> Adding palm oil-based energy supplements to cow feed is a decades-old practice said to increase the milk output of cows and increase the milk's fat content.
> Little research has been done on the true impact of palm oil in dairy, but agricultural experts say butter made from cows fed with palm oil has a higher melting point and, therefore, may be harder to spread at room temperature.
The article conflates palm oil in cow feed with palm oil in dairy. The lipid profile of butter can be measured as can its physical properties. Animal feed transparency is never going to be pretty.
I’m ok with the language used. It’s more of a theme throughout the article that I’m concerned about. Palm oil in cow feed can impact the dairy industry and it can impact the properties of the product; I want to understand both types of impacts.
heh - when I was a kid in New Zealand we had a year when the butter was 'wrong' (mostly wrong colour, wrong amount of salt) .... it was the end of the cold war (late 70s or early 80s) and the US had a 'butter mountain' basically a giant surplus of government subsidised butter they couldn't sell on the US market, nor on the world market without depressing the entire market. NZ's dairy industry (giant farmer co-ops) solved this problem, because there was a viable market for that butter - Russia, which the US didn't want to trade with, so NZ bought the US butter, sold it in NZ (yuck, doesn't taste like/look like our butter!) and sold domestic NZ butter to Russia
Listen. I live in Canada, and butter is hard at room temperature from September through June because room temperature stays below 20. In fact, for at least a few days every year, even water gets hard in my kitchen. It is Cold here in winter.
Between hard butter and cold coffee/tea this is why every Canadian kitchen has a microwave. I have also come to think of the two summer months as 'soft butter season' because I can just spread it directly on my toast in the morning.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my assumption is that the people making these complaints have central heating and aren’t just forgetting that it gets cold in Canada
As another canadian: we all have central heating or we'd die, what GP is saying is that confirmation bias may be in play here because it's the dead of winter and butter is going to be harder than the summer months anyway.
Wow, I don't know anyone who actually has heating temp set below 20C. I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe)
To stay ontopic, I completely gave up spreading the butter as it's stored in the fridge year round. Just cutting thin slices and laying them on the bread is ok.
It's two bowls. Put the butter in one bowl. Put a 1/4" of water in the other. Flip the butter-bowl upside down into the water-bowl. Leave it on your table. Voila. spreadable butter.
If it's not spreadable (because you just got it out of the fridge or you keep your house chilly), because it's in a ceramic bowl you can just chop/squish/stir.
65F in our house here in Michigan (in the US). Thats ~18C. Our house was built in 1860 and leaks hot air like a sieve. We also get a noticeable breeze inside if the wind is from the west-southwest.
On the butter front, we get it delivered from a local dairy and for about half the year its too hard for easy spreading. We keep it on the counter and I basically put a patty of it on my toast and then stick it back in the toaster oven for another 30 seconds while I get my peanut butter out.
Its still found in travel guides for Eastern Europe: your hotel will be way too hot and there will be (probably) nothing you can do about it. That's nearly free Soviet gas for you ;)
Meanwhile, here in the Netherlands, the gov advertises that 18 degrees is enough (19 is considered standard).
As sibling says, the best explanation I have found is that it's a holdover from Soviet natural gas politics (and in fact continued by Russian gas politics, as countries such as Ukraine can attest).
Now I don't know what the real issues were or are, but live in the old soviet block and the general understanding in my area is the heating systems were build badly, designed horribly. Of course the world at the time didn't know much about insulation either. So in order to satisfy the ones who had open walls aka no neighbours both sides, you had to push more hot water which made the ones living middle saunas. Also what floor you lived in, the pressure was never balanced.
Radiators didn't usually have any control mechanism either and there was no real initiative to save. So people opened windows.
I remember my father telling me that the windows were so poor quality where he used to live, it was smarter to isolate the radiators with tons of blankets instead. Wood with big cattle house was the main source of energy here.
Now the systems are usually replaced and since energy costs so much more everywhere it's your wallet that dictates it not some bureaucrats.
> I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe)
This is because the air temperature is only one component that determines how warm one feels:
> The importance of the MRT can be illustrated by something we’ve all experienced. In an older home in the middle of winter, the ambient air temperature indoors can be 68 to 70 degrees [F], and yet we feel cold when we’re near a window. That’s because the cold interior pane of glass in that window is literally sucking warmth away from us, or, to put it more accurately, our bodies are emitting heat to that cold surface, which causes us to feel cold. This is the inverse of the experience of feeling warmed by the sun outdoors on a cold winter day. Our skin has high emissivity and absorptivity, meaning we’re very sensitive to radiant heat loss and gain.
