Dairy farming is dying – we're an endangered species

Telegraph

07-03-2025

'There are some days,' Peter Gantlett says, turning into the long track to his dairy farm in a particularly isolated corner of rural Wiltshire, 'when I just think: 'Why the hell am I doing this?' Usually because I'm freezing cold. But then you get over that, and meet the challenge.' He drives on in silence for a moment. 'I mean, I've got friends who just play golf every day. I'm not about to do that …'
Gantlett is 69 years old, and like many dairy farmers, is a bit of a numbers man. So he knows off hand, for example, that he has 1,112 acres of organic farmland just south of Royal Wootton Bassett. He knows that 675 is for pasture, 296 is for growing crops, 45 is for woodland, another 45 is for solar panels and 39 is for wildflower meadows.
He also knows that Britons drink some 12 million litres of milk every day – over a litre per week per person. And while some of that milk comes from vast super-producers, much of it comes from people like him: small, dedicated family farms that have been around for generations, but are now finding life tougher and tougher.
Gantlett may have 260 beef calves, then, but the core of his family business, as it was for his father, and his father before him, is the 150 dairy cows currently sitting out the final frosts of winter in the barn across from his farmhouse. A mixture of Fleckvieh, Montbéliarde and British Friesian genetic breeds, they produce 2,000 litres of milk per day, all of which is collected by the German dairy giant Müller.
'We're as efficient as we can be,' Gantlett says. 'Twenty years ago we had a decision, and three choices: get out, get bigger, or improve the value of our product. We chose the last one, and went organic.' Today, as British dairy is under siege from various squalls – not least those driven by Westminster, including Labour's inheritance tax (IHT) changes – Gantlett is all too aware of one particular number: that one British dairy farm is going out of business every day. He's just hoping that decision not to bow out when he could was the right one.
Last month, the producer of Cathedral City Cheese, the Japanese company Saputo Dairy, axed the contracts of more than a dozen farmers in the South West. Saputo, which also makes Clover and Utterly Butterly, terminated agreements with 13 farms who supplied it with 20 million litres of milk every year. The farmers are now at risk of going bust if they do not find alternative business in 12 months.
It is a worrying trend: according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, there are 7,200 dairy producers in Great Britain. This is down four per cent on the previous year and 19 per cent on 2019. 'We are an endangered species, our number is diminishing,' Gantlett says, in a tone that's less a portent, more a matter of fact.
Mercifully, his farm is in profit and he's happy with Müller. The decision to go organic was a good one – he gets around 56p per litre at the moment, while the average milk price paid in January was a little over 46p. Yet the vicissitudes of his industry mean it's difficult for a small dairy farmer to ever feel as if they are thriving. Optimism isn't common in Gantlett's game. Instead, you're more likely to find a sense of managing decline.
Gantlett is a tall, wiry figure who walks with a slight limp. He has kind eyes, but tends to keep a stoic po face – at least until his grandchildren appear and instantly melt him. As he potters around his yard, the calves moo at a volume that seems unmatched to their tiny stature. The youngest are just five days old.
'The story of milk starts with a calf, because if a cow doesn't produce a calf, it doesn't produce milk,' he says, scratching the back of one. His is a 'closed herd', meaning he breeds all the replacement heifers, which eventually join the milking herd. This protects against the risks new animals might bring – not least diseases like tuberculosis (TB).
We stand and gaze at the herd in their winter lodgings, where we're joined by Anita, Gantlett's wife, Sally, their daughter, plus Sally's two young children. It's a family affair, as it has always been. Sally, 37, is an architect, but she's getting more and more involved with the family business. When she was a child, she and her brother, Jon, helped milk the cows and scrape the slurry. Decades before that, Gantlett did it as a child too.
They now have two Lely robotic milking machines, each of which cost £120,000 in 2011 (plus about the same again on the building work to house them). They have transformed the business over the last 15 years. The cows decide when they want to be milked and, when they do, queue up for the robots, which assess them using lasers, then do the milking swiftly and painlessly, collecting it in containers ready for the supplier. It's now a common method for dairy farmers who can afford it, but many are working as the Gantletts used to, using rudimentary milking machines. Some are even doing it by hand, as his grandfather did.
'Before the robots, the life was getting up at three or four in the morning in the summer to get the cows in for milking, then you'd milk them at half-five in the morning, then spend an hour washing everything down, then you've got your morning tasks – bedding, feeding, taking them back out – before you do it all again in the afternoon.' And sometimes again last thing at night.
A 14-hour day would be a short one. 'It's much more sociable, much more amenable for staff this way. You're working with the cows. Robots – they also have two robotic slurry scrapers, part-funded by a grant from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – have taken the drudgery out, so we can focus on the cows.'
Is there ever a part of him that misses the old days when… I begin asking, before Gantlett cuts me off. 'No. Being stuck at the wrong end of a cow, and you're there, in the dead of winter at five o'clock in the morning, the wind whistling through. Everything's freezing up. Or it's summer and too hot and the flies are everywhere…' He shakes his head. It's a definite no.
They're also large, unpredictable animals. Not always as docile as the image portrays. He shows me a curved scar on his hand. A cow leapt out of control at a gate once, knocking him down while his hand was trapped, badly cutting him. He reluctantly went to hospital for stitches, where the doctors and nurses didn't properly clean the wound before sewing him up.
