War, drought, staff shortages: why the price of milk has soared in the UK
On a misty February morning, a few dozen of Michael Oakes’ herd of dairy cows are busy tucking into their food, inside one of the large sheds on his farm near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire.
“They’re worse than teenagers,” laughs Oakes, of his 160-strong herd of mostly black and white Holstein Friesians, as well as 30 brown Jersey cows. “All they do is sleep, eat and go to the toilet.”
In about a month’s time, when the weather improves, they’ll be able to go back out to graze in the fields farmed by Oakes, and his father before him, for 40 years.
For now, they’re still eating indoors, with each cow getting through about 50kg a day of total mixed ration cattle feed, which contains a blend of ingredients including grass, maize, soya and wheat.
Animal feed is just one of Oakes’ costs that has shot up over the past year, along with the price of fuel and fertiliser, prompted by the surge in energy costs caused by the war in Ukraine, and further exacerbated by last summer’s drought.
“Wheat has gone up, soya, all the things that make up the diet for the cows have all massively increased. At the same time, we went into a summer where probably three-quarters of the country had very little forage to feed because of the drought,” he says.
British farmers are not alone in facing these challenges, he says: “Those costs and that weather was replicated throughout Europe, and the costs were shared by every other dairy-producing country in the world.”
However, as well as stubbornly high input costs, British dairy producers have been struggling with a host of other problems, such as chronic labour shortages.
These issues will once again be on the agenda when thousands of English and Welsh food producers gather in Birmingham this week at the annual
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