June 13, 2007
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THAT'S gonna sting.
According to an article this morning in the Dallas Morning News, milk prices are expected to shoot up by close to a dollar by the fall.
We like milk (well, Don, Charles and I....Dmitry drinks calcium-fortified orange juice, as he dislikes milk), so this is going to pinch, especially as I'd think where milk goes, so goes half-and-half, butter, sour cream and cheese. It's all dairy, after all. Don't see how milk prices would rise without the other dairy products doing the same, though thinking about it, it seems as if butter prices have dropped while milk's has increased.
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Comments (6)
Oh nooooooooooo. i already hate what i pay for milk as it is. eeek.
It wouldn't make sense if the market in milk and dairy products were anything even trying to resemble a free market. But it's all very tightly controlled and managed.
So it still doesn't make sense, but you can't expect it to follow the normal logic anyway.
Anyway, that's depressing. We're 4+ gallons a week around here.
Why is it going up? Are the cows making unreasonable demands? Have they unionized? A gallon of milk lasts us a couple of weeks now so it won't hit us hard but it's tough on families who consume a lot.
At least part of it is that cows eat grain. Grain requires farm equipment to grow. Farm equipment requires -- you guessed it -- petroleum to operate. Then there's the cost of getting it to you -- milk weighs A LOT, so again, a high cost in petroleum for transportation.
At least this time, so my dairy farmer friend tells me, the farmers are seeing a little bit of benefit from the rising prices. Usually how much they get paid has nothing to do with the price of milk, and the amount they get paid for the milk has not kept up with inflation for a long, long time.
Yeah...and I'm afraid my husband's work has something to do with it too. Dairy farmers are the ones, in part, paying for his air quality studies around the country; it's a multi-million dollar study in which the trucks he had to buy to haul equipment around the country are among the cheaper pieces of equipment he had to purchase. We'll all have to try to suck it up in the name of global warming, and careful science. But dairy farmers really do need to paid more, too.
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