Phil Latham 'An Update on Badgers and Milk'

Philip is now Vice Chairman of the N.F.U. for Cheshire and within two years will become Chairman.

Philip followed up his previous talk to the club which was entirely on the badger and T.B. situation and fortunately his own herd of cattle have now gone clear after several dreadful years of having the T.B. infection.

Philip reminded us that T.B. is still a massive problem throughout the country with one in five herds infected with the disease and is one hundred times worse than it was twenty years ago with Philips own area being outside of a denoted area for an attempt at vaccine control. Philip then went on to talk about the plight of the farming industry and in particular that of dairy farming where over the last 12 months we had seen most milk price paid to the producer, drop by 30%.

There had been an over supply due to decreased demand from China and EU embargoes placed on sale of milk products into Russia so this had resulted in too much milk for less demand and we were also seeing supermarket competition from the Aldi and Lidl of today’s shopping world. Philip said that every time the price of milk fell within a supermarket, then footfall increased within that store.

The result of all this is obviously farmers are losing money, the banks are becoming jittery and especially the younger ones were very depressed which could result in more serious repercussions. We will see a big retraction of the industry and this effects not only people at the coal face of the industry because the old saying that "eight people hang off a cows tail" will certainly affect other businesses.

Philip suggested some answers. One being diversification as he himself had done with equestrian facilities. Intervention prices could be lifted and certainly a different and more organised way of marketing the dairy products from a central source such as we had when the Milk Marketing Board existed but this is not going to happen very quickly and we will see further milk price drops before the industry recovers as a result of many" going to the wall"

Keith Chesters.