Perfect storm looming on milk supply
Milk price is in the news again as always – for farmers anyway, not consumers.
Will it go up or down and by how much? Will it cover production costs, or protect buyers' and supermarkets' profits? Either way the farmer has no say. He can only change milk buyer, if his contract will allow, or stop milking. Good choices!
I'm not a dairy farmer so why am I bothered? It's frustration with the system. The industry experts, movers and shakers keep forming new committees and groups to "help farmers be better", but historically they're failing. Farmers and cows numbers have reduced scarily over the last 20 years under the guidance of these perennial experts.
They're spending thousands of pounds telling the boots on the ground how to "do it better," a lot of the time reinventing the wheel with a more complicated name.
Apart from the farmers' plight, the future of our milk supply is threatened because once the perfect storm of not enough milk arrives, and it will, we'll depend on imported milk. It's so risky as we won't even have the EU's dubious umbrella to shelter us.
Rosemary Allen is a retired livestock farmer living near Ellesmere
