America Is Drowning in Milk Nobody Wants | Hacker News Reader

America Is Drowning in Milk Nobody Wants

bloomberg.com

95 pointslxm146 comments

Planet Money recently had a great episode about "Big Government Cheese", which covered the Carter administration's proposal to subsidize milk, which created a milk surplus so big that it had to create a bureaucracy to grade and store cheese, and then eventually, to repackage and give it away:

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

> DUFFIN: By the early 1980s, the dairy support program was costing taxpayers around $2 billion a year. The government was buying 1 in every 4 pounds of the country's cheddar cheese. They actually had to rent out space in multiple caves. At one point, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen.

There have been dairy issues since forever.

It works like this, if you just let the market decide then a few big dairy producers will drive all of the other dairies out of business and the only milk products on the market will be of lower quality than they are today. If you prop up the market with subsidies and minimum prices you force the cost of milk to rise and natural economics causes people to substitute something else that is less expensive. But if the subsidies are paid to the farmers, and not to the consumers, the farmers keep producing milk products even when the market doesn't want them at the price they are producing them.

Places that would like dairy products outside the US are already protecting their own dairy farmers and so they are tariffing the heck out of milk (see the Canadian discussion as part of the USMCA proposal).

Many dairy products are perishable with a short life although a big chunk of my uncle's dairy output ended up as non-fat dry milk. This makes it harder to store over periods of lower demand, and cows produce at a fairly constant rate whether you like it or not. Supply management is tough.

Milk and cheese would be a good candidate for a basic income sort of scheme. Where everyone would be issued milk and cheese vouchers every month that could be exchanged for milk and cheese at the local package milk store. People who didn't want their coupons could give them to people who did. That would create a 'base layer' of milk production and consumption that would keep dairies around but take milk and cheese out of the cost of living equation. I'm sure there are other reasons why this is impractical but the whole problem is fairly intractable as it is without putting farms out of business.

EDIT: One interesting thing would be to tie the price of sugared drinks to the price of milk. So it wouldn't be cheaper to give your kids soda than milk. Again, impractical but it is a challenging problem.

> Milk and cheese would be a good candidate for a basic income sort of scheme

Why milk? Vegetables make more sense.

Milk is not a necessary foodstuff. Creating labelling standards for high-quality milk and letting the market do its job would be the most-reasonable outcome.

That's a universal argument for industrializing all food production. No food is a necessary foodstuff. It does not follow that all our food should be industrially produced.

(Free market food production will end up industrially produced, because that's how you minimize costs and maximize profits. I, for one, don't want to live in a country like that and will vote for laws that help prevent it happening.)

> Free market food production will end up industrially produced, because that's how you minimize costs and maximize profits

Post-war Americans prioritised price. So the market made industrial food. (There was also the influence of World War II’s military-oriented factories pivoting to peacetime production.) The situation is not the same today.

There is demand for non-industrially produced food among those who can afford it. For those who can’t, I find it morally disturbing that those of us who can afford it want to tell them what they can and cannot buy. If a low-income person decides to spend their food voucher on industrially-produced cheese so they can use the surplus on fruits and vegetables (or pizzas), that’s their choice.

In any case, if the goal is less industrially-produced cheese, our subsidy regime accomplished that inefficiently.

The trouble is that there's a ratchet effect which makes non-industrial food increasingly uncompetitive over time, and the only people who can afford decent goods and services are those who are wealthy. I wrote a long comment on this over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306700

I'm sorry for your feeling of disturbance. I can't help your sense of righteous indignation, but I don't believe free markets always deliver superior results to democracy.

> If a low-income person decides to spend their food voucher on industrially-produced cheese so they can use the surplus on fruits and vegetables (or pizzas), that’s their choice.

That only works if there are no carry-on effects of their eating habits (i.e. subsidized health costs, etc). If we can reduce those carry-on costs by forcing the purchase of healthier options, then the system is more sustainable.

Add to that the fact that food subsidy programs are not intended to be a lifestyle -- they're supposed to be there to help people in times of need, a crutch to help them between jobs, not a solution to their joblessness. In other words, there should be some motivating factor to become self-sufficient.

Vegetables aren’t necessary either. Historically, humans (at least in Europe) consumed much more more milk than vegetables, deriving probably an order of magnitude more calories from dairy than from vegetables, because you could get more calories from an acre of cattle pasture than from an acre of grains fiels, and an order of magnitude more than from vegetables. Milk is also more nutritionally valuable, containing carbs, protein, and fat in very good proportion compared to vegetables. This is no surprise, since milk literally is produced by cows to be consumed by calves as their sole food.

