Supermarkets and Dairy Farmers
- Thread starter estebanrey
- Start date
Not much help. So when you are suddenly told you are getting 5p less for your milk, you can then move to another customer in 3 months as opposed to the normal 6 or 12 months notice required.
That's still 3 months losing shed loads of money plus what happens if the only other customers who want your milk are the same low price? M&S and others who pay a decent price surprisingly enough have enough farmers supplying them already.
Because people want to pay as little as possible...
Nope, normal food. I have to eat a special diet (no wheat) and so can't eat most processed food, meaning my food costs are higher than those that buy the average ready made pie/pizza in Tesco/Sainsburies.
Just the ham on top of a pizza will cost you a £2-3, unless you buy the cheap processed ham, or the goodfellas pizza...
we can demand all we want, but for a store to sell at a loss just to try and get more people in is a idiotic business model, as a couple of pence cheaper per pint isnt going to get that many people to change there shopping habits. if any.
honestly who in here actually looked at how much milk costs on the weekly shop ?
i think its just the supermarkets trying to hit targets of the lowest essential items shopping basket that are used to show who's cheapest. and rather than take the hit for there own discounts they think the farmers should get stung.
im sorry if your buying stock and sell it at a loss thats your own problem, and nothing to do with anyone else.
What, apart from the ones who go out of business and the ones who commit suicide. Sure, they are rolling in it.
The last one I saw was some old bloke in his eighties still getting up at dawn to milk his herd.
That could be the problem. People are aware of the typical basket of goods and the supermarkets use it in their adverts.
Sell everything in that basket below cost and you will appear to be the cheapest place to go buy you weekly shopping from when perhaps you aren't
I hope i'm not the snotty kid...
My grandparents were farmers and I've spent most of my time in the countryside... As I said I agreed with some of the points, however things like ripping up hedgerows is just not agreeable... Have a look at the dustbowl of America for one example. That alongside the destruction of natural habitat for native British wildlife (intensive farming and domestic cats are two of the biggest factors in the decline of native wildlife). So it's all very well you moaning about those snotty nosed kids, but they may infact know more about the local wildlife than you...My Grandparents were tenant farmers and struggled to pay the rent from their income even 10 years ago... And yes, my mother had her own horse as well (and I shared a pony with my sisters), they were bought for very little money and kept mainly in a field. Those rich farmers and their horses! I'm tempted to use the townie comment here like Btone (not at you lewism).
Sorry but that argument is laughable! Wildlife in this country has been here long before we started intensive farming and building big towns. We actually have very little real countryside left in this country, almost all of it is managed (even places like Dartmoor and the other moors)*. Wilderness is certainly not normally full of weeds and "vermin". The areas in cities are a direct response to our overmeddling and destroying the ecosystems allowing a small number of species to thrive over a more balanced ecosystem.
I fully respect the knowledge of a lot of farmers, many are now replanting hedgerows and leaving land barren (not just for the subsidies) because they have seen the benefits, unfortunately some farmers (and Btone seems to be in that camp by the comments he made) need to have some legislation controlling them, or else we may very well end up with not much of the countryside left in many places.
*In fact you could argue similar with the moors, they certainly aren't natural areas, with mass grazing and burning of heathland to keep it nicely set for growse and other farmable species at the detriment of other species.
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the dustbowl was caused by one of the most severe droughts in history + a lack of knowledge on farming on that scale can do, i would like to think we learned from it, and that it wont happen in present day farming, it had nothing to do with hedges
anyway am not talking about ripping out all the hedge rows, just a few that would allow better use of the fields
cons
some birds will have to fly a extra 20 meter to the next hedge
pro's
it let me but in a woodchip lane (better for cows feet) which means less drug use to keep the feet right
it will let me have multi gate access, which means i can let the cows into the field at different points, doing less dmg to the land letting me use less fertilizer (a all round win)
it will let me grow the hedge along side the new lane (better for the wild life) because a hedge round the field is not allowed to be thicker than 1.8 meters
and most importantly it let me stay a bit more profitable,
which has allowed me to build a pond which has wild duck on it and swans and geese + other birds ( i love going down there in the evening with my camera)
it will let me plant more trees (for no other reason than i like to look at native trees)
it would allow me to let some land (drained by the goverment) return to bog (it takes a lot of work to keep it drained, if i didnt need it it would revert back to bogland in a few years)
what you seem to forgot is that farmers are not mad men with shot guns who want to mass destroy every thing, we people who love what we do (else we wouldn't do it show to any decent businessman our return on capital and they laugh) and love were we live, and we look after were we live because we know what best. but to look after it we have to afford to live here that means making a profit. it that profit that allows me to give a corner of a field to a gun club, it return that looking after the shooting and what not to shoot, which has allowed buzzards and other birds to come back to the land around here. we had wild deer here last year (first time in near 40 years) living in a thicket in a corner of a field which i planted because when i took out the hedge to make the field bigger it meant this corner was to hard to get into with the bigger machine
[qoute]So it's all very well you moaning about those snotty nosed kids, but they may infact know more about the local wildlife than you...
[/quote]
while am sure the may know more about the species because they book smart, i very much doubt they know more about the "local" wildlife, i know were the fox runs are, were the badger sets are. i know what trees and hedges must not be touched because of the cover it gives.
it funny that in the last 10 years we seen a massive rise in environment legislation yet by the RSPCA and the NT we see a massive fall the wildlife in the same 10 years, maby the old boys knew a few things and got a few things right .
you have NO "real" countryside left in the uk, every last inch of it looks that way because of man