3 ms·

I am not sure if this factors into it but an interesting difference between dairy and eggs and most other types of farms is that those are highly perishable. Gr

by jamwil 1mo ago

I am not sure if this factors into it but an interesting difference between dairy and eggs and most other types of farms is that those are highly perishable. Grain can be stored and released gradually to even out market gyrations but dairy is just lost if they don’t match supply closely with demand in real time.

snayan 1mo ago
Yeah, that's a fair point but it still seems like a huge delta. And my rabbit hole over the last couple days has led me to spend a bunch of time looking into Fonterra, which is the farmers processing Coop that happened in NZ when they got rid of their quota system. It's turned NZ into the largest milk product exporter on earth, and their whole strategy is processing milk into more shelf stable products. Cheese and Butter is about 20% the remainder is skim milk powder, whole milk powder, whey protein, and caseins. Anyhow, all of this is to say, that there are solutions that ensure no milk goes to waste by processing it into more shelf stable ingredients, all of which have massive demand on the global markets. Whether we do much of this in Canada, I am not sure, but, feels like a missed opportunity if not, and likely partially caused by a lack of necessity to innovate due to the artificial moat. Eggs, haven't looked into but presumably similar to milk in that it can be processed into shelf stable powders. But, on the poultry front, beef, pork, etc, are all in the 92% of farms group, managed by subsidies, so, while chickens have a shorter lifespan, I don't see why we can manage cow and pork farms with subsidies, but not chicken.
- throw0101a 1mo ago
  > Anyhow, all of this is to say, that there are solutions that ensure no milk goes to waste by processing it into more shelf stable ingredients […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese

by jamwil 1mo ago

snayan 1mo ago

Yeah, that's a fair point but it still seems like a huge delta. And my rabbit hole over the last couple days has led me to spend a bunch of time looking into Fonterra, which is the farmers processing Coop that happened in NZ when they got rid of their quota system. It's turned NZ into the largest milk product exporter on earth, and their whole strategy is processing milk into more shelf stable products. Cheese and Butter is about 20% the remainder is skim milk powder, whole milk powder, whey protein, and caseins. Anyhow, all of this is to say, that there are solutions that ensure no milk goes to waste by processing it into more shelf stable ingredients, all of which have massive demand on the global markets. Whether we do much of this in Canada, I am not sure, but, feels like a missed opportunity if not, and likely partially caused by a lack of necessity to innovate due to the artificial moat. Eggs, haven't looked into but presumably similar to milk in that it can be processed into shelf stable powders. But, on the poultry front, beef, pork, etc, are all in the 92% of farms group, managed by subsidies, so, while chickens have a shorter lifespan, I don't see why we can manage cow and pork farms with subsidies, but not chicken.

throw0101a 1mo ago
> Anyhow, all of this is to say, that there are solutions that ensure no milk goes to waste by processing it into more shelf stable ingredients […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese