Dairy Industry

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, for securing this debate. I am not an expert but put my name down to speak due to the notice on the A30 that said “Save our Dairy Farmers” and after watching local TV coverage of the drastic steps dairy farmers were forced to take to bring their plight to a wider audience.

I am fortunate to live in a village which has four active dairy farms, and others within a short distance. They are all, without exception, hard-working and diligent farmers, but not all are prospering. The averaging-out of costs of producing milk is a long-established practice but, like all averages, it does not suit all. There are many quirks in the system which seriously affect some farmers’ livelihoods and do not lead to fairness or transparency.

Speaking to local farmers, I hear some fairly distressing stories. Farmer A, on a contract to Müller Wiseman, received 33.6p per litre in May 2014. He is currently paid 23.15p; from October this will drop to 22.35p, down a total of 11.25p per litre. The cost of his feed has dropped over the same period, but the decrease is well behind the rate of the drop in price, and he is down over £14,000 per month. When he left school in 1977, there were 93,000 dairy farmers in the country. Now, there are now 9,500, and they are leaving the sector daily rather than weekly.

Farmer B, on a contract with 300 other dairy farmers to Dairy Crest for Sainsbury’s, gets 30.92p per litre. In October, he will have a small drop to 30.81p. His costs are assessed at 33.48p, so he will make a loss of 2.5p per litre. The milk tanker picks up the milk from both farmers on the same trip, and it is processed together, yet they receive widely different prices for their milk. This anomaly cannot be right and needs addressing.

Four miles further down the road is a very different farmer. This farmer won the Gold Cup at the Livestock Event 2015. He has a herd of 1,800 and milks three times a day. His farm and milking parlours are immaculate and he puts animal welfare at the heart of his operation. I commend him for his efforts and enterprise. But 1,800 cows take some feeding. I have been present at parish council meetings of villages which straddle the A30 and listened to concerns and complaints from the public about the size, speed and frequency of tractor movements through their village. Although I understand that the Government’s general agenda is that bigger is better, this is not always the case. As smaller dairy farmers give up in desperation, the larger conglomerates will take over. This will have an impact on the countryside as we know it, and will not always be good.

There is a disconnect between the cost and effort involved in farming and the public’s perception of where the food they eat comes from. Not everyone watches “Countryfile”, and many in our urban areas have never been in the presence of a cow. Their connection with the countryside, if any, is limited to travelling through to their holiday at the seaside. More publicity is needed to assist understanding of the process of getting milk on to supermarket shelves and thence poured on breakfast cereals in the home.

I welcome the EU’s €500 million package to support farmers but want to know what the UK’s share of this is, how it is to be distributed and how quickly. There is an indication that it will be from 16 October. Is the Minister able to give us more detail?