Has anyone seen this article from the BBC? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lincolnshire/8508315.stm

 Up to 9000 cattle.

Tesla Coils may be the best placed to give us the inside track on this project. S'occurrin Tesla?

I can't quite decide whether I am for or against this proposed super dairy.  I have had a look through the planning application which contains some very interesting (but also quite boring) documents. 

I am quite concerned that we, or some dairy farmers, are going down the rather intensive route of keeping very large numbers of cows indoors.  I do prefer to have cows outdoors for much of their life.  However, I have visited some of the larger herds kept indoors and their health is, obviously, very important for the producer.  One could also argue that the management of the outputs of the dairy cow can be well managed when the cows are kept indoors (i.e. targeted slurry application and use of slurry etc for gas production).  However, were similar arguments (for health reasons) trotted out (no pun intended) when the fashion was to keep pigs and poultry indoors.  I imagine that consumer concern for animal welfare was much lower down the list of priorities than the demand for home produced, cheaper food following the Second World War. 

 I'm not sure what the public perception would be of keeping such a large herd indoors.  Should we be aiming for the clean green 'happy' cows outdoors image that the Kiwi's market their dairy produce with? Or are our consumers both here and abroad not interested where their milk comes from and these large units will become the norm?

Nevertheless I am pretty sure that this sort of farming is driven by the fact that producers are being screwed down by the dairy buyers / globalisation / bigger is better model.  I guess that this unit will be replicated across the UK in future years as smaller family units cease milk production unless the herd is, financially, very well managed or the milk is sold for a niche purpose. 

An interesting point is the fact that this unit is being proposed in Lincolnshire, this is made by a local resident in the planning documentation.   Proximity to arable land, arable by-products, the docks at Immingham as well as possibly as TB may be less of an issue in Lincolnshire.  Application of slurry will also be easier, possibly, in Lincolnshire rather than wet winter pasture.

I'm just a little uneasy that when attempting to defend the British dairy industry as good for the British consumer, environment and landscape critics of the dairy industry will point to an intensive unit and ask what the value of this unit is, whether located in Britain, Poland or further afield. As above though the supporter of the unit may argue it could be environmentally positive to have this sort of unit?

Many pros but, possibly, many cons...........

i am with you m.o.b.. I have just found this link to the firms website. http://noctondairies.co.uk/

Mud on Boots:

I can't quite decide whether I am for or against this proposed super dairy. 

What a well written personal journey through the mind of Mud on Boots as he ruminates on the pros and cons of large scale production. This piece deserves to be read by everyone in Britain who grows, buys, prepares, cooks and eats food.

His ambivalence towards 'mass' production and all that entails for the mass market is shared by those of us who would prefer the smaller business model with local niche markets.

I suspect however that he has concluded that the 'large' unit is the one that is going to predominate in the field of milk and dairy products manufacture just as it has prevailed in every other type of industry. It is a shame but that is how it is.

At the root of all this lies the two sides of every single human being: The consuming side that wants everything as cheap as it can get it, and the producing side which wants to get more in that it gives out.

This dichotomey will only be resolved when the individual is themself 'in balance' and one side of its nature does not predominate over the other side. To the extent that this is unlikely to happen on a sufficiently large scale, we are stuck with the situation whereby the big units will continue to expand and take up around 80% of the total market.

Interesting article from Nocton Farms and of particular note is the Q and A section, especially the bit about the water. Cows consume a lot of water and the answer for this super dairy lies in borehole and river extraction coupled with reservoirs.

Certainly their plans to extract eliminate one major cost headache from the production economics but what would the effect be on the local water table of this amount of extraction annually in water is after all a pretty dry part of the country?

It won't be good for British stockgrowers and dairymen.  These mega farms are old news here.  The public is doing a lot of teeth nashing over them now, I will try to find the CBS clip from earlier this week over antibiotic use.  The term "factory farm" is now common place, with the assertion that "99% of the meat in the USA comes from factory farms".  The public sees the way stock is handled on these huge farms and misinterpret a lot of what goes on, but perhaps properly interprets some of it.  At any rate, the public wants to get cheap food from happy animals.  At least they say they do.  The perception is livestock are very unhappy on these huge farms. Gradually, the lines get skewed and all stock farms and stockgrowers are seen in the same light.

thats mad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

where is the dairy farm???

