A peculiarly British crisis has broken out. There was an interruption in the supply of fresh milk these past few days, media reports show. It likely means the loss of around 1 million gallons of fresh milk.
It wasn’t that the cows stopped lactating.
It also wasn’t the animals had to be culled due to a nasty disease.
And it wasn’t the lack of cold storage.
None of those happened this time.
Instead, one of the country’s major milk haulers went into administration, which is more or less the same thing as bankruptcy. The news was covered extensively by the BBC Radio 4 “Farming Today” program.
The administrators showed up and told the truck drivers that they were fired because the company was no longer in business. But that wasn’t the end of the matter.
Many farmers quickly ran out of milk storage space as the truckers weren’t collecting the fresh milk. But the farmers still had to milk the cows every day and needed somewhere to put the new milk.
What happened next seems obvious when you hear it. The farmers ditched the old milk into slurry ponds to make way for the new milk. One of the interviewees on the BBC radio program said it was hard to estimate how much milk needed to be destroyed but he said it would easily have amounted to a million gallons. That’s a lot of milky cups of tea down the drain.
Of course, the farmers then complained to the administrators to get the trucks back upon the road to help get the milk to market.
However, the whole thing highlights the fragility of the agricultural supply chains even within a small country like the UK. One company going bust had the effect of interrupting farmers from making an honest living, and presumably also interrupting supplies of milk to food companies and supermarkets.
Also — and this is where it gets very British — could have a detrimental impact on the love of tea across the whole UK. To say that the residents of the UK drink a lot of tea is a vast understatement. Collectively they, the Brits, drink approximately 100 million cups of tea per day, according to the UK Tea and Infusions Association. By comparison, a mere 70 million cups of coffee are drunk in Britain each day, again according to the same source.
Brits also tend to like their tea strong and milky, which makes the recent interruption in milk supply bigger news than it might be elsewhere. For instance, in France much coffee is drunk without milk, and tea is niche market by comparison.
Still, given the stress on businesses with rising inflation-driven costs and rising interest rates, it would seem likely that other companies start feeling the economic heat. That could cause more agricultural interruptions. That’s particularly worrying when it comes to perishable products such as milk and fresh fruit / vegetables.
The question is what can be done to de-risk the food supply chain in the UK? Its not clear, and that’s an even bigger concern.
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