I

magine coming home from the 
grocery store, twisting open the 
seal on a gallon of milk that you just 

bought and pouring that milk straight 
down the drain. It seems unnatural — 
maybe even cynical — to waste perfectly 
good nutrients like this. However, many 
farmers in the United States are now left 
with no other choice. Instead of turning 
a seal on a carton of milk, they are turn-
ing the hatch on a 12-wheeler steel tank 
and dumping an estimated 3.7 million 
gallons of milk daily. 

Due to COVID-19, many restaurants, 

hotels and schools have closed and as a 
result, the food system has been severely 
impacted. When all of the custom-
ers vanish, farmers are left with few 
options. Many have tried donating their 
produce to charities, however, these 
charities cannot accept large quantities 
of perishable food with limited refriger-
ator space and a shortage of volunteers. 
As a last resort, farmers have buried 1 
million onions in ditches, plowed fields 
of fresh vegetables back into the ground 
and smashed eggs that they could not 
sell. Additionally, many dairy farmers 
have begun dumping milk. 

Milk 
processing 
plants 
have 

decreased how much milk they accept 
from farmers, and unfortunately, you 
cannot stop milking a cow abruptly. 
Cows fall into a routine based on how 
many times a day they are normally 
milked and if they are milked less than 
that, it causes pressure to build up which 
can lead to serious medical conditions 
for the cow. This leaves dairy farmers 
with no other option except to milk their 
cows and dump the milk. However, 
for the dairy industry, their customer 
base began decreasing years before the 

COVID-19 pandemic began. 

Since 1975, milk consumption per 

capita has dropped by 40 percent. 
Recently, plant and nut-based milks 
have become a millennial trend. There 
are a plethora of options now available: 
soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, coco-
nut milk, oat milk, etc. Many of these 
types of milk still carry high nutritional 
value minus the fat and calories found in 
dairy milk. For example, unsweetened 
soy milk has almost the same amount of 
protein found in dairy milk and 11 grams 
less sugar. In 2018 alone, cow milk sales 
decreased 6 percent whereas plant-
based milk sales increased 9 percent. 
That same year, 2,700 dairy farms in the 
US shut down. In addition to non-dairy 
alternatives, these farms were also run 
out of business by environmental aware-
ness, animal rights and industrial dairy 
competition. 

About 3.6 percent of planet-warm-

ing emissions each year are due to the 
production of dairy products. Carbon 
dioxide and other harmful gases are 
released from dairy cows, manure and 
wastewater on farms where manure 
and fertilizers are not handled properly. 
According to the Institute of the Envi-
ronment & Sustainability at the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles, if one 
person chooses oat milk instead of dairy 
milk, they can decrease carbon dioxide 
emissions by 71.8 kilograms in a year, 
assuming they drink two gallons per 
month. However, some of the nut-based 
dairy alternatives have large impacts on 
the environment as well. For example, it 
is estimated that it takes 15.3 gallons of 
water to produce only 16 almonds.

The abuse of dairy cows surfaced in 

the news last June, when a viral video 

was released that exposed the mistreat-
ment of animals on Fairlife Dairy farms. 
Fairlife claims that they strive to pro-
vide a quality of life for their cows that 
minimizes mental stress and avoids pain, 
however, the graphic video of employees 
kicking and throwing calves suggests 
otherwise. This company is likely not the 
only one in the dairy industry lying on 
their labels. The practice of dairy farming 
in itself seems far from ethical. Cows are 
intentionally impregnated and then their 
calves are taken away from them at birth. 
The milk from the mother is bottled for 
humans, instead of used as nutrients for 
her calf. Furthermore, if the calf is male, 
farmers either kill the calf themselves or 
hire a knackerman to perform the job.

Large-scale dairy farming has taken 

over and forced many family businesses 
to close their farms. Post-COVID-19 pan-
demic, it is doubtful that any small dairy 
businesses will survive. For example, 
in Wisconsin, the number of industrial 
dairy farms increased by 55 percent 
within the last decade. Other states that 
are top manufacturers of milk have seen 
similar trends. In addition, the COVID-
19 pandemic has put even more pressure 
on these family-run farms, forcing many 
small businesses to close.

Millennials might have some logic in 

their choice to abandon dairy. Shutting 
the door on the dairy industry could 
contribute to the fight against climate 
change, as well as animal abuse. The 
intensified milk market crash due to 
the COVID-19 pandemic could be the 
final step in closing many dairy pro-
cessing plants as well as dairy farms. 

4

Thursday, May 21, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
OPINION

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EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

EMILY ULRICH | COLUMNIST

Emily Ulrich can be reached at 

emulrich@umich.edu.