Vermont. 58F (≈ 14.4C). The only exception is that heat is never turned on before November 1st, so if it is a cold October then you better find your good flannel shirt.
I live in Ontario, Canada, and I'm about 30min outside of what most people would consider "civilization." As a result, and also a result in living in a heavy minnonite area, the only heating we have is propane, and that is super expensive. To heat my home at 16 degrees celsius , it costs about $400 for the month. It doesn't help that it's an old house that I'm slowly renovating to improve the insulation and structure, but for the time being, my wife and I keep it at 10, using a wood stove in the living room, and wear a sweater.
Around here (Eastern Europe too) people insulate their houses pretty well for a very long time. 2 weeks ago I had a power outage (heating was also off) for a day and the temperature inside was pretty good (~18C) when outside it was freezing.
We also used to use a lot of wood in stoves for heating and in most rural areas this is the main way to heat up at winter, can't you do the same? $400 for heating looks a bit too high, with a few thousand dollars you can insulate a small house if you do it yourself.
Practical. I do some schmaltz cooking and will sometimes whip rendered tallow or chicken fat with butter. Because it's seasoned from the BBQ brisket or whatever dish it came from, the fat makes a great compound butter. It's also spreadable and great to spoon over vegetables, etc.
I'm a little skeptical that the properties of palm oil that could raise the melting point of butter would survive the cow's digestion process. In any case, the experiments to prove the relationship should be almost trivially easy, right?
It's the palmitic acid content of the butter that's usually responsible for changes in the melting point.
Palm oil feedstocks do result in increased palmitic acid content of milk, see e.g.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203020... ("As the intake of palmitic acid increased with the PALM diets, milk palmitic acid concentrations were increased (P < 0.0001). When 1,500 g/d of PALM was consumed, milk palmitic acid concentration was increased by 50% compared with the control.")
Some years ago the dairy monopoly in Canada caused a schism in its conservative party because the dairy board people have so much power. What was set up as a guaranteed market for farmers has become an oligopoly of agribusiness. Quebec has this for maple syrup as well. It's corruption. Dairy quota discussions quickly become a proxy for the role of the federal government.
They say they maintain "good" prices for both producers and consumers, but the price inflation of cheese and beef has been absurd and cheese has become a luxury good.
What it means is that it is effectively illegal to start a dairy farm or a small scale cheese making operation. There is more enforcement against black market raw milk products than there is against meth dealers. The regulators insist it's to protect people from being poisoned, but it's really to protect the monopoly power and political sway. If you want to get a few cows and start an artisinal cheese business and grow it, you are out of luck. The city administrative classes hate rural people and they create and maintain these "safety" regulations to stamp out the culture. The country is so bland they have effectively succeeded. It's never just about butter. :)
Saw a documentary about that a while back. Just Googled it for anyone that's interested in how stuff like this starts and is maintained exactly like the parent describes: The Maple Syrup Heist on Netflix.
I’ve seen an analysis a while back showing that compared to US and EU, Canada subsidized agriculture to a lesser extent by a few multiples. Quotas might effectively shift the cost of subsidies to consumers, but they’re still lower. Now, if I could find this now.
As for supply management, the first question to ask is: does Canada want a domestic dairy industry? If the answer is "yes", then it becomes "how will it be supported?"
Because both the US [0][1] and EU [2] subsidize their dairy farmers out of general tax revenues: tax dollars are being sent to them regardless of whether you drink milk or not (lactose intolerant, vegans).
In Canada's supply management system, dairy prices are higher, but if you're not a dairy consumer, you don't pay anything. The cost of supporting farmers is borne by those who buy the farmers' products.
If we Canadians want "cheap" dairy, we can have it: but let's not fool ourselves that it will not come with some kind of cost.
I think you're misreading the reference to "raw milk" -- I don't think that poster is referring to pasteurization, just the cost of TPQ quotas.
For those not familiar with Canada's crazy system, farmers must own milk quotas in order to be able to sell milk beyond the farm gate, and this is very aggressively enforced. Quota prices are extraordinarily high; currently $24,000 CAD/cow in Ontario and Quebec, $36,500 CAD/cow in BC, up to around $44,000/cow in Alberta. The effect of this is that even opening a small hobby farm is impossible without huge investments (e.g., the upfront cost just to buy just the quotas, not the land or the cows, for a small 100 cow venture in Ontario is $2.4 million).
