February Snowdrops, Februdairy

February and the snowdrops have been appearing in hidden corners and along the drive for a couple of weeks now, a sure and welcome sign that spring will soon be on its way, though it is now very cold again and at regular intervals throughout the day we have been pelted with heavy showers of hailstones.
Late December & January were very busy with family events and now that things are getting back to normal I am catching up with myself.
This month has been renamed Februdairy! 28 days of social media posts devoted to promoting a positive understanding of the dairy industry in the face of the current campaigns by certain anti-farming & anti-dairy groups. @februdairy on Twitter is buzzing with farmers all over the country posting images and text telling the story of dairy farming in the hope of correcting the gross mis-information that has been put out by the vegan community amongst others. One thing can be certain, farmers will not stoop to the level of certain individuals in abusing and insulting those who farm this land as has been demonstrated on Twitter with posts containg aggressive and hateful language directed at the farming industry as a whole, not just dairy farmers. We will always inform and hopefully educate in a polite & courteous manner without pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Work on the farm is as always at this time of year hard & busy with feeding and bedding down the cattle every day. The sheep are now in too ahead of lambing which is due to start in late March though a couple of ewes ahev pre-empted us by producing a lamb each which was a surprise indeed. It would seem that a ram lamb missed the 'snip' & got in amongst the ladies at a critical time and so we have a couple of very early lambkins.

When not doing the routine work much time is being spent removing the standings from the old milking parlour with a samll digger in the building drilling away with a pecker at the concrete block upstands. The room is coming back to its original look and there is lot of discussion on what it will be used for. The Farmer wants to make it into his brew room with all his apple-pressing and cider-making equipment installed there as well a place for extracting honey and storing the bee-keeping equipment, while Elder Son is talking about making more calf-pens of which we can never have too many.

Dairy Farmers meet with Politicians, Rural Postal Services

Last evening the Farmer & I attended a meeting in Narberth arranged by Simon Hart MP to discuss the state of the dairy industry with Stephen Crabb, the Minister of State for Wales, Neil Parrish MP, chairman of the all-party group on the dairy industry & Andy Richardson, chairman of the review into Wales's dairy industry. About a 100 dairy farmers from Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion & Pembrokeshire attended.

With the price of milk falling all the time it is felt that politicians, retailers, milk buyers and producers need to work out a system by which there is a fair price for all, but more particularly for the producers. Some dairy farms are selling milk for less than their production costs and this is often due to the contracts that they are tied into. The supermarkets are also greatly at fault when they use milk as a loss leader eg. Morrisons selling 2 litres (3.5 pints) for 84p. It is outrageous. Consumers have become used to being able to buy milk at a very low price and for many producers there is almost no option but to leave the industry if prices continue to drop, particularly for smaller family farms with little capital to invest in expansion.
We are a small family dairy farm; we farm just over 200 acres and milk 50 cows. As organic producers we get a slightly higher price than conventional farms for our milk but the organic sector is affected by price drops and current politics in the milk industry the same as all dairy farmers.

In England and Wales there are now just under 10,000 dairy farms(Farmers Guardian this week) which is a drop of 20,000 in 20 years. In Scotland there are only 900 dairy farms.
In Wales dairy is one of the largest farming sectors, about 34% of agricultural production by value, twice as high as the rest of the UK.

There was lot of comment during the meeting on how the supermarkets and the consumers have no respect for food. There is so little understanding of how food is produced and the hard work that goes into putting a pint of milk on the supermarket shelf. Education is the key, of course. Schools should be teaching food...bring back home economics and domestic science into the curriculum, teaching students what food is, how it is produced and how to cook well.

The politicians are aware of how the dairy industry is enduring this time of low prices and it will be interesting to see what they can do improve the situation.
With general election coming up in just over 5 months time will the present government have any time to make any real changes?

Another issue that I have become aware of lately is the threat to postal services for those of us in rural areas as has been expressed by the FUW , the Farmer's Union of Wales.
The FUW says that there are concerns that changes to the postal sector with adversely affect Wales' rural communities.
Wales has about 42,000 agricultural holdings of which 20,000 are said to be significant. As farmers we are subject ot strict legal requirements covering animal welfare, identification, movements, feed & food production and land management. Apparently the documentation relating to these legislative requirements results in approximately 3,000 pages of information a year that has to come to the farm. Much of the notifications require responses with strict deadlines and major financial penalties if these deadlines are not met. Paper correspondence is still important even though much of the paperchase has gone online (and has become more complicated and inefficient as a result) and many areas of Wales have limited broadband coverage. The maintenance of postal deliveries six days a week is vitally important...to bring us our 3,000 pieces of paper telling us what we can and cannot do on the farm, or else!

First Milk Dairy Farmers Meeting

Hawthorn berries gleaming like rubies in the almost bare hedgerows.