'I could see them stitching slurry into me and thought, 'Well that's not good...'' Later that day his whole arm started to go grey. 'Blood poisoning,' he says, cheerfully. Back to the hospital he went, a little more quickly than the first time. He's fine now. A spot of septicemia's all in a day's work.
Gantlett feels lucky. He has always had a supportive family and a small enthusiastic staff to help on the farm. 'But I do get that mental health issues can be an issue in agriculture, because farming can be very challenging, and when you're on your own the pressures can be relentless.'
Technology helps, and previous governments offered grants to encourage robotics, but dairy farmers still face myriad issues. Some of these are the same blights that affect farmers of all kinds – the climate emergency, geopolitical strife, ever more powerful supermarkets, Brexit repercussions.
At the moment, 'it's Government policy that's the most depressing thing. We have a Government that doesn't seem to care, or understand, or is indifferent, or possibly even hostile to farming. And it's not a great place to be in terms of thinking about the future. But the flip side of that is the public support.'
Those members of the public seem to understand something he believes the Government does not: that 'farmers may be sitting on millions of pounds worth of land, but that is just a tool to produce food. We don't have surplus cash, the only income we get is by growing food on that land. And our return on capital is about one to one-and-a-half per cent. Well, the dragons on Dragon's Den always say they wouldn't get out of bed for one per cent...'
Labour rocked the entire farming sector with its Budget announcement that it will reform the Agricultural Property Relief (APR), which allows farmers to easily pass their businesses to the next generation, by introducing a 20 per cent tax rate on the value of all farms and businesses worth more than £1 million. The Gantletts aren't yet sure how it will affect them.
'I haven't run the sums yet…' Sally says, grimacing slightly. 'That's on my to-do list, to look at the business case of what would happen. It's really hard to plan at the moment, because there aren't a lot of guidelines, and you can't make any gift payments now. So they've sort of trapped us, and there's a lack of understanding about how that'll impact everyone.'
Farmers now feel helpless, she explains. For every other risk the Gantletts and farmers like them face, they can invest and combat it: technology can reduce labour costs and make jobs safer, for instance, and herbal leys improve soil health and biodiversity. Even the raw deal dairy farmers get from supermarkets can, to some extent, be buttressed by diversifying.
'But the IHT is a backwards step,' Sally says. 'No one is sure how to combat the risk: the business would need to be big enough to withstand selling off 20 per cent, which is a lot. If our business was sold it would be devastating for us, and for our employees. We have so many rural suppliers that benefit from our trade; each business that closes impacts so many more.'
One recent glimmer of hope for dairy farmers came in the news that dairy milk sales and consumption increased in 2024, after years of ceding market share to almond and oat – a rise that was driven by the surge in veganism. In her time in London, Sally saw lots of friends going vegan, and therefore dairy-free.
If anything it inspired her to stand up for the family business. 'I knew that what we do is right and good, and you're producing a good product, you're looking after the environment, looking after your animals, you're doing everything you can and [we] need food to eat.
'It's a very nutrient dense food we're creating. It hasn't flown halfway across the world, it's not a big monocrop that's been sprayed… There's so many issues in global agriculture, but what we do here stands up very strongly. It's a shame it's not shouted about a bit more.'
The money is still not great, despite going organic and diversifying. The relatively modest income from dairy is split among the family and five staff. For the average dairy farmer, the price paid for milk by supermarkets has been driven lower and lower over the years. It has risen over the last decade, since tensions were at breaking point – in Stafford in 2015, police were called when farmers paraded two cows through an Asda in protest – but Gantlett would still like greater regulation.
'If you don't pay farmers enough for milk, there won't be milk, because we're losing farmers all the time, and there's only a limited amount that those of us left can expand. There's a risk to milk production. It comes back to the Government, which needs to be careful with what they're doing. It's things like TB, things like regulations, and things like inheritance tax. They're going to push farmers out of business. They are the threats,' he says.
Sally would like to pass the farm on to another generation beyond her. Or at least, 'I'd like to be able to. And for them to have the option.' Gantlett would like that too, but it's not necessarily a given anymore. Asked if he would recommend the life to a newcomer, he pauses for a moment but reckons, on balance, that he would.
I wonder how many hours of work a week he does these days. 'I don't know,' he mutters. 'I'm trying to work less, but, is it Churchill who said that when you love something, you aren't working? Some weeks I do 80 hours, some days I'm just walking around checking things.'
On those bitterly cold days, though, when he's checking the farm before the sun rises, chasing cows around in the slurry, not knowing where the next challenge is coming from, retirement and a round of golf does seem appealing. As with many like him, he doesn't strictly 'need' to farm. We need farmers, but there'd be nothing stopping the Gantletts checking out and leaving it to someone else. And yet they won't.
'If we just wanted to make money, well we'd just sell up and put all the money on the stock market. But then what would we do?' he says. 'It's not an easy thing to explain: why we farm. It sort of makes no commercial sense. But we do, and we do enjoy it. And we're profitable. But if we weren't... well, it'd make no sense at all.'