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A legal battle over food marketing 'checkoffs' threatens to eliminate $700 million in annual spending on everything from milk and produce to cotton. Here's the story of Madison Avenue's unlikely fight with American farmers.
Joseph and Brenda Cochran rise at 5 a.m. every day to milk the 200 cows on their farm in Westfield, Pa. It's the first of two milkings in a shift that will not end for another 15 hours. The herd is rounded up from. countryside so steep that Joseph calls one field "Godforsaken Hill." "It is so hilly around here, I tell people if they want to park their car on the level they'd better get a bulldozer and scratch a spot for it," he says.
His farmhouse, a patchwork of repairs and refurbishments, was built in 1820. It has one bathroom, which the couple share with their 14 children. Their annual income is about $42,000. The nearest store-or, as Brenda puts it, "something that would be significant, like a doctor"-is 27 miles away.
From the Cochrans' vantage point, the advertising industry and its corner offices, expense account lunches and luxury hotel conferences seem remote. Those two worlds, however, are on a collision course whose outcome has the potential to unravel major food marketing practices in the U.S.
In April 2002, the Cochrans sued Dairy Management Inc., the government-supervised agency that runs the "Got Milk?" campaign. The Cochrans have argued, successfully, that the mandatory funding that farmers provide the campaign is based on an underlying principle that is unconstitutional.
Got Milk is paid for by agricultural marketing "checkoffs"-i.e., fees levied on farmers for the sale of their produce. The funds are steered into ads promoting everything from dairy products, meat, fruit and grains, to cotton and other commodities. Got Milk costs the Cochrans about $4,200 a year, or 10% of their income.
At least 16 other suits have been filed by U.S. farmers seeking to eliminate checkoff programs. If the Cochrans are right-and so far, federal courts have agreed that they are-then not only the Got Milk campaign but also more than $200 million in related dairy advertising could come to an end.
That would be only one of many dominoes to fall. The current lawsuits could consign some of...