GOOD EVANS

GOODEvans

‘Milk and eggs are predicted to be in short supply in the future – time will tell’

This month, Roger Evans discusses the price of milk, whether it is viable for farmers to keep producing their goods, and gives a suggestion for what needs to happen in Westminster.

Yesterday on TV, the chair of one of the major supermarkets was being questioned about the rising cost of food and whether the supermarkets could do anything about it. He said that his supermarket had made a commitment to freeze the cost of staple foods for 12 months.

This was bad news for dairy farmers. Milk is a staple food. If his shops keep the price of milk down, so too will all his competitors, there would not be the slightest chance they would go into a future where they were more expensive on milk.

Milk has always been a loss leader and so it will continue to be.

We are not selling milk at the moment, with no cows and no land to keep them on. But we will be in no rush to start up again if the signs are not good for the future.

We are going to concentrate our efforts on selling milk through our milk dispenser and see how that goes.

People often say the major supermarkets collude. Perhaps they do, but it doesn’t matter because they all have the same philosophy anyway, so suppliers, like dairy farmers, are squeezed.

Retail sales

We hope to be selling milk retail before too long, but our other enterprise is producing point of lay pullets.

Milk and eggs are predicted to be in short supply in the future – time will tell. There’s a part of me hopes that they will.

When I was a little boy, my father had a wealthy uncle in Canada. It was widely accepted in the family that he was to leave me all his money. This didn’t mean much to me at the time, I didn’t understand money then.

As it happened, he had ill health and moved to Florida and physicians had all the money. But he used to send me a pack of newspapers and magazines for years. One of these was a Canadian farming paper and I used to read it avidly.

They used to talk of people being paid ‘to raise hogs’. This was a new idea in this country, it was a sort of set aside. Could it be that we are about to enter an era when folk are better off not farming than actually producing food? I hope not.

Bravery

I am writing this in the kitchen. It’s a good place to be writing because there is no-one else about. It’s the time of year when our kitchen door is open all day. It’s a brave person who would go out of our kitchen door, because the space outside is ruled by a very cheeky robin that we call George.

There used to be about 100 sparrows out there. It’s all stone walls and creepers, ideal for a lot of sparrows, but there are only about 10.

George comes in the house whenever he wants. I quite like to watch the news on TV at midday and George comes down to watch it with me. He perches on a table lamp and finds it all quite fascinating.

If I have time, I quite like Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesdays. George likes this as well, he reckons that politicians are a bit like sparrows, they make a lot of noise but have very little to say.

I remember once I went to a meeting and didn’t say a word. When it was finished the chair came up to me and said: “You didn’t say much today, Roger.” I replied: “No, neither did these others.”

“Milk has always been a loss leader and so it will continue to be

It is natural to go to a meeting with a question to ask, but if someone else asks it I don’t see any need for you to repeat it, but if you see these politicians at work I would be ashamed to ask some of the questions they ask and if I couldn’t think of something better than that, well I wouldn’t bother.

Back to George. There is a squeak and a fluttering of wings and two little blue tits come into the kitchen, hotly pursued by George. They go onto the draining board and George gives them a spiteful peck before he leaves by the open door.

The blue tits fly about the kitchen, resting occasionally on some of the units. They are much too high for me to catch on my own so I decide to leave them for now until there is a solution.

We use those old-fashioned sticky fly papers in the kitchen and this week we have put two up. As good as gold, these two blue tits fly on to these papers, get stuck there and it is a simple matter for me to pluck them off.

Release

I make sure their feathers are all clean before I release them.

Perhaps they should fit some at Westminster, it might sharpen them up a bit, which would be no bad thing.