At one time long ago, this system was billed as protecting the family farm, but in practice now it drives the death of family farms, as people with quotas slowly sell out to large producers and new farmers cannot enter the marketplace because of the quota cost wall.
That sounds a lot like how taxi medallions work in many large cities. Anybody want to start an Uber for Canadian milk that uses P2P to take advantage of the "beyond the farm gate" loophole somehow?
It would be a dark web service paid for in bitcoin. Seriously, if you want sell raw dairy products in Canada and evade law enforcement, just pretend you are a meth dealer or international money launderer as a cover because they'll ignore you.
You don’t need to control supply with the equivalent of taxi medallions for cows to ensure that dairy production still exists in the country. There is no reasonable way to enter the market as a small local producer. The current system largely exists to protect the profits of large established agribusiness, fleece average families, and discourage innovation and enjoyment of food.
Cheese quality, price, and availability in Canada is absolutely pathetic compared to any European country, the US, or Australia and New Zealand, and we are usually several years behind on product innovations present in other countries such as ultrafiltered, lactose free, grassfed, and A2 milk.
> The cost of supporting farmers is borne by those who buy the farmers' products.
This should be true of any product, but you don’t need to take out a million dollar loan to purchase the quota from existing producers in order to raise cattle, grow blueberries, or produce sugar beets. All those industries are fine and supported by their consumers.
> Cheese quality, price, and availability in Canada is absolutely pathetic compared to any European country, the US, or Australia and New Zealand, and we are usually several years behind on product innovations present in other countries such as ultrafiltered, lactose free, grassfed, and A2 milk.
The EU, US, and AU all subsidize; NZ is not subsidized IIRC.
AFAICT, if you want to get rid of supply management, and have a domestic industry, then we'll have to have subsidies.
> This should be true of any product, but you don’t need to take out a million dollar loan to purchase the quota from existing producers in order to raise cattle, grow blueberries, or produce sugar beets. All those industries are fine and supported by their consumers.
The US is literally dumping milk from overproduction:
We can also choose to impose tariffs on countries that unfairly subsidize their industries. Restricting external producers and restricting internal producers are actually separate issues that don't have to be entangled, as much as the Canadian dairy lobby loves sowing confusion on this by pretending that they are.
If having autarkic dairy production is important for some reason, limiting opportunities for local producers to enter the market is a weird way of achieving it.
This is a nice theoric discussion but it's just that. Geopolitics doesn't play fair, if Canada tries this it will just get massively steamrolled by retaliatory tariffs.
Dairy quotas are a persistent stumbling block for trade negotiations as it is, and the Canadian dairy industry is so coddled and protected domestically that they don’t mind that they are restricted from export markets.
That doesn’t address the failure of current policy to encourage or even allow dynamic domestic production of this category of commodities to meet consumer demand.
New Zealand does make a lot of concessions for farmers - but not directly like other governments, most of which switched to dairy and wreaked havoc on our water systems over the past 2 decades. Sustainable farming is now becoming more popular in NZ, but the damage has already been done. More than 95% of our waterways shouldn't be swam in[0], compared to 2 decades ago only 10-15% were considered polluted (namely those near major cities and industrial areas).
The government has given no penalties to farmers polluting the environment over the last 20 years, every change in government there's a slow push to have some sort of payment for what's been done, but the it changes again and all progress evaporates. The farmers who originally wreaked havoc on the land are retired now. Putting penalties in place now would just be penalizing their kids, investors or those who joined the farming boom in this country from the 90s.
New Zealand is also a massive hotspot for testing new technology in farms. Speak to any dairy farmer here, they'll likely have some sort of regular cadence with overseas companies (usually Israel or Canada) to discuss product changes, management or updates to software or reporting, etc. But nearly none of the technology innovation happen in the country itself - as soon as development shows promise, it's acquired or relocated somewhere else leaving.
With the price of land in New Zealand reaching all time highs as New Zealand continues to make no progress in reducing the amount of investment in land - I think farming as a profession will continue to push towards intensification just as it has been over the last 20 years. Land is expensive, they need returns to justify the investment. Around, and around we go until the land is a toxic slurry.
Pasturization is used as a pretext to support supply management. Considering milk has been a staple for some 1000+ years, said dairy non-consumers in Canada are a minority interest that isn't a representative sample of the market or the culture.
Liberalizing the dairy system is not just about "cheap" dairy either, it's about enabling people to make a relatively independent living outside cities, and provide high quality and diversified products to supply food to their regions. This is what supply management prevents.
