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Originally Posted by swishina
Why is it suddenly going up so much? We bought milk at Costco and thought "hey, this is more expensive!" then saw it was even more at the grocery store!
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Everything is going up...
Corn to feed the cows - more corn is being grown right now than has been in YEARS. However, most of it being grown for ethenol (sp?), that pushes everything else up in price, things like hay that the cows are also fed, lots of corn being grown means less hay is being grown. Thus the cost of hay is going up, which completes that cycle.
Fuel and gas is going up in price. Some to the "instability" in the world, OPEC, latin american producers and russia are all playing games because, frankly they have the power to do so. American refrineries are scaling back production of oil to gas because they want to control the market as long as possible and they are NOT happy about the ethenol trend. There was story about this on NBC just last week.
So Fuel now costs more, and thus the cost to ship from the farm to the groocery store. Not to mention that electricyt rates for keeping this milk all cold are going up as well.
Demand - consumption has not dropped so demand keep the prices rising.
I have purchased organic milk for the past 3 years, so uncertain what "normal" milk prices have been doing, but my organic milk has gone up .20 a gallon in the past few months, but still can stock up and save when it's on sale.
I freeze milk from time to time, just make sure you pour a bit off the top so it have room to expand when it freezes. The color will be off a bit when it's unfrozen, some say they notice a taste difference but not so in our house, but then again we never just drink a glass of milk, it's most likely used for my morning coffee drink ot in baking, and the very rare bowl of cereal. We take it out of the freezer a week before we want to drink it, shake it twice daily to get it to defrost and "reconsistute" it back to milk from frozen milk slush.
If you normally drink 2%, buy whole milk and dilute it at home with water is also another trick many do. Some say cut "real" milk with powdered milk, but I honestly don't find much of a cost savings with powdered milk so it's not a money saver for me.
Good luck all