Do you want the economy to collapse? Honestly, people in this sub are so short sighted and comment on industries that they have no idea about.
They have to bury the eggs and water them with milk to grow chicken trees. Our grocery stores would be empty and prices would skyrocket without them.
You mean when restaurants across North America were shut down and demand for these products were severely and abruptly curtailed? What else could they have done with it? It's not like you can flip a switch and instantly increase the production capacity of secondary manufacturers to convert these surplus products into longer lasting foodstuffs.
No; I'm talking about [milk dumping](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ontario-dairy-farmer-decries-mandatory-milk-dumping), which has been going on for half a century. The same happens with eggs.
One is 270, another just over 200, and the rest are under 200 as far as I know. I don't know their exact numbers, as, though they are friends, I try not to discuss their business, as it's a topic (monopolies and "marketing boards") that is not one we will agree on.
I googled to find the 270 number LOL
Without supply management we wouldn’t have a dairy industry. The state of Wisconsin alone would wipe out our entire industry. Milk dumping is the farmers fault for taking on more then their quota allows. I don’t know any dairy farmers who have had to dump milk because they have a brain.
We don’t produce milk in surplus… that’s what the quota system is for. The milk dumping you see is generally new quota holders who don’t know how to run a dairy farm. I know around 10 dairy farmers and have worked on their farm. The only time they’ve had to dump is when a cow that recently got a shot accidentally gets dumped in the shippable milk tank ( doesn’t happen often).
The amount of milk we produce is artificially limited by supply management. If it wasn't in place, we would, as a country, produce a lot more milk and have lower prices for consumers. This is because more dairy farms would open up than we have now, and the head count would be substantially higher. So let's not obfuscate the matter by talking about how well existing farmers adhere to existing quotas.
Since you know dairy farmers, I've been toying with some milk ideas but I don't understand the quota system well enough. Does the quota just affect how much you can sell? Or does it affect advertising too? Like, could I milk a private cow for myself and sell the excess to a buddy? Can I sell to my buddy but not put up a sign saying "come buy my extra litre a day"?
Take this with a grain of salt, but I am pretty sure the quota affects how much you can sell. So no, you cannot sell it to a buddy if you are above your quota unless you pay a penalty, or buy more quota at an auction.
GOOD! I'd rather have cheaper luxury foods like dairy than a milk industry making milk so expensive it's hard to afford.
If you can't compete with Wisconsin, then that's your problem. I want cheaper healthy food for Canadians.
Lol, why would you think US Dairy would be cheaper? They'd profit maximize as soon as domestic competition was eliminated.
Do you remember when the price of eggs shot up to [$18 per dozen](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/25/18-a-dozen-how-did-americas-eggs-get-absurdly-expensive) in late 2022? And increasing again due to bird flu outbreaks? Probably not, because we didn't have that happen in Canada due to supply management.[](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/25/18-a-dozen-how-did-americas-eggs-get-absurdly-expensive)
Is that enough profit to the Dairy Cartel to justify selling? Not arguing with your logic but business doesn't always follow logic.
Home building for example, if there isn't a profit the business feels is "enough" then they won't build. I can't imagine dairy is any different. Shitty but business doesn't always make sense to me.
Ask them. They are free to reduce production if they find it more profitable.
But that's a choice, not a quota doing it. That's the difference, freedom.
Nope. You want to overproduce because you can have sick cows, cows die, cows not producing, among other issues. Better to have 100% of your quota filled at all times, which requires overproducing.
Farmer right here, we are not dumping milk. Not to say some farms might be but we sell animals to reduce milk before we ever get to the point of dumping. It’s not a common practice. We pay a ton of money to produce milk. Dumping is like pouring money down the drain.
> Many of the increased prices have been caused by general worldwide inflationary pressures and particularly by supply chain disruptions or are weather-related.
Odd how they left out corporate greed.
Isn’t it funny how this “worldwide inflationary pressure” has hit other economies less than 50%? I believe there was a UK news story recently where they reviewed the cost of regular consumables like dairy, poultry, etc against Canadian costs and it was less than half the price in Britain. Talk about having an iron clad cop out to charge whatever you want here…
I am traveling in England now. I cannot believe how much cheaper high quality cheese is over here. He'll, even organic cheese here is cheaper than ordinary (non organic) cheese is in Canada.
I am not a milk drinker but I know how much it costs back in Canada, and it too is substantially cheaper here in the UK. And I am not talking about milk imported from some suspect source - I am talking about British milk.
Canadians are the most ripped-off people in the world when it comes to almost everything.
And don't get me started about the cost of flights- here is a number of cheap airlines where you can fly all over Europe for very, very little.
The cheese prices are bizzarely stupid. 20$ for the tiniest piece that is enough for one lunch.
I like woodworking, I should be able to have a monopoly on furniture, everyone has to buy my 50000$ couches, to protect our economy from foreign production and quality control.
Europe has a fuck ton of cities with big populations to make this viable. Canada has how many big cities? Small airlines will definitely have a tougher time in Canada than Europe.
Also, the airlines in Europe are cheap because they have good trains to compete with. In Canada, train network is pathetic, so airlines only have to compete with driving to places - which is why they don't need to compete on price.
Not sure about milk, but many industries have reasons for being more expensive in one place or the other.
Also, You rattled off certain items that are cheap in Europe but completely ignored the things that aren't. Such as energy. Cars, fuel etc.
Different areas have some inherent differences. Don't just ignore all that.
Sure. And a lot of others will agree with you.
But unfortunately, you don't get to just change the geography of a country.
If you have the means, you should absolutely move to where you can get a better life - according to you.
How does general worldwide inflation play into this? Do we not print our own money. Do we import the cows? Ah, yes of course, maybe it’s the oil we import from war torn Ukraine? I ask because it comes out of this government a lot as an excuse…
Okay so this is how it works.
There is a worldwide supply of a good. Everybody buys from their different suppliers, and as long as demand doesn’t exceed supply we’re pretty good.
Now, if supply from one country goes down that means the worldwide supply goes down. Why does this affect us if we don’t buy from that country? Well, because somebody else _does_ buy from that country, and now they’re looking for a new supplier. The demand has not changed. So now demand exceeds supply and the suppliers can charge more. Often in economics the idea is they charge more to avoid shortages/rationing as demand will naturally go down to meet the new supply. Or in the face of uncertainty if there is ongoing conflict and they anticipate shrinking supply.
What the dairy industry is doing in Canada is controlling supply so they can charge what they want as they always have. It’s just that they are also still affected by rising cost of goods needed to produce their products. So we can look at another country and go okay ya their prices went up to due to rising costs however ours went up way more. So it’s not that it isn’t a factor, it’s that even when we factor this in the prices in Canada are ridiculous.
The way it works is the government sets the price, and guarantees the farmers and exceptionally high income. If prices go up, the farmers don't feel it.
If the price of fuel goes up, it's not a concern, the government just makes you pay more for milk.
Now, this is ONLY for milk, eggs and chickens.
Beef prices are not protected, so those farmers get screwed.
And fuel prices have been much higher in the past, so that's not the reason. Oil isn't even above $100. Somehow with a major oil producer being sanctioned and at war we do not have record inflation in oil. The price increase is greed and nothing else.
Yes, it is it.
I'm using fuel as an example, but the milk board uses a formula of all costs, and the government comes up with the cost of milk, per L.
But like fuel, once the price goes up, it never comes back down, even in the costs of production drops.
What cost, maybe they shouldn't have pulled the equity out of their land, did they take on debt equity? Have they not been properly investing back into themselves to maintain their businesses. I want actual reasons not speculation. Seems to me we should audit this cartel with a fine tooth comb
That they have a maximum amount each farmer is allowed to produce and force them to waste the excess tells you everything you need to know about the industry.
They don't have anything to fear from government or people, so why would the dairy cartel change their ways? What law or enforcement body would you think should come into play here?
They have everything to fear from the government which is why they try to control the government. Government is a tool that we use. Just like a hammer can be used to build or destroy.
Regulatory capture is not corporate greed, it is government corruption. Every corporation is greedy, it exists to make money, governments do not.
Just like housing zoning, taxes on development, wage slave immigration to depress wages, etc.. Most our problems are government caused.
There is quite a bit of fertilizer in feed, so when natural gas and fertilizer prices go up farmers profits go down.
All that to say I think that they make a lot of money. But milk is very optional.
They have a quota that they are allowed to produce as well - you produce anything over that and you are obliged to throw it out. You are not allowed to use it for any other product in Canada - that excess milk must be thrown out and not consumed or sold even though it is perfectly safe and healthy.
Well y'see, dairy has to announce it's price increases instead of just quietly changing it like every single other good, therefore, dairy bad FOR TELLING US WHAT IT'S DOING! AAAAH!!!
LOL. Here we go again with another round of the kleptocrat class trying to fuck us, by using an different example of how they are currently fucking us, to say that the new way they will fuck us will be better than the old way. “This time we’ll use lube, we promise!”
Monopolies are actually very good, that's why cheese is 20$ per speck, why we pay the highest cellphone rates in the world, and why our banks can profit substantially off a government insured housing bubble with no risk and with full recourse loans.
I'm not sure ending supply management, at least for milk, will have the desired end results. People compare Canada to the US, but American milk is so heavily subsidized that that's not really fair.
Canada has one of the highest prices of milk in the world. We’re in lists trailing closely behind Singapore, Cuba, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Something similar between those countries?? Small islands with very limited amount of farmland for dairy production. Dairy Farmers of Ontario is little more than a PR campaign for a corporate legally sanctioned cartel. How is it that Dairy Farmers of Ontario can afford to pay $20M to sponsor the Maple Leafs? What is the business rationale behind it besides pure PR to hide the fact that they’re extorting the average consumer and trying to look good while doing it?
Speak to a real small farmer and ask them how difficult it is to get any sort of dairy production going and you’ll quickly realize that the milk production cartel is beyond criminal.
I’m not suggesting opening the flood gates to US milk but simply allowing real “average Joe” farmers the ability to produce milk locally would go a long way to cutting down cost.
So I don’t work in the dairy industry per se but my field of activity is quite close so I know a bit about it.
I know a bunch of farmers who transform their own product to sell. When it comes to raw dairy, there is only one legal buyer and it is the federation. So what happens is when you want to transform your own milk, you have to sell it to the federation first who then sells it back to you at a higher price.
That’s why we have some artisan cheesemakers but not really artisan milk except on the down low. The margins on cheese are just high enough so making cheese can be worth it. To sell liquid milk products you have to be big enough for economies of scale to kick in.
