Cooking & EatingMilk is very cheap. You pay twice as much for a bottle of Coke in the store as for a carton of milk. While it takes so much: cows, pasture, transport and many working hours of farmers.
It is one of the cheapest drinks you can drink: milk. Farmer Jack puts in The price stunner that farmers have many cows that produce a lot. “A lot of milk on the market does not benefit the price,” he says in tonight’s broadcast. The Netherlands has 16,000 dairy farmers, who together supply 14 billion kilos of milk per year (they calculate in kilos instead of liters in that sector).
The price that farmers receive for a kilo of milk has fluctuated around 35 cents for years. That enormous pool of milk results in many cheeses, packets of butter and cups of yoghurt, but also in many liter cartons of milk. In order to be able to continue to earn a living, farmers have started to produce more milk. Also farmer Jack, who runs the company with his wife. The costs have risen, but the price per kilo has not. The result: farmers have started to work more efficiently to keep costs low. Yet he earns just above the minimum wage and hardly has any money left over to absorb setbacks or to make investments.
Pasture is an ‘industrial site’, not nature
To feed all those cows, farmers use 30 percent of the entire surface of our country for grass. That grass is even efficient, because nowadays it has much more leaves than stems. Cows can give better milk from that. The ‘super grass’ does not make everyone happy. Ecologist Ron van ‘t Veer thinks those bright green fields look more like a desert. For example, few birds breed in it. You also see fewer butterflies and insects. He thinks it is comparable to an industrial estate, not nature.
Farmer Jack cannot afford herbs and weeds precisely because he has to keep production high. It contains less nutrients. The effect: farmers leave a big mark on the biodiversity of our country, according to researcher Kim van der Leeuw. Van ‘t Veer: ,, In a good meadow you will find white, pink and yellow flowers. Then a field is rich in herbs.” But with such a pasture, the farmer will go bankrupt, he knows.
The system keeps farmers in the loop. Farmers who do it differently. Biodynamic farmers, for example. They have higher costs, but also receive more money for their milk. On balance, they do not earn more than their regular colleagues, but nature benefits from it. The large dairy company FrieslandCampina pays more, but is that enough? Van der Leeuw does not think the few cents are enough because the costs for the organic farmers do not weigh up.
700 of FrieslandCampina’s 11,000 affiliated farmers are on their way’planet proof‘ to become. “We have to accelerate”, Jeroen Elfers of the dairy company acknowledges. This is only possible with each other, but most parties mainly think about their own wallet. Consumers who are close to nature have a choice. Dairy is available from farmers who do not create green deserts in both regular supermarkets and organic supermarkets.
The price blast is a TV program by KRO-NCRV. Every Friday evening on NPO3 at 8.25 pm.
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