Word of Mouth: Britain's first milk factory

2nd March 2010 The Guardian Online

Photograph: Rex Features

Is the plan to open an industrial feed-lot in Lincolnshire another unavoidable nail in the coffin of the British dairy industry?

The move by a group of English farmers to open the UK’s first American-style industrial dairy feed-lot – where 8,100 cows will be fed on maize and Lucerne, a form of alfalfa – was desperately predictable. The evidence has been mounting – for the want of a couple of pence on a litre of milk, we’ve destroyed our traditional, and highly efficient, dairy industry.

Britain has had a dairy industry based on cows fed on grass and kept for most of the year in fields, for millennia. You may have noticed – much of our countryside was shaped by it. It worked. It employed lots of people, and provided cheap protein and fats to the entire population.

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