Have you ever wondered where the milk you pour in your tea or on your cereal in a morning comes from? I am not talking about a high school biology lesson; instead I am referring to the farms that produce the milk and the supermarkets that sell it.
It costs dairy farmers around 30 pence to produce a litre of milk, but at the moment certain supermarkets are paying 29p per litre and this is set to drop to 25p per litre. As you can see from these figures, the dairy farmers are out of pocket and so their livelihoods could be in jeopardy unless we as a nation take more care in where we buy milk from.
To make a stand against farmers being ripped off by retail commercial properties, around 2000 farmers attended a protest in London yesterday to voice their concerns about the price paid for milk by supermarkets and to also ‘name and shame’ those who are under paying for the milk.
Amongst those retail commercial properties who aren’t paying a fair price for milk was two of the big four; Asda and Morrisons.
One particular dairy farm in Sheffield, Our Cow Molly – first opened in 1947 and is a family run business. The farm started producing homemade ice cream in 2007 due to the poor price paid for their fresh milk.
Speaking of the need for the public to think about where they are purchasing their milk from, Edward Andrew from Our Cow Molly said: “Asda, Morrisons and Coop have cut the price they pay farmers for milk to such a low price that the farmers are now loosing money on every litre but the supermarkets are still making profit on every litre, the farmers hands are tied as there often on a 12 month contract
“The only thing that will make them stop is if the public stops buying the milk that they essentially have stolen from the farmers.
“Buy milk from a farmer direct (if you can) or M&S or Waitrose.”
Do you check where your milk has come from before you buy? If not, from now will you be considering the livelihoods of dairy farmers before purchasing from certain retail commercial properties?
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