CHRIS LOWREY: Pontiac April 15, 2020
With businesses of all kinds closing their doors amid the COVID-19 pandemic, dairy farmers are feeling a unique impact thanks to the outbreak.
The tough position dairy farmers find themselves in is due to two main issues: The first is the closure of restaurants – many of which are heavy consumers of dairy products. The other issue is a shortfall in the distribution chain to local grocery stores – where demand has shot upwards with farmers unable to meet supply.
The result is hundreds of thousands of litres of milk being dumped into manure pits.
According to local dairy farmer Robbie Beck, more than 60 per cent of cream and cheese goes to the restaurant industry.
“A large part of our product went to servicing those businesses,” Beck said. “So that’s a market right now where we’re lacking demand.”
To make matters worse, with so many people staying home, milk sales at grocery stores have increased somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 per cent but farmers are unable to get their milk on the shelves to meet that increase in demand.
“Demand for fluid milk has increased substantially and there seems to be shortfalls in the distribution system between the processing plants and the actual store shelves,” Beck said.
Beck says one of the main issues causing the distribution problems is the fact that dairy processing plants already operate at around 100 per cent capacity, so short of building new processing plants, there isn’t much that can be done in the short term to address the issue.
Because of Canada’s supply management system, dairy farmers are required to buy a specific quota of milk they will produce during the year. With their whole business geared towards producing that amount of milk, they can’t simply change how much they can produce – the cows still need to be milked.
Not only that, but the supply management system is also geared to ensure farmers make a decent wage off of their milk production by closely matching supply and demand. But with the sudden closure of restaurants, that calculation has been thrown out of whack, resulting in the dumping of milk.
“We’ve already dumped milk twice in the Pontiac,” Beck said.
For someone like Beck who is passionate about his life’s work, seeing all that milk go to waste leaves a sour taste in his mouth.
“I didn’t expect to be affected the way I was but actually quite sad to see,” Beck said. “Even though it was only two days of our production, yeah, it’s sad, because I know that there are people out there that want to buy it that can’t get it at the store right now.”
Beck says that while dairy farmers would like to donate as much of their milk as possible to food banks and the like, it’s not so easy with a product that needs to be pasteurized and processed – not to mention the fact that it’s a perishable product.
But despite the challenges associated with donating fluid milk, Beck said the Dairy Farmers of Quebec managed to donate 2 million litres of milk in the first week of the pandemic response which made 200 metric tons of cheese slices for food banks in Quebec.
Despite that massive donation of 2 million litres, somewhere around 200,000 additional litres of milk were dumped across the province.
And the problem appears to be getting worse. Beck said during the second week of the pandemic response, 4.8 million litres were dumped across the province and the projections estimated somewhere in the neighbourhood of 13 million litres could be filling manure pits in the third week.
It doesn’t appear there is a solution on the horizon. When asked what can be fixed in the distribution chain that could resolve these problems, Beck was blunt.
“If I had the answer to that exact question, I could seem really smart to a lot of people because that’s what we’re asking ourselves,” he said. “There aren’t 20 per cent more trucks to move 20 per cent more milk.”
“It’s been such a quick shift,” Beck said.
