This is Planet Money from NPR.

So you know how to milk a cow by hand?

Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

Andy Navakovich spent his summers as a kid working on his grandparents' dairy farm in Wisconsin.

Andy is still in the dairy world.

He is now a dairy economist at Cornell University.

And what percentage of economists would you say are able to milk a cow by hand?

Well, probably, you know, close to 100% are able, but 99.9% wouldn't have the foggy as

clue how to get started.

In the pantheon of milk-related economic disasters, there is one that rises above the rest.

And Andy had a ringside seat to it.

This is one of those slow-moving train wrecks that you can see coming from a mile away.

It was 1976.

Jimmy Carter was running for president.

And he started floating this idea.

Now, though I am a farmer, I'm not in favor of guaranteeing farmers a profit.

But I am in favor of giving farmers an equal break.

One of the ways Carter proposed giving farmers an equal break was to raise the price of milk

by about six cents per gallon, which was kind of a lot at the time.

Yeah, it certainly was on the edge of that.

It was a big enough number that it sounded like one of these campaign promises that you

really didn't expect they would actually fulfill.

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