Intensive Dairy Farming

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) for obtaining this important debate. He could not have picked a more important time to do so, as we have heard. We are all aware that we are at a crucial stage with a plan for a new factory dairy farm. It will either be approved by Lincolnshire county council or, if the decision is deferred, considered by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. I hope to contribute to persuading the Minister to use his influence to encourage the Secretary of State to delay that application when it is submitted. I shall briefly explain why.

We have heard arguments on animal welfare and broader environmental concerns. A broad range of organisations, including Compassion in World Farming, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, Friends of the Earth, the Campaign Against Factory Farming Operations and many others, have made their views known. I want to return to another major concern.

The Minister told hon. Members in the House that he welcomes the fact that people are looking to invest in our dairy sector. But is that the kind of investment that we want? No one can deny that if the mega-dairy model is a success, it will impact heavily on traditional dairy farming in this country. If the new model works, the old model will have to give way at some point. Farmers will go out of business, and for those who survive, there will be little prospect of their children taking over. We will see a profound transformation of our countryside with acceleration of the depressing trends described in the brilliant speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart).

Today, just over 16,000 dairy farms produce 12 billion litres of milk. If the CPRE research is correct, the same quantity could be produced with just 232 Nocton-style mega-dairies. We have seen in the United States how quickly intensive agriculture can take hold. In 10 years, the number of cows reared in intensive conditions nearly doubled from 2.5 million to 4.9 million between 1997 and 2007.

If we are to move to a situation in which farmers are replaced by a handful of technicians, cattle food is imported, fields are left empty, and cows are denied grazing, at the very least we should consider the implications because that shift is not inevitable, as we have been led to believe. It will not result from some kind of overwhelming evolutionary market force. It has nothing to do with the market. I have yet to meet a single consumer who wants to buy such stuff. Even some of the mega-supermarkets that have rightly taken a bashing this morning—I will give them another bashing later—and household-name supermarkets have said that they will not sell milk from mega-dairies. There is no shortage of milk. We export more than we import. The market is not what will take us towards the mega-dairy—or, indeed, towards cloned meat or genetically modified food, both of which seem to be back on the agenda. However, politicians might take us in that direction.

We have a new farming Minister who is almost unique in that he is respected by both small and large farmers. He belongs to a Government whose leaders spent a great deal of time before the election, crucially, supporting slow food, organic food, sustainable food, local food, farmers’ markets and the works—the antithesis of factory production. I do not believe that the Minister wants to preside over a process in which our countryside is effectively handed over to US-style intensive agribusiness.

I recognise that the National Farmers Union has, more or less, endorsed the Nocton plans, but the NFU stands almost alone among farmers’ groups with that support. It would be wrong to mistake the NFU for an authentic voice for farmers, given that its president casually recommended recently:

“We need to experiment…We should give it a try.”

He was not speaking for farmers but for agribusiness. That is why, outside Parliament a few years ago, representatives from countless small farming organisations lined up with posters saying, “NFU: No F…ing Use”—I was there at the time.

Nocton is opposed by a wide range of farming bodies, from FARM, the Small Farms Association and the Family Farmers Association to the Soil Association, and including the Farmers Union of Wales, which said recently:

“Given that a single super-dairy could take the place of scores of average sized family dairy farms, we would prefer to see traditional family farms staying in business and receiving a fair price for their milk, rather than single massive units pushing others out of business”.

I know that the Minister shares that concern for the future of farming in this country. I urge him to step in now, before it is too late. We do not always have to yield to the lowest possible standards. We could, for example, invest the £2 billion or so spent on food in schools and hospitals on the best quality, local, British sustainable food, cutting food miles, giving patients and children the food that they want and immediately boosting the rural economy.

As we have just heard in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Mr Gale), we can insist that whatever food is imported should meet the same standards that we apply to our own farmers, so that our farmers are not unfairly outcompeted. Yes, that requires us to take on the trade rules but, if the rules make no sense, the Government’s job is to challenge them. We must do that if we are serious about protecting the British farming sector.