I don’t think basic milk vouchers is a good idea, but basic veggies is even worse.

“Orders of magnitude” sprinkled generously make this sound more factual than it is.

Even though modern fruit and vegetable farming systems are highly industrialized, relying on vast monocultures, fertilizers, pesticides, and tillage practices that require heavy machinery and plenty of fuel, they still produce more calories per input than beef and pork.

Most views are 2x - 4x people fed per acre from plants versus meats, with milk and eggs splitting the middle.

That said, even our current ‘lacto ovo vegetarian’ compromise diet is likely not sustainable.

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010

> they still produce more calories per input than beef and pork.

True, but irrelevant. I never said anything about meat. Since the advent of agriculture until modernity, most humans ate very little meat, this is definitely true.

> Most views are 2x - 4x people fed per acre from plants versus meats, with milk and eggs splitting the middle.

True, but irrelevant as well. Not only I never said anything about meat, but the discussion here is about milk vs. vegetables. Plants today are better yields in terms of calories per acre due to fertilizers being abundant, pesticides being available, and cultivars having been improved for better yields. However, it is irrelevant for the discussion at hand, because the plants that are better than milk are corn, soy, etc., not vegetables.

maybe in parts of europe they got more from milk. i think veggies were more important everywhere else. Other people can't even eat milk!

No, grains and tubers were more important everywhere where agriculture was a thing. Vegetables were relatively insignificant as source of calories.

you are completely steering the conversation away from what the original topic is. Its not like the post you replied to came out of no where with "I think milk and cheese is best". Most notably lactose intolerance which is not uncommon.

> Milk and cheese would be a good candidate for a basic income sort of scheme. Where everyone would be issued milk and cheese vouchers every month that could be exchanged for milk and cheese at the local package milk store. People who didn't want their coupons could give them to people who did. That would create a 'base layer' of milk production and consumption that would keep dairies around but take milk and cheese out of the cost of living equation. I'm sure there are other reasons why this is impractical but the whole problem is fairly intractable as it is without putting farms out of business.

Been there, done that? Government Cheese! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/31/643486297/epis...

Also when I moved to Ireland we got butter vouchers (pic https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6Vv4MGCYAA424H.jpg:large)

“Dairy farmers are free-market guys—they don’t want to be told how much to produce,”

Sounds like a contradiction - if no one else, free-market will tell you how much to produce. Does not look like farmers are listening.

And don't we have price floors for milk in the US? In a free market the price would just keep dropping, which can't happen here, so you just get a glut.

Do you? Article says that subsidies to milk farmers are virtually non-existent these days and they dump the excess milk.

At some point, the cost to package & bring the milk to the store will exceed the price of selling the milk, so you’ll hit a price floor regardless.

And it becomes the same issue: you now can’t sell the excess milk but you still have all the production facilities. So you store it in your buffer and hold onto production, and eventually if you end up overflowing the buffer, you’ll have no choice but to drop production (which is expensive to bring back up, so highly avoidable)

It seems that we don't currently have a milk price floor in the US, although farmers are lobbying for one.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/05/01/ame...

Neither that article nor this one seem to even mention existing policies?

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/dairy/policy...

No, absent collision and when you have fixed costs, in a free market any individual producer ends up producing as much as possible. The market regulates production by people going out of business entirely.

This is why the EU built a complex production management system.

When I go to the doughnut shop at the end of the day, why are they almost out of doughnuts? It would be possible to produce a lot more doughnuts than that.

When I go to the grocery store, why do I see them tossing out tons of perfectly good bread, boxed products etc?

Presumably if the free market could reach equilibrium then we would see only as much food produced as necessary, so then food waste should be minimized. Yet that's obviously not the case and we see vast amounts of waste.

Right. Players in free markets neither maximize nor minimize waste. The goal is to maximize profit.

That might be how the free market is explained to a tenth grader, but it's not remotely the full picture.

- Do you spend on production or ramp up marketing instead?

- Do projections support taking out a loan to expand future production?

- Do you have other products where your capital would be better directed?

- Is there a point where marginal cost exceeds sale price?

The list of further considerations is endless. Nobody is just blindly producing as much as possible.

It's definitely not how it's explained to a tenth grader. In high school economics classes I was definitely introduced to marginal cost curves for firms in perfectly competitive markets, like so: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Economic...

