For more than 400 years, milk cows and the milk they produced have been providing nourishment for families in Canada and especially our children. Safe, unadulterated milk and the dairy products made from it like butter, cheese, etc., have been consumed in Canada even before there was a Canada.
Our own family has milked cows for seven generations in this county. My grandmother milked cows by hand before helping to bottle the milk and load the horse drawn milk wagon that my grandfather delivered milk in town with. Sometimes during the depression he and other farmers continued to deliver milk to families that had no money to pay.
By the 1960s, there was such a surplus of milk and eggs in Canada that some were dumped into the ocean because the federal government couldn’t even give away the surplus. Some very deep thinking farmers and a few dedicated politicians developed the supply management system for milk, eggs and fowl.
The supply management system is based on three things:
1. A cost of production to produce the product, using data collected from dozens of farms from across Canada. These include thousands of input costs like wages, fuel, electricity, taxes, fertilizer, seed, repairs on buildings and machinery, interest rates, etc. Representatives from farmers, processors, retailers, restaurants, government, and the consumers association are all invited to scrutinize and verify all these costs. Then only the top half of the farms can operate at a profit with the costs accepted by everyone. The farms that produce at a price higher than that will either have to reduce their costs to survive or find another job.
In our county of Pontiac – that in the 1960s had 600 milk producers – there are now only 17 farms producing the same quantity of milk that 600 did.
2. Canada uses a quota that allows the farmer to produce what is required for Canadians to consume without dumping excess dairy products into another country or the ocean. All other countries market with a supply and demand system that has to import dairy products when there is a shortage and throw away surplus when there is too much or dump product into another country at a price below the cost to produce it.
When there is a surplus of dairy products for an extended period and farmers are producing at less than the COP, then their government has to give out money to these farmers. The US dairy farmers have been producing milk at below the COP for more than three years and their dairy surplus is at a record high. Their last US farm bill of one point three trillion taxpayer dollars will not all get to the aid of the American farmer. There will be a substantial cost for the US civil servants to deliver some of this money.
3. The Canadian government must be strong in their trade negotiations to avoid other countries from dumping cheap dairy products into the Canadian market at below the COP.
The COP and the quota system have worked well for farmers, processors, retailers and consumers without paying dairy farmers subsidy or other bailouts for more than a half a century. Every country that abandoned the quota system has not seen a reduction in costs of dairy products except sometimes for a few months after adopting the supply and demand system.
It takes three years to bring a new milk cow from semen, to calf, heifer and finally a milking cow. Farmers must plan their production three years ahead. Every country that abandoned the quota system has noticed a great increase in stress, mental health problems and suicides in their dairy farming communities. Many of these countries have noticed an increase in civil unrest, blocked streets, manure and milk dumped on streets and at government buildings before emergency financial help is given to desperate farmers.
Canadian dairy farmers have been proud to supply our consumers with safe, milk produced by humanely- and lovingly-tended cows especially in a country where hormones are not injected into them to produce even more milk, even if it may adversely affect and even shorten their lives. There is still controversy if the milk from these hormone injected cows is really safe for human consumption.
When buying your milk or other dairy products be sure to demand products with the “Dairy Farmers of Canada” or blue cow insignia on the package.
There are only a handful of dairy farmers who have a vote but they take pride in working 365 days a year providing you with the world’s finest dairy products.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon
on land that has been in his
family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
