When I attended my first regional milk meeting 50 years ago I complained about the cardboard milk container that had been in use for two decades then. I told the president of the Quebec milk board, “If I had to drink beer from a cardboard box, I’d quit drinking beer!” Everyone laughed but knew what I was complaining about. Sometimes there is a cardboard taste on the milk that is poured from a cardboard milk container and the cardboard containers are difficult to open. They do not reseal after opening either.
Thirty-eight years later at a dairy meeting at Kemptville College I challenged the CEO of the Canadian Dairy Processors to open one of the half pint cardboard chocolate milk containers that attendees had been given with their meal for dinner with one hand.
After I had a stroke that affected my left side I always had difficulty opening those containers. He didn’t offer to show me how to open it but spouted off about how cheap they were to produce and that consumers liked the look of them.
Although consumers now have a choice to buy milk in plastic bags, recyclable plastic bottles or the cardboard box that apparently consumers like I don’t see many consumers buy cardboard because of price.
You will not find any cardboard milk containers in our fridge. Dairy farmers and their board members who represent them have had problems for decades with milk that was not stored at a cold enough temperature. Whether it is sold in stores or provided for consumption by school children, milk must be cold.
When the milk transporter picks up the milk at a dairy farm the milk must be four degrees centigrade or colder or the driver will refuse to pick it up. Most dairy farmers keep their bulk milk tanks set at three degrees.
Some consumer’s fridges are set warmer than four degrees. The quality, taste, and bacterial content changes with the temperature that milk is stored. For a couple decades now some brands of beer are sold in a can that changes colour when the beer inside is too warm.
In Europe in November 2018 someone finally realized that there is an ink that changes colour with temperature. Maybe, soon in a store near you, the blue cow on the milk container will change colour if the temperature of the milk inside is too warm.
Twenty years ago at a Quebec Provincial Milk Board meeting, board members were challenged with a growing surplus of skim milk powder. I suggested that the milk producers should work with the breweries to develop a beer made with skim milk powder. Skim milk powder is high in sugar and protein which are both needed in production of beer.
Although in Japan, beer was already being made with skim milk powder as one of its ingredients. The rest of the milk board thought my idea was a joke.
Last year, in a lab at Cornell University in the United States, a very tasty beer was developed using skim milk powder. In the recent USMCA trade talks one of the major stumbling blocks was class 7 which was introduced to stop the US dairies from dumping a form of skim milk powder into Canada.
In the 1970s General Motors produced an electric car. A limited production was sold throughout the US to be driven in many different climates. Although most consumers who bought the electric car were very satisfied with the car, production was abruptly stopped and all the electric cars sold were bought back by GM and destroyed. Many owners put up a fight to keep their electric cars but GM demanded that they be destroyed.
Although GM had many excuses why production was stopped some people still wonder if there was a financial connection between GM and the petroleum group.
Now that GM has announced the closure of Canadian auto plants, an American company that makes electric cars has expressed an interest in the Canadian GM car plants. Just this summer, 2018, the first all electric tractor was sold in Canada.
In the 1960s it was too cold in Pontiac to grow grain corn. In the 1990s it was still too cold in Pontiac to grow soybeans. Although canola was never a very popular crop in the Ottawa valley now it is too warm to successfully grow canola here. Now, grain corn is grown throughout the valley. Soybeans have become a very popular cash crop. There are still people who deny climate change.
When Maxwell Smart used his shoe phone we all laughed and thought that will never happen.
When I attended college in the 1960s, there was a climate controlled room 20 feet wide by 30 feet long that housed the university computer. Today we carry smart phones that have more power than that room full of computer.
Yes, sometimes change is very slow but changes will happen.
It’s interesting to watch changes happen but it’s also up to us to monitor these changes and express our concerns if we think society is making some bad ones.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
