For Spanish dairy farmers, it is currently more profitable to sell their cattle as meat than to produce milk due to skyrocketing costs. In the Spanish dairy industry, milk production has been steadily declining in recent months.
Increasingly, older dairy cows that produce less than 25 – 28 liters per day are being slaughtered; over the past year and a half, 50,000 such cows have been culled. This has caused the number of dairy cows to drop below 800,000, and Spain may have to start importing milk this year.
The recession began last June with rising feed prices, compounded by more expensive diesel, energy costs, and the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. At the start of this year, milk production began to fall, recording an annual decline of -1.4%, and by June the decrease was -2.7%.
Although part of the cost increases have been passed on along the supply chain, causing the average milk price to rise by about 20 cents per liter, dairy farmers have not succeeded in covering all the increased costs.
The number of cattle (both meat and milk) sent to slaughterhouses rose by 10% year-on-year in May. The chairman of the dairy farmers' association (Agaprol) calls this reality “justified because farmers are losing money in many cases.”
Milk production is expected to decline further in the summer months, when animals produce less. Problems with the national milk supply could arise in the fall, which may cause difficulties for cheese production in November.