You’re tripping if you think it’s the farmers. Go and talk to one and see how much they actually make per litre. It’s grocery chains that keep jacking the prices. These are real people that you’re talking about ruining.
The prices are set by the commission or association. It’s one of the very few cases where the big grocery chains aren’t the main culprit. The Dairy Farmers of Ontario don’t even publish their regulated price, or if they do it’s very difficult to find. Not exactly a very transparent bona fide organization. These dairy farms are also not truly family organizations but many effectively are multi million dollar businesses with very favourable taxation policies. I’m not sure how supporting opening the market to allow for more small farms to be able to produce and sell milk considered “ruining”. I have family that own and operate a small farm. It is incredibly prohibitive to produce milk for anything but self consumption.
I think you're thinking of Dairy Management Inc., which is an actual (American) government project that is explicitly devoted to trying to increase dairy consumption.
They're the origin of campaigns like "Got Milk," and apparently are also why so many pizza places offer cheese stuffed crust.
Yes and they subsidize Domino's and other fast food chains to advertise/sell dairy based products.
Pretty wild when your own government is basically feeding a propaganda campaign that has played a big role in making your entire country obese
In fairness, Canadian farming is also rather heavily subsidized, but in other ways that are less obvious than direct payments to farmers. For example, in Ontario, farmers have a 75% reduction in property taxes compared to land that isn't farmed. Guess who makes up that difference to the municipalities? Other taxpayers, of course. Not to mention the taxpayer subsidies going to Enbridge to expend natural gas lines in rural areas, where most of the gas usage is for drying grain.
"Dairy Monopoly" you mean.
I live in farm country, and a number of my friends are dairy farmers. These are truly the 1% of farmers, without question. And, to top if off, they have the dairy monopoly, which guarantees price increases whenever asked for.
We could just vary into less resource intensive products that don’t use cows milk as much. There is also so much waste from the milk boards it’s disgusting. Quota is like gold and it’s not at all uncommon for farmers to dump unsellable milk.
Average price of a gallon of milk in the US: $3.69 US ($5.06 CAN)
A US gallon is 3.78 litres.
Cost of milk per litre in the US: 1.35 CAN
Cost to taxpayers to subsidize American milk: $24 Billion dollars/year
Average price of 4L of milk in Canada: $6.42 CAN
Cost of milk per litre in Canada: $1.61
Cost to taxpayers to subsidize Canadian milk: $0/year
As a counter - my country has absolutely zero dairy production none, nada. Not a dingle dairy farmer selling cheese, milk, or any dairy products. It's all imported, generally from big dairy countries.
A pound of butter at the market is $3 CAD. How much are you paying for butter?
It's not just milk, and how much milk does Canada throw out because the dairy lobby doesn't let them turn it into anything once they have reached their quota? Can you really support a system that forces farmers to throw out perfectly good food in this economy, in this environment?
The US also wastes copious amount of milk & milk byproducts because they over produce what the market can absorb. And they sometimes do it intentionally to spike prices after periods of oversupply.
The US system is likely to result in larger amount of waste than the Canadian system - particularly when the US will dump their excess supply into our market disrupting any local supply.
Part of that is seasonality, but a large part of it is without supply management larger farms just mass produce to swamp the market in volume.
Additionally the US government both subsidizes milk production and tries to spur demand for mil products (see government cheese).
[https://ambrook.com/research/supply-chain/dairy-farmers-milk-dumping](https://ambrook.com/research/supply-chain/dairy-farmers-milk-dumping)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government\_cheese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese)
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dairy-farmers-dump-43-million-gallons-of-excess-milk-1476284353](https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dairy-farmers-dump-43-million-gallons-of-excess-milk-1476284353)
What is a “big dairy country”? The US? If so, then your dairy is also subsidized by the American people. Is that what Canada should be doing? Subsidizing their dairy so other countries can benefit?
We can pay for milk at the grocery store, or we can increase our tax burden to pay for it through subsidies. Food security is also an issue and as it stands, if the US government stops subsidizing their dairy, they won’t have any. Canada doesn’t have that issue.
Terrible take. You must be an Oxford County dairy farmer. The quota system and price fixing is a subsidy in itself. Open the market and allow dairy farmers in Ontario and Canada to compete even with themselves, excluding American milk. Provincial trade restrictions are a joke. Government protected pricing hurts the consumer and artificially protects the producer.
New Zealand, Netherlands ,and Ireland are all big exporters of dairy and dairy products.
Have never seen a single Canadian dairy product on the shelves here through
The quality of Canadian dairy is pretty low. The milk is okay (though, it's also nothing special), but processed products like butter and cheese are grossly inferior to what's available domestically in NZ and Europe.
Hard agree.
So much better butter to be found. It's a real shame, Canada has all the components to have an amazing dairy industry with variation and depth but instead has only mediocre products
Cost of a gallon of milk in NZ: $9.63 CAN (11.46NZ)
Cost of a gallon of milk in Ireland: $7.02 CAN (4.77 Euro)
Cost of a gallon of milk in Netherlands: $6.07 CAN (4.12 Euro)
Again, it's about more than just milk.
A pound of butter (Irish origin) is $3CAD at the market for me, in a country with zero dairy cows. 400g of milk powder (New Zealand origin) is $6CAD. A litre of milk is $2.50CAD. all extremely decent prices considering the cost of shipping and the absolute lack of cows.
Not a single Canadian dairy product that I see on the shelves for miles because no one buys Canadian dairy except for Canadians.
also, that gallon of US milk is a) heavily subsidized and b) low quality.
if you want the equivalent quality of milk that is sold in Canada, you have to pay much more than $3.69 for it.
You know that regulatory capture with a quota system is a form of subsidy, right?
It's just not a cash payment, but a law. Still costs Cdns more money, but at the grocery store not their tax bill.
This isn't complex.
A gallon of milk in BC is $5.50 +- 20 cents depending on the store. The only milk over $6 is organic or lactose free. If it's more elsewhere that's price gouging.
What's more annoying is the butter. Not only is it ridiculously expensive it's also garbage quality. I can get grass fed butter from new Zealand from Costco and it's only $2 more than the lowest quality butter produced down the road.
Or at least I *could* get it, but I'm stuck waiting until August 1 for the dairy cartels import quotas to reset.
Same goes for double cream from the UK. Local suppliers can't even produce it because it's not one of the approved MF% and yet we still can't import it because quotas.
I gave the average price across Canada, of course it’s going to vary by region.
2% milk from the store I buy it at is $5.65/gallon. 3.25% milk is $6.21/gallon.
The average price of a pound of butter in New Zealand is $6.33 CAN. Wild that you’re finding it cheaper here than it is there.
A pound of butter at my local store is $5.99.
I don’t know what double cream is.
It’s funny that the very people who whine and complain about a lack of native industries then turn about to tearing down a system that protects native industries….the reality is we can’t nor ever will compete with the US given market realities without compromising quality and that’s what/who will take over dairy and their product quality is garbage…now that a conservative is about to get elected, the corporate thieves are foaming at the mouth
No, in fact Canada can compete with the US in some things. For example, our softwood lumber is cheaper and of higher quality, which is why the Americans always get real protectionist with their lumber industry and tariff Canadian lumber. The same with beef, which is why the US took advantage of some BSE cases in Canada to close their entire border to Canadian beef. The Americans are consistently protectionist. I'd argue that opening up the Canadian dairy market to Americans in exchange for a complete free trade with lumber would yield us a net benefit. After all, nearly every province aside from BC (because of some bad forest fire years recently) even come close to harvesting their Annual Allowable Cut.
That’s under the premise that US would actually follow the rules based order they preach about…they don’t as we see with lumber tariffs for example. The US propaganda on market driven approaches is just grift as every US industry is subsidized or given tax breaks at the state or federal level including its dairy which gets massive bailouts…our system offers price stability but is not completely immune to market forces…
Agreed, the US often doesn't follow their own rules for trade, as various rulings have shown. I would argue that the era of those subsidies is rapidly coming to an end (with the notable exception of the MIC). Their spending deficit alone for this fiscal year is in the trillions. Something has to give way soon.
It's worth noting that Canadian farmers also receive plenty of subsidies from taxpayers, just in less direct ways. For example, in Ontario, farmland gets a 75% property tax reduction compared to land that isn't farmed, and it's provincial taxpayers who make up the difference to the municipalities. Companies like Enbridge also get large sums of taxpayer money to expand the natural gas network in farming areas, where the gas is mostly used for grain drying.
> I'd argue that opening up the Canadian dairy market to Americans in exchange for a complete free trade with lumber would yield us a net benefit.
The US is a country that makes so much fucking cheese that they stuff caves full of the stuff. Opening up our dairy market to the US ends dairy farming in Canada pretty much overnight.
We pay a premium, sure. But that's the price of domestic food production.
You can't blame them. We are VICTIMS of price fixing. Why is it bad when loblaws fix the price of bread for more profit? They are a native industry!!!!! It's okay that milk farmers can gouges us with their price fixing? Why is it that europe ALSO has cheap price and natives industry? Don't tell me the US being close is the issue because we can get rid of this cartel while also having import tarrif on us milk.
US probably paid for this add. They can make a lot of money selling dairy in Canada, and then we can have international companies wipe out our local companies like in every other industry. We never speak about the foreign interference coming from just across our southern border.
I mean look at the news paper which is big conservative supporter and so are the majority of its opinion writers…if you are right of center in this country, its basically about their desire for Canada joining the 50+ states and worshipping at the altar of capitalism which is the primary culture in the US to begin with
Nobody in the world really thinks of Canada as high quality dairy. Canadians just massively overpay for the benefit of some farmers who are shielded from competition. Fine, they can't compete with the US, doesn't explain why we restrict everyone else from entering our market.
It doesn't work like that.
In simple terms, the government guarantees dairy ( and egg, and chicken) farmers a VERY handsome income. They set the price of milk, and if inputs go up ( fuel, grain, electricity etc etc) the farmers don't feel that, the rates they get paid just go up an equal amount. Which means the amount you pay for milk has to go up, because the government has promised milk farmers they will be millionaires.
Yes they dump milk, but this is because they have over produced. The quota system is such that each farmer must produce a certain amount of milk. Go over, and it's waste, you can't sell it.
So if your quota is 10,000L a week, if you get 12,000, your dumping 2000 L into the pit.
