I don't believe that.
Still costs significantly more to cart the milk from where its produced to where it is consumed in refrigerated trucks. And here, it is carted much further too. There are damned few local dairys left anymore, its carted for hundreds of miles now and didn't used to be.
Milk is about $2/l here, Australia, and about $1/l when powdered milk is used here, so its still much cheaper dried.
Not obvious why yours is reversed.
I just looked and they say a gallon of milk was $1.15 in 1970
and if you use this inflation calculator that would be $7.43 right now.
It was $2.42 today at the store. Sounds cheaper to me.
the price of milk in the USA is among the lowest in the world for several reasons The productivity of dairies is almost double what it was in 1950 on a per cow basis. The average herd size is at least 10 times what it was in 1950. On an adjusted price basis the cost of cattle feed has also decreased for the same kinds of reasons.
This puts the cost of pruduction per unit much lower in adjusted dollar values.
The USA sells fluid milk at retail for well below the total cost of production and is overproducing by a huge percentage, and the overproduction is incrreasing at the same time that consumption is dropping.
The adjusted dollar cost of transportation and refrigeration has also dropped significantly - making fresh fluid milk more competetive against the highly processed milk powder.
The cost of processing has not dropped nearly as fast as the cost of production and the processing is not subsidized like the milk production sector. Also the value of powdered milk is more permanent" than fluid milk. What is not sold within a week or so of production is still saleable at the same price, a year later anywhere in the world. It is a semi-durable commodity traded on the world market
From various US published sources:
US dairy producers are churning out way too much milk, and they have been for a while. ?Farmers in the U.S. are pouring out tens of millions of gallons of excess milk, amid a massive glut that has slashed prices and has filled warehouses with cheese,? the Wall Street Journal reported last October. In the first eight months of 2016, the paper added, US dairy farmers dumped out 66 Olympic swimming pools worth of milk, the ?most wasted in at least 16 years.? In 2015, too, there was ?so much milk flowing out of US cows?that some is ending up in dirt pits because dairies can?t find buyers,? Bloomberg reported at the time.
The backstory: Goaded by rising demand for dairy products from Asia and low prices for feed, US farmers scaled up in 2014, increasing their herds and squeezing out more milk per cow. Trouble is, farmers in other big milk-producing regions like New Zealand made the same bet, and now there?s a global milk glut. The practice of dumping surplus milk has continued into this spring, the US Department of Agriculture recently reported.
US agriculture programs give dairy farmers incentive to produce as much as possible, embroiling them in boom-and-bust cycles like the current one, driving small farms out of business and forcing survivors to scale up. As recently as 1950, around 3.5 million US farms kept dairy cows; by 2012, that number had dwindled to 58,000, even as overall production surged. The shakeout continues. ?In 2010, Vermont had more than 1,000 dairy farms, but by the end of last year there were just more than 800,? NPR recently reported.
A September 2015 survey by the U.S. National Milk Producers Federation found that half of all workers on U.S. dairy farms are immigrants and if those workers were excluded from the workforce, the price of a gallon of milk would soar 90 per cent. It said the cost to the U.S. economy would be $32 billion.
Last month, another study found that if all illegal workers were kicked out of New York state, 1,100 of its farms would go out of business or reduce their output significantly.
The industry itself in the United States has admitted they wouldn?t be viable if they couldn?t use undocumented workers
Meanwhile, the massive overproduction persists amid heroic, government-led efforts to prod Americans to consume more dairy. As Josh Harkinson reported in 2015, USDA dietary guidelines urge everyone nine years old or older to drink three cups of milk per day, a recommendation that owes much more to industry lobbying than it does to sound nutrition science. Then there?s Dairy Management, a group overseen by the USDA that works with ?influential and globally recognized companies such as McDonald?s, Domino?s, Quaker, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut? to work more dairy into fast food. Oy.
? Canada aside, though, US dairy farmers clearly can?t export their way out of the dairy glut. As Chris Holman, a Wisconsin farmer who is active in the Wisconsin Farmers Union, noted in a recent blog post, the underlying problem is a ?vicious cycle? that leads to oversupply: ?When markets are up, farms often expand and production increases to take advantage of better prices. When the milk supply goes up and markets are down, farms often expand and production increases as they try to keep their heads above water.? Holman recently told me that ?if every dairy farm in Wisconsin culled one cow out of production, it would more than make up for the milk lost to Canada, and everyone can keep farming.?
