LILLEY: Viral video shows Canada’s dirty dairy secret – we dump lots of milk

With one simple video, Jerry Huigen let the rest of the country in on Canada’s dirty dairy secret: We waste a lot of milk to keep prices high. Huigen, a southern Ontario dairy farmer, posted an emotional video to TikTok showing his dairy operation spilling milk because he was over his quota for the month of January.

“I dumped 30,000 litres of milk. It breaks my heart,” Huigen said in the video.

It also pains the parents who do the shopping in every household with young kids. Kids drink a lot of milk and like everything else, the price of milk is going up at a time when many are feeling the pinch at the grocery store.

“This time, I’m going public. I want the people to see the pain us growers have,” Huigen said. “Only one country in the world, in Canada, not in the United States, not in Europe, do they dump when they are over, but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

Huigen pointed out that the excess milk could go to low-income families to food banks or even be donated to the hospitals but instead it is order dumped by the regulators of the system.

Milk production in Canada is controlled by a national supply management system that also has provincial arms at work. Farmers have a quota of how much milk they can produce; a quota that must be purchased. No farmer is allowed to sell or distribute more milk than their quota allows.

Dumping milk has been going on since the start of the system to control supply, and thus price, but few people know about this dirty dairy secret.

In Ontario alone, farmers dumped 74 million litres of milk between Nov. 1, 2020, and Oct. 31, 2021. Those figures, which used to be public are now considered “commercially sensitive” information and is now kept secret.

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Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at Dalhousie University and expert in food distribution and agriculture in Canada, said that he had asked the federal Canadian Dairy Commission last week for figures on how much milk is dumped down the drain but they could not respond.

The news of the dumping of 30,000 litres in one month at one farm comes just as farmers were given a 2.2% increase in the price they are paid for their milk which went into effect Feb. 1. It comes on top of a 2.5% increase last September and an 8.4% increase last February.

If you feel like milk costs more, you’re right.

It makes the supply management system look cold, callous and greedy. The system was put in place to give farmers a stable income and as an alternative to what most countries do which is subsidize farmers directly.

The news of the dumping will have some calling for an end to the supply management system, something that won’t happen. It’s too touchy politicially and banks and credit unions across the country have billions of dollars of loans tied up in financing the quota loans farmers have taken out.

That doesn’t mean there can’t be changes to the system to make it work better for farmers and consumers, there just needs to be some political will on that front from elected officials and enough producers in the dairy sector.

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“Let’s make supply management work for farmers and Canadians,” Charlebois said.

He pointed out that Canada could export more of its dairy products, which other countries want, but which the industry has been slow to react to. Doing so would stop the massive dumping, give farmers more income and keep prices lower for Canadian consumers.

The industry already had an image problem with rising prices, this dumping fiasco will only make matters worse. If they won’t innovate themselves, someone eventually will and it may not be to their liking.

Best to change and find solutions now.