Opinion: A hard-won victory for the dairy industry
After a five-year battle that has cost Powys dairy farmer Fraser Jones more than £300,000 in planning and legal fees and potentially far more in income foregone, the High Court finally granted him permission last month to build a 1,000-cow dairy on his farm at Leighton near Welshpool.
While never achieving the profile of the far larger, but ultimately doomed, 2009 Nocton Dairies proposal in Lincolnshire, Leighton’s success may prove to be far more significant in the longer term than Nocton’s failure.
It has, much to the chagrin of the campaign groups that waged a sustained and increasingly desperate campaign to stop it, created a precedent in law. This effectively says that, based on the best available evidence, there is no fundamental risk posed by large, year-round-housed dairy farms to either animal welfare, the environment or public health that cannot be mitigated by appropriate management and existing best practice.
Ironically, it was the intransigence of the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), which funded the campaign against the “Leighton megadairy”, that ultimately succeeded in validating the very system of milk production it sought so fervently to discredit.
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By resolutely refusing to accept the weight of evidence presented and by appealing each subsequent decision granted in Mr Jones’ favour to a higher authority, it has progressively undermined its own argument, while reinforcing that of pretty much every professional dairy farmer in the UK. And that’s that when it comes to sustainable, efficient and welfare-oriented dairying, the system of production employed is irrelevant. What matters is the quality and consistency of management.
The WSPA’s case certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that, despite its repeated claims to the contrary, the dairy was not nearly as unpopular with local people as it would have us believe. At a public inquiry held last autumn, the inspector asked how many actual letters of objection had been received from local residents. The answer? A rather less-than-convincing 13 (or 5% of the electoral roll of Leighton village) did little to support the argument that the dairy would irreversibly blight the quality of village life.
Despite this, the WSPA still contested the Welsh Assembly minister’s subsequent ruling in favour of the proposal and demanded a High Court judicial review – which it duly lost and was ordered to pay the assembly’s court costs.
This has been a costly and embarrassing defeat for the WSPA and raises serious questions about both its charitable objectives and the internal governance processes that allowed it to keep throwing money at a failing campaign, long after it should have been clear that the game was up. That, however, is a matter for its trustees to address.
More importantly, Mr Jones, who conducted himself with great dignity and professionalism throughout this tortuous process, can finally get on with the job of building his dairy, safe in the knowledge that the highest court in the land has approved his application. He will no doubt have also derived some comfort from the fact that his erstwhile antagonists ended up footing at least part of the bill.
Given the dairy industry has recently announced its intent to eliminate, by value, the UK’s dairy deficit by 2030, this is more than just a hard-won victory for Mr Jones. It is a victory for the whole of UK dairying, for progressive farming and, above all, common sense.
David Alvis is an independent agribusiness consultant based in Cambridgeshire. With more than 20 years’ commercial experience across livestock and arable, David is a Nuffield Scholar and recently co-managed the Technology Strategy Board’s Sustainable Agriculture & Food Innovation Platform