This does not even consider basic supply and demand. You can sell 100 widgets for $1 a piece, or 20 widgets for $10 a piece. You're going sell 20 widgets. In real life Apple is the most obvious example here. They choose to sell their products at an extremely high markup which limits the number that are purchased, but thanks to that markup they end up making far more profit per item than most other comparable companies.

Milk is not an Apple. It's a commodity. Individual producers have no pricing power. Try to sell milk at $10 a liter and you sell none, because you're undercut by someone selling an identical product for less.

There should be a major asterisk - as long as it remains profitable. If producing more causes the price to go down the margins get worse they won't do more work to earn less. Many prices aren't fixed but per quantity.

Excess milk? Make cheese curds and sell poutine. Never understood why it hasn’t caught on much in the USA.

I’m actually surprised as well. Totally a match for the American diet. Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.

It might have more to do with the image of poutine. It’s gravy, cheese, and fries, it looks messy and unhealthy. I’m not sure about the messy part (forks maybe), but sprinkle some chives on top (mostly for color) and most people will be fooled.

They're called chili cheese fries. And they're popular here and there.

That's often different thing from real Quebecois poutine, most of the time. The cheese curds are different than queso-type cheese sauce I usually see in the US. It's only relatively recently that I've been able to regularly find curd cheese in the grocery store; when I was a kid, one of the best parts of going to Canada was getting packages of "squeaky cheese" as a road snack from little Esso stations.

Of course they're not exactly the same, but I'm saying you're not going to wow Americans with poutine. They'll look at it and say it's some kind of chili cheese fries. And it kind of is.

I hear what you're saying. But that's like saying that sausage on a bun is just a kind of hotdog. They're the same, but they're also not.

I love me a good chili fries and I love poutine. I especially love shawarma poutine which is a massive hit here in Ontario. People and their tastes are a very interesting thing.

True that. Before Chobani Americans had yogurt, but it was all that runny stuff that people from other countries wouldn't call yogurt. So same situation basically.

The shawarma poutine sounds brilliant! Perfect use case of cultural appropriation.

That sounds really negative. We have middle Eastern immigrants mixing middle Eastern food and Quebecois food. Isn't that exactly what we hope to get out of immigration? We invented something new and wonderful by combining cultures.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to the word "appropriation" being used as a blanket for "political correctness." aka. a new form of xenophobia because thou shalt not mix cultures for some reason?

Yeah. See: Britain and its Indianised cuisine. Nobody calls or thinks of that as appropriation and I really think that whole thing is overblown, only what I call the ‘college left’ tend to worry about that.

It gets blown up on the internet though, you actually see more memes mocking that than actual people bothered about it.

It’s silly anyway most American dishes are ultimately from somewhere else originally or use local ingredients to change them.

The bar fight scene in Talladega Nights put it perfectly, with Ricky Bobby listing off examples of "American" food and his new French arch-nemesis correcting him with actual countries of origin.

They called shawarma poutine "brilliant", so "cultural appropriation" was probably meant approvingly.

Whether or not you agree with the concept, cultural appropriation seems pretty easy to understand. Some things have deep meaning to people, like religious symbols. Other things don't, like most food. Also, many people don't like caricatures of their culture. That's about it.

Nothing a marketing team can't solve.

(Homer Simpson drooling voice)

“Squeaky Cheese... Aaaaah...”

I always find it fascinating when someone says they've "only recently found" something that I see even at places like gas stations and liquor stores. There's cheese EVERYWHERE in the midwest US.

I dunno, my local grocery is full of cheese, but those fresh squeaky curds are nowhere to be seen. There is more than one kind of cheese, you know.

Speaking as a dairy farmer, a foodie, someone who likes chilli cheese fries, and has eaten poutine in Quebec, they are TOTALLY DIFFERENT foodstuffs.

> Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.

Brindle Room, right? I've only had their burgers, but Mile End also has poutine for $9 and I can confirm that it is authentic enough for this Canadian.

I was blanking on the name when I was originally writing this, but yes it is Brindle Room.

"it looks messy and unhealthy"

Lots of popular foods in American cuisine are messy and unhealthy. Nor sure how that'd be a problem for poutine.

The actual answer to the question of "why ain't poutine more popular south of Canada?" is because it sounds French (which - unless that Frenchiness is tied to being from Louisiana - typically implies something fancy and expensive). It needs better marketing.

The government used to have tons of cheese that they gave out. But there were multiple dangerous cheese fires.

