THE PRICE OF MILK AROUND THE WORLD

[Diesel_Bomber]

$3.39USD/gal, 2%

:buddies:

 

[Sigman]

Sent my daughter to the store this evening for a gallon of milk. Gave her $20 and didn't get any change.
Sooo, I have to assume that milk is $20 per gallon...

Sounds like my sons, they must know your daughter! Is that a reflection on us as parents?!

Milk in Anchorage averages $4 a gallon...

 

[PhantomPhoton]

Don't buy it at all, its one of the worst things you can drink. Check out notmilk.com, you wont drink it again (cows milk). There are other kinds that are ok. What does this have to do with price you say? Because they have alot of folks conned into believing that "it does a body good" which is a flat lie. I dont want to derail this thread but do some research and check the facts for yourself. I used to love cereal myself but the milk isn't good for you.

mmmmhmmm and that is of course why milk is served to athletes at the US Olympic Training Center. They're an incredibly unhealthy bunch! It's not like those athletes are monitored by some of the best nutrition and science people in the world.

Milk... not from crap fed, hormone injected mutant cows mind you... is better for your average human than most other things you'll find out there. Chocolate Milk (not the HFCF cheap junk) is one of the best recovery drinks you can take after a workout.
Are there things out there better for you than milk? Yes. Is there milk out there that you shouldn't drink? Yup. Should you as a consumer be aware of what you're taking into your body? Definitely. Are there people who have problems with milk in general, in some specific cases cows milk? Yes. But labeling all cows' milk as bad is a naive point of view.
Humans have lived on animal (non human) milk for thousands of years. It is a staple diet of many cultures, and a few cultures subsist on almost nothing but milk and milk products. More recent problems with hormones and unhealthy cows due to corporate greed should not make people avoid milk completely. It just shows how lacking some are in genuine information and proper education.

... oh and while I can sometimes find good sales of organic certified milk for $1 per 1/2 Gallon, It is more common to be $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon around here.

 

[MarNav1]

There's alot of flies that don't believe in flyswatters too. But anyhow to answer the question about $3 a gallon here.

 

[WNG]

I found milk prices vary by quire a lot around here.
In Boston it's always more expensive. Cross the river into Cambridge and it's quite cheaper in the same supermarket chain.
I believe the local city governments are taking their piece of the action out of us consumers.

Boston: $4.29 /gallon
Cambridge: 3.59-3.79 for same gallon.

Go to the Target store in Cambridge and you find milk from NY State, that sells for $2.59 /gallon! But it once spiked to $3.89.

Note:
I also noticed milk prices in Quebec, CDN are much higher. So was juice, cereals, grains, pastas.
But fruits/vegetables, pork, cheeses and bread are much cheaper.
Go figure!

Seems all the unhealthy junk in the USA supermarkets are always on sale, while healthy foods were costly.

 

[Valolammas]

1.15€/liter of organic milk here in Finland. Can't remember how much regular milk is, probably something like 0.70€/l.

Not to hijack the thread or anything, but gasoline costs 1.379€/liter here so we are waiting for someone to invent a car that runs on milk.

 

[PEU]

1 US gallon = 3.7854118 liter

Supermarket prices in Buenos Aires/Argentina

Top brand/quality milk refrigerated sachet one liter=$0.51 ($1.93 gallon)
Top brand/quality milk refrigerated tetrapak one liter=$0.73 ($2.76 gallon)

Less known brands are around 3/4 of that price


Pablo

 

[PEU]

Don't buy it at all, its one of the worst things you can drink. Check out notmilk.com, you wont drink it again (cows milk). There are other kinds that are ok. What does this have to do with price you say? Because they have alot of folks conned into believing that "it does a body good" which is a flat lie. I dont want to derail this thread but do some research and check the facts for yourself. I used to love cereal myself but the milk isn't good for you.

