CALEB NICKERSON
PONTIAC March 10, 2021
The national news media have focused in on butter over the last month, following anecdotes about how it remains hard at room temperature.
Local UPA rep and dairy farmer Scott Judd explained that the attention kicked off when a popular chef on social media commented on changes in the consistency of her butter.
“As soon as I read it, I asked [my wife] Jennifer, because she does more cooking than I do, did you notice the butter getting harder and she said, ‘Yeah actually I did,’” he said. “It’s not a lot, but it is firmer, it is noticeable.”
That’s when Judd said the discourse on the subject took a left turn. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, senior director at Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, penned . . .
a widely cited opinion piece that pinned the changes on dairy farmers’ use of palm oil products in their feed to increase milk output and fat content. With pandemic baking increasing 2020’s butter sales by 12 per cent, Charlebois asserted that the palm products were used to help meet demand.
“He’s a clickbait kind of guy, anything to rile up the dairy farmers, that’s his job in life,” Judd said. “It’s not our first rodeo with him.”
Judd said that while it’s true that farmers use palm oil products as an energy dense feed additive, it’s unlikely that it is the source of the changes.
“I’ve fed it in the past. I only ever fed it to cows after they’ve calved,” he explained. “Cows right after they’ve calved don’t eat as much, so they need a denser meal because they’re not going to eat as big a meal … especially in the summer, cows don’t like the heat, so they don’t eat as much so they milk less, so you can feed them a denser meal in the summertime with a little more energy.”
He said that the product has been used for years in many different countries, and is added to feed in relatively small quantities, due to the prohibitive price. He said that in the spring and summer last year, he had companies offering him discounts on the product because not many farmers were buying it.
He said that it’s currently too early to discern the exact source of the changes, but noted that many researchers in Canada and the US are studying the issue closely. In the mean time, Canadian Dairy Farmers have put a halt to the use of the product.
The palm industry is tied to deforestation and other unsavoury practices in countries that produce it, like Indonesia and Malaysia, and Judd said that many in the food industry are choosing to steer clear of it.
Judd speculated that changes in the supply chain could be one of the reasons for the hard butter.
“It’s got my curiosity too, why is the butter harder?” he said. “Demand for butter’s up, for sure. With COVID it ramped it up. We know that there were some updates in factories that make butter so they can process it quicker, and move it easier.”
He added that the differences in hardness varied from dairy to dairy, so there might be something to the hunch. Due to increases in robotic milking, the product isn’t agitated as much before it hits the truck for transport. Ultimately though, he said that research on the cause of the changes is still being done and he’s eagerly awaiting the findings.
“That’s regional, so you’ll be able to pick out what’s going on by the region too,” Judd said. “It’s really a wild card, we don’t know. I’m anxious about what’s going to come out of the research.”
