ABSTRACT
My neighbours, the Snell family, milk 120 cows in the south-west of England. This year the cows have been at pasture since February. Approximately 65 per cent of the food they eat, year round, has been grown on the farm. Our hamlet, Mudford Sock, and the adjoining villages Ashington and Lymington, are recorded in the Domesday Book. In 1086 they were described as pasture and meadow – and they still are today. By any environmental audit this must qualify as sustainable. Yet two of the six farms in our area have gone out of dairying in the last year. The national picture is just as dismal. According to the University of Manchester Centre for Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, one in eight dairy farms in the UK has ceased production in the last two years.
