Ann and John Van Dyk of Dunnville have launched a petition to end milk dumping by dairy farmers who do it to remain within marketing-board quota limits.
Earlier another Dunnville-area farmer, Jerry Huigen, made a video of dumping 30,000 litres of milk. The video went viral as people from around the world took a look and registered surprise and outrage that milk is being wasted.
“When a fellow farmer dumps 30,000 litres then that’s going to catch everyone’s attention,” John Van Dyk told CTV News. “It’s time to end this practice. There’s no need to have this practice.”
Even Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at Dalhousie University who has developed a huge audience for his commentaries on the Canadian food industry, said that “to see the practice is painful. Especially right now everyone’s hurting at the grocery store.”
“They make us dump it,” Huigen said in the video.“As a little boy, we grew up on a dairy farm, came from Europe, work, work, work and here we are this is what’s happening,” as the video shows milk pouring out of a drain pipe.
“There is no politician out there who’s going to support us on ‘oh yeah, it’s okay that you guys dump milk.’ No, it’s not,” said Van Dyk. “We can’t do this anymore.”
“Why don’t we as an industry grab this issue by the horns and change things?” Van Dyk said.
The issue of more milk than quota has been around ever since dairies in Ontario in the 1940s and '50s needed to limit the volume of milk they would buy to match their consumer demand.
Then it became industry-wide practice for all milk when the Ontario Milk Marketing Board came to power in the 1960s.
It is unlikely that the board, now named Dairy Farmers of Ontario, will abandon its quota system to limit production and marketing from dairy farms.
