Milk prices paid to farmers "too low"

[kenneal - lagger]

Dairy products in the UK which are used as loss leaders by the supermarkets. 82% of UK dairy farmers are now making a loss on the sale of their milk and over a third are now thinking of leaving the industry. This will mean hugely increased retail prices in the future and an increasing import bill for our food as dairy products will have to be sourced on the world market.

The supermarket cartel needs to be broken up and no retailer of any sort should have more than 10% of any sector of the retail market. Just as *ankers have shown their basic immorality so have the supermarkets. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[energy-village]

Except dairy products in the UK which are used as loss leaders by the supermarkets. 82% of UK dairy farmers are now making a loss on the sale of their milk and over a third are now thinking of leaving the industry. This will mean hugely increased retail prices in the future and an increasing import bill for our food as dairy products will have to be sourced on the world market.

Not sure about this. Perhaps the model will be vast indoor cow sheds with thousands of animals in artificial light and injected with chemicals (see various media articles). This nightmare scenario would probably produce siginificant cost savings. Morality doesn't come into it.

The supermarket cartel needs to be broken up and no retailer of any sort should have more than 10% of any sector of the retail market.

I agree with this (no sure about exact figs,).

[kenneal - lagger]

The vast cow sheds require planning permission and the nimbies don;t like them. They provoke a similar reaction to wind turbines.

It's all very well criticising the morals of farmers wanting to make a living. What about the morals of the people who buy the cheap milk? They drive the market. if everybody had their milk delivered to the door it would be more expensive but the supermarkets, who we all use, wouldn't have their monopoly position any more.

You can't buy all your stuff cheaply in a supermarket and then blame the farmers for being immoral in the way they farm. There is a direct correlation between the rise of the supermarket and the rise of the superfarmer. There is a parallel rise in the supermarket and the loss of small retailers and the customer is directly responsible for that.

What about the "morality" of a litre of bottled water being cheaper than a litre of milk?

p.s I don't support megafarming.

[extractorfan]

You can't buy all your stuff cheaply in a supermarket and then blame the farmers for being immoral in the way they farm.

+1, it's a shared responsibility requiring the purchaser to actually think.

[clv101]

...if everybody had their milk delivered to the door it would be more expensive but the supermarkets, who we all use, wouldn't have their monopoly position any more.

We get our milk delivered - it's a fantastic service.

If anyone wants to sign up, here's a referral voucher for £10 off your first £20 spend:

Voucher Code: AGYFBN7R
Enter at: www.milkandmore.co.uk/Referafriend

I get £5 off of my bill too.

[Little John]

Surely the schemes are going to conflict with the monetary systems we use. In others words, we already have carbon/resource credits. They are called "money". If we introduce another tier of exchange in the form of carbon credits, this will mean we have one form of money running side by side with the other and there may be exchange value effects of one on the other that are not fully understood.

Money is, after al, in the end, the symbolic representation of all of the work done (or yet to be done, if it is in the form of credit) by man. All of the work done by man is an abstraction of all of the resources available to man. Therefore, money is, ultimately, the symbolic representation of all of the resources available to man. Or not, in which case we end up in the kind of financial shit we currently find ourselves.

There is an old journalistic maxim that states if you want to know the truth of a story then "follow the money". However, this statement is really only derivative as opposed to axiomatic. If you want to know the truth "follow the resources". If you were to follow all of the transactions of a pound coin, eventually you would end up in a field, or a mine, or other natural environmental resource.

it seems to me that we do, indeed need to find a way through the medium of exchange, to cap resource consumption. But, we may as well just go the whole hog and do it directly with the money supply instead of muddying the waters with two different systems.

Or, are carbon credits in the form of "money"?

[DominicJ]

Milk is cheap because there is too much of it.

If "evil supermarkets" drive down the cost of milk, could someone please convince them to do it with petrol?

[energy-village]

Milk is cheap because there is too much of it.

Hasn't demand and supply of milk been fairly steady for years? Apart from the period when there were EU milk lakes.

What this seems to be is supermarkets requiring milk to be sold at a price that only bigger farms using aggressive/intensive farming methods can meet. This threatens to knock out smaller, often more local farms, using relatively traditional farming methods. In the end though if you knock the smaller suppliers out of the supply chain you get giants potentially abusing their dominant position.

That's leaving aside any ethical or employment issues or views on how our countryside should be managed.

[JohnB]

I'm surprised that the Co-op are one of the milk price offenders.

[energy-village]

I'm surprised that the Co-op are one of the milk price offenders.

+1

I have looked into this a little.

I think the Co-op will need to simplify how they compensate farmers because it's pretty obscure at present. For one thing the Co-op don't just use a baseline price, they offer a premium to certain farmers (to prioritise 'high animal welfare standards, protecting wildlife and the countryside, and carbon footprint reduction') plus they provide assorted extras to farmers to lower their costs (e.g. electricity rates, vets, special training).

To make things more complicated it seems to be the processor, Robert Wiseman, that is cutting the price by 1.7p. The Co-op is responding by upping the premium they pay, but not nearly enough to make up for the rise.

However, even if we give the Co-op the benefit of the doubt (?) it's not enough to be fair, you have to be seen to be fair.

Yep, big fan of door-to-door milk deliveries via human beings (electric floats please). They bring other stuff as well.

[RenewableCandy]

Our door-to-door guys bring the milk in the afternoon, which is fecking useless.

[adam2]

Milk is cheap because there is too much of it.

If "evil supermarkets" drive down the cost of milk, could someone please convince them to do it with petrol?

They have ! petrol is almost allways cheaper at filling stations run by supermarkets.

[energy-village]

Which is cheaper, milk or petrol?

[RenewableCandy]

Milk is cheap because there is too much of it.

at any one particular place and at any one particular time, yes. It's cheap because the buyers (supermarkets) can be flexible, the sellers (farms) cannot. Because cows can't be flexible.

[biffvernon]

The farmer gets 26p per litre and from 1st August 22p/l. Tescopoly sells milk at 52p/l, double the price at the farm gate.

Who does more work, the farmer who turns soil and sunshine into milk or the retailer that carries the milk from the farm and puts it on a shelf?

And you know what? Peter Clarke, Tescopoly's boss, earns £1,700,000 per year and doesn't even have to get up before dawn to do the milking.

Fair it is not.