Milk Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture

Preserved in the flickering images

of the films shot by some of Britain's farmers

is a unique record of the influences

that drove a 20th-century revolution on the land,

a revolution that left no area of farming unchanged.

By 1978, Britain was self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs.

We hadn't been self-sufficient since the 1760s.

That is an extraordinary achievement.

Why did farming go from this...

..to this?

How did we go from milk delivered by the milkman

to an industry dominated by supermarkets?

And why today are there so few family farms left?

When my grandfather came here 100 years ago,

there were probably 26 dairies

supplying milk into the Swindon market.

And now we're the last one.

Told through the home movies and voices of the farmers

who both led the changes and who were at the sharp end of them,

the programmes in this series tell the story of the revolution

in the four pillars of Britain's food production -

wheat, horticulture, meat and milk.

Milk is a huge industry.

Britain's farmers produce around 13 billion litres of milk every year.

Ever since we began to recognise that milk was good for our health,

a daily pinta has been part of our diet and our culture.

And milk is hugely important for Britain's farmers.

Milk takes a larger share of farm profits than any other product.

But the way it's produced and sold,

and even the product itself, has changed dramatically.

In the 1920s, there were 150,000 farmers producing milk.

Most of it was sold door to door.

Today, nearly all of the milk we drink

is produced from specialist cows.

It's treated in large-scale processing plants,

and 90% of it is sold by supermarkets.

And the number of dairy farmers has shrunk to 15,000.

-Come on, you old devil!

Come on!

Will Hosford is a dairy farmer in North Dorset.

It's a semi-tame cow, unfortunately.

So it's a bit of a friend.

Will grew up on the farm with his two brothers.

This is him as a toddler - he's on the left.

And here he is at four years old,

herding cows in the same red pullover.

Growing up on this farm I think was good fun, great fun really.

At quite a young age, we were always out doing something on the farm.

Excuse me! Come on!

Nick Gosling farms a herd of Guernsey dairy cows

in North Wiltshire.

Like Will, Nick grew up on the farm.

This is him as a five-year-old.

To go out with Dad was a thrill.

I used to ride around with him everywhere.

I was just his apprentice, really.

This is his wife, Christine. They married in 1981.

As soon as we were married

I was taught to milk, and looked after the calves.

I fell in love with this farm.

Will Hosford and Nick Gosling's home movies and family histories

reveal the scale of the milk revolution,

and why, when most dairy farmers have given up, they are carrying on.

Steady up, now.

Whoa-whoa!

How you doing?

How are you? How is that foot, eh?

How's that foot? I know!

'Well, we have about 90 in the herd, but, of course, it goes up and down.

'We've got Guernseys.

'We've always had them because we love the colour of the milk.

'And it's such a quality milk

'it goes on to make the fantastic butter and cream.'

The sugars are the highest in the grass now for about the next hour.

And then, as soon as the sun starts to go down,

the sugars disappear and there's not so much goodness in the grass.

So we let them out for a quick bite now,

then before it gets too cold tonight, cos they're talking about a frost,

we'll have them back in.

They'll be back on their straw.

'I'm in charge of the arable side of the farm

'and the producing of the food for the cows.

'And I'm working round the herd.

'The central core of the herd, the actual milking,

'is performed by Chris, my wife.'

Come on, it's all right.

Good girl. Up you get, up you get!

Come on, come on! Up, up, up!

I've been doing this since I married Nick, which is 25 years ago.

I start at five o'clock in the morning,

and then again at half past three in the afternoon.

And it's a very physical, very physical job.

These scenes of life at Berkeley Farm

were filmed by Nick Gosling's mother.

She bought her first camera just after the war,

and then carried on filming for almost 40 years.

Once she got her cinefilm, she got the bug.

And we could do nothing without a cinefilm being stuck in our face.

Mum, who never went near the farm,

except to get us picnics and bring stuff out to the combine.

But she always liked to be on film on the farm.

HE LAUGHS

So that was our very first combine,

with Dad and Uncle Toby driving.

But it was so exciting.

When the combine got going,

everyone used to rush out to watch the combine.

The Gosling story begins at the start of the last century.

Grandfather moved to Artis Farm,

which is the next one down,

which was a rented farm.

He came there in 1908.

And it was just a small 60-, 70-acre farm with a few cows.

And he gradually built up the herd,

and then decided in about 1919

he'd start delivering milk, locally to the village.

And Nick's grandfather wasn't alone.

A sensible farmer

would give up growing wheat,

particularly mixed farming on bad wheatlands,

and move into dairying.

