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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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