I for one would be happy to pay more for my milk (even if we did end up drinking less) were it to make life easier for the farmers.  I believe that it is vital to support our farmers, whatever it takes.  It would be a desperately sad (and costly to the whole country) situation if milk production stopped.  It would have many bad consequences for all of us, even those who don't drink or buy milk.

It might be very convenient to be able to go into a big supermarket and get everything you need. But with supermarkets builiding huge chains, also with the dairy industry, they have a huge market presence and try to sell at least some of their products as cheap as possible.

I wish there were more farmers selling their products directly. Here, some of the farmers do have their own farmer´s shops on their properties and are quite successfull with it. Sadly, this doesn´t work for all of them, esp. because some of the farms are quite far away from the customers and not everyone wants to drive an hour or more to buy essential food! There might be no other chance to survive for some though than building communities and bringing products to the customers by building own little farm markets. This would at least push the "buying local"- idea.

Like many, I would pay more for quite some products if I could only be sure the difference would really go to the farmers.

There is a supermarket chain in Germany that does sell some of the their products being labled "farmer friendly", which means that you do pay more for a litre of milk e.g., but the difference to the "regular" price is going to the farmers.

I want to make some research on that, basically because I want to know whether this is really true and the money I pay more is going to the farmers 100% or wether this is just a marketing thing.

Hi

I run a village shop in Oxfordshire and we do stock local milk, they bottle on site from thier own Guernsey Herd. They put in a pasterisation machine and now sell direct to local shops. So do try and hunt out a local dairy. Apparently it's also better for your health than the homogonised milk the big supermarkets sell, something to do with fat globules?

Carol

The problem we have here in Cyprus is pretty much the opposite to what you guys have, we can only get the what we can loosely call the supermarket stuff and it is getting more and more  expensive - currently around 1.25 Euros/liter. One of the milk companies makes "organic" a snip at ~2 Euros for 500ml.

Although it is "fresh", it can turn in a day or so. What I don't get though is that we can actually buy imported UHT milk for around 90c a liter. As we mostly use it to put a bit of colour into coffee, guess what we buy.