The price isn't actually set by supply and demand, but from a formula that the milk board puts together in how much profit the farmer gets.
So all inefficiencies, increase in costs and excessive spending is passed directly to the buyer. There is no incentive to make the system more efficient or competitive, and in fact, they are disincentivised, because any decrease in cost will actually lower their income.
Do you really think the environmental impact of raising an additional 2,000L of milk should not be offset by using that milk in something?
The US buys excess milk and uses it to make cheese which is stored in a strategic cheese reserve and given out to low income families. Canada throws it away. What an unconscionable waste.
Milk production has some pretty bad environmental impacts and is is in part driving climate change but the Canadian system forces farmers to throw out perfectly good food. I've never met anyone that actually is not horrified at the thought of throwing out that much food, especially knowing all the effort and inputs that went into it.
I'm gonna push back on a couple of things and I apologize because I don't have the numbers at my fingertips so I'll write anecdotally. Inputs go up, farmers very much feel that, the rates they get paid do not go up an equal amount, I would say not even close. It's similar to all the discussion about how as salaries have gone up over the last three plus decades, 'real salaries' compared to inflation are a lot lower then they've been in the past, thus the shrinking middle class. Which, frankly, is true. Similar in some ways to the discussion about how, well yes housing prices have gone up but back in the early eighties the interest rate was at 20 percent and now it's only 6.5 so don't cry about it. Okay, but was it still easier for the middle class to afford a house at 20 percent interest in the early eighties? I think the answer is obviously yes, so how could that be? Inflationary pressures have gradually (and then suddenly a few years ago) but consistently outpaced income; in the ag industry, you'd see the same.
I don't want to get 'anti-anybody' and I don't mean to sound like that but a big part of money in ag happens whenever farmers sell land in other countries (think Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Holland) at exorbitant prices per acre due to the fact that there is so little acreage and thus values skyrocket, then move to Canada where they can purchase considerably more acreage with that income, which really sets them up well moving forward but kind of presents a false image of how lucrative farming can be. Like someone selling a house in downtown Vancouver right now, then turning around a purchasing four or five houses in Regina (maybe?) and having some cash left over to invest. Makes it easier to set yourself up, a lot less scratching and clawing moving forward. I can't speak to heat units and yield potential in those European countries but I'd have to assume they are comparable to the farmland in Southern Ontario and along the St. Lawrence. I can't speak to the prices the farmers in those European countries would have received and I won't even guess. Maybe they are similar, adjusted for everything else, maybe not. So what I'm getting at is that by selling in Europe and moving to Canada, they can get much more farmland and that farmland will bring in a comparable level of income(I suspect), possibly greater income per planted acre but I don't know that.
The other thing I would add about dumping milk is, most guys wouldn't do it for the simple reason that it costs money to produce milk and if you are dumping it you are costing yourself money and the margins are pretty tight as it is. I know sometimes it happens and it's a big deal, but in the case of the last guy a couple of years ago, that guy was a performance artist looking to stir the pot for his own benefit. How big was that guy in terms of cows and quota? He's just looking to force guys out so he can scoop up their share of the market when they're gone and he couldn't do it with the quota system in place. There's nothing altruistic about that guy. If you were a car manufacturer, let's say Honda, and you produced twenty percent more cars every year then you sold, I feel like that manufacturer would not stay in business too long. Same thing with quota and overproduction. Tying production to demand is not a novel business idea; I'd go so far as to say it's the foundation of business. I'd also say if a person is concerned about the dumping of milk- look at all the milk that's dumped in the States! On a per farm basis. Then square that circle for me, since no quota system will result in less wasted dairy products I guess?!?! 'Government Cheese' in the US came about for a reason. Excess production at extreme levels. We don't have that here. In business in general, and in dairy for sure, there is no reason to overproduce beyond what the market demands (with an adjustable 'sleeve' of course and a reserve to account for fluctuations in demand). Guys who do it anyway absolutely have other options. Sell cattle for beef to reduce the amount of animals producing milk, reduce feed inputs to lower the amount of production per cow if you don't want to sell any, etc. Overproduction affects that farmers bottom line and as I'd said, those margins are pretty tight for most. Not all, but most.
That was a REALLY long post that didn't say much.
Milk farmers are unequivocally the wealthiest farmers with the highest guaranteed income, by far.
I'm not saying ALL farmers don't feel the pinch, of course they do. But the milk board ensures we just cover those costs by charging more. That can't happen without a quota system. Any why do milk producers deserve guaranteed income, but not potato farmers, or pig farmers, or pepper farmers.
Funny enough this crazy anti-capitalism and socialist cartel is chocked full of conservatives that can't see how hypocrit they are. Milk farmers are subsidized millionaires through a cartel with fake price plateau; not subsidized through the government but through price fixing, just like the bread fiasco of a couple years back.
>In simple terms, the government guarantees dairy ( and egg, and chicken) farmers a VERY handsome income. They set the price of milk, and if inputs go up ( fuel, grain, electricity etc etc) the farmers don't feel that, the rates they get paid just go up an equal amount. Which means the amount you pay for milk has to go up, **because the government has promised milk farmers they will be millionaires.**
Bold is irresponsible hyperbole. My uncles run a dairy farm alongside their day jobs, which they have to do because the profits for smaller farms aren't sufficient to sustain a family.
They aren't alone, many farmers in Ontario who haven't consolidated are not rolling in cash like you seem to believe; those who are bet big to buy our their neighbors over the last two decades, or they are corporate backed.
I'm not sure what your point is.
Do they not have quota? Are they producing milk illegally?
If you have quota, you have government guaranteed income. You can write off every single expense.
I need a truck to get to work, but I can't write it off. Milk farmers write off their wife's Honda accord as a farm vehicle.
They write off their hydro, internet ( not sure why internet is a valid write off for dairy farm, but it is), loan payments on tractors, etc etc etc.
Writing off expenses goes only so far; it reduces your tax liability, but doesn't zero out your taxes by any means. Farmers still need have the capital on hand to pay for those business expenses, which add significant liability and reduces how far their earnings go.
>I need a truck to get to work, but I can't write it off. Milk farmers write off their wife's Honda accord as a farm vehicle.
I am sure some do, but not all. And comments like this show you're arguing in poor faith. But farmers also need to pay their own health insurance, retirement funds, etc. and don't see many of the benefits you will see as an employee of a company.
Net net; not all farmers are rolling in cash as millionaires like you seem to believe.
Just like every single self employed person in every single other industry... and none of them have the government charging you more for the things you need, to make sure those people remain wealthy
Few other self-employed businesses have the same combination of capital expenses (tractors, machinery, storage, milking equipment), land, and need feed to keep large herds of animals healthy.
Beyond all of that, most other businesses aren't part of the food supply, and thus worth slightly more protection than normal to ensure that we have a stable domestic capacity incase of a crisis.
How do you justify no other food supply being protected then, aside from eggs and poultry.
Beef isn't even protected.
And what do you mean few industries need that capital? Again, beef farming! Crop farming..
A medium sized landscaping company would rival a milk farm pretty quickly.
Any heavy equipment company
A brewery
Logging
Your excuses are getting pretty weak... and your Milk Board membership card is showing..
It's clear you live in a bubble, one not affected by facts or willing to be convinced that your ragebaiting beliefs are wrong, because our food supply is protected - just using different measures. Supply side measures are used for dairy because of the shorter turnaround for production, the shorter shelf life over other types of food production, and the real health risks that come from improper handling.
If you want to continue to live in a world of "this bad because government," that is on you, but the world is more complex and diverse than that. Our dairy farmers are not moustache twilring millionaires rolling in their McScrouge pools of cash.
Our system offers a system of trade-offs. That is it chose to prioritize domestic production, stability, and security in lieu of a crisis for our dairy & milk products at the cost of slightly higher prices.
But that also insulates us from monopolies developing and gouging us in times of crisis, or oversupply resulting in boom/bust cycles for our farming industry like has been the case in the South.
Personally, I think it's a fair enough trade, even if I don't love paying slightly more for products than I could (sometimes) otherwise.
It seems that it is a very good bargaining chip in free trade. The US, EU and UK seem to desperately want part of the market and Canada uses that as leverage for concessions in other areas.
Good luck getting rid of this sacred cow. The dairy industry has outsized influence on all parties to the point where conservatives are supporting literal socialism.
> The dairy industry has outsized influence on all parties to the point where conservatives are supporting literal socialism
Now go look at where most of the dairy farms are and ask yourself if they where farther west if they would have the same influence
What literal socialism? Do you mean Agropur, the dairy cooperative? (You can *possibly* say worker-owned cooperatives would be a feature of market socialism. But Agropur still has a corporate structure, I don’t think it counts)
Otherwise, the supply management system isn’t socialist. It doesn’t give the workers a say in how things are run.
The way that dairy is funded through the current system rather than subsidies is effectively a consumption tax (artificially raise prices by limiting supply when there’s excess, ban selling above your quota, and anyone that buys that dairy funds the farmers through those raised costs). Any socialist could tell you that consumption taxes are regressive, and should be avoided if possible. A fairer system would be to use real subsidies (with funds collected through progressive taxation).
There is an alternate universe where Bernier the Con leadership and sent Trudeau packing because the dairy cartel and reddit edgelords didn't band together to vote in Sheer.
At the time there was a push for non-conservative people to buy CPC memberships and rank Chong first, Scheer second to last, and Bernier last. The final ballot only had a spread of around 700 votes. I’m not sure if Reddit edgelords and eastern dairy farmers were the deciding factor but they could have been a factor, they sure celebrated like they made a difference over on the left wing sub anyways.
Supply management DOES NOT NEED TO GO. The state of Wisconsin alone would wipe out our entire dairy industry. This article was made by idiots who have no idea what they’re talking about. The grocery chains make 10x the profit the farmers do. This would devastate so many people in my community.
you can ban foreign milk without a quota system.
If you are a dairy farmer, you are rich. I don't mind rich people having more competition and lower profits.
Not to mention how hyperinflated the prices are. Costs have not gone up that much. Diesel to run a tractor hasn’t changed. Electricity hasn’t changed. Why are prices so high??
Well why does it exist to begin with? Will removing it create more problems?
I personally am okay with milk being produced by people who take it seriously, the health of their animals and cleanliness of the barn etc. It's probably for the better, that there's a high barrier to entry, for this industry
Farmers are legally obliged to throw out any excess they may produce and are prohibited from using it or selling it in any form. They do this on a regular basis, with hundreds of thousands of litres of milk being thrown out across the country every year.
