Over the Gate by Jeff Swift

If milk production is profitable then other sectors slot into place.

Arable farmers have customers for their feed grain, sheep farmers have customers for store lambs and also for sheep flock replacements on dairy farms.

Some milk producers will buy suckled calves to finish and so on.

Also, most dairy farms are family farms and anyone attacking family farms will get short shrift from me.

The country would be a much worse place without them.

And so it would appear that milk producers will take little comfort from last week's predictions by DEFRA about how they see dairy farming in the year's ahead.

It is full of clichs about cuts in milk price paid to the producers and hints about world milk price but as I'm sure you will have guessed, the most important saying was missing - you know, the one about a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.

There have, of course, been plenty of changes but milking cows is still a seven day a week job.

I do not of course claim to be any sort of a spokesman for milk producers.

It must be 40 years since I milked cows, but I do think I have the understanding to set out the common sense issues here.

I take all this trendy talk about restructuring with a pinch of salt.

What it means is that farms have to get bigger and bigger.

You will remember me telling you that last year the country's largest dairy farmer, who was milking 3,000 cows, packed up because the year before he lost £800,000.

I rest my case.

Margaret Beckett is keen to get rid of milk quotas, but they are a tool of supply management and she must know that without them milk production would go through the roof with more people going for many more cows to see if they could make money out of say 3,000 cows.

In doing so they would squeeze out small producers (family farms) and probably go bust into the bargain.

Now I'll tell you what I think dairy farmers need: They need income and stability and a government that wants them.

You must decide for yourself whether Margaret Becket is right, but I tell you this I'm not wrong.

I am indebted to a friend for giving me what sets out yet another facet of the present position.

It goes like this.

A highly efficient dairy farmer who milks 130 cows with an average yield of 8,400 litres (sorry about the metric), and so producing a million litres of milk, wonders how ever he can manage to carry on in business with the 5p litre price cut he has just suffered.

Our friend then reads in the Irish Examiner how a dairy farmer in Ireland is making a comfortable living milking just 30 cows averaging only 6,000 litres each.

A very fair question he asks is "how can this be?" The UK is awash, we are told with cheap Irish and Continental milk.

Because the milk price is fixed in Euros and the euro has devalued, those using the currency have an immediate price advantage of 15%.

Also, Irish, French and German governments are keen to help with things like tax breaks, hidden subsidies and their own interpretation of the Common Agriculture Policy while the UK government shows no such initiative nor does it even look likely.

Just to make the pill even more bitter, British taxpayers pay over to the CAP £5 billion of which only £2.2 billion comes back to help British Farmers.

Put another way for every £1 we send to the CAP to help our own farmers, the UK taxpayer send another £ 1.50 to help our competitors.

If you ever wonder why supermarket shelves are almost collapsing under the weight of cheap foods from the continent, I hope I have explained the reason.

Do not be fooled by the suggestion that joining the euro would solve it.

Far from it because if we did, we would only be permitted to join at the present exchange rate, so we would be stuck with the present large disadvantage for good and all time.

Dialect word: Stoup - meaning gatepost.

Thought for the Day: What do farmers call the handling of the Foot and Mouth crisis? A cock-up followed by a cover-up.