The reason is quite simple,

there is a growing, and continually growing, demand for dairy product.

Fresh milk, butter, cheese,

but also industry and commercial use of dairying.

Most of these farmers sold their milk to a milk processor.

By the late 1920s,

these processors were able to use their economic power

to drive down the price of milk they paid to farmers,

and many farmers struggled to survive.

But in 1934 the Government stepped in.

It created an organisation

that bought all the milk produced by farmers

and then sold it on their behalf to the processors.

It was called the Milk Marketing Board,

and it gave economic power to the dairy farmer.

As a result of the guaranteed price,

I don't think there's much doubt that more people went into dairying.

One of the many people

excited by the new opportunities

that were opening up in agriculture in the 1930s

was David Hosford.

When we were little boys, my father was very keen on the countryside.

And when it came to leave school

what was I going to do? Well, I was going farming.

I think I'm going to need a hand to push this over.

It's his son, Will, who now runs the family farm.

No use trying to do the filming and the work at the same time,

because you'll lose the camera in the straw.

But he does record what's going on on the farm.

He likes to keep a record,

and it's quite interesting to look at the pictures

from years gone by.

I was brought up in London, in Highgate, where my father was a GP.

But the countryside was always very important.

He was keen on the countryside, he was a bit of a naturalist.

And when we purchased this cottage, in Whipsnade,

country life became part of our life.

That's David in 1938,

driving the cart with his younger brother and sister.

We got to know this farm,

Church Farm, Whipsnade,

and the family, Bates, the farmers, very well.

And, extraordinarily enough, they used to welcome us.

We were visitors that they liked to see. We weren't muddling urbanites.

I can remember I said to my father,

"Go on! Ask him if there's something we can do!"

And I was about nine or ten then.

I would be given something or another to do, and I suppose,

because I showed some keenness,

gradually we were allowed to lead the horses,

and I suppose we really, the family, got really keen on farming.

And this is the three of them on the farm, wearing air raid helmets,

two years after the outbreak of World War Two.

Through the war, we spent...

We weren't evacuated to the cottage in the war, we lived in London,

but we spent quite a lot of time at the cottage,

it was only within an hour's run from home.

And we really got dug in at that farm.

The war had a profound impact on most areas of agricultural output,

but not milk production.

The Second World War

ought to have damaged the fortunes of dairy farmers in some ways.

The concentration on the production of the staple, ie wheat,

did certainly take a good deal of pasture out of production.

And certainly the number of cattle fell during the war.

They didn't fall as much as they might have done,

for the simple reason that in the 1930s, particularly,

people had become aware of the science of diet.

And, in that, milk acquired a particular place

as essential for kids in particular.

And it was during the war that you get the introduction of school milk.

Now, the purpose of school milk is to ensure

that children get a certain amount of calcium in their diets.

So that actually protects dairying, to an extent, during the war.

War ended in 1945.

But Britain continued to face food shortages and rationing,

and the balance-of-payments crisis

meant the country didn't have the money to import food.

So, to encourage domestic production,

the government took a fundamental decision.

It decided to continue to pay financial subsidies to farmers.

The approach was enshrined in the 1947 Agriculture Act.

The Agriculture Act of 1947

is without doubt the most important piece of agricultural legislation

passed in the 20th century.

Absolutely no doubt at all.

At some very basic level, it saved British farming.

Under the Act, dairy farmers were to be given a guaranteed price for all the milk they could produce.

It amounted to an open invitation to increase output

and it led to a revolution in every aspect of dairy production.

It was already happening

when David Hosford moved onto his farm in Dorset in 1952.

-..what, since the 50s?

-Yeah, well, the first film I remember

is a calf in front of my father's house, Dad's house.

And that must have been within about six months

of the taking over of the farm in 1952.

I'm not sure I can remember that!

No, you were just a twinkle in my eye in those days.

HE LAUGHS

Yes!

Aged 55, my father said, "I'm going to retire,

"and we will look for a farm."

Which was very exciting.

We bought the farm. And we moved in.

And that was in September 1952.

And we've been here ever since.

The Hosfords had bought a classic mixed farm.

They had a little of everything.

We took over lock, stock and barrel,

which means we took all the machinery and all the livestock,

and the livestock consisted of four nurse cows, we had two sows,

and about 200 hens.

Fairly soon, we pushed along into dairying.

Although probably for 10 years we grew SOME grain.

The cows became more important,

and you couldn't have both, there wasn't room for both. We hadn't got the acreage.

We didn't set the trend.

The trend was to specialise.

