Dairy industry crisis: Farmers can now make more money selling cow muck than milk

Falling prices, which have seen supermarkets selling milk cheaper than water, have left many of the region's dairy farmers in a desperate situation with some losing up to 10p for each litre they sell.

Yorkshire Dales-based Metcalfe Farms is now making more money selling slurry from its 900 dairy cows than it does from selling their milk.

Some of the dairy herd at Metcalfe Farms. Picture: Jane Steel

The owner of the 2,700-acre farm, near Leyburn, said while he was selling the 33 litres of milk each of his Holstein heifers produce daily at a loss, 100 tonnes of slurry scraped from the barns was helping to partially balance the books, as it was being used to power nearby businesses and was also being sold to the National Grid.

David Metcalfe, who launched the power enterprise with his brothers Brian and Philip and Stokesley-based anaerobic digestion firm JFS & Associates, said other dairy farmers struggling with the low prices could benefit from similar schemes if they grouped together.

He said the 200KW of electricity the cattle, which has been named best herd in the North-East, produce 24 hours-a-day had led to power bills for the three firms on the site falling by 60 per cent.

In addition, the nutrient-rich processed slurry had led to fertiliser bills halving as the product is rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potash.

Mr Metcalfe said his grandfather, who established the dairy farm in the 1940s, would have been amazed to learn slurry was more valuable to the business than milk.

He said: "It is incredible that we are losing money on the milk and making profits from the slurry, but it's given us another angle to our business and helping to mitigate our milk losses.

"Milk is so undervalued that it's cheaper to buy milk than bottled water. How can that be when so much work goes into producing the milk.

"Using the slurry to make money looked good on the plan, particularly as the Northern Powergrid main goes through our yard which helped cut costs, but it has done better than we expected. There are very few things where that happens."

The slurry is piped into an anaerobic digester on site, before being broken down by bacteria to produce methane gas, which is used to produce electricity for the dairy, haulage and truck repair firms on the site, which employ 160 people.

Since the system was launched the businesses have paid 3.5p per unit of electricity, rather than the 11p, while also receiving a proportion of the feed-in tariffs from surplus power sold to the National Grid.

He said following the success of the slurry venture, the business also planned to introduce a biogas boiler to heat its workshops.