Farmers Protest Low Milk Prices By Giving It Away For Free

[LK]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32878129/ns/business-world_business/

Better to be bankrupt immediately than in several years? Fuck.

[Venkman]

They said "three months". Bit different from several years.

This is a shame but it makes sense. Sounds like a basic supply problem. As in, there's simply too much of it. And if you can't even cover your costs to sell at zero profit, there's only so deep you can go to cover the costs of "giving it away", because you still need to pay the fuel and service costs to get it to wherever its going.

[Evildrider]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32878129/ns/business-world_business/

Better to be bankrupt immediately than in several years? Fuck.

That's a totally retarded protest

[Merusk]

They said "three months". Bit different from several years.

This is a shame but it makes sense. Sounds like a basic supply problem. As in, there's simply too much of it. And if you can't even cover your costs to sell at zero profit, there's only so deep you can go to cover the costs of "giving it away", because you still need to pay the fuel and service costs to get it to wherever its going.

Yeah, this has always struck me as odd with farmers in general. They never organize and just cut back on how much they produce as a whole, thereby raising the prices.  Instead, the line of thought has always been, "Crap it's selling cheap because there's so much of it... so I have to produce more so I can make more money."   Organization of some sort would save their asses.

[Sir T]

Its not quite that simple. You can't easily turn off milk production in cattle. If you try and take calves away from cattle when greass is at full flow the cow could die from mastitis. And these days dairy cows produce too much milk for their calves anyway. And you cant poar the stuff on the land without breaking 20 zillion environmental laws, milk bing one of the deadliest substances you can put into a river. That and it costs money to milk the cows.

The fact is most farmers build up their herds from nothing and if you get rid of half your herd (assuming someone will buy them) it takes years to build your herds back up again. so theres a natural caution to doing that.

[gryeyes]

Too hard to make powdered milk?

[Engels]

milk is a bad pollutant? just ordinary cow milk?

[Tebonas]

Your kind of logic doesn't work on basic foods, Merusk. For one, there is (as Sir T mentioned) the fact that with milk you can't just increase and decrease production at the flick of a switch. There are fixed running costs per cow, you can't turn them off like a machine and they have to be milked, regardless of you needing the milk or not.

Second, people don't drink more and more milk because it is getting cheaper. Chance is if its getting more expensive, people safe the money elsewhere before they cut down on basic foods. On the other hand they don't indulge themself in milk drinking sprees just because its cheap.

[apocrypha]

The free market. Isn't it awesome? 

[K9]

Agriculture is still one of the most shielded economic sectors in the EU, but it has not been able to protect farmers from the global financial crisis that caused demand to crash.

Huh? Demand for food has crashed? I always thought food had the most inelastic demand curve or almost any product.

The European farming sector is a strange beast, and I'm not sure you can really describe it as a free market, given the amount of protection and subsidy awarded to many farmers. If this was a true free market there would be about 1/10th the number of French and Belgian farmers that there are now and they would all be far more productive.

[Mrbloodworth]

That is going to smell. 

[FatuousTwat]

On the other hand they don't indulge themself in milk drinking sprees just because its cheap.

HEY! That is a fucking tradition.

[NiX]

I'll help! I could drink LOTS of milk, as long as the supple of chips ahoy makes the prices go down.

[Sky]

I've been doing my part. I've been drinking a lot more milk lately. I used to drink ridiculous amounts of milk when I was a kid (which is why I've only broken one bone), forgot how much I missed it when I could only afford beer :)

[gryeyes]

No reply to my powdered milk question? If you produce a time sensitive product that you really cant turn on/off,why wouldn't you have some means to convert the product into something that can be stored? Not cost effective to sell the the excess for pennies to some aid organization or something that powders and stores it?

[Draegan]

I'm lactose intolerant.  Sorry, can't help.

[Nebu]

I'm lactose intolerant.  Sorry, can't help.

Most people will develop at least a mild milk allergy later in life.  Humans aren't built to drink cow's milk.  We're built to drink human milk... but the logistics of mass production of that would be staggering. 

[K9]

The story of lactase persistence is an interesting one.

[Viin]

If they stopped giving hormones to these cows they wouldn't have to pump so much goddamn milk out of them.

[IainC]

Even if they just pasteurise it, they're losing money on selling it, I can't see how processing it further is going to make more money. The basic problem is that we simply don't need as many farmers as we have. Which sucks pretty hard if you're a farmer obviously but the subsidies won't last forever.

[Yegolev]

A local farm stopped selling milk to people a while back.  Now they only sell "pet milk" which is just straight-from-the-cow milk and for pet use only.  I am pretty sure that no one who buys it actually gives it to pets.

[Merusk]

Your kind of logic doesn't work on basic foods, Merusk. For one, there is (as Sir T mentioned) the fact that with milk you can't just increase and decrease production at the flick of a switch. There are fixed running costs per cow, you can't turn them off like a machine and they have to be milked, regardless of you needing the milk or not.

