I don't think non-dairy milks are artificially expensive so much as cow milk is artificially cheap. At least in the US. Federal dairy subsidies and all that.
Here in Singapore, where soy milk has been around for decades, soy milk in both fresh and UHT forms tend to be much cheaper than dairy.
Also, soy milk's been around for decades in the US too! I drank a lot as a kid. My mom would keep these little single-serving cartons in her purse for us, like juicebox-sized.
Plantmilks are firstorder product.
This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk.
On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue?
On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment
If milk is a byproduct of producing meat that can be sold for money, this means milk subsidizes the price of meat. Even if the effect is small, this is almost certainly enough to make it worse for the environment than e.g. soy milk, as the difference between raising cattle and growing soy is orders of magnitudes.
What do you mean "feasible"? It's profitable to sell something for more than it costs to make. If the only companies that offer Oat milk for sale price it at $4 a gallon, that's the price you have to pay to get it.
Meanwhile there are laws around the pricing of Milk, and in my neck of the woods that includes a MINIMUM price.
People wave their hands like "the market" is magic. As long as some consumers are willing to pay $4 a gallon for oat milk, companies will not reduce the price, and plenty of people are willing to pay MORE for oat milk than for cow milk.
If you wonder why nobody starts a company that undercuts the $4 oat milk, the simple answer is that the second you are done spending $1 million on a factory to make cheap oat milk, the producers already in the market drop their price and your business fails. This is why Google Fiber for example struggled. There is no technical reason prices are high. There's just no competition because the current producers are so massive and have such giant war chests that they can just kill your brand new competitive business, and soon your business will be dead and they can slowly ratchet up prices again.
There's also the fact that homemade oat milk is trivial to produce, results in a great product, and is cheaper than even that mythical competitive industry would produce.
In what way? Data seems to suggest otherwise but maybe I'm misunderstanding