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The market and policy factors that have led farmers to “dispose of skim milk in lagoons,” as the board chair of Dairy Farmers of Ontario put it recently, are not going anywhere. This is not a blip.

The Globe and Mail has reported that “since late May, roughly 800,000 litres of milk has been poured into farm manure pits, called ‘lagoons’.”

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We got here from a combination of cultural shifts in eating habits and unrelenting bad policy. This puts the lie to the idea that the “stability” supply management creates in the marketplace is an unalloyed good. Does it matter that prices are stable if farmers aren’t able to sell their milk? The cost of food rose 3.8 per cent over the last year in Canada, and we’re dumping milk on manure piles.

One factor is a simple cultural change in the way Canadians eat. Per capita consumption of fluid milk has been declining in Canada for decades, while consumption of other dairy products – cream, butter, cheese, yogurt, ice cream – has grown or remained fairly steady. Of course nature has decided that you don’t get butterfat without skim milk, so farmers are finding themselves with excess skim milk.