No, it’s not Thanksgiving yet. However, there are a multitude of things that we must be thankful for every day. I hope that every mother was recognized on Sunday. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms. All of us have at least one mom.
When my dad was a kid, lots of families were poorer than we could imagine today. There was no welfare, no children’s aid to help kids find a family to help raise them. Many families that I can remember gave one child that they just couldn’t afford to raise to a close neighbour that had no kids or had room and finances to look after another one. Sometimes it was a relative or a very close friend. Sometimes the church helped find a new mom to take another child in and raise it as their own. Sometimes the municipality helped out a family who was trying to cope as best they could.
Often, the poorest or unluckiest of families used their own tiny little farm to plant a big garden, keep a small flock of hens for eggs and a chicken now and then for a Sunday dinner. Some kept a few hogs for pork and to eat up the scraps from the table. They always canned and preserved fruits and vegetables and maybe a deer or wild foul. Usually the mom was a super cook and made everything that could be made at home. Making a “coat of many colours” was no challenge to those mothers.
I recently read about a modern dairy farm in the U.S. near the Canadian border that milked over a thousand cows until the dairy that they sold their milk to quit paying for the milk that dairy farmers supplied daily. In the U.S., dairy farmers are on their own to find a milk plant to take their milk. For the past few years in the U.S., the cost to produce milk was more than what they were paid. The dairy farmers depend on the loss-of-profit payment from the federal government to keep them from going bankrupt. When a dairy farmer who milks a thousand cows daily no longer has a dairy to pay for the milk, they usually go bankrupt very quickly. In the U.S. there is no quota system to control surplus milk and no dairy plant is looking for a new supplier of milk for their plant. Sometimes the U.S. releases a whole-herd buyout plan to buy out some dairy farms if they get chosen. Right now, there is no such plan in effect.
I immediately thought how lucky we are to have a supply management system to manage milk supply and a milk board that directs the milk to whichever plant needs it, guarantees the dairy farmers are paid for whatever safe, clean milk that they ship within their quota, and controls the milk trucks that pick up the milk. In Canada, all dairy farmers must adhere to the Canadian Quality Milk program which not only controls the quality of the milk, but also dictates the health and welfare of the cattle at the dairy farm, and the cleanliness of the buildings.
Each dairy farm has a milk quota to ship evenly through the year, with extra milk quota given before peak usage of butter, cheeses, and other milk products like chocolates. This assures that around special holidays like Easter, Christmas, and Thanksgiving there are enough dairy products to cover consumer demand.
During a time of severe change like we experienced during the first weeks of COVID-19 restrictions when many people were forced to stay home, it took time for milk processors to install different equipment that could put more milk in smaller consumer bottles rather than the large bags used by restaurants and schools. For a short time, there was too much milk in the system and some milk had to be dumped until milk quotas were reduced to match the demand. The farms who were asked to dump were selected because they had enough room in their manure lagoon for that waste milk which was later spread in the fields. Nothing was dumped in the sewer.
When more milk was needed to match consumer demand, more milk quota was given out based on the quota holding of each farm. In Canada, any new dairy farmer can receive some free quota if the milking premises get approved for milk production. And very seldom is a dairy farm stopped permanently from shipping milk. But if it is, poor milk quality and conditions of the premises are usually the reason. The reason that China built their milk plant in Canada to produce milk formula for babies was because Chinese mothers trusted Canada to produce the safest baby milk formula in the world.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
