Milk is confusing enough already, with full fat, semi-skimmed and skimmed, not to mention organic milk, goat’s milk and, if one goes to a farmer’s market, even raw, unpasteurised milk.
It is about to get worse with the introduction of free range milk by two brands that cannot even agree on what free range means.
The people behind Enjoy Milk, launched this month, say they want to transform the dairy industry in the same way that free range eggs helped a move away from battery hens. However, they have been criticised by Free Range Dairy, a network of farmers, that says their standards are not strict enough.
Enjoy Milk is the brainchild of the Free Range Milk Marketing Board and represents more than 700 free range dairy farmers.
Nick Hiscox, a dairy farmer and the son of John, the board’s founder, said: “We can guarantee that our cows spend as much of the year as possible in fields.”
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The group aims to have its milk on the shelves by April. However, Neil Darwent, whose “pasture promise” guarantees that milk from the Free Range Dairy comes from cows that graze outside for at least 180 days a year, said that Enjoy Milk’s promises were too vague.
He said he started campaigning for free range milk because the industry was becoming more intensive as farmers chased higher yields. The majority of British milk goes through large processing plants, he said, and includes milk from both small producers and large ones of more than 1,000 cows which, in some cases, never go outside.
“It all gets pooled into one big vat, and sold to supermarkets who just like to put a Union Jack on it and a picture of a cow and tell everybody it’s great. They are deceiving people.”
A plethora of new labels could be damaging, he said. “The problem is, if we have a free range label now that is meaningless, it is not telling the consumer a true story about the farms it is coming from. It is confusing them.”
Mr Darwent, who won Outstanding Farmer of the Year at the 2014 BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards, said their Pasture Promise had run into resistance in the industry, particularly in the retail sector. “They say, ‘Oh my goodness, people are going to ask some pretty awkward questions about our standard offer if you start saying this milk is guaranteed to come from cows that graze in fields’.”
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Mr Hiscox said the problem was that there was no legal definition of free range milk, unlike eggs.
Free range hens enjoy unlimited daytime access to runs that have vegetation, and at least four square metres of outside space per bird. At night they are kept in barns with bedding and perches, with nine hens per square metre, but there is no limit on flock size. “The guiding principle has to be what is acceptable to the consumer,” Mr Hiscox said. “They want cows to be in fields when the weather is favourable, and indoors when the weather is against them.
“Our principle is that we must trust farmers to farm, and not according to the sort of regulations and red tape we are fed up with in the UK.
“Our farmers have to prove that they have land to enable the herd to spend as much time grazing as possible.”