As the system of price guarantees was introduced

following the '47 Act,

David realised that if they were going to maximise their output and profits,

they would need to become specialist producers.

In Wiltshire,

the Goslings' mixed farm was moving in the same direction.

Chris went to work when we first got married for a neighbouring farmer

to help him do his lambing,

and came back with lambs that grew into sheep, and then had lambs.

And they were forever getting out.

And those animals were more of a nuisance than 100 cows.

They drove me mad.

You really had to specialise more.

And there wasn't the profit in all those enterprises

unless you were very efficient.

So, to specialise,

you had to then put all your energies into one type of farming.

Chickens on the scale we had them weren't cost-effective.

And pigs, the same.

Because the economies of scale were driving the system,

it was becoming more and more important

for small farms to specialise in one activity

rather than a variety of activities.

A few hens, a few pigs, a few cows didn't make commercial sense.

But it was also part of the guarantees

that government was giving.

Historically, one of the reasons for mixed farming

is because you've got various eggs in various baskets.

But if everything was guaranteed

you didn't need that same diversification of risk

to the same extent as you did before.

But the revolution in dairy farming went well beyond specialisation.

Farmers were beginning to realise

that, because there was a guaranteed market for all they could produce,

they had a huge financial incentive to increase their output.

In agriculture, you can only increase production in two ways.

Extensively or intensively.

Extensively means

bringing more "land", in inverted commas, into cultivation.

Well, in dairying, this means simply having more cows.

The problem is, the land which you can keep cows on is not infinite.

So, therefore, the most sensible way to increase production,

and the way which is dominant in the post-war era in Britain,

is by intensively farming what you've got.

In other words, in the case of cows,

increasing the yield per animal of milk.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: An MMB Regional Livestock Royal Show judge.

Dairy farmers set about intensifying production in broadly three ways.

They embraced genetics to develop new breeds of cow,

science to alter its diet,

and technology to make milking more efficient.

..by infrared analysis.

This is the Herringbone milking parlour

at Will Hosford's Dorset dairy farm.

A herdsman and an assistant milk the herd of 300 cows, twice a day,

every day of the year.

During the 1930s, as David Hosford remembers, it was very different.

To start off with you were doing it by hand,

and then you had a portable milking machine

which you took from cow to cow.

Just imagine 150 cows there, and 150 down here,

you'd walk a very long way!

In 1952, we bought a bale.

A bale is a mobile contraption which you drag across the fields.

We were pretty green, I hadn't had much experience of...

I knew about horses, which perhaps didn't serve us very well,

but I didn't know much about dairying.

However, we got the cows to go through the milking bale.

Then, in 1963, he was the first farmer in the area

to install a Herringbone milking parlour.

He'd seen them in action

on a study tour of Australia and New Zealand.

I remember in Australia, driving with a journalist in a very tatty train,

in Victoria, the state of Victoria,

going north to the irrigation areas,

and we were going there, he was going as a journalist

and we were travelling together,

and he said, "What do you want to see, Daaave?"

And I said, "I really want to see how one man can look after 100 cows."

"Oh, God, we'll see plenty of that!"

And it was remarkable. When we got to this irrigation area,

there were lots and lots of herds being run very efficiently by the farmer

with really little input, labour input, from anything else.

The Herringbone milking parlour was a big step forward

in cutting down the labour, and milking cows efficiently.

By the 1980s, David Hosford's once revolutionary milking parlour

had been adopted by most dairy farmers.

Today, that technology is itself being replaced

by systems that can milk 70 cows without any labour.

Once these cows have been trained,

they can be milked by computer-automated machines,

and rarely see a herdsman.

But it was not just the way cows were milked,

it was the way they were fed that changed radically after the war.

Up until the 1930s, nearly all the food for cows came off the farm.

They fed in the fields in the summer,

and farmers dried grass and made hay for the winter.

It was a labour-intensive, arduous and weather-dependent summer activity

on most farms in Britain.

By the 1970s, haymaking and these images had vanished,

replaced by a new feed called silage.

It's mid-June at Berkeley Farm in Wiltshire,

and Nick Gosling is making silage.

Silage is grass that is cut early,

while it still has moisture, and then compressed.

Farmers found it to be much more nutritious for cattle feed than hay.

It should be dry matter, about 35 per cent.

And this is dry matter of about 15 or 14 per cent. So it's twice as wet as it needs to be.

The idea was, it was cut last Sunday,

and it was going to be picked up on Monday,

and it rained Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

We're now in Friday,

and we've decided we can't wait any longer, and it's rained again today.

We've picked it up and, if you see in there, you should find...

little bits of wheat.

There they are.

