Tuffy P pointed me to an article from The Bovine from March of last year: We’ve heard a lot about this from former Ontario dairyman Bernie Bailey, but it’s great now to have information from another source on just how major Canadian cheese producers are seeking to replace local Canadian fluid milk suppliers — that’s dairy farmers — with internationally-sourced milk protein concentrates. And of course they’ll still call the product “Canadian” cheese.
This can’t be good. Has anyone seen any updates since this piece was written?
27th Street 
First let me congratulate the Anchovy family on being regular readers of Bovine, a fine publication.
Then let me say that this really hits a hot button with me so I will rant a wee bit. When we first moved to our 50 acre haven in 1978 it seemed that about every third farm was a dairy operation and that the family farm was a viable operation. Now dairy operations are very scarce and in all segments of agriculture huge production units dominate their markets. We once had 6 sows in the barn and fattened 50-60 pigs/year for market and sold the rest of the babies to other farmers. The barn was always full. To put that in perspective there is a sow operation in Barrie that has 2,000 sows. A semi decent family vegetable operation in the Ontario Bradford marsh might be 20 acres. In California a decent vegetable operation might be 7,000 acres. This trend at least in Canada can be traced entirely to one tax policy. If a landowner rents his land to a farmer and agricultural crops are produced in excess of a small minimum then the landowner can get a big break on his property taxes. Nice but so what. Well, with farmland going for $3,000 to $5,000/acre it is very expensive to start a farming operation. The mortgage interest alone could chew up $350/acre/year. So if you are a farmer you want to rent land from people who own it but do not farm it. Most landowners would be willing to rent to a farmer for a decent return but the farmers cant really afford to pay even enough to cover the mortgage interest. So the farmers go knocking door to door asking to rent land. They offer about $50/acre which is about enough to have the landowner set his dogs on the farmer. But wait says the farmer, you also get this tax rebate. So the farmers rent land for $50/acre, and the government kicks in some as well. Now that the farmer has access to land at a cost that is as close to free as possible he can expand like crazy. The farmers who choose to not join this expansion madness suddenly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because of their lack of scale and they are forced off the land. Developers buy their land for cheap (other farmers wont buy it at a fair price) and they rent it out to farmers at $50/acre and more expansion happens. This is the true reason why the number of farmers has dropped like a rock in recent years. In my area there used to be 5 tractor dealerships to service all the farmers. Now there are so few actual farmers that only a single dealership is needed. Once remaining farms become huge a corporate mindset takes over. Professional managers are hired. Reliance on pesticides increases and all concept of land stewardship and community is forgotten. I guess we could just say so what this is progress but when the majority of production is in the hands of a few corporations there is a loss of competition and a serious risk of production failures. My guess is that in the dairy industry the mega dairy operations have helped keep prices to the cheese makers high enough that they are eager to look for alternate supplies.
The whole concept of what is a Canadian product has been badly clouded by the marketing guys. The very best example of this is Ontario wines. For a wine to be called an Ontario wine it had to contain at least 25% Ontario grown grapes or juice content. That 25% was the number I saw when I last looked and may vary slightly now. Sooooo if 75% of the grape juice in a wine comes from Chile then you can make and advertise your Ontario wine. A few short years ago we had a very dry summer and the Ontario grape crop came up short of what was required to make the desired amount of Ontario wine at the 25% rate. One would think that this would simply result in less Ontario wine right? nooooo. The wine guys got together and petitioned the government to lower the Ontario requirement to only 15%. So Ontario wine was made with 85% imported juice. The good stuff from France? Dont be silly it was the cheap stuff from California and South America. If they are going to diddle the Ontario content down to 15% I really dont know why they bother with an Ontario requirement at all.
And yes the use of imported milk portions certainly does open the possibility of slipping Chinese product into our food supply without us being aware of it. The national policy of communist China seems to be “conquer north america one product at a time”. The latest scandal is that while the lead in children’s toys deal has come to a halt as consumers become more aware , the Chinese are slipping cadmium into the toys. Cadmium has roughly the same cancer causing qualities as lead. I distrust Chinese products so thoroughly that I will not knowingly buy any product with Chinese content. I was in a Bulk Barn store a couple of weeks ago and noticed that they sold wheat gluten. The sign proudly claimed it was Canadian wheat gluten not from China. nice. But I am a cynic so I asked the manager how many products in the store actually were from China. Not more than 50 was the answer. No product in the store had a Product of China label on the bin so they were in fact selling Chinese food products to unsuspecting consumers. I am more than a bit alarmed to see that there will be a distinction between traditional cheddar which will need 100% canadian whole milk and cheddar which will need only 85%. I bet even I could muddy those waters. How about “Canadian cheddar made the traditional way”. What would that need? It will take the marketing guys about 15 minutes to have the cheddar situation so confused that no one will have a clue what they are buying. I was surprised to learn that there are only 3 significant cheese makers in the country. I guess that explains the ridiculous price of cheese in the stores. This week I can buy beef outside round roasts for $1.97/pound but Kraft cheddar costs about $8.50 /pound. Good quality cheddar costs much much more. How can that be?
What??? I hadn’t heard of this at all! I am disturbed!
I have not, but the U.S. is flooded with stuff called “food” of dubious definition. I won’t eat it, if I can discover it. People were rebelling at eating these foods and foods imported from China and countries where food controls are even worse than here, so the corporations have come up with a way to get around us not buying it by inventing false labeling, which somehow they have managed to get approval from certain agencies. Sounds like a conspiracy – right? But true.