But organizing such a move would essentially require supply management?something anathema to big US dairy processors, which enjoy all the cheap milk encouraged by a lack of production controls. Ferd Hoefner, former policy director and current senior strategic adviser for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, told me that the
2014 farm bill included a supply management program for dairy, but it was struck down at the last minute.Canada?s dairy farmers are largely insulated from these cycles. That?s because, in sharp contrast to the US government, Canada?s dairy policy is based on production quotas that prevent farmers from either under- or overproducing. The program guarantees farmers get a price that covers their production costs, and slaps a high tariff on dairy imports, protecting them from foreign competition. Canadian consumers tend to pay more for milk than their peers, but not prohibitively so. Overall, Canadians devote just 9.7 percent of their overall expenditures to groceries, one of the lowest rates in the world. (US consumers have the lowest rate of all: 6.4 percent.)
Canada?s dairy program, known as ?supply management,? might sound crazy to US ears, but it has advantages. In an excellent 2010 Gastronomica article, Barry Estabrook noted that, while decades of booms and busts had hollowed out dairy farming in New England and upstate New York, small and mid-sized dairy farms just over the border in Ontario?farming the ?same gently rolling tapestry of field and forest??are thriving.
Those don't work for specific items like house prices or specific commoditys like milk or metal prices either.
But still doesn't explain why that didn't happen with powdered milk too, given that its obviously made from fresh milk.
Looks suspiciously like something else is involved. Don't you lot have some controls on fresh milk prices at least in some states where the milk producers have some real clout with your state politicians ? I seem to remember someone there saying you did a couple of years ago, in usenet, not this particular group.
That's true in most of the first world too. The main exception is in some parts of the EU due to the CAP which is a hybrid welfare and agricultural policy, particular in France which allows them to continue with very expensive old fashioned technology in agriculture and food production.
And yet in Australia and New Zealand, powdered milk is still much cheaper than fresh milk.
And they are overproducing like crazy too and the price is a lot different between powdered whole and skimmed milk too - - -
For world pricing trends see:
See pricing at:
All kinds of dairy commodity pricing at
USDA cost of production and farm gate pricing iunformation by state and by producer size at:
This shows most dairy producers in the USA are running at a loss.
Less demand now = lower economies of scale?
Unlikely given that both australia and new zealand still have powdered milk much cheaper than fresh milk and the yanks don't.
Using half powdered/dry milk (+ water) and half fresh milk was hyped as a big money saver back in the 50s and 60s to stretch food budgets. Dry milk was definitely less expensive than fresh back then.
A lot of my bread machine recipes call for dry milk, and like others, I was shocked at the higher price for the dry stuff these days. So I just use fresh in those recipes and adjust the water or other wet ingredients accordingly.
My problem now is that some stores carrying fresh milk don't seem to know how to handle and store it properly so it goes bad much faster than it should. As in opening a new jug of milk and having it already gone lumpy within it's "use by" date. So I avoid that store and drive to a farther one whenever I need to buy fresh milk. More gas burned, but less wasted milk.
Nyssa, who has figured out that keeping a quart of milk in the freezer for emergencies is more cost effective than making a trip into town for just milk
How much do you pay for a 3-4 liter jug?
Back in the 1970's in Darwin, Australia, you had two choices with milk: either buy exactly what you described above (commercially pre-made), or risk buying 'fresh' milk that 50% of the time was bad/going bad.
Back in Australia, I live in a remote area. A lot of the time I am lucky enough to get farm fresh milk, but when I cannot I also keep pastuerised milk in the freezer for the same reason you do. I find it is okay for at least a month frozen, I cannot detect any real difference in flavour or texture.
3l $3
So that is a bit more expensive than $2.43US a gallon but close.
And the powdered milk is half the price, unlike in the US. Not clear why the US is unique with milk producers in having the powdered milk much more expensive than fresh milk. Must be some quirk of the milk market there IMO.
I am not sure powdered milk is really that popular here. I know when Reagan was giving away government cheese, powdered milk was part of that program along with rice, honey, corn meal and rolled oats. Most people just got cheese.
It isnt here either, just half the price and always has been.
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