Suddenly what we consume has become a hot political subject. According to
figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week, food
inflation alone is up by nearly 9%, thanks to “spiralling meat costs”,
“rocketing” vegetable prices and steep increases in milk.
“Food security” - the jargon phrase for whether a country can feed itself -
has shot up the government’s agenda. And no wonder: we now produce just 58%
of our own food compared with 80% just 15 years ago.
In theory, rising prices should at least help farmers who have struggled to
cover the costs of production. In practice, however, the structure of
today’s industrialised, intensive food system is driving our farmers off the
land. Subsidies have done little to save them: they are packing up even as
climate change exposes how vital local production will be to our future.
A good time to encourage UK farmers, you may think. Yet, squeezed between the
vagaries of the commodity markets and the power of oligopolies, many are
being forced to intensify further rather than farm more sustainably.
The crisis in the dairy industry is a reflection of the wider problems in the
UK’s food supply. A decade ago there were 35,000 dairy farmers in the UK;
that number has now almost halved. An average of between two and three have
been packing up each day and farmers’ organisations expect still more to go
in the next few months. Even big dairy farms that have done everything to
modernise and compete in a global market seem unable to make the economics
work.
Last year I went to Kemble Farms, in the Cotswolds, one of the most efficient
milk operations in the country, to try to understand what was happening.
David Ball, the farm manager, explained how the business worked.
The farm’s Holstein friesians, bred for productivity, give so much milk that
they are “emptied” three times a day. Yields are typically 9,000 litres
(1,980 gallons) per cow per year - spectacular compared with just a decade
ago, when the average yields were 3,500 per cow.
The herd size, usually about 700 cows, puts Kemble Farms into the
super-efficient league. The average number of cows on a dairy farm in the UK
now is more than 100; in 1994 it was 79; immediately postwar a dozen or so
cows on a mixed farm was not unusual. In fact, Kemble is such a model of
efficiency that the Chinese minister of agriculture came here to learn how
this kind of modern dairy business could be imported to meet the exploding
demand in his country.
A total of £2m has been invested in a shed the size of an aircraft hangar
where the cows are kept indoors for nearly half of the year and fed the
concentrated feed that they need to maintain such levels of production.
However, the yield is still not enough for today’s milk markets, said Ball,
as he took me to see the farm’s state-of-the-art milking parlour.
The huge shed seemed to be operated by some invisible hand. As we arrived, cow
number 777 was just passing from the herd in the holding yard via an
automated gate into the high-tech milking system. She filed down the
approach lane to the milking machines and at the same time a signal from the
transponder clipped to her foreleg was being sent to the estate’s computer,
which identified her and logged her in.
By entering the empty berth at the end of the line, 777 opened the bar for the
cow behind her - and so the herringbone row of stalls filled up without the
need for human intervention.
In the pit below, three eastern European workers were moving quietly up the
lines attaching teats to 36 sets of udders at a time. As the milking machine
began to suck, 777’s milk flowed down the pipes and through an underground
meter that measured and recorded her output.
Meanwhile, information from a pedometer - also attached to her foreleg - was
analysed by cutting-edge software to calculate how far she had moved inside
the adjoining cowshed since her last milking.
When 777 comes into season she walks more than usual and the computer will
mark her down for artificial insemination. If she has not walked as much as
usual she may have an udder infection or be suffering from lameness - a
condition to which cows bred for intensive dairy production are prone - and
the computer will then filter her out for possible antibiotic treatment.
As I watched, 777’s milk stopped pumping. Immediately detecting the
interruption to the flow, the sensor in the machine forced water back up the
pipes to clean both 777 and the equipment. Then the teats popped off by
themselves, leaving 777 to exit through the funnel area into the shed.
“We thought that so long as we were efficient we should be able to make a
profit,” said Ball. The assessment was wrong, however. The problem is that
even large farms such as Kemble have little influence over the price that
they get for their milk. When their costs go up because of global economic
forces, they cannot just pass them on.
Kemble’s costs for fuel, fertiliser, water and animal feed had gone up 8% in
the 12 months before my visit (and they have gone up even more now). Yet the
price it was being paid for its milk by Dairy Crest, the company that
processed and packed it for Sainsbury’s, had fallen by 8% over the same
period.
“Chilling milk is energy intensive,” said Ball. “The cost of our deliveries
has gone up. Feed has gone up. Fertiliser uses huge amounts of gas for its
production - that’s up 30% in three years. We are now selling milk below the
cost of production.” (After my visit the supermarkets did eventually
increase what they paid the farmers, but the extra was soon swallowed up in
even higher costs.)
Despite its industrial scale and being so well run, Kemble found itself
looking into an economic black hole. “We either pack up or intensify
further,” Ball said. “We’ve already increased our output 15% in the past
year. We’re aiming for 10,000 litres per cow in the next few months.”
This was going against the grain for someone like Ball, who works on a farm
that is run to the highest standards and audited by the RSPCA’s Freedom
Foods. At the moment, the cows here manage an average of four lactations
before they have to be culled. In many intensive factory-farming systems,
they manage only two or three before becoming so worn-out that they are
unproductive.
“We would be driving everything - the animals, the plant - to the maximum,”
Ball continued. “In a factory we are used to the idea of 24/7; but with
animals and land there are other considerations. We resist treating cows
like machines. From the consumer point of view, dairy means cows in nice
pasture - but we’re being driven away from that to intensify production
until we follow the poultry world.”
The supermarkets’ profit margin on fresh milk has increased more than fivefold
in the past decade. The processors that collect, pasteurise and bottle the
milk have kept about the same share of the money in the chain in that time,
but the farmers’ share has kept going down.
So farmers can do little except intensify. They increase the size of their
herds to spread fixed costs and they increase yields by feeding their
animals the lowest-cost, high-energy, high-protein diet that they can buy.
Much of the dairy cow feed in the UK now depends on imported intensively
produced corn and soya derivatives. Of course farmers could use clover-rich
grass instead, as well as less intensively grown UK cereals and legumes. But
then the milk yields would go down.
None of this is much fun for the cow. An animal producing milk to suckle its
own calf makes about 10 litres a day. Intensively fed cows can be expected
to produce more than 70 litres a day. In some cases they have been so
overbred for high yields that their mammary glands’ capacity to produce milk
exceeds their ability to digest enough nutrients. New research also suggests
that half of these intensively kept cows go lame in any one year, partly
because they have to stand on concrete for so long and partly because their
udders are too heavy for their hind legs.
Leaving aside animal welfare considerations, intensively produced milk appears
to be nutritionally depleted. “You are what you eat” turns out to apply as
much to cows as to humans. On the basis of official tables on the
composition of food, the iron content of milk appears to have dropped by
more than 60% in 60 years. Milk also appears to have lost 2% of its calcium
and 21% of its magnesium. Furthermore, recent studies have found that, on
average, a pint of organic milk contained 68% more omega3 fatty acids than
conventional milk.
In the past few months there has barely been enough milk - organic or
otherwise - to meet demand. Meanwhile, some experts predict that if more
dairy farmers continue to go to the wall, we will have to import fresh milk
in five years’ time. It may not be long before we are wondering how we
managed to squander such a valuable heritage as our dairy farmers.
Adapted from Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business Is Bad for the
Planet and Your Health, by Felicity Lawrence, published by Penguin on June
26 at £8.99. Copies can be ordered for £8.54, including postage and packing,
from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
