Dairy Farmers Protest.

Today dairy farmers took to the streets of London to protest at the drop in milk price from the retailers to the producers. We have watched the days events unfold with interest.On the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 today the question was asked 'What is the price of a litre of milk?' The programme ran this question from the point of view of the consumer whereas it should have been asking who is making money on milk? The answer is the processor & the retailer, not the producer.
There is such a widening gap between farmers & the consumers that there is little understanding of what is involved in producing the 'daily pinta'. The costs of animal feed, bedding & keeping up with latest legislation are going up all the time when the price for the end product is dropping. It is insane.
The dire warnings of numbers of dairy farmers being forced out of business are very worrying. Once the expertise & skill of dairying is lost it will take a long time to come back & the capital cost of entering dairy production will be so high as to be prohibitive. To say that the loss of the British dairy industry will not matter because we can always import milk from the continent is facile and short-sighted, are we to go the way of the coalmining & engineering industries of this country?