I agree totally with Peter Wells' review (sorry, Peter could not resist that one) of Mud on Boots' post, and the remainder of Peter's post - as almost always an excellent summation of the situation.

It is not farming though, it is factory production of milk. I will not call it factory farming (a term that is meaningless) because this sort of production is not farming is it? Cows should not be kept like this, to me it is a far worse scenario than battery caged hens and expect a legislative backlash at some stage.

I note they say "All cows will have access to grazing". Can somebody tell me how long a cow is dry under this type of production, presumably in-calf heifers will also have this access, and how much grazing land needs to be available for say 8500 cows and the heifers? And which beeff farmer is going to take the old cows to feed on to produce beef? 

 So if 8000 cows and followers is to many what is the right size? At what point do the numbers become 'difficult' to equate with 'farming'?

factory farm just as well work in a factory still big is best??

But surly if you can have arable farms with thousands and thousands of acres they why would it be a problom if the same happened to a dairy farm and the animals were kept in the same conditions that cows at a smaller farm.

But having this amount of cows, were will all the feed come from. I no they will try and use waste products but surly there will have to a staple diet of grass or something similar.

Perry

 "At any rate, the public wants to get cheap food from happy animals.  At least they say they do.  The perception is livestock are very unhappy on these huge farms. Gradually, the lines get skewed and all stock farms and stockgrowers are seen in the same light."

Too right, KF.

Only this week a national newspaper ran a feature about the film Food Inc, which is released in the UK today, and barely mentioned that the farms featured were not in the UK, and that not all farms were like those described.

So the Great British Public will start to think there are a lot of UK farmers running "factory farms" - in fact many already think they do, such is the disconnection between some British people, especially the younger and urban ones, and the land.

Large format livestock units are not exactly new to Lincolnshire or other counties for that matter and many of them thrive today so how come it's dairy cows where it doesn't 'feel' right to see super dairies. It might not be Free range Anchor butter but it could demonstrate a way of dairy farming that ticks all the right boxes. I wouldn't be at all suprised to see a visitors centre as part of this set up a bit like how the Stoughton estate used to be opened to the public but on a much smaller scale.

the greenth, It is not the number of cows that made me decide it was not farming, it was the method of keeping them. There are places in Australia with several times this number (beef not dairy, also sheep) and I have no problem with that. According to Nocton's website the cows will be allowed to graze when they and the land are dry, otherwise they will be permanently indoors, making it, in my opinion, a production factory not a farm.

old mcdonald:

otherwise they will be permanently indoors

Bit harsh OM, as if there was a dry county then Lincolnshire would be one of the driest and knowing of a few other herds in the area that graze for a significant period of the year these cows will get a fair amount of grazing time. The area around Nocton was also home to one of the largest grass drying outfits in the heady day's when this was the in vogue thing to do, so growing forage is not going to be a problem.

I also would like to point out that if you were to visit some of the dairy units in the other parts of the world either it is to darn cold or hot to graze at various times of the year. Although it was only a farm with 300 head my neighbour in Canada, housed his entire herd in tie stalls from around October through to around April, with daily exercise as part of the 3 times a day milking routine. His ability to produce quantity and quality of milk along with maintaining excellent herd health was a real eye opener, surely a measure that the animals were happy with their standard of welfare.

I did not make this up, so I am not being harsh. Look at the company's Q&A No.9 It says the cows will be kept indoors when in milk, then when they are dry and the weather is dry "there is plenty of grazing". I assumed from that the cows would actually be grazing during that period. That is why I posed the question to which I do not know the answer just to get a guide as to how much grazing would be required to support the dry cows and heifers and what proportion of the year they would be indoors.

can i ask where the finance is coming from to pay for the hughed construction.

old mcdonald:

It says the cows will be kept indoors when in milk, then when they are dry and the weather is dry "there is plenty of grazing".

