A headline in a farm publication caught my eye last week. It read: Butter demand is soaring. It’s common knowledge that people want to go back to natural foods and butter is certainly a natural food. But soaring? Maybe an editor wanted an eye catching headline supporting Canada’s dairy industry.
Take some rich milk, skim off the cream, shake it around for five minutes or so and you have butter. It’s one of our natural foods. Butter is not a modern invention. It has been a human staple for nearly 10,000 years. And it may have shaped history more than you think.
The earliest biblical mention of milk and milk products can be found in the book of Genesis chapter 18, vs. 7. There it says Abraham treated three male visitors to a kind of pancake, butter or cheese curds, milk and roast veal from a fat calf that was butchered for the occasion. The milk was probably quite fatty, coming from a beef cow. It says Abraham ran out to the herd and chose a fat calf and told a servant to hurry and butcher it.
The good news for European dairy farmers is that Europeans are eating so much butter that the European Unions’ stocks in storage are almost gone. Butter prices are now at all-time highs in Western Europe. The gains have been aided by shifting consumer views on its healthy attributes and a recent slowdown in the global milk output, although Europe is still awash in milk. The EU has a costly undertaking that pays for the EU milk reduction scheme. The EU pays 150 million euros to its member countries. Finland, for example, received 7.5 million euros which was paid to 1,100 dairy farms. Finland reduced their milk production by two per cent for the first five months of this year.
In the EU, one measure of reserves fell to 1,300 tonnes as of the end of May, a 99 per cent plunge from the 92,500 tonnes held a year ago, the EU said.
While the EU countries are getting money to reduce their milk production, India isn’t in that league. Today, India produces and consumes more butter than any other nation. Yes, India.
India ranks first on a list of 10 countries that produce the most butter. The country is also the world leader in milk production as well as in milk and butter consumption. In the last five years, butter production increased by 16 percent, reaching 5,035,000 tons in 2015. Only a small share of produced commodity was exported since the county has a large domestic market with the total consumption of 5,026,000 tons. Canada is last on the list of butter producing countries.