I've been saying this for years. Fries with gravy and cheese is delicious, and cheese fries are already popular in America. Big chains like McD and BK sell poutine in Canada, so why haven't they experimented in an American city with many Canadian tourists, like Bellingham?

I can get it three places in my local Iowa town

Just give me cheap cheese curds period. I can demolish a bag in a siting no prob. They’re just stupid expensive unless I drive to Tillamook, and even then they’re a bit spends.

Cultures change. When I was growing up, we had a class of milk with lunch and dinner, and often ate cereal for breakfast with milk. We don't do that any more. We still sometimes eat cereal with milk for breakfast, but the glasses of milk with lunch and dinner are gone, replaced by carbonated water, apple juice, or wine. Repeat that times a hundred million people, and it's no wonder dairy farmers are hurting.

Switzerland has had the exact same problem due to heavy dairy subsidies. Besides scaling back on subsidies, Fondue and Raclette was pushed heavily in marketing, which is probably why these are staples of Swiss food nowadays. I'm sometimes asking myself whether tabletop style Raclette couldn't be popular in the US. How strong is America's distaste for cooking food at the table (I'm just going by Lost in Translation here)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raclette

Not at all. We consider it something of a luxury, in fact. (Cooking food at the table)

So much this. The average Swiss person eats Fondue 1x per year, similarly Raclette.

I doubt your numbers. According to [1], average per capita consumption of Raclette was 1.35kg per year in 2006, and that includes infants. Gruyere was even >1.7kg per year, and I'm sure a lot of that goes into Fondues. I don't know about you, but I can't down 1.35kg of Raclette in one sitting, and I don't think Swiss have changed that much since 2006 ;).

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/record-growth-in-swiss-cheese-c...

It was big in the 70s. I enjoy cheese fondue and raclette.

Is this why Costco stores have so much cheap Jarlsberg Swiss?

Jarlsberg Swiss

??? Jarlsberg is a region in Norway not Switzerland?

That might actually be made in Ohio.

Same thing in Austria, at least until a few years ago.

Farmers still complain over falling milk prices, and that they cannot survive. Yet the market is still saturated, milk was literally drained down the gutter regularly, every milk product is incredibly cheap IMO, considering how it is produced (although there was a butter shortage and a price "spike" last year).

Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.

> Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.

It’s important to understand why they are there. There are not there because states are scared of food instability. Austria for instance tracks how much of the daily food intake it can produce locally and there are yearly goals to make it 100% self sustainable.

If that goal is still important as EU member I can’t answer but it’s still a goal.

Not entirely true in my experience. This would be particularly national interests and don't explain EU subsidies.

When staying particularly in Austria, the subsidies are there because national politicians and EU politicians from Austria want some part of the EU subsidies pot for their farmers, contributing to the general constant rope-pulling and trading "a piece of the cake" (i.e. EU budgets) - usually in the form of: "You get subsidies for x, we then get support for our poor farmers in poorer regions, since they are starving".

Generally the EU subsidies for agriculture are misguided and just money down the drain. Until they begin to dry up causing uproar and "EU took our money!"-complaints.

I think there might be some retroactive argumentation going on about why they exist which does not go back to the roots of it, but if you look at why and how the CAP was made and how subsidies and price fixing within the countries works, you can still see where it came from.

Like all things involving subsidies and the economy, there is an amazing Planet Money episode on this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607787950/epis...

Yep, I also kept thinking about that episode.

This must be why the US wants to force Canada to get rid of it's milk supply management system.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1254398531823

I switched to fortified vanilla soy milk about 2 weeks ago, (from 1% milk), and holy moly what a difference. I have a big bowl of breakfast cereal and milk for breakfast, and also milk in a morning latte and a mid-day latte. Switching to soy milk:

- in 2 weeks I have lost about 5 lbs (all other food, and exercise routines, stayed the same) - I feel less bloated after breakfast and after coffee

Maybe I was dealing with a slight lactose intolerance, I dunno (is there such a things as a "slight" lactose intolerance??). Anyway, I'm not switching back.

I've always avoided Soy as I read a long time ago that it contains plant based estrogen and can be a problem for men like gynecomastia. Of course, I have no idea if that's true or not but I'd rather not worry about it and just pick up Almond milk instead.

Same here, I made the switch to Almond milk about a year ago and have stopped using any "real" milk or butter as prices here in New Zealand are through the roof at the moment (e.g. 500g butter is $6.30 NZD ($4.15 USD), over double what they used to be. I have no plans to go back either, I feel great these days, and I'm pretty sure it's because of the lack of milk products.

