by Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 10/97) - Happy hour lasts all week these days for the milk drinkers of Yellowknife.

Shortly after dairy farmer Neil Myers started selling milk off the back of his truck for a dollar a litre and less, Extra Foods has dropped its milk prices to all-time lows.

"It's like an elephant slapping at a fly," said Myers of the Extra Foods move. "Not only will they not purchase from a small local farmer, but now they're trying to put him out of business."

Prices at Extra Foods have dropped to less than a dollar a litre.

"Obviously, if I go out of business they're not going to keep their prices there," said Myers.

Yellowknife Co-op grocery manager Al Krukoff foretold the move a month ago, when asked about pricing disagreements with Myers.

Krukoff said the Co-op did not sell Myers' milk at low prices because it did not want to get into a price war with Extra Foods.

Extra Foods is owned by grocery giant Westfair. It runs the city's two biggest grocery stores, one on Old Airport Road and another downtown.

Sunday in a corner of the Wal-Mart parking lot, Myers traded white milk for $360 in donations to the Yellowknife Women's Centre and Koinonia Christian School.

Myers, who earlier this summer took over operation of Tuaro Dairy, started selling milk from his truck two weeks ago because he felt retailers weren't pricing his milk competitively enough.

Myers wanted to increase milk production. The prices he was selling to local stores were, he said, the lowest in Canada. But on the shelves of the few retailers who agreed to carry his milk, Tuaro products sold for only a few cents less than milk from large southern dairies.

Since he started selling from his truck, one of the retailers, Wal-Mart, has stopped carrying Tuaro milk.

Telephone calls to Westfair Foods went unreturned.