Al Overland does not say that you should qualify the almond milk for nut juice. He does not say either that you should not.

"I heard it called so," said Overland, a dairy farmer near Sturgeon Lake. "They can call it juice or a drink, or whatever they want, but we do not just want them to call it milk."

Dairy farmers, struggling with widespread consolidation of the industry, low prices and falling demand, are starting to get even more fed up with all non-dairy grocery products labeled as milk.

The number of types of "milk" available to consumers has increased dramatically in recent years. It was first soya, then almond milk, coconut milk and rice milk. Now there is oatmeal and pea milk.

The Food and Drug Administration is pondering the need to update its rules on how to label herbal foods, and dairy and herbal growers have lobbied. A four-month public comment period ended at the end of January and 8,624 comments were submitted.

The dairy groups say that the FDA has allowed a mentality "everything is fine on the market". Plant-based groups say that objections make a lot of noise and disrupt the market.

"This whole exercise is a solution looking for a problem," said Michele Simon, executive director of the Plant Based Food Association. "At a time when resources are scarce, our federal government should not worry about how" almond milk "is labeled. Does the FDA not have to worry about higher priorities, such as the security of our food supply?

According to federal regulations on "standards of identity", milk is "the milk secretion, practically free of colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more cows in good health".

Lucas Sjostrom, executive director of Minnesota Milk, said federal regulations should be enforced. And the dairy industry, he added, hopefully with the milk secretions of other types of animals labeled as milk.

"We have no problem with goats," Sjostrom said.

Herbal products that look like dairy products do not have any standards of identity and so are unstandardized foods.

The debate is in a way a step back from the one that opposed the proliferation of margarine in the United States from the end of the 19th century to the Second World War. At that time, dairy farmers were inciting politicians to charge taxes and fees to the competitor.

Overland, the farmer near Sturgeon Lake, remembers that his father, also a dairy farmer, had a habit of regretting the fact that the margarine was colored yellow to give the impression that it looked like butter. Today, he considers the labeling of herbal drinks as "milk" in the same way.

But, he said, herbal drinks are not nutritionally equivalent to milk, yet they benefit from decades of milk promotion by farmers raising and treating cows and now struggling to stay in business.

"Dairy farmers have spent a lot of money over the years to promote milk and make it the nutritional product that they are, and they benefit from all these investments," said Overland.

Herbal milk substitutes account for only a small portion of the beverage market, but they are growing and dairy sales are down. In the 12 months to July 2018, sales of traditional dairy products fell by 4%, while those of milk substitutes increased by 8%.

In the United States, the alternative to the most popular herbal milk is almond milk, prepared by dipping the almonds in water, grinding them with more water, and then filtering the pulp nuts and leaving a white and frothy drink.

"The market disturbances pushed by the dairy lobby would hamper innovation, create unsustainable costs for our members and ultimately be deemed unconstitutional, which would be a waste of time and resources for everyone," he said. Simon, director of the Plant Based Food Association. said in a statement. "We encourage the FDA to respect the principles of the free market and not to restrict labeling in order to unfairly favor the dairy industry."

Simon could not be contacted for an interview and a spokesperson for the Almond Alliance, a professional association, declined to comment.

An FDA spokesperson said the agency had not set a date for a decision on labeling rules "but will carefully review the comments before determining next steps.