AI generated Image of milk dumping in The Western Standard magazine.
James Pascual
Farmers Forum
Canadians learned that in the month of November Ontario farmers dumped $18-million to $30-million in retail value of milk. But what does dumped mean?
Almost immediately, X (formerly Twitter), which is the new mainstream media, exploded with accusations. The dairy industry hates the self-proclaimed food professor at Dalhousie University, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois but his voice is heard across the country. Tweeted Charlebois: “Dumping millions of litres of milk while food prices stay elevated is not a technical necessity. It is a policy choice—one that contributes to tighter supply and helps keep dairy prices artificially high, penalizing consumers both at the grocery store and in restaurants. And that’s wrong.”
No doubt about it. Supply management has a public image problem.
Wrote Leah Mushet in The Western Standard, the leading Alberta magazine: “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 amount does not include what individual farmers might dump on their own farms. It only includes milk dumped or discarded after pick up by the milk truck.
The milk marketing board, which is the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, prefers the word “skimming” rather than “dumping.” Skimming is used to describe discarded milk, according to The Western Standard. However, the DFO says that skimming is discarding only skim milk, that is, leftover skim milk at the processing stage, and it all goes to animal feed and to biodigesters. Skim milk is primarily what is left over after butterfat has been removed. The DFO did not break down how much skim milk went to biodigesters. Regardless, skimming means diverting milk away from human consumption. Farmers Forum asked Dairy Farmers of Ontario for a complete breakdown of what per cent of the skimming goes to biodigesters but DFO said they didn’t know.
November saw a spike in skimmed milk diverted from human consumption. DFO spokesperson Rosemary MacLellan confirmed that 30-million litres of skim milk was diverted from human consumption to animal feed and biodigesters in 2025. Based on retail prices, that’s $54-million to $80-million in retail skim milk. Former DFO board member and Eastern Ontario dairy farmer Ron Versteeg connected the November spike in “skimming” to 11 incentive days that month to increase butter supply in time for Christmas. Breakdowns and labour issues with processors also contributed to the issue of excess skim milk, DFO executive Kristin Benke said.
The average amount of dumping or “skimming” milk in 2025 comes to about 1.2 % of annual milk production, DFO says. For comparison, the average amount of waste of grain corn at harvest due to spillage is about 1 % to 2 %.
The gut punch for farmers comes when The Western Standard reports that the milk dumping “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.”
That is the problem. Ensuring prosperity for farm families through supply management is not the problem. Enabling hard-working families, especially families, to prosper is always positive. Wasting food, however, is never good. Wasting milk when Canadians are struggling to buy groceries is an ugly predicament.
The Western Standard rushes to Charlebois to parse out the necessary take away for readers. Dairy boards will argue that milk disposal is unavoidable when farmers are trying to reach quota targets and surpass them, Charlebois says.
He disagrees. He says food waste is what supply management was designed to do to keep prices high. Supply management features rigid production controls and expensive quotas and in doing so government penalizes consumers, he says.
Regardless of what one might think, it is helpful to understand what the critics are saying and what the public is believing.
You can read the room by scanning reader reactions. Out of 60 comments to The Western Standard article, most were critical of supply management.
Here is a sampling:
Wrote Chris Kajewski: “THE PRICE TAG FOR 1 LITER OF 4 % – MILK SHOULDN’T BE HIGHER ,
THAN 2 . – DOLLARS , IN SUCH THE COUNTRY – AS CANADA !”
Teri: “Make the excess into long term storable milk products like milk powder and cheese products. They can be given as supplements to food pantries, low income, and the elderly when prices are high, like now.”
Guest 1019: “Mr. Trump, please bury this vile dairy cabal.”
Mustangguy: “Eggs and cheese are a fraction of the price in Arizona.”
But there were supporters of supply management too.
Wrote johnny hendriksvanwarby: “Getting rid of quotas will ruin small time Canadian farmers and leave mega corporations standing.”
Wrote Dundee: “American dairy farmers dump milk too … there is no perfect system but for a small country, our system works best for us.”
Back to Charlebois who claims supply management doesn’t have to be dismantled. It can be reformed.
He suggests that to reduce milk dumping, allow farmers to sell their excess. The province could approve of raw milk for sales of excess production, 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.”
Some Ontario farmers have suggested stockpiling skim milk as powder by adding more drying capacity.
Whether these are solutions or not, the point is that the Dairy Farmers of Ontario needs to propose a better plan because dumping or skimming milk at a time when families go hungry is morally wrong even though the sorrowful optic is not their fault. It’s the fault of provincial and federal governments for growing hungry families through government policy.
