Why American farmers are throwing out tons of milk

in South Florida the cars stretched out for nearly two miles as thousands of people waited for hours to reach their local food bank the same thing happened in California Pennsylvania and New York City food banks across the u.s. are seeing a massive rise in the number of residents in need because of coronavirus but on American farms the economic fallout from the corona virus looks very different here it's led to a widespread surplus of food that's gone to waste millions of pounds of perfectly good potatoes cucumbers and squash left to rot or plowed back into the fields and dairy farmers forced to dump millions of gallons of fresh milk down the drain it's all because of a break in the food supply chain one that for now means we have farmers with too much food and very few options where the farmers out here we're all in this together and there's something don't change Sue and we're going down to understand why the food supply chain is broken let's look at milk a very simplified supply chain for dairy products in the u.s. looks something like this it starts with cows and a dairy farm where they're milked that milk is filled into tanks and then sent to processors there it turns into products like pasteurized fluid milk cheese yogurt or butter it's then packaged and sent off to grocery stores where consumers can get their dairy off the shelves but here's the thing even though a large portion of dairy production is aimed at grocery stores it's just one of many places where the product ends up about half of all production is aimed at other avenues like schools and businesses Starbucks for example typically goes through hundreds of thousands of gallons of milk every day together all of these avenues amount to a huge amount of No production in the u.s. about 218 billion pounds in 2019 every part of dairy production from farming to processing and packaging carries out a specialized process which makes the supply chain efficient under normal circumstances but as the coronavirus started to spread and the nation began to shut down this chain started to look a lot different schools and restaurants canceled orders but the cows at the farm still needed to be milked a significant drop in demand from these avenues led to way more supply but there's nowhere to send that surplus even though more people have been buying dairy at grocery stores during lockdown the system isn't built to redirect excess supply that easily we want to get food to the people who need it and we're trying but when you have a really specialized industry it doesn't necessarily translate that's because the same dairy products meant for schools businesses and grocery stores look very different after they're processed and packaged for example at grade schools they might take the shape of small milk cartons made for kids or massive bags of cheese for food service companies to make lunches at a restaurant the products might be large five gallon containers of milk or 40 pound blocks of cheese and at grocery stores there are the products we're more used to seeing like single gallon cartons of milk and small packages of cheese converting those school milk cartons into something that people will actually buy at grocery stores would be a massive change facilities often don't have the right packaging to make a switch while other products like a large block of cheese would need to be cut to a more manageable size for consumers meaning millions of dollars in new equipment that many processors can't afford you can't deliver a 500-pound barrel to someone's house and be like here's your cheese I mean you have entire plants built for school milk for kids we could have just sent crates of Malcolm what parents may like here's your crates from the school feed your kid where are they gonna store it in their fridges what we have from restaurants and from food service just doesn't neatly turn into something that's usable for the average person at home we're switching as fast as we can but this is unprecedented right some are sending their surplus product to food banks but these organizations often don't have the refrigerator capacity or the manpower needed to distribute so much perishable product and even with shifts in some production from businesses and schools to grocery stores the new consumer demand likely wouldn't make up for the huge losses from these other avenues that extra supply leads to an incredible amount of food waste we started dumping milk March 31st and we dumped seven semi loads of milk a day which is 42,000 gallons of milk a day we dumped for about two weeks when you think about a semi load like the big tanker trucks you would see out on the interstate that hundreds of trucks that size you don't have that food getting to people that's crushed this food supply chain problem has led to a massive drop in milk prices which started to tumble just as the coronavirus took hold in the US December's milk was 24 bucks today it's 1080 I don't care if you're milking 10 cows or 5,000 it don't matter 10 dollars and 80 cents is not gonna pay the bills my organic milk is very expensive it's expensive to make it's expensive to market what happens to my milk is it gets marketed as conventional milk which is basically about half of what I get paid it doesn't take much of a math scientist to figure out that you're really in trouble that drop is just the latest in several years of record low prices for the dairy industry since 2015 milk prices paid to farmers have been well below the cost of production factors like a rise in corporate farming trade wars that decreased us and more people choosing milk alternatives have led to too much dairy and low prices it's also led to a dairy farming crisis in 2014 there were about 45,000 dairy farms in the US but over the next five years 11,000 dairy farms shut down that's 9 US dairy farms lost every day during that period that number is likely to increase even more because of coronavirus today many dairy cooperatives often made up of hundreds of different farms are taking this hit together by sharing the burden and making sure not every farm has to dump their milk many have enacted quotas to keep production at a level that's more in line with what they predict can be sold some are suggesting farmers sell off cows and others are incentivizing farmers to leave their businesses entirely we have to cut back 10 percent of our milk we are selling cows we're drying up cows early we're trying to do whatever we can now to drop our production 10% but it's going to be tough the US government has allocated payouts for farmers to cover some of these losses and they have set aside money for government purchases of dairy and other fresh produce for food banks these provisions could be one way to tackle both the hardships of farmers and the growing hunger crisis that affects millions of Americans but while it may be a good first step many in the industry warned that it could disproportionately help large corporate farms and fall short of getting small farmers the help they need immediately as those things run out who knows what's going to happen and that's the uncertainty that I feel I think most other people feel it we need to have a better plan the unprecedented amount of extra milk has forced some farmers and processors to think about other solutions too like lobbying Pizza chains to put more cheese on pizzas or lobbying for a more controversial long-term solution like setting federal limits on the amount of milk production across the country so that the supply and the prices will always be stable we need some help out here and how we're gonna get it I don't know but if we don't get it we're all in big trouble what's happening with the supply chain in the US isn't just a problem for dairy it's a problem for farmers across the country who have seen their demands diminish from schools and restaurants and whether it's milk or green beans for farmers trashing their produce isn't just a financial blow it's also an emotional one we work so hard to provide for other people that's what our calling is that's why we do this we're not doing it for the money that's for sure and so to see what we provide go to waste is just been really devastating [Music]

Channel: Vox

Views: 1,282,804

Keywords: dairy, milk, coronavirus, food supply chain, farmers, crops, produce, food waste, food banks, grocery stores, restaurants, lockdown, schools, milk carton, school milk, wisconsin, minnesota, california, dairy farmer, hunger crisis, organic milk, usda, Vox.com, vox, explain, explainer, covid-19, food stamps, food pantry, coronavirus explained, vox coronavirus, us dairy, milk surplus, dairy farm, milk production, starbucks milk

Id: MODobm9mWIk

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020