During the Great Depression, a drop in the demand for farm and dairy goods led farmers to discard or destroy their produce. According to historical sources, “the fruit rotted in full view of those who needed it”; indeed, as Americans struggled to find a way to feed themselves, farm owners deliberately damaged their fruit and vegetable stocks to stop the starving populace from pilfering.

Nowadays, the coronavirus pandemic is causing dairies in the United States to flush away thousands of gallons of milk every day. The reason is an apparent oversupply of milk in the market, the inevitable result of thousands of eating establishments closing down to stay in line with social distancing policies, as well as China, the world’s biggest importer of dairy products, withdrawing from international trade to deal with the spread of the virus. 

The similarities with Great Depression-era food destruction are jarring: the advent of COVID-19 has left millions unemployed, and as world leaders grapple with the possibility of a global recession, people have turned to crowdfunding to afford rent, bills, and bare necessities. With that in mind, milk dumping comes in poor taste - but this situation has environmental implications as well, as milk spills can spell disaster for aquatic ecosystems.

Few understand the importance of milk as a pollutant outside the environmental science and agriculture fields, but those who do associate it with major ecological damage and hefty fines. When large volumes of milk reach lakes, rivers, or coasts, its nutrients break down and can lead to eutrophication - and with that, the death of nearby aquatic lifeforms.

Let’s talk about this in layman’s terms: eutrophication is a phenomenon that occurs when nutrient- or mineral-rich materials come into contact with bodies of water, in which a dramatic increase in vegetating microorganisms disrupts the balance of those ecosystems. If left unchecked, this can lead to the deaths of the plants and animals adjacent to that body of water: underwater plants can lose their access to sunlight as algal blooms expand to cover the surface, and the biological process of breaking down the pollutant’s nutrients can leave fish and shellfish gasping for oxygen. 

The latter is particularly relevant in the case of milk dumping because milk has a notably high biological oxygen demand. This effectively means that aerobic microorganisms need to use up most of the oxygen in the water to break down the nutrients in milk, ultimately suffocating the rest of the area’s wildlife. This can lead to a severe decrease in the lake’s biodiversity, and even make lakes and rivers unable to sustain life for years on end. That’s what makes the fining policy surrounding milk pollution so unscrupulous; truck spills during transportation have resulted in thousands of fish dying time and again in states like Minnesota.

But existing regulations can hardly make up for the current situation, simply because the main source of milk spills has now shifted from transportation routes to dairy farms themselves. Let’s break down the numbers: unlike other industries, farmers can’t put a halt to milk production if there is no demand for it, as cows need to be milked up to three times a day. The result? Some dairies have reported an estimated total of 25,000 to 30,000 gallons of milk going down the drain every day. Worse yet, these data come from Wisconsin, a state with around 15,000 lakes and a heavily agricultural-based economy. Officials have already given instructions to mitigate the problem, encouraging farmers to dump milk in fields where contamination is unlikely, but doing so might present farmers with challenges in transportation and technical know-how. With the United States being a trendsetter in agriculture, similar practices can be expected to pop up around the world - especially in countries like Greece, where farmers have been destroying their produce in exchange for funding for years.

That being said, milk dumping demonstrates an issue of governance rather than a pattern of farming malpractices. According to the dairies questioned, the order to start flushing away milk came from the local authorities. When the farmers suggested that the government buy and donate the surplus stock to feeding programs, they were met with rejection. It is also worth noting how the local leadership gave instructions without prior consideration of the environmental impact they would have, which reflects poorly on their regard for their state’s wildlife.

Eutrophication isn’t anything new - if anything, its mitigation is built upon rigid prevention policies and sizable fines. However, unempathetic and profit-driven models of governance prioritize sustaining the financial status quo, even if that requires them to make cruel decisions; and there is no time where cruelty shines brighter than during a crisis. In the end, what started as an oversupply issue became a vicious circle of food insecurity, unpaid farmers, and the potential for a massive ecological disaster. The irony of shoddy leadership is that it forces us to confront the most ridiculous problems. Case in point: an entire article was written over spilled milk.

Citations:

1. Food 1929 - 1941, updated Mar. 25, 2020, encyclopedia.com

2. Shaun Ghallagher, Down the drain: Wisconsin dairy farmers told to dump milk because of an oversupply in the market, Apr. 2, 2020, tmj4.com

3. David Yaffe-Bellany, Michael Corkery, Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic, Apr. 11, 2020, The New York Times

4. Dairy farmers begin to flush away milk due to coronavirus, Apr. 4, 2020, komonews.com

5. Clair N. Sawyer, Perry L. McCarty, Gene F. Parkin, Chemistry for Environmental Engineering and Science (5th Edition), 2003, New York: McGraw-Hill

6. Dimosthenis Sarigiannis, Notes on Environmental Engineering (revised), 2018, envelab.eu

7. Oil Spills Prevention and Preparedness Regulations, retrieved Apr. 17, 2020, epa.gov