Richard Fisher’s family has run a dairy farm near Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, for the past 64 years. It has weathered the financial crash, resisted rewilding and avoided every crisis that has beset British farming: foot and mouth, mad cow disease, drought and flood. But under inflationary pressure affecting the three ‘Fs’ – feed, fuel and fertiliser – it just might crack, along with hundreds of other small, family-run farms just like it.
For consumers, the war in Ukraine and its impact on commodity prices could soon send the price of supermarket milk rocketing by up to 50 per cent. That would mean four pints of milk will jump from around £1.15 to between £1.60 and £1.70, and a typical pack of butter will rise from £1.55 to more than £2, according to dairy farmer advisor Kite Consulting.
The reasons for the rise are stark. Michael Oakes, chairman of the National Farmers Union (NFU) dairy board, has warned that the conflict has sparked a “seismic change” in the cost of milk production, and farmers will have to make “tough decisions” about whether to continue. “Fertiliser costs have gone up over 200 per cent, and either I borrow the money to buy the fertiliser or I get out of dairy,” he said.
Some farmers will be making a loss, and they feel unsupported by a government that appears out of touch both with the price of milk, and the realities of farming.
Enter Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Minister for Brexit Opportunities, who during a phone-in on LBC on Monday said that farmers were now being paid 54p per litre of milk – “an extraordinary increase […] from 30p, where we’ve been for the past 15 years”.
The implication that dairy farmers have never had it so good didn’t last long. Christian Skipton, a dairy farmer’s son in the Yorkshire Dales, called in to say Rees-Mogg’s pricing was “completely incorrect”: “There’ll be no dairy farmer in the country getting anywhere near 50p a litre.” (His family supplies a major supermarket and currently receives 33p per litre.)
Fertiliser that last year cost £250 or £260 per tonne has now reached £800 per tonne.
“We put our price of milk up for the first time in two years, and that was before prices went mad,” says Fisher, 34, who works with his father, Alexander, mother, Jean, and two employees to produce 7,000 litres of milk per week and process 60 cows a year for beef. He works, on average, a 14-hour day that starts at 6am and ends at 8pm.
On top of that, “red diesel has almost doubled in price”.
“I try not to take any worries home to my wife as we have a two-year-old son. I try to switch off as much as I can. My father is worried about the extra costs, though. I think it is going to be difficult for farmers to continue long term.”
The problem doesn’t end with milk. British farmers are facing uncertainty and financial pressure in all areas, due to new post-Brexit agricultural policies introduced by the Government that encourage prioritising nature over higher yields. That could mean as a nation we simply can’t produce enough of our own food.