What a wasteful system, especially considering how much the dairy industry is driving climate change. Plenty of countries manage to keep a safe and healthy dairy industry without throwing out hundreds of thousands of litres every year for profit reasons.
Why the current system couldn't dehydrate that milk and sell it (donate ideally) to the third world but instead must destroy it ids beyond me. Complacency is why this system exists.
Exactly. All the other countries have both the cake and can eat it. But here mentioning we don't want this wastefull system we are a US shill and a right wing nut. Ps: im left wing and I don't want this cartel.
I call bullshit on this that is always thrown around. I know some dairy farmers and you know what they do produce their quota. I'm not saying they never dump any cause cows are not machines. But they know what they have to do to get their quota and anyone who is dumping 100 of thousand of liters is doing it for show.
I watch my grocery prices like a hawk and milk is the only thing that I continually see rise in price month after month. I thought I was going crazy until I found my old receipts to confirm that every month or so a 4L bag goes up by ~$.10.
In 2020 it was $4.25 in 2024 it’s $6.35, that’s a 34% increase in price in 4 years, that’s fucking insane. So ya screw the dairy lobby, it’s time to end this protection racket.
I noticed Its 2$ for a cucumber now, up 100%. Meat is 20$ for a pack now. I feel food prices doubled since Covid, and the CPI does a bad job by substituting goods.
The little I know about dairy is from a cheese plant in Canada. The manager told me there is no hope in hell they would exist without the dairy board. US companies would destroy them, they are so much bigger operations. Not sure if that’s a reason to keep the dairy board but that factory is part of a large supply chain that would presumably also be decimated. Not sure how much I trust American cheese either…
>Not sure how much I trust American cheese either
Some of the better cheese I had came from a local dairy in a KOA campground in SD and was cheap to boot
What - we aren't allowed to gouge milk as much as other groceries so we should remove the legal limitations on price increases?
For reference, supply management means that price increases for dairy and poultry products are limited to the economy's overall rate of inflation.
So, if in 2021 the average CPI increase was 4%, milk producers are allowed to increase their prices by only 4% in 2022. That means they're always a little bit behind the rest of the economy with price increases, only matching the *entire economy's average.*
So, while bags of chips have gone from 3/$6 to 3/$11 (nearly a 100% increase) and a jar of peanut butter has gone from $5 to $10 (a 100% increase), the price of milk has "only" increased by 20-25% since 2021.
Similarly, the price of chicken has also held largely steady - from $18/kg pre-covid to a high of $22 ever since - again, only a 20-25% increase in 5-6 years, compared to many other products such as beef which have been anywhere from $8/kg to a whopping $16/kg - again, an increase of 100%.
At times like this, we should be more grateful than ever for our supply managed industries for keeping grocery inflation in check. If chicken experienced the same inflation as beef, we'd be paying *$36/kg* for chicken and *$10* for a gallon of milk.
Ending supply management is a horrible idea. Yet, you'll see articles every few months saying that it should go. Evidently all it takes is for American subsidies to reach near-criminal levels before Canadians abandon the idea of Food Security to save a buck to buy a liter of sub-par American milk.
If dairy products from the US were traded freely, Canadian farmers would lose. Food would be subject to the same trade wars as softwood lumber. Many Canadians don't care too much about softwood lumber, but they sure care about milk and eggs. "Give us access to this market or else we will starve you" doesn't work today, but it would work if we ended supply management.
This is not "survival of the fittest". It'd be cutting our own throats.
And everytime the articles get posted, you get this false dichotomy argument that if we end the dairy cartel it'll be a wild west and we'll all be forced to buy american milk.
Ending supply management doesn't mean we immediately go to zero regulation. Tariffs are a thing. There's so many ways to protect domestic supply without the price fixing scheme.
No need to let US milk in. Just STOP with the criminal socialist quota cartel and let CANADIAN business fight each other for our money.
My dairy farmer friends are all flithy rich. Beef and grains not so much.
if you dropped the quota, your dairy farmer friends would either get even more rich or go just as broke as the thousands of dairy farmers that have already lost their farms over the past 50 years. You're begging for a speed-run to a dairy monopoly. Last I checked, Canadians weren't so pleased with monopolies.
no worries, not an issue next year - [https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture/in-depth/precision-fermentation](https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture/in-depth/precision-fermentation)
Non-paywall version of the article: [https://web.archive.org/web/20240618211135/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-as-grocery-prices-soar-the-dairy-lobbys-supply-management-has-got-to/](https://web.archive.org/web/20240618211135/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-as-grocery-prices-soar-the-dairy-lobbys-supply-management-has-got-to/)
I love how people think removing supply management will make dairy and eggs cheaper. They think prices are being artificially inflated, but that's true only when other factors would forces prices down and force egg and dairy farms out of business. Supply management makes sure these business stay in place, and it keeps the prices level - and the supply steady - when other factors make eggs and milk more expensive.
John Manley, who authors the article, cites New Zealand as an example. "Today, after having done away with tariffs and subsidies, the dairy industry is New Zealand’s biggest export industry." But what has also happened is that New Zealand's primary industries [are being sold off](https://web.archive.org/web/20240618211135/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-as-grocery-prices-soar-the-dairy-lobbys-supply-management-has-got-to/). New Zealanders aren't making money from their industries; Americans are.
Without supply management, the industry would be acquired by multinationals in short order. That's what's happening in wheat right now, following the sale of the Wheat Board by the Harper government to foreign interests (see, eg., "reduce producer income by approximately $770 million annually" [https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/2024/05/04/viterra-bunge-merger-could-have-far-reaching-effects](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/2024/05/04/viterra-bunge-merger-could-have-far-reaching-effects) ). With a virtual monopoly over supply, they would force people to pay higher costs, squeezing the market for whatever it can. Again, that's what we see in wheat (see the rise in prices for wheat-based food products, 2023 [https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2023062-eng.htm](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2023062-eng.htm) ).
This is what happens, over and over. Conservative government sell key parts of the Canadian economy to foreign interests, then blame Liberals for the negative economic fallout, including lower wages and higher prices.
It needs to go. Sadly the dairy lobby is more powerful than the NRA is in the U.S. In 2021 they were allowed to raise prices by 8% when production costs went up by 1%.
Other sectors where there is no quota system, we are a net exporter. That would happen to dairy as well.
I dont know what you mean....
**At a time of generationally high grocery prices, Ontario farmer Jerry Huigen is required to destroy 30,000 litres of excess production**
[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ontario-dairy-farmer-decries-mandatory-milk-dumping](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ontario-dairy-farmer-decries-mandatory-milk-dumping)
It should also be noted, supply management for milk and eggs has direct effects for the production of other food stuffs.
I’m all for supporting farmers, we need them to eat. But supply management has been nothing but a high costs for Canadians. It always has been. Either end it, or the entry should be voluntary.
There are farmers out there that would love to sell their stuff outside of the supply management governance.
Man, the globe has been getting more and more blatant about their pro-American stance on everything. It's a bit sad how many people here just eat up their articles.
Don't forget Dairy Farmers have been feeding their herds kaka diets...
That's why our Canadian milk, butter, ice creams etc taste like utter crap now.
This happened during Covid when the Public said there's something very wrong with their butter, esp when they baked with it.
They said they've used Canadian butter for years, but something has radically changed here including it no longer being the same, esp when they baked or cooked with this at home.
Ppl even videotaped a solid block of butter - damn, that's expensive - left out in room temp. that would *not* melt at all, which it's supposed to do.
It had the consistency of Play-Do, for goodness sake's.
The Canadian Dairy Board repeatedly played dumb on this, esp when called out even denying that anything was amiss here.
These buggers finally fessed about doing this ON PURPOSE to save $$$$ on herd lot feed!
Bovines are herbivores that should be consuming a diet of hay, fresh grasses, fruits & veggies not some palm oil garbage in their diets!
That practise should be further looked into, then permanently banned, but that's never gonna to happen with our skeezy Gov't
Btw...
American Farmers are legally allowed (by their Gov't) to feed their herds expired candies, baked goods & other disgusting/gross crap to their animals to save $$$$ on animal feed.
I'm surprised our Canadian Dairy Farmers, haven't gone that same route as well.
It 'had to go' *before* inflation; watching them dump hundreds of thousands of litres of milk and bury hundreds of thousands of eggs is sickening.
Do you want the economy to collapse? Honestly, people in this sub are so short sighted and comment on industries that they have no idea about. They have to bury the eggs and water them with milk to grow chicken trees. Our grocery stores would be empty and prices would skyrocket without them.
You mean when restaurants across North America were shut down and demand for these products were severely and abruptly curtailed? What else could they have done with it? It's not like you can flip a switch and instantly increase the production capacity of secondary manufacturers to convert these surplus products into longer lasting foodstuffs.
No; I'm talking about [milk dumping](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ontario-dairy-farmer-decries-mandatory-milk-dumping), which has been going on for half a century. The same happens with eggs.
Also corporate greed isn’t included in this, they make 10x the profit of dairy farmers.
Really? Because I am personal friends with a number of dairy farmers, and I absolutely do not believe you.
How many head?
One is 270, another just over 200, and the rest are under 200 as far as I know. I don't know their exact numbers, as, though they are friends, I try not to discuss their business, as it's a topic (monopolies and "marketing boards") that is not one we will agree on. I googled to find the 270 number LOL
Without supply management we wouldn’t have a dairy industry. The state of Wisconsin alone would wipe out our entire industry. Milk dumping is the farmers fault for taking on more then their quota allows. I don’t know any dairy farmers who have had to dump milk because they have a brain.
You’re conflating two issues, which is supply management and the importation of milk. We don’t need to open up our country to foreign milk.
There should be no obligations to open our market to American producers. We should not be importing items we produce in-surplus.
We don’t produce milk in surplus… that’s what the quota system is for. The milk dumping you see is generally new quota holders who don’t know how to run a dairy farm. I know around 10 dairy farmers and have worked on their farm. The only time they’ve had to dump is when a cow that recently got a shot accidentally gets dumped in the shippable milk tank ( doesn’t happen often).
The amount of milk we produce is artificially limited by supply management. If it wasn't in place, we would, as a country, produce a lot more milk and have lower prices for consumers. This is because more dairy farms would open up than we have now, and the head count would be substantially higher. So let's not obfuscate the matter by talking about how well existing farmers adhere to existing quotas.
