Big is beautiful and businesslike

摘要

Kite Consulting's John Allen puts the case for taking the bold step and expanding into a world class large-scale dairy unit - but it is not for the fainthearted. In the race for world competitiveness, can the UK industry maintain a lead over our Continental competitors? If we can continue to improve our competitiveness at farm level, and achieve similar improvements in the processing sector, then we could, ultimately, become the major dairy state within the EU. We often forget that we could actuallybecome exporters to the EU as trade liberalisation occurs. Within the next 10 years we forecast the following producer structure: The largest 2,000 producers will produce 50 percent of current UK output. Within 20 years, they will be producing 80 percent of output. Typically they will be family-owned operations managing 300-1,000 cows whether on high-output US systems or low-output NZ systems.