Letter: Dairy farmers should cut their herds and seek new markets

Too much milk, prices fall. Solution: cut the number of dairy cows producing milk. Cull the herds.

Easily accessible official statistics show a number of plain facts.

What seems to have been suppressed by the farmers in their argument is the fact that in the last year, feed prices have fallen, energy prices have fallen and so costs have actually gone down.

In addition, agricultural land values have risen sharply over recent years.

The number of cows has also risen in the last 12 months by 100,000 as farmers tried to increase their income by producing more and more milk. Russian and Chinese markets have, meanwhile collapsed.

As a result we now have a milk lake, like earlier butter mountains, wine lakes and grain surpluses.

So, farmers have to change their business strategy and do something else. Cull their herds and produce less, diversify into other fields or just sell up and move on into other enterprises.

There is no other reason than sentimentality to keep a loss making farm to hand on to the family.

I respectfully suggest that our farmers look to the New Zealand model, following the removal of all government subsidies in that country in the 1980s. After much pain, the whole economy rebalanced into a highly efficient framework of producers who now thrive, again, despite the recent contraction of their Chinese markets.

It is also worthy of note that the UK producers of lamb are protesting at unsubsidised imports of meat from New Zealand taking their markets. Why should the taxpayer support inefficiency for sentimental reasons!

Having run my own international training business for 25 years, recessions and banking crises have severely strained our business from time to time. Did we complain and protest, whinge and ask for government charity from hard pressed taxpayers? No, we got off our backsides, sought out different clients in different global markets and recovered.

Our protesting milk farmers, as some I know in this county have already done, should do the same. Otherwise they can try to follow the notorious French model of EU CAP subsidy which we all know is an expensive disaster.

P Cartledge, Ellesmere