THE PRICE OF MILK

[Stanley]

The question of farm gate milk prices has risen to the top of the farming agenda again. Perhaps a good time to re-post this article written in August 2000.

PRICE of MILK

“I HAVE to tell you that I’m a bit angry this week because I bought 250cc of semi-skimmed milk at a motorway service station last week and was charged 80p for it. I know we are all used to being ripped off in these places, but I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that the farmers round here are getting between 10p and 16p a litre for full cream milk!
In other words, not only are the middlemen working on a margin of over £3 on a litre of milk, but they are skimming the cream off as well!
I can hear the usual question - what’s this got to do with history? Well, I think it has a lot to do with it because what happens now in this area will have a tremendous effect on the future. This has triggered off some thoughts about agriculture and the local countryside.
We are very lucky in Barlick. If you walk in a straight line in any direction from the middle of town for 15 minutes you are out into open countryside and some of the nicest views to be found anywhere in England. What many people don’t realise is that, with the exception of some parts of the moors on the tops of the hills, everything you look at is man-made. Our countryside isn’t natural - it’s a product of over 3,000 years of agriculture.
Some 10,000 years ago, as the ice caps receded and what we now call ‘The British Isles’ became inhabitable again, the land looked very different than it does now. For a start off, there was no such thing as the ‘Isles’ because we were connected to the continent by a land bridge that wasn’t broken until probably about 5,500BC.
The Celts were the dominant race in what is now Western Europe and as conditions improved, they gradually moved in to the peninsula over the land bridge. The only way they knew how to survive was by hunting and gathering whatever natural food was available. These hunter-gatherers had to keep moving as they soon exhausted the resources of a locality and had to follow the wild animals and the seasonal crops. There were no settled dwellings and they made little impact on the landscape.
Out in the Middle East, there was no Ice Age to interrupt progress and by about 8,000BC, the people living to the south of the Dead Sea in Jordan were finding better ways of providing food for themselves. They realised that if they stayed in one place and improved the land by cultivation, they could encourage far better crops from the wild fruits and grasses they needed to survive.
They kept the best examples of their crops for seed the following year and by a process of natural selection, evolved the first improved grasses or cereals which eventually became our staple crops of wheat, oats and barley. At the same time, they started to catch animals and keep them in captivity until they needed them for food, making another interesting discovery.
This was that if they fed them the cereals and grasses and encouraged them to breed, there was no need to go out hunting and so the first animals were domesticated. This new system or culture of ‘ager’, the Latin word for field, gave us our modern name of agriculture - the cultivation of fields. This new culture was so successful it spread outwards from Jordan and 6,000 years later had reached Barlick.
The new culture had a tremendous effect on the landscape. Land had to be enclosed to keep animals in and protect crops. Ownership of land became important. There had been no concept of owning land until agriculture - look at the culture of the Australian aborigines, the native North Americans and any hunter-gatherer tribes for evidence of this right up to the present day.
Field enclosures became boundaries, shelters were built and people became rooted to their own land holding. Once people were stationary, they tended to use the same routes when travelling about the locality and tracks were worn into the ground following boundaries and these eventually became roads. Remember the bends in the road at Hollins Hall that we looked at a few weeks ago?
Places where roads met assumed their own importance as meeting places and villages sprang up. All this took thousands of years, but by the beginning of the first Millennium, the face of Britain had been changed entirely. As population increased and other civilisations moved in and influenced the land, there was more enclosure, building and roads.
By the end of the 16th century, as we have seen in Barlick on the 1580 map, there had to be more enclosures of land for cultivation and in the early part of the 19th century, there were even more encroachments on to the moor, which left us with the field pattern we have today.
All this farming had even greater effects if we look at what was growing on the land. The native scrub and woodland was cleared. The land was then drained and cultivated for crops of grass and cereals and the result was the pattern of fields we see today. The end result was a landscape that was totally altered by the uses it was put to and these changes were maintained by continued cultivation.
This brings me back to the point I was making at the beginning of this article - what happens if the pattern of farming is interrupted?
The place to look for evidence is where farming has been under-funded for longest such as the hill farms in the Dales and on the moors that rely entirely on sheep subsidy. Go up there and use your eyes. The highest fields are not being grazed or mowed and are reverting to the moor from whence they came. Clumps of rushes grow indicating that the drainage is breaking down and walls are left unrepaired. Nature is taking over and reclaiming the land as moor and fell.
There is little evidence of this happening as yet in the lower fields because they are continuing to be farmed, but for how much longer? This all depends on how long the family farms can hold out against losses caused by uneconomic prices for milk because liquid milk is the main source of income in this area.
The stock-rearing farms are no better off because the price of cattle has suffered in the last few years because of BSE. I was talking to an old mate of mine who farms in Barlick and he was telling me that he is getting a ‘good’ price for his milk, 16p a litre. When he says good he means in comparison to others, who are getting less, some of them as low as 10p a litre in summer. Production cannot be sustained at this level of return and what it means is that eventually, these farmers are going to reach the end of their resources and go out of business.
Consider then, if nothing is done, the pattern of well-kept fields and walls, which we have known all our lives. They will gradually disappear. The only animals grazing will be horses owned by people who are doing very nicely thank you in industries other than agriculture. Horses are all right. I have nothing against them, but they are selective and untidy grazers.
Unless the fields are topped regularly with a mower, they will gradually become full of docks and thistles and well-kept grass will be a thing of the past. What makes it worse is that other pressures are bearing in on the farmers due to the plethora of regulation, which bears down on every walk of life these days. If you have a farm, you can’t sell your eggs at the gate or make cream, butter or cheese unless you invest a fortune in modern dairy equipment and submit to stringent inspection. The Government exhorts farmers to diversify, but there is a limit to how many golf courses, driving ranges, pony-trekking operations or rare breed farms a community can support.
Horticulture, the production of vegetables for the local market, could have been a way out, but have you looked at some of the countries of origin on the labels in your local supermarket lately? I have seen onions from New Zealand, carrots from Australia and milk products from France. I came across a statistic the other day that amazed me. It was that 20 years ago, the average distance a carrot travelled to market was 40 miles. Today it is 4,000.
The main customers for produce like this are the supermarkets. Talk to any producer who supplies them and they will tell you that they are getting pitifully low prices for their produce and cannot get any advance because the supermarkets can source their needs abroad just as easily.
The only spark of hope I can see on the horizon is the growth of ‘Farmers’ Markets’ where farmers get together and sell their produce at a central location and charge economic prices. Where this is happening, it seems to be a success because there are people about who are willing to pay extra for fresh local produce.
So, back to the history. It took 2,000 years of care and cultivation to give us the landscape we know and love. It will take less than 50 years to destroy it. As things stand at the moment, history is being re-written in Barlick and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not have the benefit of the lovely landscape that we enjoy.
What can be done about it? Simple, take the time to write to Nick Brown, the Government minister for agriculture, and tell him you think farmers should be paid a fair price. I know that you’ll naturally think that this won’t do any good, but if everyone who reads this did put pen to paper and then copied their letter to Gordon Prentice, it would create a small wave.
Just imagine what would happen if everyone in the country did the same. One thing is sure and certain - if we don’t open our mouths, we will lose our heritage. The buck stops here.

SCG/ August 2000

[Stanley]

Bumped.

[Stanley]

Bumped but it's too late now to write to the government. The industry has largely gone, only a few cattle left.