In addition, we could negotiate a better deal from the supermarkets. I will not repeat the arguments that we have already heard, but they are absolutely valid and I echo them. There is an imbalance of power—again, I cannot imagine any other body in this country, other than the Government, that is able or equipped to challenge and address that imbalance. That is a prerequisite for ensuring the survival of the farming sector.

We have heard that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs does not have the power to stop Nocton or such a dairy model. However, if the Minister is persuaded that the risks are too great, he can raise standards without legislation, to prevent such developments from happening. I do not expect him to be persuaded in this forum, in a brief series of speeches, but I ask him to acknowledge the concerns and to use his influence to put the project on hold until he has commissioned a broad and thorough analysis of the likely impacts, not just on welfare, which is key, but on the whole farming sector. Without that information, we cannot take a proper, responsible or reasonable decision.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Paice]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, and I will try to pick it up, although I will obviously not be able to respond to all the important points that my hon. Friends and the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain) have made.

There has been a bit of a battle for credibility between some of my hon. Friends as to who first milked cows. If I might join in, it is about 44 years since I first milked cows. In those days—we can all say “in those days”—most dairy herds were in the 20-to-30 cow bracket, and 100 was a massive herd. If we had had a debate about mega-dairies in those days, we would have been talking about 100 cows.

The average herd in England is now 113 cows. There are lots of herds with more than 500 cows; one has 2,000 cows and several have more than 1,000 cows. The world has moved on, and no Government of any colour—we have obviously had all shades over the past 44 years—have blown the whistle and said, “This is too big.”

[Zac Goldsmith]

The Minister is right to have identified, as others have, the perverse European rules that force us into a situation where our farmers are out-competed by farmers importing substandard products from elsewhere in Europe. Before the election, the Prime Minister pledged to challenge those rules, and my question is simply whether the Government still have any appetite to do so on behalf of our farmers and food security groups. It would be welcomed by farmers across the board if that pledge was fulfilled.

[Mr Paice]

Without wishing to duck that question, I should say that trade issues are, as my hon. Friend is well aware, a matter for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. Obviously, however, we would wish to pursue as best we can commitments made by the Prime Minister before the election.

Let me move on to the point about competition in the domestic market and about supermarkets, which all my hon. Friends have raised in various ways. First, let me reaffirm that the Government are committed to introducing legislation to bring in the supermarket code adjudicator. We will call it an adjudicator because, compared with existing ombudsmen, it is not strictly an ombudsman.

I urge those of my hon. Friends who share my view that the sooner we introduce the adjudicator the better, to press the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills because this is his legislation. We will proceed as quickly as possible, but we need to be absolutely honest with ourselves and with farmers that this proposal will not in itself lead to a price rise; it is about ensuring that we have fair and transparent terms of trade and about enforcing the code, which has been in operation since February. We must not be accused of misleading people into thinking that the adjudicator will somehow make everything all right.

My hon. Friends said a lot about supermarkets, so I will not go further into that issue. However, we also need to look at processors. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) said, certain processors have massively bid for contracts to process and bottle for supermarkets. They then pass on to the producers the results of what is, in many ways, over-bidding. We are now in the absurd situation where the farm-gate price paid for milk that goes into liquid products or relatively high-value cheese products is lower than that which people could afford to pay if they were going to convert that milk into skimmed milk powder, which is the lowest-priced global commodity—although, even then, the global price for the raw milk is about 27p or 28p a litre.

The Government are, of course, committed to the concept of free trade and open markets, and the Opposition probably largely share that fundamental belief. We do not believe in interfering in how business operates, but it behoves business to operate a fair market arrangement.

I cannot stand here and say that the Government will never intervene if we clearly see unfair practices going on. We hope that the adjudicator will resolve all that, but let me make it clear to the dairy processing and retail sectors that it behoves them to operate a fair market. They must recognise that if they do not, we will, as hon. Members have frequently said, lose the British dairy industry, whatever the type of housing, to overseas competitors. The result will be ever-more volatile prices.