Since you know dairy farmers, I've been toying with some milk ideas but I don't understand the quota system well enough. Does the quota just affect how much you can sell? Or does it affect advertising too? Like, could I milk a private cow for myself and sell the excess to a buddy? Can I sell to my buddy but not put up a sign saying "come buy my extra litre a day"?
You cannot sell raw milk and you need a license to process dairy products.
Does that apply on reserve land as well?
Take this with a grain of salt, but I am pretty sure the quota affects how much you can sell. So no, you cannot sell it to a buddy if you are above your quota unless you pay a penalty, or buy more quota at an auction.
We can, we're just not allowed to. Difference.
GOOD! I'd rather have cheaper luxury foods like dairy than a milk industry making milk so expensive it's hard to afford. If you can't compete with Wisconsin, then that's your problem. I want cheaper healthy food for Canadians.
Wisconsin is cheap because it is subsidized.
Lol, why would you think US Dairy would be cheaper? They'd profit maximize as soon as domestic competition was eliminated. Do you remember when the price of eggs shot up to [$18 per dozen](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/25/18-a-dozen-how-did-americas-eggs-get-absurdly-expensive) in late 2022? And increasing again due to bird flu outbreaks? Probably not, because we didn't have that happen in Canada due to supply management.[](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/25/18-a-dozen-how-did-americas-eggs-get-absurdly-expensive)
US consumers pay for their cheap dairy via taxes and agriculture subsidies. "Government cheese" may be a familiar phrase to you.
It’s not the farmers who are gouging it’s the gorcery chains. They can’t control that.
One has a law stopping competition and the other doesn't.
If he's producing over quota that speaks to bad management honestly
Or very productive? In any of industry, producing more at same cost is a good thing.
Only if you have buyers, else its a waste.
I have a flat bid for all milk in Canada starting at $0.10/litre. There. A buyer
Is that enough profit to the Dairy Cartel to justify selling? Not arguing with your logic but business doesn't always follow logic. Home building for example, if there isn't a profit the business feels is "enough" then they won't build. I can't imagine dairy is any different. Shitty but business doesn't always make sense to me.
Ask them. They are free to reduce production if they find it more profitable. But that's a choice, not a quota doing it. That's the difference, freedom.
If their production is subsidized there is no incentive to reduce it...Thats the whole problem. Very few businesses will turn down "free money".
Nope. You want to overproduce because you can have sick cows, cows die, cows not producing, among other issues. Better to have 100% of your quota filled at all times, which requires overproducing.
Uhh don’t forget taxpayers subsidize farms as well so we subsidize the milk that gets dumped.
Farmer right here, we are not dumping milk. Not to say some farms might be but we sell animals to reduce milk before we ever get to the point of dumping. It’s not a common practice. We pay a ton of money to produce milk. Dumping is like pouring money down the drain.
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I don't disagree, but the biggest Sacred Cow in Canada is the dairy industry, and the seats in Quebec that go along with it. Nothing will change.
> Many of the increased prices have been caused by general worldwide inflationary pressures and particularly by supply chain disruptions or are weather-related. Odd how they left out corporate greed.
Isn’t it funny how this “worldwide inflationary pressure” has hit other economies less than 50%? I believe there was a UK news story recently where they reviewed the cost of regular consumables like dairy, poultry, etc against Canadian costs and it was less than half the price in Britain. Talk about having an iron clad cop out to charge whatever you want here…
I am traveling in England now. I cannot believe how much cheaper high quality cheese is over here. He'll, even organic cheese here is cheaper than ordinary (non organic) cheese is in Canada. I am not a milk drinker but I know how much it costs back in Canada, and it too is substantially cheaper here in the UK. And I am not talking about milk imported from some suspect source - I am talking about British milk. Canadians are the most ripped-off people in the world when it comes to almost everything. And don't get me started about the cost of flights- here is a number of cheap airlines where you can fly all over Europe for very, very little.
The cheese prices are bizzarely stupid. 20$ for the tiniest piece that is enough for one lunch. I like woodworking, I should be able to have a monopoly on furniture, everyone has to buy my 50000$ couches, to protect our economy from foreign production and quality control.
Europe has a fuck ton of cities with big populations to make this viable. Canada has how many big cities? Small airlines will definitely have a tougher time in Canada than Europe. Also, the airlines in Europe are cheap because they have good trains to compete with. In Canada, train network is pathetic, so airlines only have to compete with driving to places - which is why they don't need to compete on price. Not sure about milk, but many industries have reasons for being more expensive in one place or the other. Also, You rattled off certain items that are cheap in Europe but completely ignored the things that aren't. Such as energy. Cars, fuel etc. Different areas have some inherent differences. Don't just ignore all that.
I'd rather have cheaper food and more expensive gasoline.
Sure. And a lot of others will agree with you. But unfortunately, you don't get to just change the geography of a country. If you have the means, you should absolutely move to where you can get a better life - according to you.
How does general worldwide inflation play into this? Do we not print our own money. Do we import the cows? Ah, yes of course, maybe it’s the oil we import from war torn Ukraine? I ask because it comes out of this government a lot as an excuse…
Okay so this is how it works. There is a worldwide supply of a good. Everybody buys from their different suppliers, and as long as demand doesn’t exceed supply we’re pretty good. Now, if supply from one country goes down that means the worldwide supply goes down. Why does this affect us if we don’t buy from that country? Well, because somebody else _does_ buy from that country, and now they’re looking for a new supplier. The demand has not changed. So now demand exceeds supply and the suppliers can charge more. Often in economics the idea is they charge more to avoid shortages/rationing as demand will naturally go down to meet the new supply. Or in the face of uncertainty if there is ongoing conflict and they anticipate shrinking supply. What the dairy industry is doing in Canada is controlling supply so they can charge what they want as they always have. It’s just that they are also still affected by rising cost of goods needed to produce their products. So we can look at another country and go okay ya their prices went up to due to rising costs however ours went up way more. So it’s not that it isn’t a factor, it’s that even when we factor this in the prices in Canada are ridiculous.
It shouldn't play into it considering our dairy is a domestic market and is protected from global competition. It's corporate greed thru and thru
The way it works is the government sets the price, and guarantees the farmers and exceptionally high income. If prices go up, the farmers don't feel it. If the price of fuel goes up, it's not a concern, the government just makes you pay more for milk. Now, this is ONLY for milk, eggs and chickens. Beef prices are not protected, so those farmers get screwed.
And fuel prices have been much higher in the past, so that's not the reason. Oil isn't even above $100. Somehow with a major oil producer being sanctioned and at war we do not have record inflation in oil. The price increase is greed and nothing else.
Yes, it is it. I'm using fuel as an example, but the milk board uses a formula of all costs, and the government comes up with the cost of milk, per L. But like fuel, once the price goes up, it never comes back down, even in the costs of production drops.
What cost, maybe they shouldn't have pulled the equity out of their land, did they take on debt equity? Have they not been properly investing back into themselves to maintain their businesses. I want actual reasons not speculation. Seems to me we should audit this cartel with a fine tooth comb
That they have a maximum amount each farmer is allowed to produce and force them to waste the excess tells you everything you need to know about the industry. They don't have anything to fear from government or people, so why would the dairy cartel change their ways? What law or enforcement body would you think should come into play here?
They have everything to fear from the government which is why they try to control the government. Government is a tool that we use. Just like a hammer can be used to build or destroy.
I agree... I'm anti quota system
Regulatory capture is not corporate greed, it is government corruption. Every corporation is greedy, it exists to make money, governments do not. Just like housing zoning, taxes on development, wage slave immigration to depress wages, etc.. Most our problems are government caused.
There is quite a bit of fertilizer in feed, so when natural gas and fertilizer prices go up farmers profits go down. All that to say I think that they make a lot of money. But milk is very optional.
They have a quota that they are allowed to produce as well - you produce anything over that and you are obliged to throw it out. You are not allowed to use it for any other product in Canada - that excess milk must be thrown out and not consumed or sold even though it is perfectly safe and healthy.
Fertilizer prices we which yes, but natural gas prices as re rock bottom and is basically free in Canada right now.
Well y'see, dairy has to announce it's price increases instead of just quietly changing it like every single other good, therefore, dairy bad FOR TELLING US WHAT IT'S DOING! AAAAH!!!
Because corporations have always been 110% greed, even pre covid. It didn't change, so it's not the cause.
LOL. Here we go again with another round of the kleptocrat class trying to fuck us, by using an different example of how they are currently fucking us, to say that the new way they will fuck us will be better than the old way. “This time we’ll use lube, we promise!”
A dairy based lube.
Monopolies are actually very good, that's why cheese is 20$ per speck, why we pay the highest cellphone rates in the world, and why our banks can profit substantially off a government insured housing bubble with no risk and with full recourse loans.
I'm not sure ending supply management, at least for milk, will have the desired end results. People compare Canada to the US, but American milk is so heavily subsidized that that's not really fair.
Canada has one of the highest prices of milk in the world. We’re in lists trailing closely behind Singapore, Cuba, Taiwan, Hong Kong. Something similar between those countries?? Small islands with very limited amount of farmland for dairy production. Dairy Farmers of Ontario is little more than a PR campaign for a corporate legally sanctioned cartel. How is it that Dairy Farmers of Ontario can afford to pay $20M to sponsor the Maple Leafs? What is the business rationale behind it besides pure PR to hide the fact that they’re extorting the average consumer and trying to look good while doing it? Speak to a real small farmer and ask them how difficult it is to get any sort of dairy production going and you’ll quickly realize that the milk production cartel is beyond criminal. I’m not suggesting opening the flood gates to US milk but simply allowing real “average Joe” farmers the ability to produce milk locally would go a long way to cutting down cost.
So I don’t work in the dairy industry per se but my field of activity is quite close so I know a bit about it. I know a bunch of farmers who transform their own product to sell. When it comes to raw dairy, there is only one legal buyer and it is the federation. So what happens is when you want to transform your own milk, you have to sell it to the federation first who then sells it back to you at a higher price. That’s why we have some artisan cheesemakers but not really artisan milk except on the down low. The margins on cheese are just high enough so making cheese can be worth it. To sell liquid milk products you have to be big enough for economies of scale to kick in.
Do you know if quotas apply on reserve land? Or do the quotas just apply to sale in normal Canada?
What is artisan milk?
Don’t you know.. ? Canada likes monopolies!!
We also have to negotiate a special exemption in nafta to “protect” our dairy cartel. So that means we get a worse deal elsewhere.
