08/22/2026
The DAIRY CARTEL controls your milk!!!
That sounds pretty nefarious, doesn't it?
But who exactly is this evil cartel?
Dairy farmers. About 3,100 Ontario farm families. That's it. Those are the shady characters.
And there's a pretty good reason they organized.
Fresh milk leaves a dairy farm every 48 hours. You can't park it in a shed for six months waiting for a better price. You can't put it on Kijiji. And the cows are making more tomorrow whether the market needs it or not.
Now, imagine a little farmer with a tank full of highly perishable milk, negotiating with a giant corporate buyer.
"We'll give you $20."
"But it cost $30 to make."
"Okay. Keep it."
Well... s**t.
A handful of enormous purchasers could habour an extraordinary amount of power over thousands of individual farms.
So beginning in 1965, Ontario dairy farmers organized under what became supply management. Instead of 3,100 little farms individually begging processors to buy tomorrow's milk, farmers collectively market it through Dairy Farmers of Ontario.
Basically, dairy farmers formed one giant union and took the bargaining power back.
Is it a perfect system? Of course not. Find 3,100 farmers who agree unanimously about anything and we'll go vegan for a week.
But dairy farmers overwhelmingly support supply management because it gives family farms something remarkably rare in agriculture: the ability to bargain collectively with companies much, much bigger than they are.
So where do you hear words like "cartel"?
Mostly from the people on the other side of the bargaining table.
Large milk processors and other major purchasers have plenty of reason to dislike supply management. Organized farmers are considerably harder to bargain down than desperate individual ones.
So processors and their allies lobby against the system — and "cartel" makes a much better headline than "3,100 farmers bargaining together."
So yes, Virginia: the DAIRY CARTEL controls your milk.
Fortunately, cartel headquarters are mostly barns, the uniforms are rubber boots, and the morning meetings start at 4 am.