There's a bit of wheat.

There's a bit there.

That's what we're after. That's what makes...that's the starch portion of the food.

The transition from hay was a gradual one.

It took time before farmers developed the skills

to make good silage.

The additive we're putting on the silage here,

we now put a microbial additive on to make the silage work better.

This is an acid one, and this acid was sulphuric acid.

It used to rot the metal on the machinery,

and it would rot our clothes.

We'd completely come back after silage making with holes in our clothes,

and if you didn't watch it, and it went in your face and eyes, you knew.

You were in agony.

David Hosford filmed the same changes on his Dorset farm.

The next stage on was, make the silage at the buildings,

when you had great big trailers, which now are huge.

You see them on the road, full of stuff.

I remember getting the local trailer maker in Durweston

to make these trailers which were 12 by 8, I think, in size.

"Oh, David, you don't want trailers that size, you'll come adrift!"

Now, of course, they're tiny little trailers. "We'll make 'em," he said.

"We'll make 'em if you want us to, but..."

HE DRAWS BREATH

Farmers who fed their dairy cattle silage instead of hay,

were able to increase yields

from around 15 to 25 litres of milk a day per cow.

But another development was to double yields again.

And this involved the use of genetics

to modify the breed of the cow itself.

Before the war,

the dominant dairy breeds had been Ayrshire and Shorthorn.

But the post-war policy that encouraged farmers to intensify output changed all that.

Every farmer feels that he's going to benefit

if he has a cow that produces more milk.

It's very easy to sell the farmers the idea

that the cow that produces the most milk will make the most money.

In the periods of the '50s and '60s and '70s,

that was really the black and white Friesian cow,

who was a very good cow for English conditions.

However, meanwhile, in North America, - Canada and the USA -

they were breeding what is now known as the North American Holstein.

The North American Holstein cow was a barn-fed cow,

not turned out to grass, mostly zero graze,

kept in a barn the whole year round.

Fed on very, very high-energy maize and alfalfa diets

and she was designed to produce more and more and more milk per cow.

-ORIGINAL VOICEOVER:

-The breed, as a whole,

is the result of careful selection for both conformation and yield...

Increased productivity was the goal.

And the Ministry of Agriculture and the Milk Marketing Board

produced films to encourage it.

This yearling is now ready to be admitted to the progeny test programme.

From Chippenham, the young bulls are moved to an AI freezing unit.

The collected semen is immediately processed in the laboratory.

Sufficient semen is collected from each bull on test

to get 330 cows in calf in officially milk-recorded herds.

The breeders were able to persuade the British farmer to go away from

the classic British Friesian into the North American Holstein.

We are talking now of cows that can produce 60 litres a day.

If you can imagine 110 milk bottles outside your door in the morning,

that's the sort of amount you can get out of a single cow.

By the late 1970s,

most British dairy farmers were adopting the American Holstein

and yields had soared.

-Bloody cold this morning.

-It is bloody cold.

Are you going to come and film us bedding up?

Yes, I've got to keep filming. You've got to keep the thing going.

Will Hosford made the transition to Holsteins

soon after he took over the farm from his father in the early 1980s.

How are these animals doing? They look a bit skinny. I suppose they're all right?

That's what you always say! You always say they're not growing.

It's always quite difficult when you go from one generation to another.

For many farmers, it doesn't go very smoothly.

But I remember well the time it happened to me.

I was driving the forage harvester, as I always do,

and bloody little William came along and said, "I think I'm going to take over this."

I thought I'd been doing it quite well.

And, from that day onwards, he had taken over the farm.

Very amiably, and the transition went very smoothly,

but I reckon that was the day when things changed.

Ha-ha! I'm sure he was only too happy

that I drove the forage harvester!

He suffered from hay fever terribly,

and I'm sure he was only too happy to hand over this noisy machine

to some young person who's only too happy to drive it up and down the field.

I decided then

that I needed to increase the financial turnover of the farm.

I changed the breeding of the cows.

And I produced a more Holstein type cow, which is a bigger cow,

which will produce more milk.

Come on.

My father was probably producing around 4,000 to 4,500 litres a cow.

We eventually got to around 8,000 to 8,100 litres per cow.

The cows changed radically, I'd say.

They became much more angular and larger.

Come on, Gary! Come on. Go on!

No, you old bugger! Come on. Come on.

The move to intensively farmed Holstein cows

that Will Hosford and many other dairy farmers made

came at a price.

The years of expansion

saw an increase in the production diseases suffered by dairy cows,

mastitis, infertility and lameness,

problems that persist today.