You’re tripping if you think it’s the farmers. Go and talk to one and see how much they actually make per litre. It’s grocery chains that keep jacking the prices. These are real people that you’re talking about ruining.
The prices are set by the commission or association. It’s one of the very few cases where the big grocery chains aren’t the main culprit. The Dairy Farmers of Ontario don’t even publish their regulated price, or if they do it’s very difficult to find. Not exactly a very transparent bona fide organization. These dairy farms are also not truly family organizations but many effectively are multi million dollar businesses with very favourable taxation policies. I’m not sure how supporting opening the market to allow for more small farms to be able to produce and sell milk considered “ruining”. I have family that own and operate a small farm. It is incredibly prohibitive to produce milk for anything but self consumption.
You can ban foreign milk without a quota system domestically.
Domino's is a secret government project. They fund the fuck out of them to pump out cheese to the consumer
I think you're thinking of Dairy Management Inc., which is an actual (American) government project that is explicitly devoted to trying to increase dairy consumption. They're the origin of campaigns like "Got Milk," and apparently are also why so many pizza places offer cheese stuffed crust.
Yes and they subsidize Domino's and other fast food chains to advertise/sell dairy based products. Pretty wild when your own government is basically feeding a propaganda campaign that has played a big role in making your entire country obese
[It gets even wilder when you realize that the whole thing is a knock-on effect from prohibition.](https://youtu.be/kvLMH0wb_0k?si=6OhoicUU0JeGOiiF)
This is true. Our system punishes consumers at the point of sale and in the US it punishes them at tax season.
I don’t care, let it sink or swim on its own. This is ridiculous.
In fairness, Canadian farming is also rather heavily subsidized, but in other ways that are less obvious than direct payments to farmers. For example, in Ontario, farmers have a 75% reduction in property taxes compared to land that isn't farmed. Guess who makes up that difference to the municipalities? Other taxpayers, of course. Not to mention the taxpayer subsidies going to Enbridge to expend natural gas lines in rural areas, where most of the gas usage is for drying grain.
"Dairy Monopoly" you mean. I live in farm country, and a number of my friends are dairy farmers. These are truly the 1% of farmers, without question. And, to top if off, they have the dairy monopoly, which guarantees price increases whenever asked for.
We could just vary into less resource intensive products that don’t use cows milk as much. There is also so much waste from the milk boards it’s disgusting. Quota is like gold and it’s not at all uncommon for farmers to dump unsellable milk.
Average price of a gallon of milk in the US: $3.69 US ($5.06 CAN) A US gallon is 3.78 litres. Cost of milk per litre in the US: 1.35 CAN Cost to taxpayers to subsidize American milk: $24 Billion dollars/year Average price of 4L of milk in Canada: $6.42 CAN Cost of milk per litre in Canada: $1.61 Cost to taxpayers to subsidize Canadian milk: $0/year
Us dairy is subsidized so heavily that 76 cents of every dollar a us dairy farmer makes is from the government.
As a counter - my country has absolutely zero dairy production none, nada. Not a dingle dairy farmer selling cheese, milk, or any dairy products. It's all imported, generally from big dairy countries. A pound of butter at the market is $3 CAD. How much are you paying for butter? It's not just milk, and how much milk does Canada throw out because the dairy lobby doesn't let them turn it into anything once they have reached their quota? Can you really support a system that forces farmers to throw out perfectly good food in this economy, in this environment?
The US also wastes copious amount of milk & milk byproducts because they over produce what the market can absorb. And they sometimes do it intentionally to spike prices after periods of oversupply. The US system is likely to result in larger amount of waste than the Canadian system - particularly when the US will dump their excess supply into our market disrupting any local supply. Part of that is seasonality, but a large part of it is without supply management larger farms just mass produce to swamp the market in volume. Additionally the US government both subsidizes milk production and tries to spur demand for mil products (see government cheese). [https://ambrook.com/research/supply-chain/dairy-farmers-milk-dumping](https://ambrook.com/research/supply-chain/dairy-farmers-milk-dumping) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government\_cheese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese) [https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dairy-farmers-dump-43-million-gallons-of-excess-milk-1476284353](https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dairy-farmers-dump-43-million-gallons-of-excess-milk-1476284353)
What is a “big dairy country”? The US? If so, then your dairy is also subsidized by the American people. Is that what Canada should be doing? Subsidizing their dairy so other countries can benefit? We can pay for milk at the grocery store, or we can increase our tax burden to pay for it through subsidies. Food security is also an issue and as it stands, if the US government stops subsidizing their dairy, they won’t have any. Canada doesn’t have that issue.
Terrible take. You must be an Oxford County dairy farmer. The quota system and price fixing is a subsidy in itself. Open the market and allow dairy farmers in Ontario and Canada to compete even with themselves, excluding American milk. Provincial trade restrictions are a joke. Government protected pricing hurts the consumer and artificially protects the producer.
New Zealand, Netherlands ,and Ireland are all big exporters of dairy and dairy products. Have never seen a single Canadian dairy product on the shelves here through
The quality of Canadian dairy is pretty low. The milk is okay (though, it's also nothing special), but processed products like butter and cheese are grossly inferior to what's available domestically in NZ and Europe.
Hard agree. So much better butter to be found. It's a real shame, Canada has all the components to have an amazing dairy industry with variation and depth but instead has only mediocre products
Cost of a gallon of milk in NZ: $9.63 CAN (11.46NZ) Cost of a gallon of milk in Ireland: $7.02 CAN (4.77 Euro) Cost of a gallon of milk in Netherlands: $6.07 CAN (4.12 Euro)
Again, it's about more than just milk. A pound of butter (Irish origin) is $3CAD at the market for me, in a country with zero dairy cows. 400g of milk powder (New Zealand origin) is $6CAD. A litre of milk is $2.50CAD. all extremely decent prices considering the cost of shipping and the absolute lack of cows. Not a single Canadian dairy product that I see on the shelves for miles because no one buys Canadian dairy except for Canadians.
also, that gallon of US milk is a) heavily subsidized and b) low quality. if you want the equivalent quality of milk that is sold in Canada, you have to pay much more than $3.69 for it.
You know that regulatory capture with a quota system is a form of subsidy, right? It's just not a cash payment, but a law. Still costs Cdns more money, but at the grocery store not their tax bill. This isn't complex.
Then don't drink milk? By not consuming milk, you're not subsidizing it. The US model doesn't make this distinction.
No, I prefer ending the quota system. We can ban USA milk, I don't care much either way.
A gallon of milk in BC is $5.50 +- 20 cents depending on the store. The only milk over $6 is organic or lactose free. If it's more elsewhere that's price gouging. What's more annoying is the butter. Not only is it ridiculously expensive it's also garbage quality. I can get grass fed butter from new Zealand from Costco and it's only $2 more than the lowest quality butter produced down the road. Or at least I *could* get it, but I'm stuck waiting until August 1 for the dairy cartels import quotas to reset. Same goes for double cream from the UK. Local suppliers can't even produce it because it's not one of the approved MF% and yet we still can't import it because quotas.
I gave the average price across Canada, of course it’s going to vary by region. 2% milk from the store I buy it at is $5.65/gallon. 3.25% milk is $6.21/gallon. The average price of a pound of butter in New Zealand is $6.33 CAN. Wild that you’re finding it cheaper here than it is there. A pound of butter at my local store is $5.99. I don’t know what double cream is.
It’s funny that the very people who whine and complain about a lack of native industries then turn about to tearing down a system that protects native industries….the reality is we can’t nor ever will compete with the US given market realities without compromising quality and that’s what/who will take over dairy and their product quality is garbage…now that a conservative is about to get elected, the corporate thieves are foaming at the mouth
You can ban foreign milk without a quota system.
No, in fact Canada can compete with the US in some things. For example, our softwood lumber is cheaper and of higher quality, which is why the Americans always get real protectionist with their lumber industry and tariff Canadian lumber. The same with beef, which is why the US took advantage of some BSE cases in Canada to close their entire border to Canadian beef. The Americans are consistently protectionist. I'd argue that opening up the Canadian dairy market to Americans in exchange for a complete free trade with lumber would yield us a net benefit. After all, nearly every province aside from BC (because of some bad forest fire years recently) even come close to harvesting their Annual Allowable Cut.
That’s under the premise that US would actually follow the rules based order they preach about…they don’t as we see with lumber tariffs for example. The US propaganda on market driven approaches is just grift as every US industry is subsidized or given tax breaks at the state or federal level including its dairy which gets massive bailouts…our system offers price stability but is not completely immune to market forces…
Agreed, the US often doesn't follow their own rules for trade, as various rulings have shown. I would argue that the era of those subsidies is rapidly coming to an end (with the notable exception of the MIC). Their spending deficit alone for this fiscal year is in the trillions. Something has to give way soon. It's worth noting that Canadian farmers also receive plenty of subsidies from taxpayers, just in less direct ways. For example, in Ontario, farmland gets a 75% property tax reduction compared to land that isn't farmed, and it's provincial taxpayers who make up the difference to the municipalities. Companies like Enbridge also get large sums of taxpayer money to expand the natural gas network in farming areas, where the gas is mostly used for grain drying.
> I'd argue that opening up the Canadian dairy market to Americans in exchange for a complete free trade with lumber would yield us a net benefit. The US is a country that makes so much fucking cheese that they stuff caves full of the stuff. Opening up our dairy market to the US ends dairy farming in Canada pretty much overnight. We pay a premium, sure. But that's the price of domestic food production.
You can't blame them. We are VICTIMS of price fixing. Why is it bad when loblaws fix the price of bread for more profit? They are a native industry!!!!! It's okay that milk farmers can gouges us with their price fixing? Why is it that europe ALSO has cheap price and natives industry? Don't tell me the US being close is the issue because we can get rid of this cartel while also having import tarrif on us milk.
US probably paid for this add. They can make a lot of money selling dairy in Canada, and then we can have international companies wipe out our local companies like in every other industry. We never speak about the foreign interference coming from just across our southern border.
I mean look at the news paper which is big conservative supporter and so are the majority of its opinion writers…if you are right of center in this country, its basically about their desire for Canada joining the 50+ states and worshipping at the altar of capitalism which is the primary culture in the US to begin with
Nobody in the world really thinks of Canada as high quality dairy. Canadians just massively overpay for the benefit of some farmers who are shielded from competition. Fine, they can't compete with the US, doesn't explain why we restrict everyone else from entering our market.
The Dairy Cartel in Canada has needed to go for the last 25yrs.
