The whole underpinning of that study seems a bit specious to me. If I'm reading it correctly, they've taken the theoretical production per cow in a year and multiplied that by the number of cows in the country. Then they've deducted the reported amount of milk sold in a year and assumed that the entire difference between those two numbers was farmers dumping milk on their farm, with no corroboration of any kind.
But they're don't actually know how much milk was produced, it's just a rough estimate. Whereas the government does release milk production numbers which are pretty different from what these researchers are estimating. And it's worth noting that the government figures do show some wastage when compared against sales figures, but nothing close to what this study is suggesting.
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