Any suggestions on how to move a ton and a half of bull?

-Come on, Gary!

-Go on, Gary!

-Ha-ha-ha!

-Come on!

Come on!

An image of cows with a bull, and the bull lame,

has a certain irony about it

because generally bulls don't get lame,

partly because they're not under the same pressure as cows

and partly because farmers are more likely to look after them.

In dairy cows, 80% of the lameness is in the hind legs

and 80% of that is in the outer claw of the hind feet.

And that, in part, reflects the fact

that they've been selected for cows with bigger and bigger udders,

and, if you can imagine two feet going straight down,

you stick something like a medicine ball in-between them,

it throws the knees out, ankles in, the weight onto the outside foot,

increases the pressure on the outside foot,

and that's the one that gets... the sole gets torn off.

Right, 407 I've seen hanging about here.

-407.

-And 397.

I wonder if we've got 397 already.

'They have a tendency to have more problems with lameness, yes.'

I think their hooves are thinner

and their legs, in particular, perhaps are not as good,

particularly if you're someone like me

who wants them to walk quite a long way to pasture every day.

That can cause trouble,

yes, and we did have an increase in incidence in lameness, definitely.

'As far as the cow is concerned, the main impact of lameness is it hurts.

'As far as the farmer is concerned,

'it's another reason for a cow breaking down.

'A lame cow will eat less. She will lose body condition.

'She'll give less milk. She will probably become infertile.'

And then she will have to be culled from physical exhaustion

after maybe two or three lactations.

From the time David Hosford bought his first dairy cows in 1952,

to the time his son took control of the farm in the early 1980s,

dairy farmers had prospered.

Farming was easier.

Subsidies, advisers, everything.

And prices were guaranteed all the time.

We used to have a price review every year, when the prices for most things were SET.

Nowadays you can't really believe that.

Encouraged by advisers from the Milk Marketing Board

and the Ministry of Agriculture,

they'd used science to change cattle feeds,

they'd adopted new technologies for milking

and they'd embraced genetics to change the breed of the dairy cow itself.

The result had been that milk yields had increased fourfold

in just two generations.

And, while farmers were being urged to produce more and more,

the public was being urged to drink more and more.

-NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:

-In 1957, the slogan "Drinka Pinta Milka Day" was created,

and in a few years became one of the best-known advertising slogans of the century.

The word "pinta" achieved dictionary recognition

and today the public knows well the difference between a pinta and a pint.

Politicians too made use of it.

Buy it,

drink it.

That's my advice.

It's nice.

It's good for you.

Drinka Pinta Milka Day.

Drinka Pinta Milka Day...

But the public didn't respond.

By the 1960s, consumption had levelled off.

By the 1970s,

I think people are beginning to worry

about the production of milk

or, rather, the massive over-production of milk.

And it's not just a British problem.

It's a European-wide problem.

And once British farming goes fully into the CAP,

the Common Agricultural Policy, in 1978, it becomes clear,

I think, on a European level, that we are massively overproducing milk.

Latest figures confirm Britain, like Europe,

has a food mountain out of control.

Despite Ethiopia, despite Bob Geldof,

its value increased by 75% last year.

By the early '80s, the popular press, on bad news days,

is picking up on things like "butter mountains"

and "milk lakes".

And this is really very, very bad publicity for farming.

But it's also beginning to put pressure on the EC.

From the '80s, it's clear the CAP is going to have to be reformed

and dairying is the first bit that's picked off.

-ORIGINAL REPORT:

-..may increase five-fold by 1990.

Something had to change.

Either the milk prices had to fall sharply

or another way of cutting production had to be found.

And, at that time, there were calculations made

which said that, in order to get rid of the surpluses,

the milk price would have to fall by 25 per cent.

And that was politically unacceptable

within the European Community,

where, of course, farmers had a huge say, particularly in the 1980s,

because much of the European policy was the Common Agricultural Policy.

That was the centrepiece of the European project in many ways, at that time.

So, the alternative was to impose quotas and force production to drop.

Under the quota system

individual farmers had to restrict their output to 1981 levels.

Milk quotas came in in 1984.

A little bit out of the blue.

We'd been told they were coming

but they did come out of the blue and they did shake us all up,

to the extent that we had no idea, really, as far as I remember,

how much milk we were going to be allowed to sell.

And, worse than that,

if the milk lorry took away milk that was above quota

we were going to be charged a fine.

We were not going to get the price of the milk.

We were also going to get beaten to supply some money for the privilege of them taking it away.