It's not.

Humans don't digest soy in the same way as animal models - studies found no hormonal impact on a heavy soy diet. If hormone absorption was that readily influenced digestively one should only eat meat of the same sex and athletes should be eating rocky mountain oysters and spotted hyena meat frequently as a loophole for steroids as it is just food that happens to have testerone and not drugs.

You are certainly describing a lactose intolerance vs allergy. If you immediately presented with symptoms there was nothing slight about it, it is just an intolerance.

My household prefers lactose free milk(not necessarily Lactaid brand) over alternatives, which can also be cheaper. I would also guess that you will continue to drop weight as your digestion improves and inflammation decreases.

The best way to describe it would be that you had self inflicted IBS.

We had a child in care in our home that presented with obvious un-diagnosed lactose intolerance. After removing lactose, she dropped about 3-4% body weight in about 60 days, and then grew about 12% in height over 120-150 days. So her ability to absorb nutrients dramatically shifted after we got her off lactose. I am sure other factors contributed, but simply not having nearly constant loose stool drastically changed her health.

I am also convinced that a much larger portion of the population has difficulty in processing lactose than people think.

The first graph, "New York's Shrinking Dairy Herd Starts To Grow Again", has a Y-axis starting at 610,000 and a maximum of about 627,000. I expect Bloomberg to represent a 2.5% change more honestly.

It's common in financial publications, and in other publications with numerically literate audiences, to focus statistical graphics on the region of interest (except in bar charts, in which bars are expected to sit on a baseline of zero). For example, stock charts, one of the most common plots in financial publications, follow this practice:

http://google.com/search?q=GOOG

Surprised there was no mention of non dairy milk. Almond, soy and others have all taken over much of the aisles, has to leave a mark I would imagi ne.

Hm. Not in Iowa. I see them on their one shelf in the grocery Wall of Dairy. Cows milk has 6 cases.

An estimated $2.11 billion U.S. sales. I would think that has to impact milk sales. [0]

In their market research of consumers, the same article found that many people are intentionally consuming less dairy.

...nearly one in five (19%) Americans claims to be consuming less dairy for health reasons.

[0]http://www.nutritionaloutlook.com/article/us-non-dairy-milk-...

Keep in mind it often has a much longer shelf life so the shelf space is not a good measure.* Also, my local store has milk cart shelves on wheels that can be restocked much faster than fixed shelves.

Tip: the same non dairy milk can be found a smidgen cheaper non refrigerated

I’ve never seen it on sale refrigerated, really. It’s generally shelf stable; why would you bother?

At Costco, they sell box type non-dairy milk as room temp and shelf stable, while other almond and coconut milks are in half gallon form and refrigerated. Not sure whether the latter actually require refrigeration before opening.

I'm sure with falling prices the market will correct itself.

I was going to make a snarky comment about US dairy subsidies, but aside from a billion dollar giveaway in 2009, those are almost nothing today. $370,000 in 2017.

It sounds like these dairy subsidies fluctuate greatly.

In 2016, the dairy industry asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for a staggering $150 million to buy their excess cheese. A spokesperson for the National Farmers Union said they were disappointed to receive “only” $20 million. [0]

And according to this 600 page Canadian report, indirect subsidies are also a huge factor and contribute to 73 percent of producer returns coming from subsidies. [1]

The American government contributed around $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to the dairy sector in 2015.

[0] https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/377406-dairy-...

[1] https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-...

If you're interested in this you can dig deeper at https://farm.ewg.org

This made me think of this incredible piece of art by Mishka Henner that I saw in Edinburgh at the Scottish National Gallery: https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots

what is that?

Massive cattle farms according to the text below the pictures.

It looked so disconcerting I clicked it away immediately. I was so sure it was a tiled wall of some kind in a slaughter house - and a nightmarish rendition of a cross section of a heart or an animal or a clogged vein.

It was all of these things

Yes. The pictures look strange indeed.

Prior to slaughter, most large scale farming of animals has a finishing step where the animals are confined to limit movement to fatten them up. In and Out has said it was limiting their expansion eastward to Texas because they did not want to freeze their beef, probably not coincidentally cattle feedlots range from California to Texas, north to Colorado, that I have seen personally.

If you live in California, you can smell the feedlots for miles near Coalinga/Harris Ranch on I-5 while driving between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and when cattle are visible, it appears much denser than that photograph, but that may be sample bias where the cows just like to get closer to the fence for some reason, need a drone to have a better idea.

