Just looking at the rain gauge, 25ml (1in) of the wet stuff has fallen on saturated land again today. At the beginning of milking tonight, there was a "river flow" of rainwater streaming through one doorway to the next! Sadly, the cows had to walked up the track back to the sodden fields, to munch yet more soggy grass! How would you like to eat soggy limp lettuce everyday? Milk yields are dropping! Come on Almighty God, stop this rain and give us a break!
If it's not the rain, it's the milk price crisis. NFU and related organisations are working extremely hard to get all us dairy farmers to work together to lobby, protest, shout and scream as much as possible about this crisis in British dairy industry. Even if the general public wants and is able to pay a bit more for every carton of milk at the supermarkets, how does that extra few pence reach us? There's always a middle man (processor) who have to take their cut too. Supermarkets are powerful and there's alot of them. Processors are squealing too but seem to be happy to pass on the cost down to us who have no one to pass it on to.
One idea is to shoot cows on mass (a few from each dairy farm) which would solve the problem of tipping milk down the drain (illegal as it's a pollutant) and cows are worth more made into beefburgers than producers of milk! Shocking it would be, but if farmers can't afford to keep them/feed them extra (because of the wet summer) how else are we going to keep afloat? (no pun intended). If you want to help us, lobby your MP, write letters to local newspapers, keep talking about it and help to keep this ball rolling to roll further and longer!
Another eventful week ends. Our EMT broadcast was shown throughout Wednesdays bulletins which coincided with the SOS Dairy Summit in London. Both myself and Mark had soundbites aired - about the weather mainly - but how we could have got a much better point across about milk price!
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