Also, the point of a market for something people want is that it doesn't need subsidies or have quotas. There is literally no legitimate benefit the quota system provides that could not be handled by import tariffs instead. That is, to actually enforce borders and markets instead of hollowing them out with globalized and dumped products from countries with abusive labour practices and other corrupt subsidies.
Not only this, but the monopoly has has compromised our political processes to where it manipulates party processes. It's laughably corrupt and is an example of what makes Canada seem like a write-off economy in its other sectors as well.
People were smuggling cheese from the states all the time. Canada is on serious downward slope. Super expensive housing, and food prices and high taxes. And outside of the big cities, very little development in decades. Thinking of moving back to Europe.
The economics for maple syrup are a little different. Most maple groves are located on very fertile land that could be converted for agricultural use. If the price of syrup falls too low, it would be tempting to convert that land to farmland.
Now, converting farmland back to a healthy maple grove would take 40+ years (the time it takes for sugar maple to grow to a point where it starts producing sap).
OK, so what is the problem, is maple syrup an essential product that is at risk if farmers convert the land for other agricultural use? I am an European that never consumed maple syrup, so I am trying to understand what is this about.
> that is at risk if farmers convert the land for other agricultural use?
Yes. You basically have to let very productive land untouched for 40+ years before you can have a single harvest. At current prices it's not worth it. Once a maple grove is gone, it's gone forever.
Current pricing makes it a viable proposition for farmers to keep their groves.
That is the whole point: if maple syrup is not an essential product and some farmers decide to change the use of their land to something else, what is the problem you cannot produce it anymore in the next 40 years? You just give up to some of the syrup, it's not like if supply will reduce and prices will increase you will have to produce more. You just move on and don't do it.
I remember how expensive cheese was in Quebec, and wine too for that matter. After moving to Germany, it felt weird buying those things and not just when I'm celebrating something. It completely changed my picnic game.
Eh? And what do you want Canadians to complain about?
Winter, when Texas goes dark with a little snow? Covid, when most of the developed world is worse than Canada?
That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic.
Btw, Canadian butter is excellent, even some of the cheapest ones. I use the President's Choice brand and like it.
>That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic.
Some may read this and naturally say "So buy butter from another country!". I'm here to tell you that this is basically impossible due to protectionist laws.
There are theoretically ways to import butter to Canada, but you need a special license, and there are very strict quotas. Generally, only large dairy corporations can get them, and only to handle major shortage.
In my entire life spent mostly in Canada, I have never seen butter being advertised as being from another country. Cheese, definitely, but never butter.
Even trying to bring some home with you from a vacation isn't allowed. It would be taken if declared at the border, and destroyed. Failure to declare it is a crime.
Why? The Canadian dairy industry is an incredibly powerful lobby group. All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that". Liberal governments and Conservative governments alike pander to them endlessly.
I know this is a serious issue for Canadians, but I can't help but laugh my ass off at the fact that you literally have an American-Prohibition-Era "Big Dairy" cartel that fucking extorts the little guy through government interference and corruption.
It's one of those things that if you think too hard about it, you laugh, until you realize that it's actually real and you live under it's nonsense and then you cry instead.
As long as it is restricted to dairy it's funny, but whats really sad is that a majority of people want ever more of this kind of centralization and regulation. I have a feeling that many western countries are on a slow downwards spiral to become "shithole countries". Let's see whose constitution is strongest and allows the people to buy the f*ing dairy they want. I bet this will not be our EU, the protectionist mastermind
All joking aside though, it is more complicated than a "big dairy cartel" with strong lobbying power.
See what happens at least in Quebec is that we kept the family agriculture model with single family actually owning there farm and a hundred cows. In that context, they can't be competitive with US milk which has megafarms and can mass produce basically any animal product these days.
To solve this issue the government create the milk quotas and limited imports of milk from the US. While I agree that it creates a somewhat absurd situation, I disagree that it's necessarily a bad thing. I much prefer drinking milk from my farmer friend who takes good care of his cows than some megafarm in the US.
> In that context, they can't be competitive with US milk which has megafarms and can mass produce basically any animal product these days.
On top of that, the US government subsidizes/bails out those mega-farms as well.
US dairy consumption has been going down for decades, and yet production volume is up. Milk is being dumped into the (metaphorical? literal?) gutter because of over-production.
See also EU:
> Multibillion-euro dairy multinationals are exploiting rock-bottom European milk prices to expand aggressively into West Africa. Over five years, they have nearly tripled their exports to the region, shipping milk powder produced by heavily subsidized European farmers to be transformed into liquid milk for the region's booming middle class.
