FEATURE Dairy industry
Why are the cows no longer outside? Read Mark Metcalf’s special report
Just as environmental subsidies are allowing money to grow on trees for big companies who are buying up large amounts of land for carbon trading projects then so too are our public funds being misused in a case of missing cows helping to boost supermarket profits.
From the towns where you buy your packaged milk from the supermarket, you will not have noticed the radical changes in the fields that are taking place to provide that carton.
Yet if you are lucky enough to have the time to roam round the countryside, you will not see many cows grazing anymore. They are being replaced by black plastic bags stuffed with grass cuttings ready for storage nearer the farm for use as feed for cattle, whose pats are washed out and collected in slurry tanks, all ready to be transported by road to the fields.
The cattle still exist though, and many farms now house several thousand cows – or beef cattle. They are out of sight in big barns. They stay indoors
throughout the year as the drag of taking them out to fields and bringing them back, twice a day in all sorts of weathers, is several steps too far for most producers these days. Quite simply it’s ‘inefficient’. The cattle are there 24 hours a day in sparse conditions. While we rightly hear about chickens indoors, we hear much less about these cattle, yet they are sentient creatures too.
So, the animals stay indoors, and eat mainly grass from the fields. But they also eat a lot of ‘concentrate’. This is usually soy beans, £800m annually imported from Brazil, and maize (about the same amount in money) mainly imported from USA. The tax/tariff on this maize has been removed by this government in June this year, only the second tariff change since Brexit, to keep feed prices low.
The change from field to factory production has gone on in the last five to 10 years out of sight and with few controls on conditions.
Banks have shoved dairy farmers, 26 uniteLANDWORKER Winter 2023/24
caught by supermarkets pushing them to produce milk ever cheaper, into major investment. They need massive tractors and mowers to cut the grass as quickly as possible, often four times a year, and then shift the cuttings into silage bags.
Farmers also need slurry tanks to hold the waste washed from the barns and slurry tankers to cart the stuff to deposit on the fields, often along busy roads at high speed. They also need to improve their own infrastructure to carry this frequently used heavyweight. No wonder one in 20 dairy farmers went to the wall last year.
Many dairy workers have been replaced by ever more accurate machines to feed, precisely measured amounts, and to milk and measure the production of the beasts. There is a
shortage of dairy workers. A survey for The Cattle Site found that four fifths of all respondents were worried by staff recruitment with almost a third considering leaving the industry due to a lack of labour. Many reported staff were leaving due to unsociable
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