U.S. dairy farmers have way too much milk on their hands

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published 12 October 2016

This is one milk spill that might be worth crying over. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that a milk glut in the U.S. forced dairy farmers to dump out a whopping 43 million gallons of milk between January and August. To put that into perspective, The Wall Street Journal calculated that's "enough milk to fill 66 Olympic swimming pools."

While milk has been dumped in years past, this is the most milk wasted in the last 16 years by far. As a result, dairy farmers' earnings have dropped by as much as 35 percent in the past two years. Money Magazine attributed the plummet to both overproduction and the waning popularity of dairy milk amid the rise of alternatives like almond milk.

So what's a dairy farmer to do? Try to get more dairy products into fast food restaurants and school cafeterias, The Wall Street Journal said. McDonald's, for example, swapped out liquid margarine for butter in some of its products, a switch that's expected to use "up to 600 million pounds of milk annually," The Wall Street Journal reported. Taco Bell, meanwhile, introduced a new quesadilla-chalupa hybrid that's heavy on the cheese. As a result, Americans have eaten an average of one more pound of cheese and butter in the last year alone.