As a fellow Québécois, I have one major issue with the current system. I live very near a dairy farm; I know the owners well and I love their approach, how they treat their cows, etc. I'd love to buy _their_ milk, but I just can't. A couple times a week, a truck comes in, takes all the milk and brings it to a plant in St-Hyacinthe or whatever (1+ hour from me) where it gets mixed with the milk from all the other producers.
So yes, we have managed to protect the "family farm" model, but you can't actually buy their milk. To me, that's pretty stupid; I don't mind the price, but I do mind not knowing where my milk comes from.
I get your point but raw milk is 3.5% fat it has to be processed to be ready for human consumption so I don't see how it can get much better than a plant "only" (on a global scale) 1 hour away.
To be clear I am not a fan of all the restrictions either. One of my friend brought fresh cheese curds from his farm to a diner between friends and explained that just for doing that the fine could be as high as 4000$.
> I get your point but raw milk is 3.5% fat it has to be processed to be ready for human consumption
I'm confused - are you suggesting that raw milk is unfit for consumption due to the fat content?
I ask because I (and probably lots of the other Indians on here) grew up drinking raw buffalo (Asian Water Buffalo) milk at home. That's about 7-8% fat. I knew plenty of people who got raw cow milk as well.
Of course, it was standard practice to "cook" the milk before consumption, which would cause cream to separate out. The cream would be skimmed off for other purposes, but usually the kids got the full cream milk.
Not at all, if that what you like I don't see any issue with someone liking whole milk, but at least around here 1-2% is way more popular so for my preferred consumption it would still need to be processed, that's what I meant.
That seems to be a choice of the dairy farm to either outsource their processing or to sell to bulk purchasers. I live in the US, and a local dairy decided to start selling their product and skip the cooperative exchanges. They bottle their own milk and sell it to grocery stores. Best of all it comes in a reusable glass bottle (they charge a deposit). Their prices are higher than the more generic milk at the store, but I think the taste is much better.
I also have a coworker whose father owns a small dairy farm that sells directly to the co-ops. Different business model.
>That seems to be a choice of the dairy farm to either outsource their processing or to sell to bulk purchasers.
No, in Canada it's not a choice. Any farmer that has milk quotas cannot sell directly to consumers, even inside the farm gate.
Some provinces allow farmers a "personal use" exemption, which enables non-milk farmers (i.e., farmers who happen to own a cow or two; quota holders are ineligible) to sell very small quantities of cow milk to consumers inside the farm gates. The largest I believe is Alberta that has a 50 litre a day exemption.
> I much prefer drinking milk from my farmer friend who takes good care of his cows than some megafarm in the US.
You are right in using the singular “I” in that sentence but to make it compatible with the policy you are proposing you have to swap it with “we” because thats what policies do, they force others to adhere to your preferences. To get to the bottom of it: By putting it like this you are basically stating that most individuals are not able to make this decision on their own.
First that goes against what I believe Individuals are capable of, but second exposing a society for too long to these paternalistic policies seems to subtract from the capability and willingness of individuals to take responsibility for their life
HN is an international US-based forum, that's why I used I. As far as Quebec (and Canada to a certain extent) is concerned these policies are generally popular which is why they were not struck down.
There is also the idea of food independence from the US. Trump and COVID showed that when a crisis occurs the US interests will be put first and I don't see anything positive coming from outsourcing our food production and transformation to a southern neighbour that might cut the tap with little warning.
What a pity. Down here even the regular grocery stores will have Kerrygold (grass fed Irish butter), and the fancy gourmet stores will have imports from Iceland and France and Belgium and New Zealand as well. My favorite is Isigny Ste Mere.
Not joking, my friends and I have discussed the idea of actually smuggling Kerrygold into the country illegally. Buy it in bulk and freeze it until needed.
> All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that".
Don't know about the standards - wouldn't be surprised that they are lower - but I don't recall hearing much if anything about safety issues at any kind of frequency - so what would they be 'exposing' people to??
If any Europeans want a good laugh-slash-cry, search 'cheese' on a Canadian supermarket site.
(I'm sure Canadians make nice stuff too, and why wouldn't Quebec produce plenty of 'French' cheeses, but you'd have to learn what the rough equivalents are called, because it's not going to have its protected-origin name. (And then there's all the stuff that's sliced or shredded or squirty, and heavily coloured, that seems way more popular in NA. But I don't include that in being sure they make 'nice stuff'. ;)))
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread> Little research has been done on the true impact of palm oil in dairy, but agricultural experts say butter made from cows fed with palm oil has a higher melting point and, therefore, may be harder to spread at room temperature.
