DAIRY MILES SIMON FAIRLIE Follows the Tortous Route Taken by Milk on Its Way to the Consumer, and Examines Some Local Alternatives
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The Land 13 Winter 2012-13 DAIRY MILES SIMON FAIRLIE follows the tortous route taken by milk on its way to the consumer, and examines some local alternatives. he last ten days of July 2012 came as a welcome surprise Consulting’s recent report World Class Dairying — A Vision for Tto anyone who had begun to despair at the apathy of 2020 states that “there are significant opportunities for the UK British farmers. Faced with cuts of two pence per litre in the dairy sector to grow in the next few years” yet paradoxically price of milk, dairy farmers picketed supermarkets by day and predicts that this growth will require the loss of a further 42 per blockaded processors by night. After a week of repeated actions, cent of dairy farms, leaving us with just 8600.2 most of the cuts were withdrawn and the processing industry Meanwhile the number of cows per farm has risen, from an agreed to a voluntary code of conduct. average of 17 in 1950, to 125 in 2010, and Kite expect that to It was a hollow victory, of course. !e price now paid to most increase to 220 by 2020; and the productivity of these cows has dairy farmers is around 29 pence per litre, while production multiplied by two and a half, from an average of 2,800 litres costs, which were estimated at 30 pence a litre in July, had risen in 1950 to 7000 litres (see box on the next page). Dairy farms to 31.5 pence by the end of October, so many farmers are still are producing 18 times as much milk as they were in the fifties, operating at a loss. !e voluntary code of conduct, if it is worth but they are still going bust. the paper it’s written on, doesn’t offer much: its most valuable All of this seems particularly bizarre to anyone who has any concession is to allow dairy farmers who produce more than familiarity with the productive capacity of a single cow. A low their contract with a processor requires, to sell the surplus to yielding Jersey cow nowadays gives about 3,500 litres a year another company — something that in most sectors would be with a retail value of nearly £4000 — it produces enough nu- taken for granted. trition to keep three and a half adults alive for a year.. A top of It also came too late. In 2001 there were 26,500 dairy farms in the range, non-organic Holstein produces about 10,000 litres, the UK; by 2011 there were 14,700: we have lost nearly half with has a retail value of about £7500, and is sufficient to feed of them in ten years. In 1950 there were no less than 196,000 eight people for a year.3 What perversity of economics is it that dairy farms, which means that over my lifetime 92.5 per cent dictates that a farmer milking 125 of these beasts, producing of them have disappeared.1 And despite the voluntary code the best part of a million pounds’ worth of food a year, suffi- of conduct and whatever other palliative concessions may be cient to nourish 1000 people, can barely scrape a living? made, forecasters expect them to continue disappearing. Kite Hard to Shift In order to disentangle this problem it may help to start out with two primordial facts about milk. !e first is that it can be produced with considerable ease virtually anywhere — anywhere that grass grows, that is. Most people who live in the countryside only have to look out of their window to see enough raw material to supply all the milk, butter and cheese they might ever need. All of this raw material is obligingly gathered, chipped and shredded, digested and transported for us on a daily basis by cattle — all we have to do to secure a days’ harvest is ten minutes’ milking. We hear a lot about foraged food these days, but we forget that our most enthusiastic and prolific forager is the cow. !e second matter is that milk is liquid, heavy, difficult to transport, and, worst of all, it doesn’t keep. In Adam Smith’s words, “of all the productions of land, milk is perhaps the most perishable. In the warm season, when it is most abun- dant, it will scarce keep 24 hours.”4 It will last a bit longer now, with the aid of refrigeration, but dairy farmers still have to shift their fresh milk quickly, or else process it into cheese or butter themselves, which requires a lot of labour. In other words production is relatively easy and distribution is difficult; this puts dairy producers in a weak bargaining position when they encounter the market. !e wider Adrian Arbib Adrian the market, and the more urbanised and globalised the distribution network, the weaker their position. Since the The Turkana, in Kenya, have very low food miles. advent of industrialisation, farmers have seen profit margins 48 The Land 13 Winter 2012-13 on their produce decline as processors and distributors, selling nastiness of his own kitchen.” 