On January 1st, Farming Today’s Anna Hill asked what 2013 might hold for the dairy industry following 2012’s blockades, negotiations and boycotts. Her use of language betrayed her stance as she described farmers mobilising to fight for what they saw as a fair price for milk and later spoke of protests fizzling out.
David Handley elsewhere put the record straight, saying that farmers had mobilised to fight cumulative cuts in milk prices. FFA seeks a fair price now and also in the future. At the moment estimates of a fair price range from 32-34ppl – see the Scottish Farmer, FG comments and Shropshire dairy producer Roger Evans in Cow Management, p20.
Farming Today rendered inoffensive
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Fifteen years ago in the late ‘90s, Farming Today ‘faced the chop’ because of its brutally frank coverage of BSE & FMD issues and is now proud that its ‘the rural agenda’ – and that of Countryfile – has made countryside “now relevant to people’s lives as both a playground and a source of affordable and safe food.”
Dairy farmers continue to move away from milk production
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On December 14th in Norwich Louis and Fran Baugh reluctantly left dairying and sold their herd of 160 pedigree Holsteins because low milk prices gave no margin for reinvestment needed to farm buildings and the milking parlour (above).
Four voices
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There was a recording of James Paice addressing the London Dairy Coalition event and asking if farmers were sure they had done everything to reduce production costs. Barry Smith from Derbyshire said angrily that he had heard not one word which encouraged him to stay in farming.
Rob Newbery, the NFU’s chief dairy adviser, said that he hoped a voluntary code would address bad practice and protect producers and gave a clear signal that if this does not happen there will have to be legal protection.
Jim Begg of Dairy UK, who works closely with the processing industry, said that the campaigners had trodden a thin line between protest and disrupting the business of dairy companies, and that was not helping anyone. Processors regrettably are driven by market circumstances and cannot pay out what they don’t get in. The four major processors had announced sudden cuts, due, he said, to market decline.
Industry consultant, Ian Potter commented that farmers had been watching market movements and expected prices to ease back but the Dairy Crest price cuts were so large that even DEFRA condemned them and farmers were selling milk at well below costs of production. He is aware that processors are being squeezed by their customers, the supermarkets, but deplored, without naming Freshways, the buying of milk from Belgium at 31ppl whilst paying English producers less than 25pp.
In more outspoken vein in his July newsletter Ian Potter said:
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We keep returning to the fact this market does not work and the only people who will change it are the dairy farmers. Yes there is evidence that both large and small retailers are very, very nervous and that their previous aggressive attitude has weakened this week. Some who had the nerve to hold their greedy selfish plate out for a share of the August price drops have even wound back this request. You may get a short term fix from embarrassed retailers but the problem will return.
Yes the root problems are greedy, dispassionate, morally bankrupt retailers (both large and small) who want ever cheaper milk so they can take an ever bigger their slice of the cake for themselves.
Adding in August:
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There is an awful lot wrong and immoral with this supply chain. There’s the obvious to start with – the obscenely unfair share of the margins. But there are other unseen, shady activities too. How many “back door” payments do retailers “force” processors to make, for example, which muddy the waters? The ones I am told about make my eyes water, let alone theirs. The bottom line is dairy farmers and processors are paying for cheap milk, for this immoral activity and wanton greed. And if recent drops are not quickly reversed the cows themselves will pay the price: more, inevitably, will be culled.
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In spring the Dairy Crest initiative will get under way and all will be watching the operation of the new voluntary dairy code of contract practice. In the Farming Today programme, Ian Potter concluded that all must try to make it work because dialogue is better than protest.
The BBC Farming Today broadcast can be heard again for five days here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phfsr
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