If you only had one month to dump as much milk as possible — how much would you dump?The answer, for Dairy Farmers of Ontario, is 4.9% of the milk supply in the province, or 10.2 million litres, in November 2025 alone.This is according to Milk Producer Magazine, and the amount in retail prices that was ultimately left for the fish equates to $18 million worth.The Food Professor, Sylvain Charlebois, who runs an agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University, writes on Substack, the butterfat in the milk alone accounts for $10 million of retail product. .This was done quietly, Charlebois adds.Even in the magazine itself, the process of dumping is referred to as "skimming", a jargon term used to obscure what was technically being done: discarding milk.This, Charlebois insinuates could be to avoid public scrutiny.Why is that?It comes at a time when for the ninth year in a row in 2025, the number of people (over one million) accessing food banks in Ontario has grown, according to a Hunger Report from Feed Ontario.."When questioned, dairy boards often argue that milk disposal is inevitable," stated Charlebois"Demand fluctuates, processing capacity is constrained, and surplus milk, they claim, cannot be used.""Some level of loss, therefore, is presented as unavoidable."He says these arguments have been repeated by dairy boards for decades — often without being challenged..However, Charlebois says the argument is flawed because it isn't a natural consequence — it's the cost of policy design.More specifically, it is supply management.How is this related to supply management, you may ask?This milk is being discarded to prevent oversupply and maintain artificially elevated prices..Supply management features rigid production controls and the most expensive quotas in the world.These quotas are bought by dairy farmers who are incentivized to use them to get the most bang for their buck.Unlike other agricultural commodities milk production is not as easily cut when supply is higher than demand, and it cannot adjust gradually to short-term changes. When there is overproduction, there is nowhere for it to go. .This is what is ironic about Canada's centralized dairy system.Unlike the US, Canada may allow policymakers to optimize resource use and, most importantly, reduce waste.However, what actually occurs is a system that incentivizes wasting "perfectly edible food while prices remain high for consumers."This, Charlebois says, is a policy choice that contributes to tighter supply, which leads to inflated prices for consumers..In this case, government policy penalizes consumers.That said, Charlebois claims supply management does have to be this bad; instead, it just has to be reformed.To reduce milk dumping, allowing farmers to sell their access is a solution.This could be done by enabling the sale of extra raw milk (and informing consumers), while expanding processing for butter, cheese, and milk powder to absorb temporary surpluses.."Temporary, non-subsidized export channels for dairy ingredients could be activated when excess emerges," adds Charlebois."Improved real-time demand forecasting, using retail and food-service data, could help prevent overproduction before it occurs."This calls for modernizing supply management.Although the feds frequently remind Canadians that supply management enables "stability, fairness, and predictability for both farmers and consumers," this is not the case, nor is the inevitability of milk dumping.Milk dumping "is a choice," Charlebois asserts.