The article conflates palm oil in cow feed with palm oil in dairy. The lipid profile of butter can be measured as can its physical properties. Animal feed transparency is never going to be pretty.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2SxQa1RqQ&feature=youtu.be
Between hard butter and cold coffee/tea this is why every Canadian kitchen has a microwave. I have also come to think of the two summer months as 'soft butter season' because I can just spread it directly on my toast in the morning.
To stay ontopic, I completely gave up spreading the butter as it's stored in the fridge year round. Just cutting thin slices and laying them on the bread is ok.
It's two bowls. Put the butter in one bowl. Put a 1/4" of water in the other. Flip the butter-bowl upside down into the water-bowl. Leave it on your table. Voila. spreadable butter.
If it's not spreadable (because you just got it out of the fridge or you keep your house chilly), because it's in a ceramic bowl you can just chop/squish/stir.
On the butter front, we get it delivered from a local dairy and for about half the year its too hard for easy spreading. We keep it on the counter and I basically put a patty of it on my toast and then stick it back in the toaster oven for another 30 seconds while I get my peanut butter out.
Meanwhile, here in the Netherlands, the gov advertises that 18 degrees is enough (19 is considered standard).
This is because the air temperature is only one component that determines how warm one feels:
> The importance of the MRT can be illustrated by something we’ve all experienced. In an older home in the middle of winter, the ambient air temperature indoors can be 68 to 70 degrees [F], and yet we feel cold when we’re near a window. That’s because the cold interior pane of glass in that window is literally sucking warmth away from us, or, to put it more accurately, our bodies are emitting heat to that cold surface, which causes us to feel cold. This is the inverse of the experience of feeling warmed by the sun outdoors on a cold winter day. Our skin has high emissivity and absorptivity, meaning we’re very sensitive to radiant heat loss and gain.
* https://blipdesign.com/blog/passive-house-2/mean-radiant-tem...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_radiant_temperature
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_comfort
We also used to use a lot of wood in stoves for heating and in most rural areas this is the main way to heat up at winter, can't you do the same? $400 for heating looks a bit too high, with a few thousand dollars you can insulate a small house if you do it yourself.
You should message them, tell them to turn their thermostat up.
I wonder if it is an issue in the US too but Americans don’t leave their butter out as much as other countries.
I think these type of stories are what journalists live for. "Did you see how I used 'churned up' in that sentence? Hahaha"
Palm oil feedstocks do result in increased palmitic acid content of milk, see e.g.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203020... ("As the intake of palmitic acid increased with the PALM diets, milk palmitic acid concentrations were increased (P < 0.0001). When 1,500 g/d of PALM was consumed, milk palmitic acid concentration was increased by 50% compared with the control.")
They say they maintain "good" prices for both producers and consumers, but the price inflation of cheese and beef has been absurd and cheese has become a luxury good.
What it means is that it is effectively illegal to start a dairy farm or a small scale cheese making operation. There is more enforcement against black market raw milk products than there is against meth dealers. The regulators insist it's to protect people from being poisoned, but it's really to protect the monopoly power and political sway. If you want to get a few cows and start an artisinal cheese business and grow it, you are out of luck. The city administrative classes hate rural people and they create and maintain these "safety" regulations to stamp out the culture. The country is so bland they have effectively succeeded. It's never just about butter. :)
For raw milk, it is illegal in plenty of places (Nordics, Scotland, England requires license, Australia):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_milk#Legal_status
As for supply management, the first question to ask is: does Canada want a domestic dairy industry? If the answer is "yes", then it becomes "how will it be supported?"
Because both the US [0][1] and EU [2] subsidize their dairy farmers out of general tax revenues: tax dollars are being sent to them regardless of whether you drink milk or not (lactose intolerant, vegans).
In Canada's supply management system, dairy prices are higher, but if you're not a dairy consumer, you don't pay anything. The cost of supporting farmers is borne by those who buy the farmers' products.
If we Canadians want "cheap" dairy, we can have it: but let's not fool ourselves that it will not come with some kind of cost.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/farmers-a...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/12/best-way-...
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-milk-scramble-for-africa...
For those not familiar with Canada's crazy system, farmers must own milk quotas in order to be able to sell milk beyond the farm gate, and this is very aggressively enforced. Quota prices are extraordinarily high; currently $24,000 CAD/cow in Ontario and Quebec, $36,500 CAD/cow in BC, up to around $44,000/cow in Alberta. The effect of this is that even opening a small hobby farm is impossible without huge investments (e.g., the upfront cost just to buy just the quotas, not the land or the cows, for a small 100 cow venture in Ontario is $2.4 million).
