This week’s milk crisis has reached fever pitch with a radical call for the culling of dairy cows to crash milk volumes and thereby raise milk prices.
The idea follows milk price cuts imposed by the nation’s major milk processors, over the past two weeks, of up to two pence per litre.
The cull idea – endorsed by a prominent dairy industry figure, Ian Potter, a milk quota broker and industry commentator – is for farmers to cull young or older cows in their herds that would currently be worth more to farmers dead than alive.
“This cull idea is all about crashing milk volumes and farmers talking charge,” he wrote in his weekly newsletter issued this afternoon. The cows were more valuable as burgers than for their milk, he added.
The cull “campaign” could be kick-started with a photo shoot of “haltered” cows outside every retailer’s headquarters “with a farmer holding a bolt gun, with milk on one side of the cow and a pile of burgers on the other”, he wrote.
Every major retailer, middle ground retailer, chain of coffee shops and corner shop should be visited for the photo shoot, he added. “That should give their PR departments plenty to deal with.”
If it went ahead, the activity is proposed for 1 August – the date by which the NFU, the National Farmers Union of Scotland, NFU Cymru, the Tenant Farmers Association and Farmers For Action have demanded price cuts be reversed. The cull idea is not related to those industry bodies.
This afternoon, the NFU said it had no comment to make on the proposed cull. retailers have also come in for criticism for not paying a high enough price for their milk, to ensure a sustainable dairy industry.
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