We have been following the plight of British dairy farmers as they try to draw attention of consumers to what is happening in their country. Today there is a video clip of farmers walking Holstein dairy cattle down the aisles in a supermarket to make their point: if milk continues being sold at the present price in supermarkets, in six months there won't be any dairy farmers in the UK. Their protests appear to be drawing some response, as witnessed by the article (and video) Milk price row: ALDI and Morrisons vow to raise the price paid to farmers.
Five editions of our The Agri Handbook (previously the National Agricultural Directory) have been published, spanning just over a decade. The introduction to the dairy chapter includes the number of dairy farmers in South Africa. It has been a cause of great concern to watch this number plummet over the years. It appears especially iniquitous when the price the public pays for raw milk is 66% more than what is paid to the farmer!
Farmers are caught between a rock and a hard place, as the expression goes. They are price takers, both in terms of inputs and in terms of what they get from their produce. How much can they be squeezed? How much pressure can they absorb?
What to do when, for various reasons, your product can be sourced from elsewhere at a lower price than what it costs you to produce it? Apart from produce-something-else/give-up, options usually offered include better technology, greater efficiency across the value chain, and going bigger (economies of scale).
The major challenge in this country is that at a time when veterans are packing up, we are trying to establish new black farmers on the soil. Not only this; we have also made dairy products one of the country's action programmes in our 2015 Industrial Action Policy Plans (IPAPs). Watch this space ...
Find the two dairy chapters in the livestock and processing sections. Another chapter of immediate relevance is Goat & sheep dairy.
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