And I remember we were so ill-informed about it -

perhaps because we were a bit dim,

but in general farmers didn't know what was going to happen -

that we loaded milk into 40-gallon drums

and took it away to feed our calves on

and we forced the milk down the calves

because we thought it would be better to do that

than it would to put it down the drain.

But, in the end, the thing did become rationalised

and I think, even in the first year of quotas,

we managed to keep within our quota.

But it did kibosh any expansion

and that was in strict contrast to all the rest of my farming career.

You could always sell, at a predetermined price,

any amount of milk that you produced.

1984 was a defining year for the dairy industry.

Milk quotas marked the beginning of the end of the system of guarantees

that farmers like David Hosford had experienced all their working lives.

But, even then, another significant change was on the way.

ORIGINAL NARRATION: Most milkmen were small traders who'd only one cart or pram

and served just a few streets,

but they usually made their rounds three times a day,

starting before six in the morning, and each time with fresh milk.

The other great change that took place in the 20th century was how milk was sold.

Fairly early on in the 20th century,

big combines bought and sold milk, particularly in the big cities.

But there was still a very large number

of small and localised suppliers, sometimes producer-retailers,

sometimes simply retailers who bought from local dairies,

or whatever.

But one thing that held them together

was this curious British thing of delivering milk to the doorstep.

Now, I don't think that happens anywhere else in the world!

At Berkeley Farm in Wiltshire, Chris Gosling is just finishing milking.

And Nick, her husband, is taking it along the road to their dairy.

From the 1920s,

when Nick's grandfather began to sell his milk in Swindon,

the Goslings bottled their own milk

and throughout the post-war years they sold it, door-to-door.

This is Nick's father loading up churns in the late 1950s.

Farming goes in dips and troughs. Highs and lows.

And whenever there was a trough the milk rounds pulled us through.

This is Dad and one of the roundsmen out trying to catch the horses,

early in the morning, probably about 6 o'clock, to go on a milk round.

And these horses sometimes didn't want to be caught

and I always remember seeing Dad running behind these horses trying to catch them,

and he'd get his cap and throw it on the ground and stamp on it!

And I was a little boy up in the bedroom watching.

The horses knew the round themselves, so they'd go off in the morning

and on one Christmas Eve Taffy went off with Strawberry.

He drank too much whisky - Taffy did - at his first few calls.

He was then found at the end of his round.

The horse had walked the whole round without him getting off the cart

and he was asleep in the back of the cart.

They got back to the farm with all the milk still on board.

Dad then said, "Well, you'll have to go back out again,"

and the horse refused to go because it had done the round that day.

So why would it want to go again?

But huge changes in the way milk was sold were looming.

The door-step delivery was being eclipsed

by the emergence of supermarkets.

Up to the late 1970s,

the distribution of milk was controlled

by the large processing and delivery companies.

And they were able to fix the price.

It would appear there was a cartel operating in the dairy industry

and, if the supermarkets wanted to buy milk,

they could do so at the same price

that the retail customer on the round was buying milk

and it would come in a glass bottle

and it would be delivered to the front door of the supermarket

from the retail round.

And that just wasn't feasible as far as the supermarkets were concerned.

The first supermarket to break this system was Sainsbury's.

In June 1980, it began to sell milk half a penny cheaper

than the doorstep price.

It was a fundamental change and, in time,

it broke the economic power of the processors.

I think that was a major turning point, because...

I mean, in some ways sadly,

because the retail round had performed a number of different functions for society as a whole,

but it was the beginning of the end of the retail round.

We were actually not affected by it too much

at the beginning of the '80s, even,

because we only had the one store here in Rowton.

We were supplying them with milk at the time,

so it didn't matter too much if they sold some of our milk through their store.

But they were taken over and Somerfields came in

and then the multi out-of-town stores started up

and suddenly we realised, yes, our doorstep trade was going.

There has been a remarkable transformation.

In the 1980s, the doorstep deliveries of milk

were as much as 80 per cent

of total liquid milk consumption.

Currently, that's down to about 12 per cent,

with the supermarkets taking most of the rest.

The influence of the supermarkets was profound.

Not only did they revolutionise the way milk was sold,

they drove changes in the nature of the product itself.

Nick's milk arrives at their processing plant.

The Goslings process and bottle it themselves.

It comes from their herd of Guernsey cows,

a tradition Nick inherited from his father.

He believed in those early days that the best milk

was still Channel Island milk

and our customers deserve the best milk,

so therefore they got the best cows, which were Guernseys.

When the milk arrives at the plant it's raw,

and before the public can buy it it has to be pasteurised.

This is the pasteurising unit, which is basically a large heat exchanger.

