No, I don’t think so. One pregnancy is enough to get the milk flowing. The body then produces milk as long as there is a demand for it. The less the demand the less milk the body produces. Its just in dairy farming, the demand never decreases.
Bologna. Dairy cows are dried off for 45-60 days after the end of lactation (about 10 months after the last calving). The cow has already been bred by this time, and the dry-out period is timed to end with the next calving; the cow starts lactating again.
www.sci-ctr.edu.sg/ScienceNet/ cat_life/cat_bio00322.html
The production life and capacity of a diary cow is a whole lot less than the production life of an oil well – much less an oil field – and while initial costs are lower for dairy farmers, maintenance costs per gallon are a whole lot higher.
Also, I’ve heard dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota complain about the cost of regulation and that dairy producers in California have a much lower regulatory cost. I’ll bet that’s the only business in the United States where regulatory costs in California are lower.
And there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on the board about the role of farm and dairy price supports. Stripped of everything else, the government pays produers not to produce when times are good so that the producers don’t overproduce, which would drive prices down, which would forcee producers out of business, which would cause shortages, which would drive prices up.
But that’s a topic for another thread.
Cheapest gas type in my area of Calfornia is about $1.71 gal. Yet, at Albertsons if you buy 2 gallons
of milk, it comes to about $2.20 per gallon. If you buy one gallon, its about $3.65 per gallon. As
the person above said, you don’t have to put gas in one gallon plastic jugs. I bet if we could buy
milk like we buy gas, it would be about the same price.
Cheapest gas type in my area of Calfornia is about $1.71 gal. Yet, at Albertsons if you buy 2 gallons
of milk, it comes to about $2.20 per gallon. If you buy one gallon, its about $3.65 per gallon. As
the person above said, you don’t have to put gas in one gallon plastic jugs. I bet if we could buy
milk like we buy gas, it would be about the same price.
But then gas has plenty of taxes on it too.
kunilou’s paragraph on price supports leads to another thought. In the oil & gas business the cycles are often dramatic, and producers are forced out of business with every downturn. And the frequency of the cycles has been steadily increasing.
The result is perpetual pressure to increase efficiency, and we are much more efficient than we were when I started 22 years ago. Every downturn produces innovations, restructurings, changes in practices, etc. that result in more cost effective production. Hence gasoline is actually much cheaper than it was 20 years ago.
Well if you could buy it directly from the farm minus the pastuerization, packaging, shipping etc. you could buy it for about $13.70 /cwt or $1.10/gal (Price for April at 3.5% butterfat, whole milk is 3.29% butterfat). Whatever price you paid above that in the grocery store is what the bottler/distributor and the store are making. The newly passed farm bill will set a “floor” price of just over $16/cwt. Though this is a bit of a rough estimate since that is based Class such and such milk yada yada. Let’s just say that they’re changing the way they figure the price and establishing a price floor so to level out the price fluctuations. For a look at milk prices at the farm level for the past 7 years check out the below USDA site…
http://www.usda.gov/nass/aggraphs/pricemk.htm
Cheapest gas in the world is in Caracas. $.40/gallon.
Is no one going to mention how US foreign policy contributes to the low price of petrolium?
Are you goiing to?
Who am I to bring it up when I don’t even know how to spell petroleum?
A post way back there reminded me of an email that went around a long time ago which used dairy cows as a metaphor for political ideologies.
Does anyone have that? I thought it was absolutely hilarious.
If anyone cares - Australians are complaining because the price of gas has raised from an ave of about 60-70cents per litre to 70-80cents per litre. Bear in mind our dollars worth half of the US. That’s fairly cheap.
Yeah, another comparison, Aussie milk costs around $1.25 L.
That’s around US$0.65 L.
I seem to recall seeing an apartment like yours once on Law and Order.
You don’t go by the name of Lemon-Head too, do you?
Hasn’t anyone read about or seen old newsreel footage of farmers literally dumping milk on the ground because its selling price was less than it cost to produce it?