Yesterday the Farmer & I attended a meeting of dairy farmers who sell their milk to First Milk (www.firstmilk.co.uk). First Milk is farmer's co-operative and about 150 members from Wales attended the meeting held at Nant y Ffin (www.nantyffin.co.uk),LLandissilio in Pembrokeshire.
Chairing the meeting was Sir Jim Paice MP, chairman of First Milk & former minister of food.
The state of the dairy industry is fairly dire at present, not just in the UK but globally. Many farmers are being paid less than the cost of production for their milk and there is a drop in demand which has not been helped by the Russian embargo on UK dairy products. 2/3 of Europe's dairy produce was exported to Russia and without that market there is a massive over supply of milk & milk products in Europe. The price paid to dairy farmers is not going to improve until production and supply drops and demand goes up.
To reduce production is not a simple matter; when a dairy cow is put in calf the decision has been made for what happens with the cow in 5 years time when she will be in full milk production. Many farms are planning to expand but while the current low in the industry will eventually change, we all have to weather this difficult time. We are very fortunate that as organic producers things are are a little better in the organic sector but nonetheless the situation affects everyone in the dairy industry one way or another.
A final thought - 50,000 farmers & farm workers are employed on dairy farms in the UK. Next time you buy a pint of milk think about the many people involved in producing that pint.
For information on all things dairy see www.thisisdairyfarming.com.

'British Dairying' & Small Dairy Herds, St. Patrick's Day, A Ghost in the Cottage, Lambing Time

I doubt that many readers of this blog ever see a publication called 'British Dairying'. Our copy of the March issue arrived this morning and the Farmer read it over breakfast with his usual interest. It is after all, the journal that keeps us up to date with what is happening in our industry.
 One of the regular columnists reflected on the withdrawal of the Nocton 'super' dairy planning application saying that the decision was 'bad news for the UK dairy industry'. He felt that the campaign against the huge dairy was misplaced and that animal welfare campaigners should turn their attention to the 3,000 small dairy producers, (those like us who milk fewer than 30 cows) who he claims have 'possibly the worst welfare standards in the country.'
This is an outrageous slur on the integrity of small farms and our attitude to the welfare of our animals.
 The Farmer & I are so angry at this comment. We invite anyone at any time to visit this farm and to see for themselves the standard of care that we give our hard -working dairy cows. If we did not look after them properly they would not give the milk...it is in our own interests to ensure that the welfare of our cows is of the highest standard. The size of herd has nothing to do with welfare standards.
As dairy farmers we have enough to cope with without journalists showing contempt for those of us at the smaller end of the scale who continue to milk cows. We all, whether we milk 30 or 300+ cows, have annual inspections by the County Council to check dairy hygiene, Farm Assurance & because we farm organically, the Soil Association, to make sure that the welfare standards are met...nothing should go unseen under this much scrutiny.

A few facts about UK dairy farming;
In 2002 there were 19,000 dairy farmers in Britain, by 2011 there are 11,000.
The UK is the 3rd largest milk producer in Europe & 9th in the world.
There are 1.9 million dairy cows in the UK & 17,000 dairy farms.
The average dairy farm in UK is bigger than the average dairy farm in Europe.

There was very good article in The Telegraph yesterday (16th March) entitled 'Why the life of the milk man has gone sour.'

It is St. Patrick's Day. My maternal grand-father was Irish and I can remember as a very small child, the post-man delivering small packages from  the great-uncles & aunts in Portadown to us in Wales, which contained bunches of shamrock tucked into boxes lines with damp cotton wool. The shamrock was pinned to our coat lapels as we went off proudly to school. One year there was even a large fruit cake covered in green marzipan with little pink flowers iced on it.
The word 'shamrock'  comes from the Irish 'seamrog' meaning 'clover' and it refers to a whole variety of clovers & trefoils.St. Patrick is said to have used the leaf to explain the three-in-one of the the Holy Trinity, but this saying was not heard before the 18th century.

I had a very interesting conversation with one of our guests in the cottage who have been staying with us for a couple of days in which she told me that we had a ghost. It seems that both nights she had seen the shadowy figure of a man with long curly hair in the bedroom. She said he seemed very pleased to see people in the building and looked more as though he was the owner of the farm than a farmworker. She asked him politely to go away as they needed their space back and he just disappeared. Apparently he was accompanied by a couple of other figures who were less clear.
This is the first time anyone has reported a sighting to me.
One would have expected the ghosts to be of a more porcine nature seeing as how the cottage was once a piggery! Maybe the mysterious man with long hair lived long before the piggery was built in the 19th century, more than likely I think.

Lambing is continuing albeit rather slowly...the Farmer says he's waiting for an explosion of lambs any time now. He says the ewes are huge and he's sure one of them might well produce 3 or 4 lambs. Multiple births of more than 3 make a lot of extra work and the lambs are usually so tiny that getting them to suck a teat on bottle is difficult. But we persevere with them and do all we can to give them a chance of life.