It raises the temperature of the milk from five degrees centigrade

up to 72 degrees,

and holds it at that temperature for 15 seconds,

which is the pasteurisation technique.

As soon as it's done the pasteurisation,

it then cools it back down again to five degrees,

for keeping quality, so it will keep longer.

It's very important to get the temperature down as quick as we can.

From 1945, most milk in Britain was being pasteurised,

but as supermarkets began to sell it

they wanted the product to have a particular consistency and look,

and therefore required it to pass through a second process,

called homogenisation.

The homogenisation process is, you basically force the milk

through a very small hole,

which breaks all the fat globules down into a very small size,

which is dispersed uniformly through the product

and you don't get a cream line.

A long time ago, the industry decided it was better,

this more uniform product,

and that's why the larger dairies have gone with that.

And so, from the 1980s, most milk sold in Britain was homogenised.

But not the milk sold by the Goslings.

With ours it's the old-fashioned way. No homogenising,

and you end up with that cream line on the top, which the customers seem to love.

They often tell us about the joy of opening it up

and pouring the cream off the top.

Yeah, we're one of the few still doing that.

By the 1990s, the supermarkets had begun to change the face

of the dairy industry.

But the Milk Marketing Board continued to protect the price

that farmers received for their milk.

Then, in 1994, there was a fundamental change.

As part of a wider policy of using free markets and competition,

the Government abolished the Board.

Economic power slipped back to the retailers.

While the MMB was there,

the price was by and large protected.

Once you remove that price protection,

then the supermarkets' power grows very rapidly.

And I suspect what you're getting

is, as in other respects, a return to the 1920s,

where you have potential cartelisation.

In other words,

one or two or three big buyers of milk.

In this case, the supermarkets,

who can eventually dictate the price to the producer.

The whole thing went completely wrong and it all became a turmoil,

much as it had been in 1934,

before the Milk Marketing Board took up.

And the dairy farmer had no power in the markets at all.

It was all in the hands of these roguish buyers, these processors,

aided and abetted by the supermarkets.

And we were ground down and ground down

until dairy farming was unprofitable.

Right, good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

It's time to make a start. We're running late but we've had a very busy morning this morning.

It's too loud, Charlotte, can you turn it down a bit?

The end of the Milk Marketing Board was another defining moment in dairying

and, for years after, it presented a huge crisis for many of its farmers.

We're here today on behalf of Jeff and Helena...

Thousands just gave up and sold their herds.

..we have a total of 207

and I think it's a real dispersal sale, ladies and gentlemen.

Right from the oldest cow through to the baby cows,

through to the Hereford bull.

Have you left anything behind?

Two Belgian Blues. He's got some nice Belgian Blues, I saw them last week...

In 1994 there were more than 35,000 dairy farmers.

By 2000 the number had almost halved.

The scale of decline was unlike anything the industry had ever witnessed.

700, 700, 720.

At 720, 740, 760, 80 on top?

780, 800? At 780. On the hammer, then, at 780 guineas,

I sell at 780.

By 2000, the price farmers were paid for a litre of their milk

had fallen from 25p to 17p, below the cost of production.

Nick and Chris Gosling's Wiltshire farm faced bankruptcy.

Hello, there!

Hello!

How are you? Eh?

Hello!

When it got to the point where the profits were all falling off,

farm and milk rounds,

the only way we could stay in farming

was to become organic

and go upmarket and form our own niche.

I've always pestered Nick, ever since we got married,

that we should be organic.

But it was his decision.

It was a commercial decision to go ahead.

As the time has gone on, even Nick,

who can be quite cynical about these things

- he calls homoeopathy "Harry Potter medicine" -

he has actually decided that organic farming is the right way to go,

and he does prefer it,

in the way that we treat the animals, the way we treat the land.

So I think we're both really glad that we did become organic.

This is my friend, Veronica.

We converted the farm to organic. The cows became organic.

The milk became organic.

Now all we needed was to now see if we could sell our own organic milk.

There were buyers of organic milk,

but unfortunately the market was only growing at five per cent a year

but production suddenly jumped to 15, 20, 30 per cent a year,

so suddenly there was too much milk.

And the organic milk price then slumped.

Well, we actually had the herd up for sale

and we were going to probably have to close the processing plant

and rent the buildings out.

And my wife and I sat up in bed one morning

and realised that we were only a month away from selling.

The brochure was here, ready to go out to the public to buy,

and we suddenly thought,

gosh, we don't know what else we can do other than dairy farming.