At one time long ago, this system was billed as protecting the family farm, but in practice now it drives the death of family farms, as people with quotas slowly sell out to large producers and new farmers cannot enter the marketplace because of the quota cost wall.
Cheese quality, price, and availability in Canada is absolutely pathetic compared to any European country, the US, or Australia and New Zealand, and we are usually several years behind on product innovations present in other countries such as ultrafiltered, lactose free, grassfed, and A2 milk.
> The cost of supporting farmers is borne by those who buy the farmers' products.
This should be true of any product, but you don’t need to take out a million dollar loan to purchase the quota from existing producers in order to raise cattle, grow blueberries, or produce sugar beets. All those industries are fine and supported by their consumers.
The EU, US, and AU all subsidize; NZ is not subsidized IIRC.
AFAICT, if you want to get rid of supply management, and have a domestic industry, then we'll have to have subsidies.
> This should be true of any product, but you don’t need to take out a million dollar loan to purchase the quota from existing producers in order to raise cattle, grow blueberries, or produce sugar beets. All those industries are fine and supported by their consumers.
The US is literally dumping milk from overproduction:
* https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/22/politics/pfas-water-chemicals
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dairy-farmers-dump-43-...
What do you think will happen to our (Canadian) farmers if we all US market dumping?
Not all product segments are the same, even with-in the agriculture sector.
If having autarkic dairy production is important for some reason, limiting opportunities for local producers to enter the market is a weird way of achieving it.
That doesn’t address the failure of current policy to encourage or even allow dynamic domestic production of this category of commodities to meet consumer demand.
The government has given no penalties to farmers polluting the environment over the last 20 years, every change in government there's a slow push to have some sort of payment for what's been done, but the it changes again and all progress evaporates. The farmers who originally wreaked havoc on the land are retired now. Putting penalties in place now would just be penalizing their kids, investors or those who joined the farming boom in this country from the 90s.
New Zealand is also a massive hotspot for testing new technology in farms. Speak to any dairy farmer here, they'll likely have some sort of regular cadence with overseas companies (usually Israel or Canada) to discuss product changes, management or updates to software or reporting, etc. But nearly none of the technology innovation happen in the country itself - as soon as development shows promise, it's acquired or relocated somewhere else leaving.
With the price of land in New Zealand reaching all time highs as New Zealand continues to make no progress in reducing the amount of investment in land - I think farming as a profession will continue to push towards intensification just as it has been over the last 20 years. Land is expensive, they need returns to justify the investment. Around, and around we go until the land is a toxic slurry.
[0] https://theconversation.com/polluted-drained-and-drying-out-...
Liberalizing the dairy system is not just about "cheap" dairy either, it's about enabling people to make a relatively independent living outside cities, and provide high quality and diversified products to supply food to their regions. This is what supply management prevents.
Also, the point of a market for something people want is that it doesn't need subsidies or have quotas. There is literally no legitimate benefit the quota system provides that could not be handled by import tariffs instead. That is, to actually enforce borders and markets instead of hollowing them out with globalized and dumped products from countries with abusive labour practices and other corrupt subsidies.
Not only this, but the monopoly has has compromised our political processes to where it manipulates party processes. It's laughably corrupt and is an example of what makes Canada seem like a write-off economy in its other sectors as well.
The economics for maple syrup are a little different. Most maple groves are located on very fertile land that could be converted for agricultural use. If the price of syrup falls too low, it would be tempting to convert that land to farmland.
Now, converting farmland back to a healthy maple grove would take 40+ years (the time it takes for sugar maple to grow to a point where it starts producing sap).
No.
> that is at risk if farmers convert the land for other agricultural use?
Yes. You basically have to let very productive land untouched for 40+ years before you can have a single harvest. At current prices it's not worth it. Once a maple grove is gone, it's gone forever.
Current pricing makes it a viable proposition for farmers to keep their groves.
Winter, when Texas goes dark with a little snow? Covid, when most of the developed world is worse than Canada?
That's the biggest problem on being Canadian, it's hard to find something to bitch about. When you live in a nice country all your dramas become pathetic.
Btw, Canadian butter is excellent, even some of the cheapest ones. I use the President's Choice brand and like it.
Like that veritable mountain of sulfur that you guys have no clue with what to do...
https://www.southernfriedscience.com/alberta-canada-is-the-p...
Utterly clueless.