You are providing a disservice by saying that milk is bad for the health, in fact milk is so good that some of we humans developed a mutation around 7000 years ago to tolerate it after the lactancy period.

This is a fact many ignore (or choose to ignore) and then they use the example of mammals that after the lactancy period never drinks milk again...


Pablo

 

[LEDninja]

I think a nice glass of cold full fat milk, is absolutely fantastic.

supposedly a lot of oriental people are lactose intolerant.

regards

John.

What happened to full fat milk?

When I was a kid, milk came in bottles with the fat on top.
Then came homogenized milk with 3.5% fat.
Skim milk was 2% fat.

Now I see 2%, 1%, or skim (0%?) on the store shelves. What do they do with all the fat they removed. The milk does not taste like it used to.

 

[TinderBox (UK)]

Hi.

In the UK, we have full fat, semi-skimmed and full skimmed milk, and they are all the same price, so what happens to all the fat they skim off, does it go to make butter and the like.

When i was at school, we use to get little glass bottles of milk every day!

And the cream at the top of the bottle was the best bit.

regards

John.

 

[roknrandy]

Milk here (Gallon of 2%) is 3.19 at Sam's and 4.09 any of the local grocery stores

 

[LED_Thrift]

What happened to full fat milk?

When I was a kid, milk came in bottles with the fat on top.
Then came homogenized milk with 3.5% fat.
Skim milk was 2% fat.

Now I see 2%, 1%, or skim (0%?) on the store shelves. What do they do with all the fat they removed. The milk does not taste like it used to.

I remember reading a nutrition book by Adele Davis, who wrote about eating good food to be healthy and to cure some conditions, that stated that the body can process the fat in non-homogenized milk much better than in homogenized milk. Homogenization breaks down the relatively large fat molecules into much smaller ones, which is why they don't float to the top as they do in non-processed milk. Your body has mechanisms that can separate out the large fat molecules too, and use them properly and remove what it doesn't need. Homogenized milk has smaller, broken down fat molecules that get to places in the body that it would not normally.


Milk is $3.59 / gallon here.

 

[Kilovolt]

Fresh milk at Euro 1.35 per liter (£ 0.95) at the supermarket this morning here.

Gasoline 95 octane Euro 1,38.....so it's not worth while putting milk into the car, yet.

 

[js]

I live (rent an apartment) on a dairy farm in upstate New York. It's a small dairy, on the order of 150 cows. And back in 2003, my landlord was essentially working for free when the price of milk dropped to $11. He stopped milking three times a day and went to two times a day and had a very difficult time making ends meet from March through June.

Now, most businesses charge FOUR TIMES the cost of production. Right now, the price of milk is near a high at just over $21. Think about that.

Here's an excerpt from an article on www.agselect.com (emphasis mine):

Milk Prices
Imagine earning an income comparable to what someone doing your same job earned twenty-two years ago. Meanwhile, all of your expenses match the current day, not what the expense would have been twenty-two years ago. Filling your car up with gas, buying groceries, and every other expense you incur has to be paid on a salary that is twenty-two years old. How would you survive?

Last year, many dairy farmers across the United States faced this exact scenario. The prices they were being paid for their milk was equivalent to the prices they were earning in 1978. Yet they still had to keep up with taxes, insurance, equipment and fuel prices of the present day. The year 2000 saw the biggest one-year drop for producer milk prices in history.

There is no straightforward explanation for how these prices are determined. Classes, regions, and the market all fit into a complicated, unpredictable formula that I will attempt to explain. A characteristic of the federal milk marketing orders is classified pricing of milk, whereby prices are set according to how the milk is used. The country is divided into eleven regions such as Upper Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Southeast, and so on. There are four classes of milk. Class I, the highest priced class, is for fluid milk, Class II is for soft dairy products such as yogurt and ice cream, Class III milk is used for cheese, and Class IV is used for butter. These classes have nothing to do with the quality of milk that is produced, but rather, what that region's milk is used for.

