UK Milk- The current picture (ish)

Most milk is still produced traditionally in the UK based on grazing cows outside in the summer and feeding conserved grass or forage in the winter when the cows come inside sheds to shelter from the elements.
This is a bit of a general statement; but so is the next one.
Consumers (sometimes known rather sexistly (is that a word)) as the Housewife, expect food to be cheap.

• The percentage of income spent on food has shrunk from 33% to 15% in the last 50 years.
• Farmers are paid less now per litre of milk than they were 20 years ago.
• Petrol price in that time has risen from 40ppl to 111ppl.

Do the math!!
This has had a serious impact on the profit per litre of dairy farmers and now around 80 dairy farmers per day leave the industry (Source: DairyCo Datum)
If your business made only a few pence for every unit of product you produced in your business how would you make more money?
There are 3 basic ways of doing this
1) Charge more for each unit
2) make each unit more cheaply
3) produce more units

Dairy Farmers are no different to any other business in basic economics and because dairy farmers don't have a lot of control over the price they charge for milk so options 2 and 3 are their only way to make more money.

So, it is no surprise that the way milk is produced is changing and it seems to be polarising into the following two systems- this once again is a generalisation so don't start on me!!

1) Cheap extensive grazed systems where capital and input costs are kept to a minimum so that lower yields can be profitable at a higher unit profit
2) Large intensive systems where large number of cows are kept indoors and their diet, environment and health and welfare are strictly controlled to prodcue large volumes of product with lower unit profit.

I said that dairy farmers were no different to other businesses, well they are except for the fact that they do not have machines (yeah i know they have tractors but bear with me) they have animals and this is where, if we don't watch out, is where we may come unstuck as the consumer has a bit of an love of animals as well as a love of cheap food.

My study over the next 12 months is to try and find out if consumers are actually worried about where their food comes from and if they find they don't like how we produce their milk, are they happy to pay more for it to be produced in a different way.

THIS WHOLE THING STARTED A LONG TIME AGO

As I suspect that no-one will really read this I can ramble a bit and tell you a long and pretty ancient story.
In the mid Eighties I was inspired by a man, he travelled to far off countries and was sponsered by a mysterious Nuffield thing. I suspected that this may be something like the Freemasons. I mean why would anyone pay you to travel?
Shortly after this Gordon Fisher, as this was his name, helped me to apply for a trip to travel to the other side of the world. I thought this was very helpful of him not realising that it may have been a ploy to get me away from his 16 year old daughter. I realise this now that I nearly have 16 year old daughters of my own mothered by Liz his lovely daughter (my wife- I did it legally). There may be a lesson there, but that is for another time.
My trip to NZ was through the YFC and although this trip defined a lot of my farming life since, I think that at 21 I was a bit young to fully appreciate what I was seeing and what I could learn from travel, in those days Steinlager as apposed to Dryboroughs heavy was a big learning curve...
Ten years, a marriage, a farm change and a good few years later I decided it was time to "learn" some more. I wrote my application for my Nuffield Scholarship and was about to send it off when the dreaded FAM attacked our area, this essentially scuppered my idea to apply and events conspired to mean that, although I was busy at work, my world tour was postponed...indefinately.
If anyone out there has ever completed the Worshipful Company of Farmers Course they will know that by doing this in 2003 I managed to use my time wisely while secretely planning to tour the world again.
In the meantime family life was great fun, its great watching your kids develop, but now after attempts at cheese, yoghurt and compost production (some of this more succesful than others) and a visit locally to a Nuffield promotional meeting, here I am again only this time I am off on my tour for real.
Liz has given me her blessing, which is good becauseIi will leave her in the lurch a bit, and Harriet and Rachael seem at ease with allowing me to go (at least they have written me a shopping list of duty free items to bring back- I think this may be love of some sort) I am ready to go off on my own (there has already been a brief tour of Washington and Pennsylvannia, but go to http://www.nuffieldscholar.org.uk/ for details of this)
I will promise to update this as regularly as I can. next time I will be letting you know what I have done over the summer here in dear old blighty.