U.S. farmers dumped 43 million gallons of milk in the first eight months of the year, according to USDA - the most wasted in 16 years of data requested by the Wall Street Journal. That's enough milk to fill 66 Olympic swimming pools.
“Desperate producers are working to find new uses for the excess, like getting more milk into school lunches, and in revamped tacos and Egg McMuffins. But many can’t even afford to transport raw milk to market at current prices, which have plunged 36% on average since prices hit records in 2014,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
“On Tuesday, the USDA pledged to buy about $20 million of cheddar cheese to help struggling dairy farmers, the second time it has intervened in the market in less than three months,” the article stated.
The Michigan Milk Producers Association, a farmer-run cooperative, has donated 83,000 gallons of milk to a food bank “as the market softened,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
And over the summer, it had to “dump a batch of excess skim milk into lagoons of manure because it couldn’t find a trucker to haul it” to a plant in Wisconsin.