There are theoretically ways to import butter to Canada, but you need a special license, and there are very strict quotas. Generally, only large dairy corporations can get them, and only to handle major shortage.
In my entire life spent mostly in Canada, I have never seen butter being advertised as being from another country. Cheese, definitely, but never butter.
Even trying to bring some home with you from a vacation isn't allowed. It would be taken if declared at the border, and destroyed. Failure to declare it is a crime.
Why? The Canadian dairy industry is an incredibly powerful lobby group. All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that". Liberal governments and Conservative governments alike pander to them endlessly.
I'm LOL'ing just thinking about it.
See what happens at least in Quebec is that we kept the family agriculture model with single family actually owning there farm and a hundred cows. In that context, they can't be competitive with US milk which has megafarms and can mass produce basically any animal product these days.
To solve this issue the government create the milk quotas and limited imports of milk from the US. While I agree that it creates a somewhat absurd situation, I disagree that it's necessarily a bad thing. I much prefer drinking milk from my farmer friend who takes good care of his cows than some megafarm in the US.
On top of that, the US government subsidizes/bails out those mega-farms as well.
US dairy consumption has been going down for decades, and yet production volume is up. Milk is being dumped into the (metaphorical? literal?) gutter because of over-production.
See also EU:
> Multibillion-euro dairy multinationals are exploiting rock-bottom European milk prices to expand aggressively into West Africa. Over five years, they have nearly tripled their exports to the region, shipping milk powder produced by heavily subsidized European farmers to be transformed into liquid milk for the region's booming middle class.
* https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-milk-scramble-for-africa...
AFAICT, the only country that has a completely open market is New Zealand.
I truly hope this isn't the case, because I love cheese and would gladly do my part to help get rid of the excess production.
https://adisagroblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/milchkrise1-di...
So yes, we have managed to protect the "family farm" model, but you can't actually buy their milk. To me, that's pretty stupid; I don't mind the price, but I do mind not knowing where my milk comes from.
To be clear I am not a fan of all the restrictions either. One of my friend brought fresh cheese curds from his farm to a diner between friends and explained that just for doing that the fine could be as high as 4000$.
I'm confused - are you suggesting that raw milk is unfit for consumption due to the fat content?
I ask because I (and probably lots of the other Indians on here) grew up drinking raw buffalo (Asian Water Buffalo) milk at home. That's about 7-8% fat. I knew plenty of people who got raw cow milk as well.
Of course, it was standard practice to "cook" the milk before consumption, which would cause cream to separate out. The cream would be skimmed off for other purposes, but usually the kids got the full cream milk.
I also have a coworker whose father owns a small dairy farm that sells directly to the co-ops. Different business model.
https://www.burbachscountrysidedairy.com
No, in Canada it's not a choice. Any farmer that has milk quotas cannot sell directly to consumers, even inside the farm gate.
Some provinces allow farmers a "personal use" exemption, which enables non-milk farmers (i.e., farmers who happen to own a cow or two; quota holders are ineligible) to sell very small quantities of cow milk to consumers inside the farm gates. The largest I believe is Alberta that has a 50 litre a day exemption.
You are right in using the singular “I” in that sentence but to make it compatible with the policy you are proposing you have to swap it with “we” because thats what policies do, they force others to adhere to your preferences. To get to the bottom of it: By putting it like this you are basically stating that most individuals are not able to make this decision on their own.
First that goes against what I believe Individuals are capable of, but second exposing a society for too long to these paternalistic policies seems to subtract from the capability and willingness of individuals to take responsibility for their life
There is also the idea of food independence from the US. Trump and COVID showed that when a crisis occurs the US interests will be put first and I don't see anything positive coming from outsourcing our food production and transformation to a southern neighbour that might cut the tap with little warning.
None of us have the nerve to do it.
https://www.amazon.ca/Kerrygold-Pure-Irish-Butter-Unsalted/d...
But I'm also so curious as to how this is going to work, I may just try.
Don't know about the standards - wouldn't be surprised that they are lower - but I don't recall hearing much if anything about safety issues at any kind of frequency - so what would they be 'exposing' people to??
Also outrageously quota'd.
If any Europeans want a good laugh-slash-cry, search 'cheese' on a Canadian supermarket site.
(I'm sure Canadians make nice stuff too, and why wouldn't Quebec produce plenty of 'French' cheeses, but you'd have to learn what the rough equivalents are called, because it's not going to have its protected-origin name. (And then there's all the stuff that's sliced or shredded or squirty, and heavily coloured, that seems way more popular in NA. But I don't include that in being sure they make 'nice stuff'. ;)))