I'm curious how much of this is because of demographic trends in America--Lactose intolerance for adults is relatively common among everyone except northern europeans.

Would especially explain the decline in liquid milk consumption (and also part of the popularity of greek yogurt, which is pretty low in lactose content).

everyone except

1. northwestern Europeans, centered around Belgium

2. The Maasai tribe, of Kenya and Tanzania

Stop breeding milk cows...

A supply side solution to a weakening demand? That's just logical enough to work.

... or start making more buttons ...

http://plastiquarian.com/?page_id=14228

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith

The funny part is, in Asia, Dairy is a premium. Look at Philippines for example, stagnant production since 1995-

http://www.nda.da.gov.ph/images/2017/data/Phil%20%20DAiry%20...

I'm not Filipino, but, hell I would love to manufacture milk products.

The thing that fuels it is A: local population isn't used to dairy. B: Yogurt and such are considered high premium -- a half kilo of yogurt at the store costs $5-7$, a kilo about $10, from Australia.

https://gain.fas.usda.gov/Recent%20GAIN%20Publications/Dairy... Better article.

I had a thought the other day. Did we convince people that fat was bad, and then used that to water down milk so that from one harvest we could sell more watery milk and other dairy fat products?

Removing fat from milk does not make it “watered down”, it’s just not as rich in fat. If you’re trying to say there’s some kind of collusion going on between milk producers and other makers of high-fat foods — do you really think any of the industrial food companies care at all that people would exceed their RDA of fat?

They skimmed the fat so it could be sold as cheese and other dairy products, yes. Americans basically didn't even reduce their dairy fat intake, they just increased how much $$ they were spending on it across more dairy products.

Chobani is mentioned so many times that this must be paid for by that company. The article is a dress that barely covers an advertisement's bare bottom.

Do farmers ever learn? Bandwagoning onto the latest food fad is the failure story that just repeats itself over and over again. Farms are firms in a perfectly competitive market: why invest oodles of capital to chase what is basically noise in the market? Why is anyone surprised when the market contracts?

They could have export more milk, UHT, Cream Cheese, Butter etc.

Instead they won't interested. They won't interested in completing against EU, AUS, New Zealand's dairy products. I doubt they will lose any money if they were priced competitively against it, they are just likely to have less profit margins.

Actually that is not a totally fair assessment, since a few of them did complete on price, but their quality won't as good. And they blame it on their international sales staff, which has since changed hands multiple times.

P.S Those companies do not include any Multinational like Nestle USA, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.

I found accidentally many of my digestive problems gone just after I stopped consuming milk-based products for a week. I wonder now how and why our diet has evolved in that way.

The ability to digest milk's lactose in adults is only retained in some Northern European and African (notably cattle raising cultures like the Maasai) descendants who traditionally drank milk as adults. It's genetic AFAIK.

China is a massive consumer of dried milk powder. I wonder if the trump tariffs have anything to do with the changing demand for US milk.

Bound to be, but also some competitors on the international market like New Zealand (which has no government price supports or subsidies), have free trade agreements with China.

If you become insular and erect tariff walls people play where there are none and they make more money.

The real problem is govt price supports, often brought in to tide people over for a year, once people start to depend on them they really stop working, you get stuck with inefficient industries when people should be growing something else, or simply be in another business. When NZ cut all farm subsidies back in the 80s farmers formed farmer cooperatives, in the dairy industry they now own most of the back end milk processing infrastructure, they're big enough that they are big players on the world markets, and the profits go back to their owners

If I were the milk industry, I'd heavily promote meal replacements that use milk as a base. Especially in places where milk is cheap. I love Milk Fuel(formerly Schmilk) and I think it would be a good breakfast replacement for the masses.

http://superbodyfuel.com/shop/milk-fuel/

We just opened up the Canadian market.

(Not sure who 'we' is but,) in the recent renegotiation of NAFTA, Canada did surrender some additional access to their domestic dairy market. The USA was demanding 100% access, but got only a couple of % more. But CETA, CPTPP, and USMCA combined get only 10% total of the total Canadian market.

Basically, Canada prefers to have its supply management system, and the USA prefers have its massive subsidies.

Canadian here. Although my personal politics tends to be CENTRE-right (note the capitalization) and favouring market forces, I do see some merit in supply management to avoid the extreme pain being experienced by the American dairy farmers mentioned in the article. Yes, we mostly do prefer supply management, paid for by dairy consumers, than massive subsidies, paid for by all taxpayers and leading to wasted output.