Most farms fall into the Class I or Class III categories. Class III is paid the lowest price for their milk. Most dairy farms in the upper Midwest and central regions are in Class III, including Wisconsin, where a significant number of U.S. dairy farms are located. A fair portion of the western region is also in Class III. This is why Class III gets the most publicity of all the classes, because it affects the most dairy farms. Florida is considered its own region under the federal milk marketing orders and Florida dairy farmers receive some of the highest prices for their milk, with most of the state being Class I. Many of the northeast, Appalachian, southeast, and Mideast states are also Class I. Classes II and IV are much less common, with the highest percentage of Class IV farmers being in the Pacific Northwest, and the most Class II farmers being in the northeast.

Milk is priced per one hundred pounds. For example, a producer milk price of $10.05 means the farmer is getting paid $10.05 for every hundred pounds of milk he or she produces. Class III milk prices hit rock bottom in November of 2000. The price that month was $8.57, the lowest price since March of 1977 when the price was $8.31. In 2000, the Class III price averaged $9.74 per hundredweight, the lowest annual average since 1978, when it was $9.57. To give you some idea of how poor these prices are, compare it with the averages of previous years. In 1999, the average was $12.43, 1998-$14.20, 1997-$12.05, and 1996- $13.39. By the end of a year, farmers lose thousands of dollars because of a low milk price. However, even when farmers are making little profit from their milk, the retail price of milk and other dairy products remains nearly the same. Obviously someone in the middle is profiting.

Indeed.

And milk is not alone in this. What do you think it costs for a bushel of wheat? Any idea? How much do you think 60 freaking POUNDS of wheat is worth? Take a guess.

Right now a bushel of winter wheat goes for just over $3. The estimated cost of production is $2.15. In 2004 winter wheat was priced at $3.60 and durum at $3.99. Yes, not only have prices not gotten better in the last three years, they've hit an all time low (but are now on the rise). Meanwhile, you can bet your a** that costs have continually gone up.

Flour costs something on the order of $.25 to $.50 per POUND, which is, say, conservatively, the equivalent of $15 per bushel.

So the middle businesses, the flour mills and agribusinesses and distributors, get $12 per bushel to process and mill the grain, package it, and market it to consumers. Meanwhile, the farmers get $1 (or less).

They say that slavery has been abolished, but don't believe it. Modern farmers are essentially debt slaves, working for next to nothing, swamped in massive debt--and I mean MASSIVE, like the kind of debt that is totally impossible to ever pay off, but, it's so kind of the banks and the governments to let the farmer play the game as long as he or she wants, allowing debt to expand further and offering subsidies and so on. Why? Slave labor. In order for the "economy" to be strong, for the $USD to be strong, food prices MUST be kept low, but not so low that farmers are forced out of business entirely.

If farmers and farm workers were paid what other industrial workers were paid, and if subsidies were removed, the cost of a gallon of milk would go way over $4, my friends, and the same would happen with everything else, especially meat.

Forgive me for ranting, but, anyone who thinks he or she is paying too much for food is just a wee bit out of touch with the reality of the situation.

When the dollar crashes--and it will crash--and the chickens come home to roost (all those $USD held by stupid foreign investors come back home), we'll all have a very different idea of the value of a dozen eggs or a gallon of milk.

 

[js]

Oh, I should mention that a hundred pounds of milk is about 12 gallons. So the dairy farmers are currently getting about $1.75 per gallon here in the US, which is a recent high. Averaged over the last two or three years, this would be more like $1.25.

And cost of production of almost all agricultural products is strongly affected by the price of oil. Machinery is what allows less than 2 percent of the population to produce the food for the other 98 percent.

 

[Erasmus]

Yesterday I bought a 1 liter milk carton for .95 EUR. This is milk from organic farming, I expect regular milk to be cheaper.

 

[qadsan]

Our friend's in Hawaii that were just visiting told us that they're paying ~$8 / gallon for milk...ouch.