91Èȱ¬

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day and the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea…

 … but not for much longer if farmers can’t get a viable price for a pint of milk. In the village in rural Northamptonshire where I lived twenty years ago there were two dairy herds, which winded slowly along the street knocking wing mirrors off cars and depositing, lavishly, skid hazards on their way.  

There are no dairy herds there now and generations of careful husbandry and rich tradition have been lost to hard economic realities.  

So what? Milk’s still abundant on the supermarket shelves, and never more affordably. Farmers can diversify, and have – in the outlying parts of my parish wind turbines turn where once sheep and cattle grazed. The market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be its name.

 Except we are more than economics. The relationships which make up our communities, our societies, are more complex than any balance sheet can capture, and if we measure what we do only in terms of net present values how can we serve our long term needs?

 Go and live in North Korea, you cry, and see how you get on there chasing down a pint of gold top.

 But I’m not calling for the collectivisation of the milk industry any more than I’m calling to establish Ye Olde England Dairy Preservation Society: I’m suggesting we too acknowledge some hard realities: that we must plan for the future, be good stewards of what has been entrusted to us, not lose sight of the human consequences of economic enterprises.