The Collapse of British Dairy

When I was a child there was a joke that went; A farmer talking to his neighbour said “I have crossed a chicken with a spider, The neighbour asks why. The farmer says well there are eight in the family and we all like a leg. So the neighbour asks “Well what does it taste like?” The farmers reply is, “I don't know as we cant catch it”

As well as being a silly joke, it was rather prescient as there are practices in the agricultural industry that just look wrong. I have talked in previous posts about having read a book that was predicting BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (I know I have probably misspelt it) back in 1977 and this prompted me to become vegetarian for many years. The same applies to the gross abomination of the hundred pints of milk per day cow that is the Holstein

Following my posting on the report by Dom Broom of Cambridge University, I was emailed by a farmer who said that while the report gave a technical description of starvation, where the body tissue is converted to produce milk, and that it is offensive to suggest that farmers are deliberately harming their livestock is offensive. I would have pasted the comments verbatim had they not been liberally fertilised with expletives (enough to make a Mouse Blush), but even in that response there is an acknowledgement that the animal is suffering by simply having been breed to produce that much milk. While I know that most farmers do not intend to inflict suffering, there are many practices that farmers are taught to carry out that are seriously impacting animal welfare.

The Holstein suffers from mastitis more than any other breed as well as greater lameness, and infertility. This drive to greater and greater milk volume per cow is totally crazy and has gone beyond the limits of what the animals can take. Add to this the zero grazing methods of farming, where the cattle are housed in vast sheds and their food is brought to them, and that is no longer farming but a milk factory.

This abuse of the animals, the sentient creatures, that produce the milk is not only about animal welfare but the unsustainability of the economics of the systems in place. Just as occurred with the banks, were the business model for banking was to lend greater and greater sums of money, also requiring the banks to borrow even larger sums themselves, would eventually lead to a collapse when people and or businesses had over borrowed and could no longer repay. It is a question of sustainability. With the Industrial Agriculture of the milk industry driving the price of milk lower and lower from over production, that is basic economics. While this may have benefited some industrial farmers, it has led to the crazy situation where cows seriously suffer to produce that milk.

The crazy economics of this so called free market has led to the bankruptcy of the Farmers cooperative, The Dairy Farmers of Britain, and the closure on Friday of the Blaydon Dairy, via that local dairy I used to get my milk. But now with that closure and the importation of liquid milk from Europe, four hundred farmers are now at risk of going under.

That means in the North East of England, there is no dairy to take the milk produced by the small and family owned farms. Many of these traditional farms are in isolated upland areas, like the North Yorkshire Moors and the Foot Hills of the Pennines where I live, and through to the Northumberland Moors, farmers can not find anywhere to sell there milk. The official receiver of The Dairy Farmers of Britain are now only paying ten pence per litre for this milk. This is half the cost of production.

All of this situation has been the result directly and indirectly of the industrial system of production. While Farmers and agricultural workers never set out to create a system that abused the animals that provide milk, nor did farmers design the economic food chain, they are responsible for the short term economic thinking that has lead to this crisis.

Last year, there was a food crisis with grain crops, this fed into the present crisis in the British Milk industry. With oil prices on the rise again, we need to start thinking and acting towards ensuring that food is produced as close to the consumer as possible.

Over the past twenty five years in Britain, food production has become much more centralised and industrial. It is no coincidence that this has coincided with the environmental degradation of farmland exemplified by the loss of sixty percent of farmland bird species, as well as the growth in power of the large retailers. While farming is a business it should also be a way of life. In an Industrial milking factory where the cows are milked in their hundreds by robots, where is the human eye to spot a cow that is not looking her best, or looks ill, lame or suffering in some other way?

BSE was the result of industrial agriculture, even Foot and Mouth spread because of industrial agriculture, both cost Britain billions. As we loose major parts of the Milk Field in Britain, does the consumer really believe that importing liquid milk will maintain low consumer prices?

Parliament is investigating zero grazing farming and it may well lead to a ban on this abusive system. Farming needs to change with welfare and quality being the primary focus. The big retailers need to have regulations imposed upon them so that can not abuse their power.

If I could, I would buy my milk direct from one of the local farms, but years ago it became illegal for farmers to sell “Green Top” milk. That was the result of pressure from the Multi National food companies, and what government needs to do is stop abdicating responsibility to big businesses.

I now can not buy local milk at all, what milk I can get has travelled at least four hundred miles to get to me.