Could Brexit be an answer as dairy farming reaches crisis point?

John Postlethwaite, 32, who recently moved back to south Cumbria to join his two uncles in the family farm, believes the future for dairy farming is "bleak", and that the industry needs "a miracle".

John Postlethwaite, John Watson and Henry Watson  Mr Postlethwaite, who runs New Close Farm at Oxen Park with his uncles, John and Henry Watson, said: "People need to realise the importance of producing our own British milk and keeping that industry alive. If the dairy industry in Britain dies, then we will lose our ability to be self-sufficient.

"Once the dairy farms disappear they will be gone forever and what would happen if there was a world war or for some reason trading ceased with foreign suppliers?

"We need to keep the British farming industry alive so that we could remain self-sufficient if we had to."

Last week national farming bodies predicted that during 2016, up to one in five dairy farms across the UK could be forced to close, as the crippling affect of falling milk prices and mounting debt becomes overwhelming. Twelve dairy farmers have already left the industry in January this year.

For anybody struggling to understand how this all happened, the dairy crisis was caused by the dissolution of the Milk Marketing Board, which guaranteed a fair price for milk producers regardless of the international market.

Now that the MMB is no more, supermarkets have access to a global milk market and deregulated prices and so they tend to source dairy products from wherever they are cheapest. This means British farmers must accept lower prices in order to compete.

Mr Postlethwaite said: "The future for dairy farming is looking pretty bleak at the moment; we would need a miracle for things to really improve."

EU subsidies make up 53 per cent of the average farming income in Britain. However, last week 1,300 farmers gathered at the annual conference for the National Farmers' Union to hear arguments for and against remaining in the EU ahead of the referendum this summer.

Farming minister George Eustice revealed at the conference that he would be backing the "out" campaign and insisted that it could be the miracle that British farmers need. He said: "If we ended the supremacy of EU law we would be free to come up with fresh thinking on policy and to deal with some of the problems farmers have around regulation."

The NFU still has to make a decision as to where they stand on the Brexit, but have asked LEI Wageningen UR, a research institute in the Netherlands, to run different scenarios in the event of Brexit that can show the impacts on the UK agricultural sector.

The findings of this research will be released in the coming weeks.

Mr Eustice has promised that from the £18m of Brexit dividends, £2m will be spent on British farming, and a stronger national government could help crack down on issues like milk regulations and could hopefully have a positive impact on making milk prices fairer.

John Watson is a third-generation dairy farmer. He said: "We cannot afford to produce milk as cheaply as foreign suppliers because there are such high standards of welfare in Britain.

"If you look around our farm you will see how well we care for our animals. We need to be up to the standards of welfare set for this country but farmers outside of the country do not. That is how they produce cheaper milk and are pushing us out of the industry."

"I would be very wary of leaving the EU because they have subsidised the income of British farmers for so long but there definitely needs to be more regulations on milk prices so if leaving the EU made that possible then I suppose it could be a good thing."

The best way that we can help British farmers as a nation is to make sure that we are shopping at supermarkets which support British farming and buy produce from local farms or dairies. Milk will always have a label on the front to say whether it is sourced from British farms and it's not just milk but cheese, cream, butter and yogurt too. The "Red Tractor" logo is a sign that the dairy produce has been fairly sourced in Britain.

Small, family run farms like New Close Farm are the ones that are struggling most, but they care the most for their animals. Mr Watson said: "We have a herd of about 240 Ayrshire cattle, they're called the New Close Ayrshires.

“Here at New Close we have names for all of the cows. “We just have one bull here, he’s a Limousin bull and his name is Hero. I know the names of every one of the cattle here on the farm.” 

At New Close Farm, milk production costs 24-25 pence per litre. In March they will move to Yew Tree Dairy who will pay them 19 pence per litre, meaning that they are still operating at a loss. 

This will follow on from their contract with First Milk.

Mr Watson said: "At the moment it's incredibly difficult just to make ends meet. Our income has halved from two years ago. If as many farms close this year as people have forecast, the dairy cows will probably all go to slaughter, as no farmers will be able to afford to expand and take them."

READ MORE:

NOSTALGIA: Lambing season in Furness

15 years on - what has Cumbria farming industry learned from foot-and-mouth?