For details, read Wikipedia [0]. Some quotes:

- High (tariffs) are only placed on imports above the quota, not on all the dairy products sold to Canada.

- Canada's milk quota system is butterfat-based so the highest TRQ is on butter at 298.5%.

- By 2018 the United States's quantitative (tariff) threshold for the import of milk products is 3% and Canada's is 10%.

- designed to prevent shortages and surpluses, to ensure farmers a fair rate of return and Canadian consumer access to a high-quality, stable, and secure supply of these sensitive products.

Mr T, in his incendiary speeches to his tribe, was selective with his facts. The 300% tariff does not apply to all dairy; only butter and only when exceeding USA's quota (Canadian farmers who exceed their quota cannot sell at all). The threats and beatings delivered by Mr T's negotiators did "open up" the Canadian dairy market a little, but supply management is still intact and "diversification" is now on the minds of many Canadians.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada)

As a sidebar, the US has its own 'supply management'-style policies in place for markets like sugar, where Canada's access was limited to 0.1% of the market, pre-USMCA. [0]

I wonder what will end having greater economic impact in the long run: the relatively minor 'tweaks' USMCA makes in these markets, or the extent to which Mr T has shaken the foundations of Canadians' relationship with the US.

[0] https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/f...

> and the USA prefers have its massive subsidies.

There are no dairy subsidies in the US right now.

What about turning milk into a biofuel? Can yeast grow in milk and produce alcohol?

I would love to see biofuel done with surplus milk. It's full of excess fat, so it shouldn't be too hard to convert it to biodiesel or candles.

I have heard of vodka made from milk[1]. I would really like to try that one. There's also milk beers[2]. Although I don't like the taste of them.

[1]: https://www.blackcow.co.uk/

[2]: http://allaboutbeer.com/article/milk-stout-2/

If the Earth's cows were a country, they'd be the #3 GHG emitter. Making milk to make fuel would be horribly inefficient and detrimental to the environment. We simply need less cows.

It would be nice to get rid of the excess cows, but since that won't happen. It's better to make something out of the excess rather than let it go to waste.

Especially considering that a large amount of fat is produced from skim milk. This fat just goes into making cheese, and deflating the cost of cheese. More cheese than most people would like to eat.

Seems like that would be awfully inefficient. We use oil (fertilizer) to grow corn and soybeans, which we then feed to cows, which then convert it to milk. Each step in the process reduces the efficiency. Why not just use the oil for fuel? Or convert the corn the ethanol if that type of oil is not useful as fuel? The efficiency of ethanol is already in question due to the use of corn.

It could be a way to use the excess or that milk which is about to spoil. There's a large amount of fat left over from the production of skim milk. This fat usually gets turned into cheese, that's why pizzas are more cheesy than in the past.

I can imagine cars powered by butterfat with butter sputtering out of the exhaust.

Didn’t read the article. Just saw the “Bloomberg” in parentheses and thought “ah some reporter at Bloomberg is trying to get his yearly bonus by moving the dairy market.”

Which is irrational and silly. But it’s amazing the way something like the controversy around “The Big Hack” brews suspicion.

>Which is irrational and silly.

Not really irrational. Half of what's published is PR in one form or another.

I wouldn't expect Bloomberg to represent anything honestly.

I wouldn't read Washington Post for technology: I read it for politics. I don't read Bloomberg for technology news, I read it for investment news.

Well, there's certainly a problem with Bloomberg's technology / cyber-attack division. But Bloomberg as a whole is one of the better investment newspapers. IMO, Bloomberg probably should just stop writing about cyber-attacks. They're clearly incompetent at that and its causing people to lose trust in the greater newspaper.

But I won't go to Ars Technica to read about insider Washington politics. Its a matter of recognizing what these papers are "good" in.

Haven't you seen that idea, that you might know some media sucks in tech, but think is ok in other stuff, because you are an expert in tech, but not in that other stuff? E.g. Bloomberg might suck in everything, but you'd only see a problem with tech.

I'm not an expert in finance / investing. But I think I'm good enough to see that Bloomberg has great economic analysis and breakdowns into company financials.

Here are some key quotes from the article in question that demonstrate Bloomberg's research ability into financial / investment matters.

> From April 2017 to April 2018, sales of Chobani products grew only 1 percent while sales by all companies in the segment slipped 2.2 percent.