So I said, "Well, I'll give it one last chance and try to find someone who wants our milk,"

and luckily we got hold of this company called Abel and Cole,

and now we're up and running with Abel and Cole.

Abel and Cole is an organic food delivery service.

As well as buying the Goslings' milk,

it buys their farmhouse cream and handmade butter.

Keith Abel is visiting Nick.

He wants to discuss plans for the future of their partnership.

There you are.

That's the plan.

-That's the present milking parlour.

-Yep.

-We're extending that building right down here...

-Right.

..dry cows, springers, and as they calve they go into these pens.

-As they go into the pens, they then enter the new parlour.

-Right.

New silage clamp there, and the old silage clamp, which is up here,

then becomes an extra building for the cattle.

So, it's all to do with cow comfort. We've designed it for the cows.

-At the moment the dry cows are over here somewhere?

-Spread over all these buildings.

When this is cold and frosted, you have to take them across concrete.

And they fall over, and this sort of thing, so we're going to keep them all in one building...

'80 per cent of my production is now going to Abel and Cole,

'which is too much, in a way, to have in one customer.

'But as long as they keep growing, and they keep wanting our product,

'and we keep supplying what they want,

'it's a marvellous relationship we have and we're all very happy.'

While the relationship with Abel and Cole secured Nick Gosling's business,

thousands of dairy farmers left the industry and milk production began to fall.

This decline in production forced large retailers

to rethink their strategy,

and for some farmers

the fear of a shortage of milk created an opportunity.

Will Hosford took advantage

and made a deal with the country's largest seller of milk.

A little over 18 months ago,

Tesco decided to have a dedicated producer group

and I, as a milk producer in the South,

was invited to become a Tesco producer, which I then became.

Tesco, along with other supermarkets,

began to obtain their supplies of milk

through direct contracts with a limited number of farmers.

Will is one of around 900 producers

who supply the supermarket with a billion litres of milk a year.

Ten years ago, they didn't need to have any involvement with farmers at all.

They could go to a big processor

and say, "I need so many litres of milk on tomorrow,

"please deliver it, thank you very much, and this is what you'll get paid."

Through the WI campaign, the NFU campaign,

at a period of time when dairy farmers in particular

were being paid rock-bottom prices,

there was an impression that maybe the milk supply

wouldn't be there in the future.

And not only that, but provenance,

ie, where all the milk came from,

how the animals were kept and how the farms were farmed,

became much more important in the public's eye.

And, therefore, supermarkets in particular

decided to go for a dedicated producer group

where they knew exactly where their milk was coming from.

Emma Rutter coordinates the scheme.

And I was hoping that maybe,

with Liverpool University and all the rest of it,

maybe we'd be able to get perhaps some work done

on specific issues within lameness

that might help us all understand a bit more about it.

Yeah, we sort of...

As you know, the first year of the project we were looking very much at lameness issues

because that was one of the key issues that affected farmers.

And also, consumers tend to notice the lame cows at the end of the herd, coming in last,

because they've been waiting for the cows to cross the road.

So it was both a consumer issue and a producer issue,

so we looked at lameness first.

But now we've bought...

We have very much been blamed for what's happened in the past

and I know, coming into it from a farming background

and actually being two years at Tesco's,

I realise the rather long memories

of what's happened before,

and people can't get over that.

But we are out there to change and to actually say,

we're not basing it on what's happening in the marketplace any more.

We do realise we were part of that before, but actually

now we're going to guarantee you your cost of production,

and your milk price will never fall below that.

Well, head for the gate.

With the security of the Tesco deal in place,

Will Hosford began to return to a less intensive way of farming.

I decided to go for a lower output system,

more pasture based,

and produce...not substantially, but a little less milk.

All round, it'll be easier for me,

and easier for the animals that I farm.

He's gradually replacing the high-yielding Holsteins

with lower-yielding Friesians.

It's all part of his solution

to the pressures he's faced in the last ten years.

For Will and his father, David,

this has been this story of their entire farming lives,

constant change.

Just watch as I get mown down!

The people dairy-farming just three generations ago

might have found it hard to imagine just how much their working lives

would have changed over the century.

They milked by hand and delivered to the door.

Their cows produced 15 litres of milk a day.

Today's cows produce 60.

Supermarkets, new breeds and even milking parlours were unheard of.

Until the 1980s they prospered, but from that time

they've been witnesses to a revolution that saw thousands leave the land

and those who stayed do so in a state of perpetual uncertainty.

Hopefully she'll start pushing in a minute.

But, even in a world of constant change,

there are some things that stay pretty much as they always were.

We're there. Once it starts licking.

Job done. One live calf.

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