As is now well understood, by the 1970s and accelerating into the late 1980s, the New England dairy marketplace, and the New York marketplace to a lesser extent, had evolved into regional marketplaces that on the whole no longer recognized intrastate boundaries. Larger-scale fluid milk processing facilities located in the primary urban areas of the southern New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island became the primary sources for the evolved regional marketplace as well as the more local, intrastate markets.
In addition, because of large-scale attrition in the portion of the milkshed close-in to the population centers, these large facilities had become primarily dependent for their raw supply upon farmers residing in the Northern New England states of Maine and Vermont, and upon farmers residing in eastern New York, and no longer depended on in-state farmers for their supply. For their part, farmers in those exporting states had come to rely upon the large-scale processors in southern New England as the market for their product, rather than upon local processors located in their home states.
Under basic principles of constitutional law stemming from the Interstate Commerce Clause of the federal constitution, the milk now increasingly crossing state lines was essentially immune from individual state price regulation. Simultaneous with the evolution of the marketplace, in a series of cases that helped define the national law of interstate commerce, federal courts first winnowed down and then essentially terminated the authority of individual state milk control boards. [1] These cases made it increasingly clear by the 1970s that states could no longer rely on their individual regulatory authority to promote the local public interest in milk price regulation.
Elimination of their individual state regulatory pricing powers meant the states could no longer make local adjustments to the national regulatory scheme as it applied to their localities. This meant, in effect, that the states were left solely to rely on the federal government to promote the local public interest in milk market price regulation.
[1]See, e.g., Baldwin v. G.A.F. Seelig, Inc., 294 U.S. 511, 522 (1935) (“It is the established doctrine of this court that a state may not, in any form or under any guise, directly burden the prosecution of interstate business.” (quoting International Textbook Co. v. Pigg, 217 U.S. 91, 112 (1910)) (internal quotation marks omitted)).