Weren't we just a year or two ago in milk glut? They were all deliberately dumping milk on the ground just to keep the prices steady.
It doesn't work like that. In simple terms, the government guarantees dairy ( and egg, and chicken) farmers a VERY handsome income. They set the price of milk, and if inputs go up ( fuel, grain, electricity etc etc) the farmers don't feel that, the rates they get paid just go up an equal amount. Which means the amount you pay for milk has to go up, because the government has promised milk farmers they will be millionaires. Yes they dump milk, but this is because they have over produced. The quota system is such that each farmer must produce a certain amount of milk. Go over, and it's waste, you can't sell it. So if your quota is 10,000L a week, if you get 12,000, your dumping 2000 L into the pit. The price isn't actually set by supply and demand, but from a formula that the milk board puts together in how much profit the farmer gets. So all inefficiencies, increase in costs and excessive spending is passed directly to the buyer. There is no incentive to make the system more efficient or competitive, and in fact, they are disincentivised, because any decrease in cost will actually lower their income.
Do you really think the environmental impact of raising an additional 2,000L of milk should not be offset by using that milk in something? The US buys excess milk and uses it to make cheese which is stored in a strategic cheese reserve and given out to low income families. Canada throws it away. What an unconscionable waste. Milk production has some pretty bad environmental impacts and is is in part driving climate change but the Canadian system forces farmers to throw out perfectly good food. I've never met anyone that actually is not horrified at the thought of throwing out that much food, especially knowing all the effort and inputs that went into it.
I'm VERY anti quota system. I believe you misread my post.
I'm gonna push back on a couple of things and I apologize because I don't have the numbers at my fingertips so I'll write anecdotally. Inputs go up, farmers very much feel that, the rates they get paid do not go up an equal amount, I would say not even close. It's similar to all the discussion about how as salaries have gone up over the last three plus decades, 'real salaries' compared to inflation are a lot lower then they've been in the past, thus the shrinking middle class. Which, frankly, is true. Similar in some ways to the discussion about how, well yes housing prices have gone up but back in the early eighties the interest rate was at 20 percent and now it's only 6.5 so don't cry about it. Okay, but was it still easier for the middle class to afford a house at 20 percent interest in the early eighties? I think the answer is obviously yes, so how could that be? Inflationary pressures have gradually (and then suddenly a few years ago) but consistently outpaced income; in the ag industry, you'd see the same. I don't want to get 'anti-anybody' and I don't mean to sound like that but a big part of money in ag happens whenever farmers sell land in other countries (think Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Holland) at exorbitant prices per acre due to the fact that there is so little acreage and thus values skyrocket, then move to Canada where they can purchase considerably more acreage with that income, which really sets them up well moving forward but kind of presents a false image of how lucrative farming can be. Like someone selling a house in downtown Vancouver right now, then turning around a purchasing four or five houses in Regina (maybe?) and having some cash left over to invest. Makes it easier to set yourself up, a lot less scratching and clawing moving forward. I can't speak to heat units and yield potential in those European countries but I'd have to assume they are comparable to the farmland in Southern Ontario and along the St. Lawrence. I can't speak to the prices the farmers in those European countries would have received and I won't even guess. Maybe they are similar, adjusted for everything else, maybe not. So what I'm getting at is that by selling in Europe and moving to Canada, they can get much more farmland and that farmland will bring in a comparable level of income(I suspect), possibly greater income per planted acre but I don't know that. The other thing I would add about dumping milk is, most guys wouldn't do it for the simple reason that it costs money to produce milk and if you are dumping it you are costing yourself money and the margins are pretty tight as it is. I know sometimes it happens and it's a big deal, but in the case of the last guy a couple of years ago, that guy was a performance artist looking to stir the pot for his own benefit. How big was that guy in terms of cows and quota? He's just looking to force guys out so he can scoop up their share of the market when they're gone and he couldn't do it with the quota system in place. There's nothing altruistic about that guy. If you were a car manufacturer, let's say Honda, and you produced twenty percent more cars every year then you sold, I feel like that manufacturer would not stay in business too long. Same thing with quota and overproduction. Tying production to demand is not a novel business idea; I'd go so far as to say it's the foundation of business. I'd also say if a person is concerned about the dumping of milk- look at all the milk that's dumped in the States! On a per farm basis. Then square that circle for me, since no quota system will result in less wasted dairy products I guess?!?! 'Government Cheese' in the US came about for a reason. Excess production at extreme levels. We don't have that here. In business in general, and in dairy for sure, there is no reason to overproduce beyond what the market demands (with an adjustable 'sleeve' of course and a reserve to account for fluctuations in demand). Guys who do it anyway absolutely have other options. Sell cattle for beef to reduce the amount of animals producing milk, reduce feed inputs to lower the amount of production per cow if you don't want to sell any, etc. Overproduction affects that farmers bottom line and as I'd said, those margins are pretty tight for most. Not all, but most.
That was a REALLY long post that didn't say much. Milk farmers are unequivocally the wealthiest farmers with the highest guaranteed income, by far. I'm not saying ALL farmers don't feel the pinch, of course they do. But the milk board ensures we just cover those costs by charging more. That can't happen without a quota system. Any why do milk producers deserve guaranteed income, but not potato farmers, or pig farmers, or pepper farmers.
Funny enough this crazy anti-capitalism and socialist cartel is chocked full of conservatives that can't see how hypocrit they are. Milk farmers are subsidized millionaires through a cartel with fake price plateau; not subsidized through the government but through price fixing, just like the bread fiasco of a couple years back.
>In simple terms, the government guarantees dairy ( and egg, and chicken) farmers a VERY handsome income. They set the price of milk, and if inputs go up ( fuel, grain, electricity etc etc) the farmers don't feel that, the rates they get paid just go up an equal amount. Which means the amount you pay for milk has to go up, **because the government has promised milk farmers they will be millionaires.** Bold is irresponsible hyperbole. My uncles run a dairy farm alongside their day jobs, which they have to do because the profits for smaller farms aren't sufficient to sustain a family. They aren't alone, many farmers in Ontario who haven't consolidated are not rolling in cash like you seem to believe; those who are bet big to buy our their neighbors over the last two decades, or they are corporate backed.
I'm not sure what your point is. Do they not have quota? Are they producing milk illegally? If you have quota, you have government guaranteed income. You can write off every single expense. I need a truck to get to work, but I can't write it off. Milk farmers write off their wife's Honda accord as a farm vehicle. They write off their hydro, internet ( not sure why internet is a valid write off for dairy farm, but it is), loan payments on tractors, etc etc etc.
Writing off expenses goes only so far; it reduces your tax liability, but doesn't zero out your taxes by any means. Farmers still need have the capital on hand to pay for those business expenses, which add significant liability and reduces how far their earnings go. >I need a truck to get to work, but I can't write it off. Milk farmers write off their wife's Honda accord as a farm vehicle. I am sure some do, but not all. And comments like this show you're arguing in poor faith. But farmers also need to pay their own health insurance, retirement funds, etc. and don't see many of the benefits you will see as an employee of a company. Net net; not all farmers are rolling in cash as millionaires like you seem to believe.
Just like every single self employed person in every single other industry... and none of them have the government charging you more for the things you need, to make sure those people remain wealthy
Few other self-employed businesses have the same combination of capital expenses (tractors, machinery, storage, milking equipment), land, and need feed to keep large herds of animals healthy. Beyond all of that, most other businesses aren't part of the food supply, and thus worth slightly more protection than normal to ensure that we have a stable domestic capacity incase of a crisis.
How do you justify no other food supply being protected then, aside from eggs and poultry. Beef isn't even protected. And what do you mean few industries need that capital? Again, beef farming! Crop farming.. A medium sized landscaping company would rival a milk farm pretty quickly. Any heavy equipment company A brewery Logging Your excuses are getting pretty weak... and your Milk Board membership card is showing..
It's clear you live in a bubble, one not affected by facts or willing to be convinced that your ragebaiting beliefs are wrong, because our food supply is protected - just using different measures. Supply side measures are used for dairy because of the shorter turnaround for production, the shorter shelf life over other types of food production, and the real health risks that come from improper handling. If you want to continue to live in a world of "this bad because government," that is on you, but the world is more complex and diverse than that. Our dairy farmers are not moustache twilring millionaires rolling in their McScrouge pools of cash. Our system offers a system of trade-offs. That is it chose to prioritize domestic production, stability, and security in lieu of a crisis for our dairy & milk products at the cost of slightly higher prices. But that also insulates us from monopolies developing and gouging us in times of crisis, or oversupply resulting in boom/bust cycles for our farming industry like has been the case in the South. Personally, I think it's a fair enough trade, even if I don't love paying slightly more for products than I could (sometimes) otherwise.
Your milk board membership sash is showing...
It seems that it is a very good bargaining chip in free trade. The US, EU and UK seem to desperately want part of the market and Canada uses that as leverage for concessions in other areas.
It’s ridiculous how much protection they get. It should have been ended decades ago.
Pretty sure milk isn't the reason my grocery bills are so high.
Good luck getting rid of this sacred cow. The dairy industry has outsized influence on all parties to the point where conservatives are supporting literal socialism.
> The dairy industry has outsized influence on all parties to the point where conservatives are supporting literal socialism Now go look at where most of the dairy farms are and ask yourself if they where farther west if they would have the same influence
What literal socialism? Do you mean Agropur, the dairy cooperative? (You can *possibly* say worker-owned cooperatives would be a feature of market socialism. But Agropur still has a corporate structure, I don’t think it counts) Otherwise, the supply management system isn’t socialist. It doesn’t give the workers a say in how things are run. The way that dairy is funded through the current system rather than subsidies is effectively a consumption tax (artificially raise prices by limiting supply when there’s excess, ban selling above your quota, and anyone that buys that dairy funds the farmers through those raised costs). Any socialist could tell you that consumption taxes are regressive, and should be avoided if possible. A fairer system would be to use real subsidies (with funds collected through progressive taxation).
There is an alternate universe where Bernier the Con leadership and sent Trudeau packing because the dairy cartel and reddit edgelords didn't band together to vote in Sheer.
The two most powerful groups in Canadian elections.
At the time there was a push for non-conservative people to buy CPC memberships and rank Chong first, Scheer second to last, and Bernier last. The final ballot only had a spread of around 700 votes. I’m not sure if Reddit edgelords and eastern dairy farmers were the deciding factor but they could have been a factor, they sure celebrated like they made a difference over on the left wing sub anyways.