5 Of course, his wife, who carried goods over an ever widening radius, extract an increasing out most of the dairy processing in what she no doubt regarded proportion of the retail price. One response to lower margins as her own kitchen, might have thought differently. is to increase production — to counter diseconomies of As a result, before industrialisation, little fresh milk reached the distribution with economies of scale — but if the market is market beyond what was sold to neighbours. As late as 1748, a saturated this can only be achieved by successful farmers if Swedish visitor to London, Pehr Kalm, complained that “milk others go out of business. However it is not the only response, is hardly ever seen at their meals . except what is taken in and in fact the fortunes of dairy farming have fluctuated puddings, and in tea in the morning.”6 !e money was in but- somewhat over the centuries as distribution technologies have ter and cheese: by the 18th century counties such as Essex, changed. Suffolk and Berkshire, which are no longer associated with dairying, were supplying the burgeoning London market with Farmhouse Kitchen to Factory Farm cheese and butter, owing to their proximity and good roads, Prior to the rise of industry and commerce, Adam Smith and in the 19th century Lancashire and Cheshire found a ready explains “the business of the dairy, like the feeding of hogs market in Manchester and the textile towns. Most traditional and poultry, is originally carried on as a save-all” by which he British cheeses are hard, and British butter is salted, because means a by-product of the core business of producing grain. both were devised for transport to a concentrated urban mar- “!e cattle necessarily kept on the farm [to manure the fields], ket, whereas a country such as France, with a more evenly dis- produce more milk than either the rearing of their own young tributed and dense rural population, could develop soft cheeses or the consumption of the farmer’s family require.” !e surplus and supply unsalted butter for local consumption. French hard is made into cheese or butter, part of which “is reserved for cheeses tend to come from remote mountain areas.7 the use of his own family. !e rest goes to market.” When the However cheese takes time to manufacture, and hence is more price for these commodities is low, Smith warns, the farmer expensive to produce than raw milk, provided the milk doesn’t “will be likely to manage his dairy in a very slovenly and dirty have to travel far. As industrial towns expanded, demand in- manner, and will scarce perhaps think it is worth while to creased for cheap milk to feed a growing labour force with large have a particular room or building on purpose for it, but will families. Bringing fresh milk into the metropolis on a daily suffer the business to be carried on amidst the smoke, filth and 3100 PLIA PLIA JFIH « JFIH « 2600 LC LC IFQOB IFQOB ?RQQBOC>Q MBO ?RQQBOC>Q MBO 2100 Ë Ë QL QL 1600 BNRFS>IBKQ BNRFS>IBKQ >AGRPQBA >AGRPQBA 1100 DO>JP ª DO>JP ª 600 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000 11000 12000 ( litres per cow per year ) ª HD LC CBBA MBO IFQOB LC JFIH MOLAR@BA « Low Yielding Cows Can Have Fewer Carbon Emissions Proponents of industrial farming argue dairy farms. This did indeed show “a DURXQGSHUFHQWRIFXUUHQWDYHUDJH that cows with higher yield produce slight but positive trend indicating that UK per capita carbon emissions. fewer carbon emissions. This, says Sam as the yield per cow increases, carbon 7KHÀJXUHVGRQRWWDNHDFFRXQWRI Evans of Kite Consulting, is because: footprint decreases.” (See the table carbon sequestration in the soil which, on left, in which each dot represents a “A lower-yielding cow carries a higher if anything, would tip the balance farm). However there was a stronger link maintenance cost per litre of milk in further in favour of farms with less between the carbon emissions per litre of terms of methane, whereas the higher intensive grass-fed cows.In addition, low milk and the amount of concentrate feed yielding cow spreads its methane yielding cows have more calves per litre used (see table right). maintenance cost over more litres of of milk, which diminishes the need for maintaining carbon-costly dams in the milk.” Moreover, as can be seen from the table suckler beef industry.