Milk prices in Canada aren't set in a competitive market like other products, but in a supply management system that is intended to ensure stable income for farmers while supporting a domestic supply of milk and butterfat.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
Canada’s dairy industry discarded approximately 7 per cent of all milk it produced over a 10-year period, according to a new estimate, as part of a supply management system that is designed to control output and keep prices stable.
In a paper recently published in the Ecological Economics journal, the authors teamed up to calculate how much milk dairy farmers dispose of. They determined that more than 6.8 billion litres of raw milk – and possibly as much as 10 billion litres – disappeared from Canadian farms between 2012 and 2021, worth at least $6.7-billion.
“If you’re wasting 7 per cent of the milk you produce, well, logically, you can only come to the conclusion that milk is too expensive in Canada,” Sylvain Charlebois, a Dalhousie University professor and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview.
“That’s why it’s been taboo for dairy farmers. They don’t want to talk about it.”
Whereas prices for most commodities are set in competitive markets, milk prices in Canada are set in a supply management system that is intended to ensure stable income for farmers while supporting a domestic supply of milk and butterfat. Production quotas are set based on monthly market analysis. According to the Canadian Dairy Commission’s website, “costly surpluses can be avoided by controlling production effectively.”
The CDC contested the new paper’s data and assumptions, adding that when milk cannot be processed owing to unforeseen circumstances, producers will often send it to other provinces, donate it to food banks or feed it to calves.
“Disposing large volumes of milk is not sustainable and takes place on rare occasion,” executive director Philippe Charlebois wrote in an e-mail.
“Based on verifiable data, of the approximately 9.6 billion litres of milk produced in Canada in 2023-2024, 99.9% of butterfat and 99.1% of solids non-fat in Canada were processed and marketed.”
Jacques Lefebvre, chief executive officer of Dairy Farmers of Canada, said the paper’s conclusions are drawn from estimates, not a “robust data set,” and require independent validation.
“Milk is disposed only as a last resort after exploring all other alternatives,” he wrote in a statement. “This is done in accordance with regulations and the costs are borne by the dairy farmers.”
The paper’s authors, however, concluded that vast quantities of milk are wasted annually owing to inefficiencies in that system. The dumped milk results in excess greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 350,000 passenger vehicles annually, and needlessly pollutes soil, air and water, according to the paper, published last month. To grow feed for the cows and care for them, between 920 and 1,900 square kilometres of farmland are required, and huge volumes of water.
Prof. Charlebois said the paper’s authors, who include professors Thomas Elliot from Denmark’s Aalborg University and Benjamin Goldstein from the University of Michigan, assembled last year after an Ontario dairy farmer filmed himself dumping 30,000 litres of milk, which went viral after he published it. They met in Montreal to discuss how to determine the extent of the waste, which they said had never before been revealed by the industry or government.
They calculated national milk production based on the size of the dairy cow herd and average yield per cow, and then determined wastage by subtracting from that amount the milk sales reported by Statistics Canada.
“Boards will call farmers at the end of the month and say there’s a surplus because there’s too much production in the system, or demand has shifted,” Prof. Charlebois explained. “And so they’ll ask a bunch of farmers to dump. It’s a common practice.”
A Senate committee is considering a private member’s bill, known as C-282, which would grant significant new protections to the dairy industry. Passed by the House of Commons in June, 2023, it would prohibit the federal government from granting greater foreign access to Canada’s supply managed agriculture sectors, including dairy, eggs and poultry.
The authors said the practice of dumping milk that meets food safety standards should be halted, and that the CDC should pay farmers to document and report on how much milk they dispose of. Increased transparency, they added, would incentivize farmers to reduce their herds and move to plant-based alternatives. And the system should be reformed to penalize overproduction.
“The dairy farming community in Canada is doing nothing to limit the amount of surpluses,” Prof. Charlebois said.
“We’re not advocating for the end of supply management. We do think that supply management is part of the solution. And because we have supply management, we shouldn’t be tolerating any waste at all.”