Al Overland is not saying you should refer to almond milk as nut juice. He's also not saying you shouldn't.

“I've heard it called that,” said Overland, a dairy farmer near Sturgeon Lake, Minn. “They can call it juice or beverage, or whatever they wish, but we just don't want them to call it milk.”

Dairy farmers, who are struggling with widespread industry consolidation, low prices and declining demand, are becoming even more fed up with all the nondairy products labeled as milk. The number of different types of “milk” available to consumers has ballooned in recent years. First it was soy, then almond milk, coconut milk and rice milk. Now, there's oat milk and pea milk.

The Food and Drug Administration is mulling whether to update its rules for how to label plant-based foods, and has been lobbied hard by both dairy and plant-based producers. A four-month public comment period closed at the end of January, and 8,624 comments were submitted.

Dairy groups say the FDA has allowed an “anything goes mentality in the marketplace.” Plant-based groups say the objections are much ado about nothing, and would disrupt the marketplace.

“This entire exercise is a solution in search of a problem,” said Michele Simon, executive director of Plant Based Food Association. “At a time when resources are scarce, our federal government should not be concerned with how 'almond milk' is labeled. Aren't there higher priorities, such as the safety of our food supply, for FDA to worry about?”

According to the federal “standards of identity” regulations, milk is “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.”

Lucas Sjostrom, executive director of Minnesota Milk, said the federal regulations should be enforced. And the dairy industry, he added, is fine with lacteal secretions from other types of animals being labeled as milk. “We have no problem with goats,” Sjostrom said.

Plant-based products that resemble dairy foods do not have standards of identity, and therefore are nonstandardized foods.

The debate is a throwback in some ways to one that played out from the late 19th century up to World War II over the proliferation of margarine in the U.S. In those days, dairy farmers prodded politicians to imposes taxes and fees on the competitor to butter.

Plant-based milk alternatives remain a small portion of the beverage market, but they're growing and sales of dairy products are declining.