No milk to be spilt or cried over

It’s long been the cry of the dairy industry that farmers were being driven out of milk production because they got a pitiful price for their labours. Now though it seems the chickens are well and truly coming home to roost, or rather the cows, as well as the farmers are being retired and this has left the country short of milk.

Just last year the cows of Britain gave us fourteen billion litres of the white stuff for the breakfast table, or for the butter on your toast or for the cheddar cheese for your sandwiches. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly that’s slipped. Somewhere a billion litres has disappeared.

For the past decade, some say even longer, the dairy farming industry has lurched from one crisis to another, until now almost entirely over the price which farmers were getting, but now it’s all about the amount of milk those farms are producing.

Over that time the British dairy cow has worked harder and harder. It’s not unknown for some of the high yielding animals to give as much as ten thousand litres of milk a year, the average across the board is about seven thousand. The problem is that there are fewer and fewer cows to yield anything at all.

Ten years ago there were more than three million chewing the cud and trudging into the milking parlour twice a day to give us our morning pinta…or litre. Not that figure’s down to less than two million.

Ten years ago the price the farmer got for the effort put in by their cows was about twenty two pence per litre. Today it’s gone up… a massive four pence per litre to twenty six pence. In between then and now it fell to as little as just sixteen pence per litre, at some times of some years even less. And for almost all dairy farms the cost of production never fell below about seventeen pence per litre, often without taking into account any wage for the farmer.

It’s no surprise that many bailed out. In the early years of this century the National Farmers Union reckoned that as many as three a day were leaving the industry. The problem for those who were left was that very often the farmers might have been off to pastures new, but their cows were sold on to other farmers to make bigger and bigger herds.

At the turn of the century, the 21st, not the twentieth there were thirty two thousand dairy farms in the UK, just five years later that had shrunk to just under twenty five thousand…nut at the same time the average size of the herd had risen from 72.8 cows to 83.8. Bigger herds were a way of reducing costs. All the time though, the milk price was falling as the overall level of supply stayed constant.
The biggest factor was foreign competition for the milk products which could be imported. For instance those cheesy spreads that are so heavily advertised with smiling children going demented to get their hands on them, are often made with milk from cows in continental Europe, which is dried into powder, shipped in container lorries over to the UK, and then re-constituted into something the marketing wonks can really get their teeth into….mmmm….yummy….not. So in effect the only real UK market was for fresh milk and for cheese or butter production which wanted to use British milk.

The trouble was that all of this yummy stuff made from the dried produce of Polish or Austrian udders helped keep the market price of good old British Milk well and truly on the floor.

But those of us who were watching the industry unwind started to notice something. In 1984 the European community, as it was called then, introduced a limit on the amount of milk that every member state, and every farmer could produce. For the UK it was something in the region of fourteen million litres per year.

About four years ago I noticed that for the first time we seemed to be heading for an `undershoot of the quota limit’ in other words we were producing less milk than we were allowed to. At first this looked like it was just a temporary blip, but then it got bigger and bigger.

This was the point at which the national herd started to seriously decrease. Of course the milk powder could still come in from Poland, Austria or even Timbuktu, the trouble is that doorstep deliveries….those which still exist need fresh milk which is both expensive to transport and has a limited life. The same is true of cheese and butter production, and consumers are getting more and more fussy about where their food is from. Although the number of cows in the country had been decreasing for some time, those left were more productive. But now the hard working Holsteins who were left could no longer keep up. Shortages started to appear.

The culmination of this is that First Milk, one of the biggest farmer owner dairy co-operatives in the country is now cutting jobs at two of its cheese making plants because of shortages of milk.

And the question that now arises is whether paying farmers more in the difficult years might have encouraged more of them to stay in the industry. But there is a further problem. Even with the price of milk from the farm gate at a whopping 26 pence per litre, many dairy farms are still running at a loss because the cost of fuel and feed has gone through the roof.

So there are real fears that unless shoppers and the shops they use pay a lot more for their milk and dairy products shelves could be left empty.