<p>I just bought milk yesterday, using the weekly store coupon and spent $0.98 for a gallon of store brand- had to buy $5 more in noncoupon items as well (the strange thing is that I usually easily find enough to buy, yesterday I only needed milk and eggs, another coupon item- last week I bought everything…). It was on sale even without the coupon and the regular price is usually around $2.49 a gallon recently (a week or two ago there was a $1.48? per gallon coupon).</p>
<p>On vacation last month in Florida the price of milk was at least $1 more. A reminder of why Wisconsin still has the “dairy state” moniker (even though most of the state’s milk goes into cheese). A long time ago milk pricing/farm subsidies were set on the distance from LaCrosse, WI when shipping from here was needed and milk considered a necessity. That has changed- milk production geographically, not dairy price supports. Now I see the California dairy ads on TV (btw- there is a quality difference, as pointed out to me by a dairy farmer- she knew the nitty gritty on all sorts of compounds in cow’s milk I never knew they measured).</p>
<p>Just a frivolous topic as I once again realize how the cost of food varies so much across the country. And another example of how hard it is to modernize laws to keep up with the times- lobbies from other states don’t want to change laws in their favor.</p>
<p>Wow, $2.49 without a coupon. Ours is up near $4.00 (Oklahoma). I remember several years going to some small slightly hard to get to town in Colorado and the milk being $4 a gallon and being shocked at the time. Of course it is probably $6 there now. </p>
<p>My son drinks a huge amount of milk, almost a gallon a day - he just moved across country for a new job - our grocery bills will probably drop enough just on milk to pay for a road trip out to see him pretty soon ;)</p>
<p>A gallon of whole milk is $2.49 (that’s .80 off w/ the grocery card, but for 2.5yrs it’s never changed). Organic is $5.50. This is in the mid-Atlantic.</p>
<p>Did you ever see how big a cow is? They are huge and eat alot of food and they need a place to stay inside in the winter when it is cold. But i bet the real problem is that money isn’t worth anything anymore and guess what? It’s just going to get worse in a few years. And you used to be able to get a candy bar for 5 cents. Food and everything else is going to cost so much everyone who wants milk will have to own their own cow.</p>
<p>We use so little milk that I have no clue as to the price. I don’t buy the store brand. If I am at Trader Joe’s I will buy a half gallon of their hormone free milk. I don’t buy the organic. If I am at the regular market I buy the hormone free Alta Dena Dairy brand which is regional for Ca. A 1/2 gallon will last a long time in our house. If D and H are not in a cereal mode I usually end up throwing half the carton away.
Growing up my brother loved milk. My Mom would buy 6 half gallons in a case at the army grocery store each week and we would run out.</p>
<p>And the sad part is that diary farmers around the country are losing money big time. Many of them can no longer afford to stay in the business, they are losing thousands of dollars a month. Where does that money go?? Not to the farmer. My brother-in-law, who has run a family dairy for the last 45 years, on family farm that is over 200 years old, just got of the business because he couldn’t afford to keep producing and losing money. The worst part? he could sell his herd, but had to send them all to slaughter. A truly tragic time for a diary man.</p>
<p>We like our milk in glass bottles so I buy from the dairy-owned chain of convenience stores. It’s $1.29 a half gal for 1% or $1.49 a half for whole milk , unless I forget to bring the bottles back and have to pay another .55 bottle deposit. I think that’s in line with the local stores sale pricing but the milk in bottles tastes colder and fresher to us and seems to keep longer. Goes great with the half-moon cookies they sell there…</p>
<p>We are empty nesters, but still go through about 3 gallons/week. The price varies from $3.99 at regular price, to $1.99 when on sale. Overall the best place price-wise is Walgreen’s.</p>
<p>Surplus milk is bought by the federal government and dumped to keep prices artificially high. That’s why the Bovine Growth Hormone makes so little sense, why make more milk when we’re already dumping milk? Now we get to pay big dairy operations AND Monsanto.</p>
<p>I try to buy milk in glass bottles from a smallish farm in Pennsylvania. It’s not sold everywhere, so sometimes I buy other organic milk. I don’t drink milk “straight”, but my kids swear the milk in the bottles tastes better than any other milk they’ve had. It also tastes fresher longer, even though it’s not “super-pasteurized”.</p>
<p>Even stranger, when a cousin visited us when we were all in South Carolina, she couldn’t get over how much less a box of cereal cost there. Where she lives in California, it was all about $6 a box or more. The grocery story in SC wasn’t that cheap either compared to sale prices I’ve seen here in MD.</p>
<p>The government is no longer buying surplus milk because there is no longer any surplus. The term “dumped” is also misleading because it was not dumped as thrown away but as in sold on the open market for other uses such as milk replacements for animals.</p>
<p>Just clarifying a couple of points after reading some of this to DH, who works in this area of agribusiness. He said if I was really interested he could send me to a website that would explain the whole thing but it’s very boring reading. Mostly he said that there is lots of misinformation out there about milk.</p>
<p>Here in CO, we have milk delivered from a dairy–$2.59 per half gallon of skim milk (glass bottles). We also think it tastes better in a glass bottle!</p>
<p>I just signed up for milk delivery- we don’t drink much. not quite 1/2 gallon week ( $3.89 organic), but since we usually walk to the grocery store- it will be nice not to have to carry the milk.</p>
<p>One of the things I miss from England is having the milkman deliver milk daily. Nowadays they will also deliver other things as well, such as bread and eggs. Especially good for older people such as my 87 year old Mum - the milkmen tend to keep an eye out for their older customers - not taking in the milk and things like that.</p>
<p>And you wash out the glass bottle and they pick it up to sterilize and re use - so one less thing to throw away/recycle.</p>