Millennials and milk

O

ver 4 million people around 
the world have now been 
diagnosed with the new coro-

navirus disease, COVID-19. Since major 
countries and cities have enacted stay-
at-home orders to decrease the spread 
of COVID-19, multiple images showing 
empty tourist destinations have gone 
viral. The most famous post was a tweet 
showing the water in the Venice canals 
had cleared enough to see fish. Another 
viral photo going around shows Los 
Angeles’s clear skies, side-by-side with 
a smoggy photo taken weeks before the 
pandemic started, among many others. 

I was in disbelief when I first saw 

these tweets, especially the side-by-side 
photo of Los Angeles pre- and post-
shutdown. I thought they might be 
Photoshopped, but eventually, I started 
noticing changes in my community. 
Within a week of classes being can-
celed and students moving back home 
en masse, the air in Ann Arbor did feel 
cleaner. Maybe it was real, or maybe it 
was just a placebo, my mind trying to 
trick me after seeing those photos on 
Twitter.

As an environmentalist, tracking the 

environmental effects of COVID-19 
has been interesting. In a world filled 
with panic and uncertainty, people 
seem to feel comforted that at least 
Mother Nature is benefitting from this. 
Numerous photos have been posted on 
Twitter and Reddit from users living 
in polluted cities that now have clear 
skies out their windows. Emissions in 
China have been reduced by a quarter 
and air pollution is improving globally. 
By all means, this is great news for the 
environment. However, I am also pain-
fully aware that these effects will be 
fleeting. There has been lots of talk of 
certain aspects of society not going back 
to normal after this pandemic is over — 
we may no longer hug or shake hands to 
greet each other, and some employees 
may shift to working from home per-
manently. Lots of things are expected 
to change. But when this is all over, the 
environment will almost certainly go 
back to normal. Planes will start flying 
again, cruises will continue to dump 
trash into the oceans and factories will 
still pollute. Asthma and lung cancer 
rates will continue to rise due to envi-
ronmental exposures like they were 
pre-COVID-19. The smog will return to 
Los Angeles, and the fish will disappear 
from the Venice canals. We will witness 
the regression of our newly clean envi-
ronment back to its normal state: dirty. 

When this happens — and it will 

happen — I hope it instills anger in 
people as much as it angers in me. A 
global pandemic is not the cure for 
climate change. This pandemic has 
shown that we desperately need sys-
temic change and that our society 
needs to revolutionize its relationship 

with the environment. For the first 
time, we’re seeing that it is possible to 
live in a cleaner world — why should we 
let things go back to the way they were 
when this way is clearly better? When 
we’re allowed to throw parties with our 
friends again, I suspect most of us will 
try to forget this period of our lives in an 
attempt to move on and embrace a pan-
demic-free future. But I hope that peo-
ple will always remember what they 
felt the first time they saw that picture 
of fish in the Venice canals or the clear 
picture of the Los Angeles horizon, and 
I hope it motivates people to fight for a 
permanently cleaner world.

A greener planet is not incompat-

ible with economic growth. Now is 
the perfect time to start funding and 
implementing aggressive climate poli-
cies like the Green New Deal, which 
calls for increased renewable energy 
and green jobs, while we have a head 
start on decreased emissions around 
the world. In fact, some have argued 
that investing in the Green New Deal 
and decarbonizing the economy may 
actually help us with the incoming 
recession. We finally have the chance to 
slingshot ourselves into a future where 
staying below a global net temperature 
increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius — which 
will help to prevent the most extreme 
climate effects like mass animal extinc-
tions and major droughts — might actu-
ally be possible to achieve. In fact, we 
have less than 10 years to do so. 

Yet, rather than prioritizing the 

environment, the government is 
prioritizing polluters by providing 
bailouts to the airline and cruise 
line industries. The Trump admin-
istration has rolled back Obama-era 
policies, withdrawn from the Paris 
Agreement and is currently pushing 
back emissions regulations for cor-
porations, meaning corporations are 
no longer held accountable for how 
much they pollute during the pan-
demic. In fact, air quality in Amer-
ica is currently the worst it’s been in 
years, largely due to these emission 
rollbacks. We have been working for 
decades to lower our carbon emis-
sions to prevent reaching 1.5 degrees 
Celsius, and now that we may be on a 
trajectory to reach that goal, the gov-
ernment is prioritizing the fossil fuel 
industries for the sake of the economy, 
despite renewables being the cheapest 
they’ve ever been. 

Individual action is not enough. 

This pandemic has only emphasized 
that individuals are not the problem — 
corporations and governments are. 

COVID-19 won’t solve climate change

 MADELINE PEERY | OP-ED

Madeline Peery is a senior in the College 

of Literature, Science & the Arts and can be 

reached at peerym@umich.edu.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

