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Goat milk’s doing great too!

Imagine you’re a young, brash farmer looking to get into the liquids trade. You can try your hand at starting a cow farm, but first you’ll have to get your hands on a quota. And assuming you can find one for sale, it’s going to cost you as much as $30,000 per cow. Or, you just start milking goats: No marketing board, no quotas and you can export wherever you want. Canada’s goat sector is still dwarfed by the cow milk market, but it’s fair to say that the goat trade is benefiting from a brain drain of dairy enthusiasts looking for a low-barrier way to start making livestock juice. “Ontario really is positioned as the North American leader for goat milk production,” said Jennifer Haley, executive director with the industry association Ontario Goat. “I can tell you there’s a lot less gray hair in the room when we have our meetings.”

You may not have noticed, but there was a pretty severe butter shortage last year

“Butter is back and people want to enjoy it again,” Chef Susie Reading at Toronto’s George Brown College told the National Post. And butter consumption is indeed surging in Canada. And while this would normally be good news for an industry that makes the stuff, it was an utter fiasco last year. The Canadian Dairy Commission’s supply targets were not nearly enough to anticipate Canada’s hunger for butter. So, with Canada on the verge of a shortage that could have ground bakeries to a halt, the agency was forced to obtain emergency permission to bring in a one-time only bailout of 8.8 million pounds of butter from New Zealand, Ireland, Belgium and Uruguay. “The Canadian Dairy Commission has dropped the ball,” Greg Nogler with the Stirling Creamery said at the time. “If you have supply management, it’s up to them to ensure that there is supply.” Under conventional circumstances, this butter shortage would have worked itself out: The price of butter would have simply gone up and legions of milk producers from around the world would be busting down our doors to unload their butter at premium rates. It’s the same reason Canada never has “avocado shortages” — there are just times of the year when avocados are more expensive.