The Dairy Documentary

Last week’s BBC panorama was horrific to watch and has thoroughly traumatised consumers and dairy farmers alike. I think anything that encourages people to think about where their food comes from is very important, however I do feel the documentary has portrayed all dairy farmers in a bad light, which is not fair.

The first note I want to make is that what was shown on the BBC was not in any way representative of all dairy farms, and there are many farms which uphold extremely high welfare standards and treat their animals with the respect they deserve.

What I really want to talk about though is how the dairy industry has been one which has been continuously crippled with extremely low prices for many years. Before writing this, I had a very interesting conversation with local dairy farmer John Tucker who has farmed for the last 52 years in Parkham, he explained how most dairy farmers have been forced to intensify to make ends meet, how they have had no option but to get more cows, and produce more and more milk, faster and faster and despite the costs of labour, inputs and energy having increased substantially over the years, the price paid per litre of milk has not.

As many of you know I sell products for a living, and each time a new container of stock arrives we re-cost it using the price paid for the goods, the shipping and the duty so that our margin is consistent regardless of inflated costs. If we didn’t do this, we would start to make a loss on the products we are selling, because the over the last 10 years the cost of getting a container from India to here as increased by at least 3 times. Dairy farmers can’t re-cost their product like this, they are told by the milk processers & supermarkets what price they are going to get. It is beyond belief that a bottled litre of water can be more expensive than a litre of milk. Farmers are being paid less for milk now than they were 10 years ago and without the subsidies from the government most farms would be making a loss. With the subsidies, most farms are probably just about breaking even (and that’s usually with thousands of hours of labour not accounted for).

So, with the outrage that has been sparked amongst consumers, where did it all go wrong and who’s to blame? Years ago, there was a milk man, everyone got their milk from the local dairy farm. When supermarkets started emerging, they saw offering essentials such as milk, bread and meat at the lowest price possible, as a great opportunity to get people in their stores regularly whether those individual items were profitable or not. As they grew, they encouraged all the small dairies to get bigger and bigger, through offering big contracts, albeit paying less per litre but buying more of it. They slowly but surely shaped the whole industry to what it is today with nearly all dairy farmers now reliant on them. A monopoly has been created.

How has the supermarket come to have so much power? Well, it provided a well-priced, convenient way of doing food shopping, which works for people who are short of time and money, which happens to be most people these days. The globalised system that we are in has made it difficult for families to survive on one wage, food has been kept cheap but other costs which are now deemed essential have crept in, such as cars, mobile phones, internet and subscriptions, as well as constantly rising costs of essential items such as energy.

So whether you want to blame increased bureaucracy that stifles small farmers, the corporations for being too greedy or consumers for supporting it all, one thing is for sure, it’s really not fair to blame the farmers.