Second, people don't drink more and more milk because it is getting cheaper. Chance is if its getting more expensive, people safe the money elsewhere before they cut down on basic foods. On the other hand they don't indulge themself in milk drinking sprees just because its cheap.

I'm quite aware of ramp-up, and that's part of the problem. The farmers don't think forward well enough. What you usually see is a spike in demand in which farmers think "Oh shit, the good times are here, boyos. Start planting more of <cropx> or breeding more of <animaly> followed years later by a bust in prices because they're finally ramped-up to demand levels from years prior and the new food fad/ need is elsewhere.  This is only exacerbated by the guys who jumped in in the months following that initial boom and are also adding to the oversupply.   It seems that a little more education, organization and forethought could fix some of this crap.  This looks to me like boom-bust on a much quicker cycle.

Also, expect to see milk prices spike in the next year or two if the farmers DO go bankrupt.  Bankrupt farmers can't feed cows anyway, right?  So they'll be forced to sell or slaughter them, leading to an under supply.  Wheee, watch that hill.

Who said they drink more milk because it's cheap? I said they tried to sell more when it gets cheap.  Doesn't mean they're successful at it.

[HaemishM]

Part of the problem seems to be that the farmers are REQUIRED to produce X amount at a set price (the price of which is less than it costs to produce) - if they don't produce that much, not only do they not get the subsidies, their cows can get sick, and they still have to milk the cows anyway. They still have all the costs associated with owning the animal, they just get fuckall to pay for it.

[Yegolev]

I can't tell if you are saying the system is too socialist or not socialist enough.

[HaemishM]

I'm actually not sure either. How about the system is just fucked up?

[Brogarn]

I'm actually not sure either. How about the system is just fucked up?

I'm going with that.

[Sky]

Farming is a tough issue. One the one hand, there is the love of the small farmer who can provide quality goods to local markets, the independent lifestyle, the outright americana of it. On the other hand, I grew up in farm country and knew a lot of farmers, and it's hellish work that can be done more efficiently by corporate farms. There are issues on both sides, but the only thing I know for sure is I would never want to be a farmer and I have a ton of respect for anyone who is, because you basically have no life outside the hard work of running the farm.

[K9]

I can't tell if you are saying the system is too socialist or not socialist enough.

The Common Agricultural Policy

[Yegolev]

I can't tell if you are saying the system is too socialist or not socialist enough.

The Common Agricultural Policy

It represents 48% of the EU's budget, €49.8 billion in 2006

zomg

[Nevermore]

I'm just wondering how he ever expects to get married if he just gives the milk away for free.

[Sky]

That's when she told me a story bout free milk and a cow
And she said no huggin no kissin until I get a wedding vow

[Riggswolfe]

And you cant poar the stuff on the land without breaking 20 zillion environmental laws, milk bing one of the deadliest substances you can put into a river.

Ok, I'm dying to hear about this. Why would milk be so bad for a river? Does it fuck up the fish or something?

[gryeyes]

Milk has been known to form radioactive isotopes when exposed to spawning fish. The reasons why this occurs are still relatively unknown. At one point Iran was using a similar method in their nuclear program.

[Sir T]

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/district/fareham/4498456.Meon_milk_pollution_brings___11_250_bill/

A HAMPSHIRE dairy firm has been fined thousands of pounds for deliberately polluting a river and killing its wildlife.
 
Medina Processing Limited based in Mislingford, Fareham, pleaded guilty to two offences of causing long-term pollution of a tributary of the River Meon with milk effluent.

The incident happened in October 2008, when the milky substance was illegally discharged at Hawknest Farm, via a pipe onto adjacent fields before running off into the tributary.

The pollutant stripped the oxygen from the river and increased its ammonia level to more than eight times the lethal limit for aquatic life.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/shropshire/3231863.stm

Milk is a pollutant if it gets into water supplies and can kill fish by causing bacteria to feed on it, using up oxygen that would otherwise benefit wildlife.

http://www.rense.com/general26/milk.htm

"Milk is a very strong pollutant: it is about 400 times more polluting than untreated sewage. To put it another way, 1,000 gallons of milk has the same polluting potential as the untreated sewage from a town of 7,000 people." Morlais Owen. Chief Scientist for Welsh Water. North Wales Weekly News. 24.3.88.

[MahrinSkel]

No reply to my powdered milk question? If you produce a time sensitive product that you really cant turn on/off,why wouldn't you have some means to convert the product into something that can be stored? Not cost effective to sell the the excess for pennies to some aid organization or something that powders and stores it?

Well, it's been done.  One of Reagan's budget cuts was to shut down the refrigerated facilities in which cheese made from milk purchased through the dairy subsidies had built up.  So they were giving away 5-pound bricks of what amounts to a hardened Velveeta all through the 80's, to clear out the fridge.  Everyone who received any kind of government assistance (including Social Security) could pick up a brick a week, my grandparents used to send us home with a cooler full every time we visited.

--Dave