David Handley, chairman of Farmers for Action, the activist group that is organising the march, said the government lacked a coherent agricultural strategy. He said this left too many farmers at the mercy of powerful supermarkets.
“British farming is on the edge of an abyss. Farmers are giving up and getting out,” said Mr Handley.
Dairy has been at the forefront of UK agriculture’s woes. Almost 1,000 dairy farmers have quit since 2014 — 10 per cent of the total in England and Wales — after a 30 per cent slide in milk prices over the same period.
The average price of 24p a litre is below the cost of production for many dairy farmers, whose incomes are predicted to drop by 45 per cent this year, according to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.
Andersons, a farm consultancy, has a bleak forecast. The number of dairy farmers “might well reduce by between 30 and 50 per cent within the next three to five years, if prices remain low”, it said in its annual survey in January. Those remaining were likely to get bigger, it added.
The National Farmers’ Union, the biggest industry group, says its members are free to join Wednesday’s march but added that it does not “wholeheartedly support” the protest.
“We are still unclear what FFA’s call for action is for government,” it said.
The dairy industry is divided about how to tackle the crisis, especially because there appears to be no quick reprieve from the weaker demand that has led to milk oversupply and depressed prices around the world.
Sian Davies, chief dairy adviser at the NFU, said: “The vast majority of dairy farmers are still hoping the market will improve in the short term — but that isn’t going to happen.”
The NFU, which beat its own path to Downing Street last week, asked Prime Minister David Cameron to help cash-strapped farmers by restructuring their growing debts into longer-term loans and to broaden the mandate of the Groceries Code Adjudicator to include farmers.
But just a day after the Downing Street meeting, the industry was dealt another blow when Public Health England recommended that people reduce by almost a half the amount of dairy products they consume.
Judith Bryans, chief executive of Dairy UK, the trade association, described as “baffling and disappointing” the government agency’s new dietary guidelines recommending people cut the amount of dairy from 15 to 8 per cent of their daily intake.
Defra said it is doing all it can to help farmers cope with the volatility of milk and cereal prices by raising investment and reducing regulatory burdens. But it wants the dairy industry to reduce its reliance on liquid milk in favour of more value-added production, such as cheese, yoghurt and butter.
Last month, MPs noted in a report on farmgate prices: “The British dairy market is somewhat unusual in that approximately 65 per cent of production is sold as liquid milk.” In the rest of Europe, this proportion is 30 per cent, making British farmers more vulnerable to changes in milk prices.
The environment, food and rural affairs committee also recommended that dairy farmers work together through producer organisations — when farmers club together — to give themselves more bargaining power with milk processors.
Rory Christie, chairman of the Milk Suppliers Association, Scotland’s first producer group, said since its 140 farmers had come together, they were getting better prices.
“We decided, perhaps, we had been unreasonable as farmers and needed to understand the problems of the processors, so they could understand ours. You have to work together and look longer-term because the first thing to accept is that the status quo can’t go on.”
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