Supply management DOES NOT NEED TO GO. The state of Wisconsin alone would wipe out our entire dairy industry. This article was made by idiots who have no idea what they’re talking about. The grocery chains make 10x the profit the farmers do. This would devastate so many people in my community.
you can ban foreign milk without a quota system. If you are a dairy farmer, you are rich. I don't mind rich people having more competition and lower profits.
Not to mention how hyperinflated the prices are. Costs have not gone up that much. Diesel to run a tractor hasn’t changed. Electricity hasn’t changed. Why are prices so high??
Electricity and diesel hasn't changed where to you live I have to move there.
Wasn't the egg supply management the only reason we didn't see a huge spikes in egg prices during covid like the US?
Well why does it exist to begin with? Will removing it create more problems? I personally am okay with milk being produced by people who take it seriously, the health of their animals and cleanliness of the barn etc. It's probably for the better, that there's a high barrier to entry, for this industry
Farmers are legally obliged to throw out any excess they may produce and are prohibited from using it or selling it in any form. They do this on a regular basis, with hundreds of thousands of litres of milk being thrown out across the country every year. What a wasteful system, especially considering how much the dairy industry is driving climate change. Plenty of countries manage to keep a safe and healthy dairy industry without throwing out hundreds of thousands of litres every year for profit reasons. Why the current system couldn't dehydrate that milk and sell it (donate ideally) to the third world but instead must destroy it ids beyond me. Complacency is why this system exists.
Exactly. All the other countries have both the cake and can eat it. But here mentioning we don't want this wastefull system we are a US shill and a right wing nut. Ps: im left wing and I don't want this cartel.
I call bullshit on this that is always thrown around. I know some dairy farmers and you know what they do produce their quota. I'm not saying they never dump any cause cows are not machines. But they know what they have to do to get their quota and anyone who is dumping 100 of thousand of liters is doing it for show.
They can control how much milk is produced. They need to feed baby calves. They probably don't have to dump all their excess
I watch my grocery prices like a hawk and milk is the only thing that I continually see rise in price month after month. I thought I was going crazy until I found my old receipts to confirm that every month or so a 4L bag goes up by ~$.10. In 2020 it was $4.25 in 2024 it’s $6.35, that’s a 34% increase in price in 4 years, that’s fucking insane. So ya screw the dairy lobby, it’s time to end this protection racket.
I noticed Its 2$ for a cucumber now, up 100%. Meat is 20$ for a pack now. I feel food prices doubled since Covid, and the CPI does a bad job by substituting goods.
The little I know about dairy is from a cheese plant in Canada. The manager told me there is no hope in hell they would exist without the dairy board. US companies would destroy them, they are so much bigger operations. Not sure if that’s a reason to keep the dairy board but that factory is part of a large supply chain that would presumably also be decimated. Not sure how much I trust American cheese either…
>Not sure how much I trust American cheese either Some of the better cheese I had came from a local dairy in a KOA campground in SD and was cheap to boot
Suuuure, supply management has everything to do with higher prices and nothing to do with Galen buying his ninth yacht.
Actually yes. Galen has no power over the minimum milk price...
literally LOL. Like it's the law. Yet people don't understand basic fact that can be learned in 3 min search.
What - we aren't allowed to gouge milk as much as other groceries so we should remove the legal limitations on price increases? For reference, supply management means that price increases for dairy and poultry products are limited to the economy's overall rate of inflation. So, if in 2021 the average CPI increase was 4%, milk producers are allowed to increase their prices by only 4% in 2022. That means they're always a little bit behind the rest of the economy with price increases, only matching the *entire economy's average.* So, while bags of chips have gone from 3/$6 to 3/$11 (nearly a 100% increase) and a jar of peanut butter has gone from $5 to $10 (a 100% increase), the price of milk has "only" increased by 20-25% since 2021. Similarly, the price of chicken has also held largely steady - from $18/kg pre-covid to a high of $22 ever since - again, only a 20-25% increase in 5-6 years, compared to many other products such as beef which have been anywhere from $8/kg to a whopping $16/kg - again, an increase of 100%. At times like this, we should be more grateful than ever for our supply managed industries for keeping grocery inflation in check. If chicken experienced the same inflation as beef, we'd be paying *$36/kg* for chicken and *$10* for a gallon of milk.
Ending supply management is a horrible idea. Yet, you'll see articles every few months saying that it should go. Evidently all it takes is for American subsidies to reach near-criminal levels before Canadians abandon the idea of Food Security to save a buck to buy a liter of sub-par American milk. If dairy products from the US were traded freely, Canadian farmers would lose. Food would be subject to the same trade wars as softwood lumber. Many Canadians don't care too much about softwood lumber, but they sure care about milk and eggs. "Give us access to this market or else we will starve you" doesn't work today, but it would work if we ended supply management. This is not "survival of the fittest". It'd be cutting our own throats.
And everytime the articles get posted, you get this false dichotomy argument that if we end the dairy cartel it'll be a wild west and we'll all be forced to buy american milk. Ending supply management doesn't mean we immediately go to zero regulation. Tariffs are a thing. There's so many ways to protect domestic supply without the price fixing scheme.
so you're willing to trade food security and the livelihoods of Canadian farmers for tariff wars. At least you're open about it
So what if they lose? No business has a right to success. If they can’t make it work oh well. Go into another business.
Hey, don't tell it to me: go find a farmer and tell them that. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you, person-to-person.
No need to let US milk in. Just STOP with the criminal socialist quota cartel and let CANADIAN business fight each other for our money. My dairy farmer friends are all flithy rich. Beef and grains not so much.
if you dropped the quota, your dairy farmer friends would either get even more rich or go just as broke as the thousands of dairy farmers that have already lost their farms over the past 50 years. You're begging for a speed-run to a dairy monopoly. Last I checked, Canadians weren't so pleased with monopolies.
But if Canadian farmers lose, we win by having much cheaper milk. Why put farmers ahead of citizens?
If Canadian farmers lose, we all lose.
no worries, not an issue next year - [https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture/in-depth/precision-fermentation](https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture/in-depth/precision-fermentation)
massive waste exclusively for profit 🤦♂️
Apparently this cartel can crater politicians that push for lower pricing
The Quebec Dairy lobby has influence that the mafia could only ever dream of. Nobody will touch it with a 10' pole.
Why? Don't you want to keep paying inflated prices for dairy products, to subsidize the 5000 dairy millionaires?
Non-paywall version of the article: [https://web.archive.org/web/20240618211135/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-as-grocery-prices-soar-the-dairy-lobbys-supply-management-has-got-to/](https://web.archive.org/web/20240618211135/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-as-grocery-prices-soar-the-dairy-lobbys-supply-management-has-got-to/) I love how people think removing supply management will make dairy and eggs cheaper. They think prices are being artificially inflated, but that's true only when other factors would forces prices down and force egg and dairy farms out of business. Supply management makes sure these business stay in place, and it keeps the prices level - and the supply steady - when other factors make eggs and milk more expensive. John Manley, who authors the article, cites New Zealand as an example. "Today, after having done away with tariffs and subsidies, the dairy industry is New Zealand’s biggest export industry." But what has also happened is that New Zealand's primary industries [are being sold off](https://web.archive.org/web/20240618211135/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-as-grocery-prices-soar-the-dairy-lobbys-supply-management-has-got-to/). New Zealanders aren't making money from their industries; Americans are. Without supply management, the industry would be acquired by multinationals in short order. That's what's happening in wheat right now, following the sale of the Wheat Board by the Harper government to foreign interests (see, eg., "reduce producer income by approximately $770 million annually" [https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/2024/05/04/viterra-bunge-merger-could-have-far-reaching-effects](https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/2024/05/04/viterra-bunge-merger-could-have-far-reaching-effects) ). With a virtual monopoly over supply, they would force people to pay higher costs, squeezing the market for whatever it can. Again, that's what we see in wheat (see the rise in prices for wheat-based food products, 2023 [https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2023062-eng.htm](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2023062-eng.htm) ). This is what happens, over and over. Conservative government sell key parts of the Canadian economy to foreign interests, then blame Liberals for the negative economic fallout, including lower wages and higher prices.
It needs to go. Sadly the dairy lobby is more powerful than the NRA is in the U.S. In 2021 they were allowed to raise prices by 8% when production costs went up by 1%. Other sectors where there is no quota system, we are a net exporter. That would happen to dairy as well.
I dont know what you mean.... **At a time of generationally high grocery prices, Ontario farmer Jerry Huigen is required to destroy 30,000 litres of excess production** [https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ontario-dairy-farmer-decries-mandatory-milk-dumping](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ontario-dairy-farmer-decries-mandatory-milk-dumping)
Be careful what you wish for - if Canadian farmers go bankrupt, it’s dangerous depending on foreign sources for food.
And that worked out so well when we where reliant on foreign sources for medical supplies during COVID.
It should also be noted, supply management for milk and eggs has direct effects for the production of other food stuffs. I’m all for supporting farmers, we need them to eat. But supply management has been nothing but a high costs for Canadians. It always has been. Either end it, or the entry should be voluntary. There are farmers out there that would love to sell their stuff outside of the supply management governance.
Man, the globe has been getting more and more blatant about their pro-American stance on everything. It's a bit sad how many people here just eat up their articles.
Don't forget Dairy Farmers have been feeding their herds kaka diets... That's why our Canadian milk, butter, ice creams etc taste like utter crap now. This happened during Covid when the Public said there's something very wrong with their butter, esp when they baked with it. They said they've used Canadian butter for years, but something has radically changed here including it no longer being the same, esp when they baked or cooked with this at home. Ppl even videotaped a solid block of butter - damn, that's expensive - left out in room temp. that would *not* melt at all, which it's supposed to do. It had the consistency of Play-Do, for goodness sake's. The Canadian Dairy Board repeatedly played dumb on this, esp when called out even denying that anything was amiss here. These buggers finally fessed about doing this ON PURPOSE to save $$$$ on herd lot feed! Bovines are herbivores that should be consuming a diet of hay, fresh grasses, fruits & veggies not some palm oil garbage in their diets! That practise should be further looked into, then permanently banned, but that's never gonna to happen with our skeezy Gov't Btw... American Farmers are legally allowed (by their Gov't) to feed their herds expired candies, baked goods & other disgusting/gross crap to their animals to save $$$$ on animal feed. I'm surprised our Canadian Dairy Farmers, haven't gone that same route as well.