No use crying over spilt milk If we don’t put our hands in our pockets it will be Scottish dairy farmers who pay the price

The sour note that has crept into the most recent crisis in the dairy industry in Scotland prompts me to make a radical suggestion: why don’t we all give up drinking milk altogether and be done with the whole vexed business?

Then the rest of us can join the thousands who have already chosen to pour imported soya, almond and coconut milk onto their breakfast cereal instead of cows’ in the vague hope of staving off allergy attacks triggered by lactose or other intolerances, spurious or real.

We could all cultivate a taste for fake cheese – the kind that melts at the very hint of heat and contains no dairy whatsoever, like the stuff they use on burgers and other cheap fast-food – and try to convince ourselves that avocados, hunks of cookie dough and frozen bananas with soya yoghurt actually taste as good as dairy ice-cream.

Dairy farmers – once again facing financial hardship following further reductions in the price of milk to as low as 20p per litre, coupled with the decision by the large dairy co-operative First Milk to delay its regular milk payment to them by two weeks, and nervously looking ahead to the EU quota scheme being dismantled – could simply sell up and move away.

Those of us who insist on drinking cows’ milk could buy it in frozen blocks from Poland. This would free up prime Scottish land, previously owned by generations of hard-working farming families, to the highest bid from private developers, who could build luxury houses with fantastic rural aspects for the wealthiest in society. For the rest of us: no more boring fields and cows to look at.

I am joking, of course. I can’t imagine anything worse than the final demise of our dairy farms and the despatch of our prized dairy herds to pastures new.

I hoped to highlight how much we take for granted our highly nutritious, butterfat-rich, sweet-tasting milk from low-intensity, grass-fed cows.

The lack of value we consumers place on it is nothing short of shameful, borne largely of the unfortunate habit of our supermarkets of putting the cheapest possible price on it to get people into their stores to go and buy other stuff. At the moment Asda, Aldi, Lidl and Iceland are selling four pints of milk for just 89p, while Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose are not far behind at £1. Milk is cheaper than mineral water in most supermarkets.

As a consequence we expect milk to be plentiful and cheap – to hell with where it comes from, how it’s produced, or financial consequences for farmers.

Seven years ago I had the heartbreaking experience of watching a relatively young farmer in Dumfries in tears as he watched his prize herd of 500 pedigree Holsteins go under the auctioneer’s hammer.

He’d been forced to sell up the farm that had been in his family for three generations beause the price he was being paid for milk had plummeted to 19p a litre, and it was costing him 23p a litre to produce it; margins had become too tight for him to go on. At that time, one in three farmers were going out of business and the total dairy farm count had shrunk to 1000 from the 5000 in Scotland 20 years ago. Do we want this to continue? The current situation is not new; the dairy market is notoriously volatile and the price paid to the primary producers (ie dairy farmers) frequently dips below the cost of producing the milk; this time it’s exacerbated by an imbalance in global supply and demand. Hopefully, this will right itself in the medium to long term, but in the meantime there’s much we consumers can do closer to home.

We can demand more Scottish milk, cream, cheese, butter, ice-cream and yoghurt in shops. We can demand that it’s properly marketed on the shelf to give it equal, if not better promotion, than Irish, English, Welsh, French and other dairy producers. Its envied credentials should be screaming out from the packaging (Scottish butter sells at a premium in US shops because of its provenance). And, crucially, we should be prepared to pay more for it than we do now.

We should bear in mind supermarkets only act when there’s sufficient and sustained consumer demand.

Farmers themselves could diversify from total dependency on liquid milk into making artisan cheeses, butter, yoghurts, probiotic drinks, and so on.

Some who have already done this say it can represent 40% of their income, creating a safety net of sorts when crises like this one happen. This requires investment in specialist machinery and staff training, and of course support from retailers and farmers’ markets.

There’s an over-provision of hard Cheddar-type cheese; small-batch artisan produce on the other hand has made fantastic headway in Scotland, but it’s often hard to find and we should be demanding more of it. This is one way consumers can really help our precious dairy industry. If we don’t start making more of a noise, who else is going to do it?

You know I’m going to say it, so I will. One it’s gone it’s gone. In other words, it’s no use crying over spilt milk.