Is it not the growing trend, or should I say possibly the new ideal to keep the cows milking for two years or more, before they calve again, in which case if that was adopted they would not see much grazing outdoors.

fretaw:

they would not see much grazing outdoors

Ok, the idealist in me would like to see fields of cows munching away too, but if the forage is cut and carted to the cows does this matter, certainly the very significant fencing costs would be a factor if you were to go for a rotational grazing system for 8000 milkers in which the closed grazing period was around 5/6 months to include winter, drought and excessively wet seasons.

Does this mean that other posters don't think you should milk cows unless you can give them access to managed grazing, certainly there are many countries where this is the case.

Wow! What an idea! Who's behind the project?

Peter Willes, David Barnes and a local farmer, Robert Howard, according to Farmers Guardian who have splashed it all over their front page.

 I hate to see the UK go down the road we have gone down.  Our public now has a growing distrust of livestock producers and livestock production, nearly once a week on one US website or another, or on TV there is a hyper-critical article about livestock farming.  Because most of our cattle are finished in huge commercial lots of up to 50000 head, the common figure used is "99% of our meat comes from factory farms" even though nearly all of the beef cattle in this nation spend a large portion of their lives on pasture of some type. 

Up until the mid 1990s many of our farm states had fairly strong anti-corporate farm laws. These laws were weakened or repealed, surprisingly often with the support of the groups that supposedly represent farmers.  Our farm groups, like the National Pork Producers Council proudly proclaimed this was capitalism at its finest, did any of us really want laws restricting the numbers of livestock we could own, and most importantly that as long was we were efficient the small farmer could compete with the biggest corporate as long as the playing field was level.  The problem is, the playing field is never level.  Once someone builds a new 9000 cow dairy, or a 5000 sow hog farm, if things go bad they won't just fold up and quit.  They will perhaps take out bankruptcy, or sell the unit for pennies on the dollar invested, but new buildings and large modern operations will seldom if ever just lay idle.  No matter how bad things get, the large farms keep producing.

I will not name the name, but 6 months after one of the first corporate swine units went into production in Missouri in the late 1990s(1998 I believe) it went bankrupt, in large part because of the unexpected crash of hog prices, to $8 per hundredweight.  That didn't stop them producing pigs though, they kept right on going, to this day. The average farmer cannot compete with large corporations who view bankruptcy as merely another facet of doing business.  

The other factor that was certainly not level, was that once large units became more of the norm, packers quit buying from smaller producers, or bought at a huge discount to what they were paying the larger farms. So in a sense, what the NPPC and others claimed was true, we could all compete with each other on a level playing field, if indeed it had really been level, which it never was.

I am sure there are those in the UK who will declare this dairy a great model of efficiency, and  that it will usher in a brave new era of super efficient agriculture.  What it will usher in is an increasing distrust of livestock production in general.  It will also usher in the demise of the small dairies, even more than is already occurring in the UK today.  UK livestock producers would do well to look at what has happened in the USA over the last 20 years and ask themselves if that is really the path they want to go down.  There seems to be a certain degree of protection afforded smaller farmers in Europe that is not present here. It doesn't pay to be noble.  US pig and dairy farmers were sold a bill of goods that they would be playing by the same rules as the big farms, and bought into the idea that they could compete if that were the case.  The truth was from day one the deck was stacked against the smaller producers.  If you want to return to serfdom, where a very few people own the land and get the profits, and the rest of the agriculture work force merely works for a wage, by all means embrace this model.

I have just spent three quarters of an hour replying at length of this posting by KF. I did not copy my work before posting and so am livid that the work has been lost due to the piece requiring to be read by a Moderator prior to posting. (al la a piece by Old McDonald a few days ago). I am guessing that the list of banned words I used included a reference to the situation whereby I questioned the curious view that Muslims have towards land and what the situation is likely to be when, as is likely, they have a significant investment in the agri businesses including land in the UK of the future.