> The key ratio of income-to-feed costs reveals that dairy farmers have very little margin left these days, said Bill Brooks, an economist at INTL FCStone. Feed such as alfalfa and hay are more expensive than last year, as are labor and energy expenses.

> The amount of milk dumped by farmers in the U.S. Northeast reached almost 145 million pounds through July—the most in at least a decade—including 23.6 million pounds that month alone.

-------

These are specific statistics. And sure, they may be available from publicly available research sources, but they contribute to the article's primary thesis. Knowing what statistics seem relevant for a particular article is what Bloomberg is good at.

Besides, these individual statistics are relatively easy to check. The main benefit of Bloomberg is their ability to collate various information sources together into a singular article.

You're referring to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18268036 and marked it off-topic.

I found this article unreadable as Bloomberg's relentless assault (of ads) on my eyes nearly gave me a seizure. Note to self: Don't read Bloomberg.

The US dairy industry and the USDA have a large operation to promote cheese. With everything. Over half of Dunkin' Donuts offerings now include cheese, and they are rebranding to "Dunkin". Cheese filled tacos are now a thing.

I recently chewed out a restaurant manager of a "natural" and "green" restaurant when they started putting cheese on a piece of plain salmon on top of fresh greens. That's a chef problem - they have to add something to justify being paid more than McDonalds.

You yelled at a restaurant manager for putting cheese on your salmon? Wow.

> For decades, yogurt was runny and high in sugar. “Then Chobani comes onto the scene and changes the idea of what yogurt can be.”

Um...

Plain yogurt from Chobani: serving size 150g, of which 15g sugar. ( https://www.chobani.com/products/greek/plain/non-fat-plain/ )

Cookies-and-cream flavored yogurt from Yoplait: serving size 170g, of which 19g sugar. (All yogurt in the same product line has the same amount of sugar, but it's more fun to quote it for cookies-and-cream. https://www.yoplait.com/product/regular-original-cookies-cre... )

Chobani didn't change the idea that yogurt is high in sugar. What was that comment about?

There's a chance that is lactose, which, per the FDA [1] counts as sugar for nutrition labelling purposes.

[1] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/interactivenutritionf...

[2]https://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/johannah-sakimura-nut...

> There's a chance that is lactose, which, per the FDA [1] counts as sugar for nutrition labelling purposes.

I'd expect most sugar in yogurt to not be lactose: part of the point and advantage of yogurt and other fermented dairy (and they're commonly consumed in places with low to no lactase persistence) is the cultures break down much of the milk's lactose into simpler sugars. In fact, the chobani nutrition section quotes 6g carbs, 4g sugars, less than 5% lactose.

More to the point, unsweetened yogurt should contain about the same sugar ratio as milk (4~6% by weight on average), >10% (the yoplait one) is way above the upper end and indicates added sugars. GP misread the chobani's nutrition label though, they quote 6g carbs (4g sugars) per 5.3oz (150g) not 15g.

15g protein. Only 4g sugar.

I think you read that wrong. It doesn’t have 15g of sugar.

Greek yogurt is regular yogurt that has been strained— the whey that they discard has a lot of the sugar content. Its closer to a soft cheese than a traditional yogurt.

Traditional? You must realise that Greek yoghurt is the closest you can get to the historical origins of it.

And you must realise that different regions have different traditional concepts of food products.

And ofcourse everything that we think of as traditional whatever is all but traditionally manufactured nowadays

What's the amount of added sugar?

None in the chobani (GP misread the nutrition information, it lists 6g carbs of which 4g sugars), a ton in the yoplait (sugars is the second ingredient in the list).

> Plain yogurt from Chobani: serving size 150g, of which 15g sugar. ( https://www.chobani.com/products/greek/plain/non-fat-plain/ )

Not sure where you've read that, the page lists 6g carbs (4g sugars), roughly in line with cow milk.

> Cookies-and-cream flavored yogurt from Yoplait: serving size 170g, of which 19g sugar.

"Sugars" is literally the second ingredient in the list, right behind low-fat milk.

Please cite your sources accurately. The Yoplait has more than four times the amount of sugar as the Chobani, almost twice the calories, and less than half the protein.

    Total Fat       0g 0%
      Saturated Fat 0g 0%
      Trans Fat     0g
    -
    Cholesterol   10mg 3%
    Potassium    210mg 6%
    Sodium        55mg 2%
    Total Carbs     6g 2%
      Dietary Fiber 0g 0%
      Sugars        4g
    -
    Protein        15g

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