![]() ![]() Adding insult to injury, about 34 million people in the US are food insecure, but most large-scale dairy operations aren’t set up to process their own milk or sell it directly to consumers, resulting in the difficult decision to dump it. Milk is highly perishable and requires expensive transportation, and farmers don’t have room to store it all themselves. Unlike other supermarket staples that can halt the factory line when the market shifts, cows can’t just turn off their udders. The last time American farmers dumped milk en masse was during the early weeks of Covid-19, when the sudden closure of restaurants and schools threw off a delicate supply and demand balance. “At the same time, farms are making decisions as milk prices fall to their lowest levels since the worst period of the pandemic.” “We know that milk is being dumped in other parts of the Midwest, not just Wisconsin,” said Laurie Fischer, the founder and chief executive officer of American Dairy Coalition. Pete Hardin, editor of Wisconsin-based dairy publication The Milkweed, told local media the state’s milk supply with no home could fill as many as 50 trailers a day, each carrying 6,000 to 7,000 gallons. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s wastewater treatment system has been handling increased volumes of milk, a spokesperson confirmed, though he couldn’t verify how much. Since-deleted videos on social media earlier this summer showed farmers pumping thousands of gallons of excess milk directly onto their fields. There’s more milk than ever in the US but nowhere left to process it, forcing farmers across the Upper Midwest to pour the excess dairy down the drain. By Nazmul Ahasan and Michael Hirtzer | Bloomberg ![]()
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