Canadian Government Forces Dairy Farm to Dump 30,000 liters of Milk

[Helix]

Didn't Chucklehead win the milk war?

 

[madman]

And people wonder why I hate government regulation:

View attachment 67435449

You can watch the video here:



By the way, progressive hero and economic illiterate FDR did the same thing, but even wor

"government regulation" or "government regulation that you agree with"

 

[Stealers Wheel]

Why would dairy farms be more susceptible to this than any other industry? And if that big dairy monopoly started overcharging customers, what's to stop other players from getting back in the game?

Cows have to be milked EVERY DAY, regardless of the market. That milk represents labor, overhead, supplies, etc. Barring government intervention, that milk, and the associated products, is going to market from all the dairy farmers. And it will be sold at the current market price. It is all about supply and demand in a free market. No one can profit if the free market demand for milk and milk products is insufficient to meet the needs of the producers at any given time. An automobile maker can decide how many cars to produce and what kinds of cars to produce. Dairy farmers cannot do that. Milk is milk at the farm. The consumer has nothing to differentiate the milk from one farm over another.

And once the corporation has ALL the dairy farms under its control, it can decide how much milk to produce and they can control the supply. Independent farms simply cannot to do that. Further, if a single entity controls the majority of a market, they have the economics of size on their side. They will get their supplies cheaper than the independents. And if need be, the corporation can undercut the independents, once again driving them out of the market.

Farmers who vote know all this. That is why we have government prop up the price of dairy products, to keep greedy corporations from taking over the market and driving the dairy farmers out of business.

It's called a level playing field.

 

[Gatsby]

Cows have to be milked EVERY DAY, regardless of the market. That milk represents labor, overhead, supplies, etc. Barring government intervention, that milk, and the associated products, is going to market from all the dairy farmers. And it will be sold at the current market price. It is all about supply and demand in a free market. No one can profit if the free market demand for milk and milk products is insufficient to meet the needs of the producers at any given time. An automobile maker can decide how many cars to produce and what kinds of cars to produce. Dairy farmers cannot do that. Milk is milk at the farm.

This is incorrect. They might not be able to alter their production much from one day to the next, but they can most certainly make decisions for how much milk to produce (e.g. how many cows to have) from one year to the next. If dairy systemically becomes a less profitable industry, they can simply own fewer cows and/or get out of the business.

And once the corporation has ALL the dairy farms under its control, it can decide how much milk to produce and they can control the supply.

Well no, they can't, because there's nothing stopping anyone else from buying cows once it becomes a profitable business again.

Independent farms simply cannot to do that. Further, if a single entity controls the majority of a market, they have the economics of size on their side. They will get their supplies cheaper than the independents.

That sounds like an argument in favor of monopoly rather than against it.

Farmers who vote know all this. That is why we have government prop up the price of dairy products, to keep greedy corporations from taking over the market and driving the dairy farmers out of business.

It's called a level playing field.

Price stabilization is much better accomplished by having government buy milk at a fixed price, than having producers dump their milk.

 

[Scrabaholic]

And people wonder why I hate government regulation:

View attachment 67435449

You can watch the video here:



By the way, progressive hero and economic illiterate FDR did the same thing, but even worse.

We? You are American and milk is not $7 a litre here in Canada, at least not in my area.

Yes, we have a quota system - have had it for a long time. What we don't have is farmers dumping milk en masse because they cannot sell it.

 

[Scrabaholic]

So why not give it away to homeless people?

It would have to be pasteurized and packaged. And where would the homeless store it? It's a great idea, but I don't know how feasible it would be.

 

[EMNofSeattle]

It would have to be pasteurized and packaged. And where would the homeless store it? It's a great idea, but I don't know how feasible it would be.

I don’t think many people realize just how much work goes into distributing food. I used to work for a food distributor in Seattle and it was a very dynamic business environment because you have to predict what a customer will order next week, but the customer doesn’t have to actually sign the contract until the night before, then the product has to arrive from the farm on a refrigerated trailer two days before the customer is even obligated to pay for it, then it has to sit in a refrigerated warehouse for a day or two and get ordered, then the next day be delivered and at that point you’re halfway through the shelf life of many fresh products like produce and dairy.

Now we did donate large amounts of food to charities, but almost never for the homeless, you can’t just find a homeless guy and give him fresh milk or tomatoes, when you donate this food to the homeless what that really means is donating it to a shelter or a church or other form of charity that will use it to feed them, and which has a commercial kitchen set up to accept the cold product, and again they don’t know what they need until the day before they need it, so there’s often a mismatch between what our lady of mercy parish or Salvation Army’s cafeteria would like to have and what unsold product is actually available. A lot of this product would actually just get sold at bargain basement prices to school districts

This is a long winded explanation, but the idea that you just give excess food to the homeless, while well intentioned, is very difficult to carry out in practice given the limited shelf life of the product and the effort expended in distributing it.


As far as pasteurizing the milk. I don’t know if Canada owns a cheese plant to make government style cheese because I used to have a long haul truck driving job and I used to drive Kraft style cheese (which is the only resl way you can store this stuff refrigerated for years until needed) and the American cheese blocks were made a plant in Fresno California and I would drive them to Vancouver Canada. Clearly for the Canadian government it would be very costly to drive milk in tankers to Southern California and then drive the cheese back up to Canada

 

[EMNofSeattle]

Price stabilization is much better accomplished by having government buy milk at a fixed price, than having producers dump their milk.

In one sense maybe that’s true, except that to actually do this you need to process the milk into butter or American style cheese for long storage. This is what the US government did (and still does) for decades. All the cultural references to “government cheese” (there’s a similar cultural thing in Germany of “Christmas butter” where free butter would be distributed at the end of the year from a similar program in Germany) in the 1980s comes from the fact that the US government was buying the milk, and then the only thing they could do with it was make cheese, which was basically Kraft style American but stored in non descriptive boxes.

Well they accumulated so much of it by 1981 they were openly talking about dumping it in the ocean because they had no more room to store it and it was starting to go bad.

The US government owns massive underground caverns just to store this stuff, maybe the Canadians don’t have the money or labor force necessary to literally store millions of tons of cheese in a cave in Quebec or somethings. Not just store it, but take the milk in tanker trucks to a processing plant, then turn it into Kraft deli blocks (I don’t know if a plant of this type even exists in Canada as I used to drive Kraft cheese from California to Vancouver) then drive it in trucks to the storage facility only to have to drive it back out when ready to use or throw away