failed miserably over and over again. It really 
doesn't matter if it was milk butter eggs or Monsanto and genetic engineering, collapse is right around the 
corner when greedy middle men and market manipulators take over.  Steve Hanken  



------- Original Message -------
From    : George Myers[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent    : 6/9/2011 11:50:53 AM
To      : [log in to unmask]
Cc      : 
Subject : RE: Re: Iowa cheese factory

 I worked on the initial survey of Fort Drum, NY for Envirosphere a division of the Texas power plant design 
company Ebasco, once located at 40 Rector Street and then on a number of floors in the World Trade Center "twin 
towers". At one time New York State led the nation in cheese production until it shifted further west to 
Wisconsin, and today I think I read California. In the expansion to the current 100,000+ acres after WWII of Pine 
Camp to Fort Drum about 10,000 people were relocated and structures removed, many had been 19th century and 20th 
century cheese factories, based on the available bag of cheese curds found nearby at still operating then "cheese 
factories", that is small production area I visited in nearby Black River, NY, the only river flowing north in NY 
state. I worked in the field testing and I'm not sure where after us, the Berger five year contract went, perhaps 
where as Mr. Gibbs points out, no archaeology study has gone before. There was also about four b
 og-iron source foundries in and near the federal facility, that it's stated produced early railroad wheels and 
axles, and were part of a cultural resources plan for the new cantonment of the US Army 10th Mountain Division 
(light infantry) from Camp Hale in Colorado.

Envirosphere move to East Orange, New Jersey before the debacle of 9/11/01. Anecdotal by the way archaeologist 
Edward Johanneman and I once visited the excavation of then new Building 7 going up and were denied access, 
though he worked for the State Museums office, and fortunately things have changed in regards to this profession. 
Joel Klein, PhD., was the P.I. on the 90-something floor of the WTC for the original Fort Drum survey before he 
joined Foster-Wheeler which also suffered a tragedy when the plane crashed in Bosnia in April 1996 with the then 
trade mission headed by the former Chairman of the Democratic Party Ron Brown then Commerce Secretary. He might 
have more info on "cheese factories" or by anthropology fieldwork we might study some of the few remaining there.

I must confess in a blinding dark rainstorm handed a miss-fired smoke grenade in the shelter of a large tree, to 
have pulled the bent-up pin and tossed what turned out to be an orange smoke grenade into a cheese factory 
foundation, or so I was told. 

An amazing bit of geomorphology based archaeology has been done there by the US Army relocating ancient glacial 
beach shores and paleolithics found.